Unjudged

March 18, 2023

I find myself seeking out spaces where there isn’t any kind of judgment present. To fill the need for no recognition whatsoever. The desire to just be without comment or buttonary reaction. No count, nothing trending, nothing following, no curation or algorithm, not a feedback loop at all. I just want to be for a moment, which should be enough. But will it be, if I can find it? What do you think? Do you like it?

Frequency vs. Not

March 16, 2023

I just finished Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. A great read in very typical Klosterman fashion. And as a product of those Nineties he’s talking about, I enjoyed going back through them with over two decades of hindsight and firmly being able to put those years to rest. They’ve been over for awhile, but now they strangely feel finished.

One thing I do miss from the nineties was the frequency of everything. Movies, music, books, TV shows, and whatever else, there was just less of them. So you had to replay what you liked over and over again. You couldn’t just ping to something else that was newer because there was nothing else, even if your mission was to find and consume things very much out of the mainstream.

The frequency of the nineties increased your understanding. It made the music mean more, sound louder, and speak to deeper areas of your soul.

Frequency, in general, can offer a perspective only grasped through repetition and the passage of time. There are no cheat codes for watching Pulp Fiction 20+ times or listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind every single day for years and years.

What Is This About?

March 11, 2023

In the interview process, we were discussing what I was ultimately hoping the audience would take away from my talk. While I wished I was a media theorist but wasn’t, or a great artist doing amazing visual works which I’m not, the talk had elements of both things in common ways. In the back and forth with the TEDx Omaha team, when pressed, I landed on “I want people to question more what they see online, to not just blindly accept what’s put in front of them.” Using my progressively minded images would be the messengers for a message about critical thinking. If you align philosophically with the images, great, if not, that works too. And if you happen to have a problem with the images, fine, then do your own talk.

An image is between us and an action

March 7, 2023

The Intentional Impact of Images

We’re surrounded by images, and they’re all trying to get us to do something. The question is, what will we choose to do? The script from my TEDx Talk is now up on Medium. If you’re looking for a 9 minute read rather than a 15 minute video, this is for you. An image flat and static, can, within a split second of being scrolled by, make us click the button:

Read on Medium

Design Notes

March 2, 2023

This is, basically, the third version of the talk. The first idea took more of an unveiling approach. The second, more combative, where the core idea was of images fighting back. The final version I presented, in my mind, is a very middle-of-the-road approach. The showing of my graphic design work while I, the maker, tell you, the viewer, the basic brief behind the images and the context they exist within. These images don’t simply emerge out of thin air. There’s a reason for everything — what I’m trying to say, why I’m saying it, and to whom I’m saying it to, as well as, where the image is meant to end up and the action I want a particular audience to take.

We Love Our Sons and Daughters

February 28, 2023

Project launch for Campaign Zero:

Michael O.D. Brown was eighteen, black, unarmed and gunned down in broad daylight, around noon on August 9, 2014, in the middle of Canfield Drive by a Ferguson police officer. In the days that followed, no police report was released, only a video by the Ferguson police department assassinating Michael’s character. His brutal killing sparked protests all over the country, gaining international attention and support.

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