I romanticized their life there. I remember staying for a party and feeling extremely awkward lol. Socializing outside of the bubble of their friendship felt difficult. Their kindness was comforting. Wandering the streets with them felt like a form of play. I liked trying to become their style, tricking yourself into seeing the city as an artwork.

Would love to claim some advertising space in the city for personal websites.

Summer poster, 30 × 48 inches, [download]
Spring poster, 30 × 48 inches, [download]

I returned from traveling. Back in routines. I thought I would change my life, but I'm embracing the patience.

I don't recognize myself or my work in the internet theories that people are writing about. But that's okay. I don't believe they represent humans with complex lives. That's the internet::life I see.

The more I think this way about the internet, that it is life, the less I can see it differently. No one lives that way, not even the people writing it.

I've started to believe in landscape. In the mist and talus fields and the curve of the road. I try to steer the car on the narrow road, following the tracks between the snow, wondering if the tires are actually snow tires. It's only scary when a large truck passes. I feel fragile in this humid box. I think I'm interested in living a slow fast slow life.

On the last night, the cabin gets very smoky. It's difficult to leave the warmth. The cold air is like drinking water. I miss both.

want to echo this :) huge thanks to everyone who organized! it's so beautiful to see everyone gathering offline and writing together. feeling very hopeful about the future of the web ❇️💚

it does feel like something is a little different this year. maybe it's more internal, like how i have been treating it. we took it a bit more seriously this year. html energy is not a passing trend or an art project. i think it has legs now and people are gravitating toward it for various reasons.

for me it's a way of showing the world the kind of web we could have: something that balances online and offline time, something where irl social time is prioritized, something that is a learning environment, something that anyone can make their own.

I've thought about moving back to the US but I'm not sure if the trade offs are worth it. Working a full-time job just to live in an expensive US city. Somehow fitting an artistic practice in on the weekends. Being stretched thin. That also doesn't sound sustainable. Where do people live cheaply these days?

This morning I listened to a podcast about the financial life of Bernadette Mayer. They mentioned Committee on Poetry, which I'd never heard of. Feels like there should be something similar for web artists.

On another note, I was browsing Bernadette Mayer's website, and she made a work called Memory.

[bells ringing]

yesterday i was stuck thinking about the future again. the decisions i make now have real weight. i guess that's why i'm taking so much time with them. its not so light in the end.

the internet has felt the most like home. when you've spent so much of your childhood here its difficult not to feel this way. being in nature also feels like home. i miss the pasture lands and forest around the house i grew up in.

i guess its really a question of how to live. like where do you put your energy. how do you put energy into things that won't just dissolve? or maybe that's inevitable

the sky is very blue today. no monks

At first, he was hesitant about doing the independent study with me, but eventually he agreed. In the end, we only met twice over the semester. I vaguely remember the first meeting. I think he visited my studio, which at the time was in the glass studios. I was making “paintings” with long pieces of colored string draped around my tiny studio. I remember him being sort of neutral about the work, but he thought it was heading somewhere.

The next and final time we met was at his studio in West Oakland. His studio was at the back of a long creme colored twisting tile hallway. Inside, it felt like a gallery: a huge skylight and florescent lighting. His paintings were very minimal, often just single color fields. He was really into materials: handmade paints, special linen and canvas.

At the end of the independent study, I was supposed to present a new work I'd made during the semester. Instead, I’d used the extra time the study gave me to focus on my other courses. The night before our final meeting, I came up with a last minute idea. I made some "loop" drawings on printer paper using different colored pencils. Just a series of lines that looped and crossed. It took an hour to make them. For some reason, I was convinced he would love them. The movement of making the loops felt good in my mind, and I thought he would obviously understand that haha.

The next morning I biked over to his studio, anxious to show him the drawings. I was worried he might think it was a joke with all these quickly made sketches but I also felt that if anyone he would understand, that he would feel what I had felt.

He paged through the stack. I could tell he wasn’t happy. I tried to explain a bit, but the words couldn’t carry the feeling I’d had while making them. He set the drawings down, looked at me with a harsh expression, very unusual for him, and simply said, "these are not good." Then his face returned to its usual jolly expression. He signed the independent study form with the highest marks and walked me to the door.

I remember biking home feeling confused. I felt like I had let him down, but I also felt misunderstood. Yes, it was rushed work, but I didn’t think it was all terrible. It felt like something important had been missed. Like a whole conversation hadn’t happened. I wanted to convey why I felt so good about the drawings, how the feeling of making them was what mattered.

I stopped painting and drawing around that time. It might have also been due to graduating and shifting priorities, but looking back on it I do think this affected it a bit too. I think it got to me, even if I didn’t see it clearly then. But I also think something good came from it. I had been trying to make paintings and drawings I thought he would like. In some way, this experience broke that cycle. I was free, in a way.

walking onto the deck from the kitchen
fence surrounding it to keep the bunny in
lifting one part of the fence momentarily
you could easily walk onto the roof and climb a bit until you were on top of the apartment. was there a ladder?
a strange corner of roof
it was easily navigated but one wrong step and you'd fall several stories
the heat on the expansive roof and the view in all directions
dizzy after being there for an hour
orange (lemon) trees below in the neighbor's yard and the orange sky in all directions

I remember the roof and how to get onto it in vivid detail

shortly after (could be a day | could be a month) SN and I broke up
and i moved out of the house with H and M
got the job at the gallery
moved into M's place on Juniper St.

So much happened in that month

I decided to re-record, because there's construction happening next door, and it's rather loud, and sometimes they'll just have this saw that goes on for like a minute. Um, what was I talking about? I guess I'll try to just like repeat what I said before, but in a different way. So I'm sitting in the sun on to Cecile's balcony, and she's in Berlin right now. So I've been using her balcony in the mornings and evenings, and I think I prefer it over my balcony. Mine looks out on the street, and hers looks out on the backyard, and there's a school behind us, and you can probably hear the kids playing right now. Just a little while ago, they were all kind of congregated against the fence, and there's just the sound of breaking sticks. Um, well actually, at first I just thought it was fireworks, kind of has the same sound, and there's always fireworks going off somewhere in Rotterdam, but um, and then after a while, I saw one of the kids like, emerging to our neighbor's backyard, and he had just lost his ball, and he was like, got the ball, and then went back through the branches, so I realized it was just these branches breaking, and then when he got back to the playground, all the kids like celebrated, it's kind of cute. Now it's getting pretty windy, a lot of shouting and screaming, but yeah, it's weird to use my voice like in the morning because, I mean, yeah, I haven't like said anything until this call or this recording, so it's kind of like a voice, like wake up a little bit, and I really have to like, think about like, projecting, and like, how to say words. Um, warming up the vocal muscles I guess. Oh yeah, like, before I was talking about the bird in the back backyard, and I actually don't hear many of them now, but when I focus on it, you can really hear them. I also got this app, this like Merlin Bird ID app, it's pretty nice, and it like allows you to, um, identify different birds based on their call, and it has a cool interface that shows the bird call or like, when you're recording, it shows little histogram, I think that's what it's called, um, of the sounds, and it's beautiful to see like, this drawing of sound, and it's like, what the bird calls look like, anyway, I thought it would be, I was having breakfast, and then I was thinking about like, I was thinking a bit about like Caveh's work, and yeah, one of my favorite artists, he's a filmmaker, and I haven't watched his films in a long time, but, um, but a lot of his work is like, diaristic, and I think my intention with the memory site was to make more diaristic work in this year. So, but then I feel like it's kind of become like a blog, and so, I feel like I've maybe gone off track a little bit, and I'm like, trying to figure out how to bring it back to this like, personal, the personal isn't like the right word, it's like, personal is overused, but yeah, maybe like, diaristic is better word or like, what I just love about his movies is like, there's, he just kind of shows everything, and yeah, even the boring things, and he's really into this like, radical honesty, I guess, which can go both ways, and it can be rather hurtful, um, at times, or for the people in his films, which is also sad to see, but yeah, I don't, I don't know if I would, I don't want to hurt people through, through, my memory site, but, um, but I would like to be more like transparent maybe, and like, care, and like, and less, I don't know, sometimes things just feel like, there's a layer between who I actually am, and what I'm writing, or what I'm posting, so this is kind of an attempt at that I guess, although now I'm kind of like, also, um, it feels like I'm starting to get into like, interview mode, or something, um, there's a plane like, stretching across the sky, it's, uh, trail, and I've really been like, like, the last days, I was just kind of, I was a bit sad, and I was just, uh, doing a lot of just, I guess meditation, or just sitting with my feelings, and thinking a lot, and there's something like, it's strange, like when you're doing just nothing, and like, especially when you're not looking at a screen, it just feels like more productive to do nothing, you know, like, um, but when I'm looking at a screen, I'll come out of that, like, feeling exhausted, so it's like, but yeah, when I'm like, sitting on the balcony looking at the sky, or like, looking at the trees, and just watching the wind in the trees, like, it feels like, it's energizing or something, or I come out of it feeling like, pretty peaceful, I mean, I guess it makes sense, but, um, I guess when you're looking at a screen, you're, you're really not doing, you're doing a lot, it's not nothing, so that's the difference against, but anyway, this, um, but I started noticing how many planes are in the sky, like all the time, and at any time, there's like, at least three to five, I guess, like, right now, I see two, oh, no, three, there's three right now, maybe more, but, oh, four, there's four planes in the sky, and I guess we're close to the airport too, so, but it's just wild, and they make these drawings across the sky, which are quite beautiful, um, and when it's closer to sunset, like, the light will catch the trails, and then, like, it looks like a piece of paper with, like, little slits in it, and light is coming through it, or something, um,

Hello! I’m currently in the forest and away from my computer. I’ll be slower to respond but will get back to you as soon as possible.

A client emailed and wrote:

Bumping this up! Hope the forest is good to you.

I do think the forest was good to me.

I don't have many reflections on the forest at this moment. It might have been more of a feeling trip instead of a word trip.

Today the Internet Phone Book arrived at XP from Athens. At first it felt strange to hold it and page through it. A little overwhelming after a year of looking at it on a screen. I brought it home and started updating the dial-a-site website. Using it alongside the book feels nice. A book and a computer needing each other. It makes sense for some reason. A very direct way of experiencing the web. Like writing HTML and watching it appear in your browser like magic.

I'm grateful to everyone who contributed their time, energy, and websites to the book. Grateful to Kristoffer and Ana. Grateful to Are.na and the sponsors for believing in the project from the beginning.