Image associations revealed by the subconscious can take us by surprise, even though we made them. The starting image is a freshly-minted collection of vibrant, moody, illuminated, gently interactive, fun, poignant, generative 3D environments by Sam Hains. They show shadowy space, an empty room, not exactly a home, squares of nuclear sky or surveillance, with the focus on an illuminated little castle aggregate in a bell jar.

In November 2022, computer art studio Mathcastles announced an experimental course for artists and coders. Six months later, final projects were completed, and group art crits concluded. What happened in between was transformative. Below is a personal record. Other records exist in 100s of sketches, in the projects minted immutably as NFTs, and, more mutably, in the projects germinating, in the strengthened chats and networks, in the changed texture of ideas about technology and art. For an experience which was ephemeral by design (artist and facilitator 113 in the first class: if anyone records these lessons I will end it immediately), there are a lot of records, a lot of threads woven and marks made.

Some people will literally learn p5.js rather than go to therapy. Four creative coding psychology hacks they don’t want you to know about.

I made a JPG.SPACE 2022 WRAPPED gallery. For fun, to flex my favourite jpgs, and to take it seriously and write about seasons.

The labyrinth model is done in museum theory, but it offers a couple of useful ways of thinking about the digital gallery that release it from static folio or uncanny physical derivative, and that help link some art-archive-ownership-community vectors:

1 Art?

Genuary was scorching and humid this year in Melbourne. I spent the month, happily, at the extreme far left edge of the curve of all the graphs - eg. the midwit graph, the Dunning Krueger. Hanging in the ‘you don’t even know that you know nothing’ zone is not an achievement, but it is an open space for play. In this short piece I draw some dots between creation and ownership in this open play zone, revealed in the digital art via NFT landscape.

I began describing Nuxui, but ended up writing about Nic Hamilton’s other work.

This is what density and lightness look like in artist Case Simmons’ 2021 Clouds on Chains series: