future_speak
I've been thinking a lot about the future recently, how the work i'm making ages, how the people I want to see it should interact with it. How it should be documented/preserved, the space it takes up, what the work expects itself to scale up to.
It's made me want to delete my website, or at least, stop thinking about the web as where my work comes to rest (storage). What is the use of a collection of files anyway? I'm fine w/ the sentimentality of it, but does anyone else need to know? Why is it not kept in my bedroom on the shelf of small trinkets that I can't force myself to throw out.
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After graduating college I was excited at the idea of working on longer timelines, i would no longer have to spend < 3 months per project and could invest time and space to ideas, however for the past 4 years my longest collaboration hasn't lasted > 1 year. Everything's been cramped and I can't breath. I've made ~ 50 websites in the 4 years and I feel like i'm littering, or just creating a big pile. I want to generate a methodology for work that is in-line w/ time. That considers time, that appreciates scale, that us in harmony w/ certain ways of viewing reality: I'm not an individual, i'm the byproduct of millions of year, a chance arrangement that should be regarded as significant.
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fuck 5 year plans, I want a 300 year plan, or a 3000 year plan: i feel like, building a city is a 300 year plan. It's a dream anyone should be allowed to have. people like Elon Musk aren't the only ones that want to go to space or dig tunnels under the earth, and just cus I'll never be down to exploit the labor of others doesn't mean that I should be averse to the creation of more monolithic ruins. Earth will reform itself as it sees fit, and the energy that i'm transferring through the duration of my life is eternal, a constant that I will not be alive to see dissipate/disappear.
With that said I am working towards building a monument, holding the energy I have been gifted that must eventually escape, it will stand for as long as it is used, for as long as the space it takes up is not needed for anything else. It will be made of bespoke parts, it will be capable of splintering, like slime mold, able to take on disparate lives as it is entangled in the monuments of others.
With these thoughts out of my head I want to propose a preliminary set of rules to dictate 'projects' that I will work on after I clean up my current TODOs:
- It will be physical first, if it takes energy it will require space, and I will no longer neglect that.
- Distribution will be the second to last step, and must be explicitly considered, every 'bespoke part' will take on a distribution mechanism of it's own
- The last step is preservation. This step should consider two aspects:
- The preservation should enable redistribution if necessary
- The preservation should be 'project' specific and have the ability to be stored in some sort of centralized system (a computer/hardrive is g enough probably)
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Some additional notes
- I value the ideas and opinions of people that I have tried to stay in contact with. I need to share my work more directly, i think pdfs/zip files would be the lightest weight/best to use cross platform, i think a contact list would be good to start, no automation tho, mailing ists are dehumanizing.
- keeping things human scale is p infinite if ur not a rube