draft of my artists statement for the tower show happening next week on Thursday April 23rd at Union Channel

As a child of an architect and a dollmaker, I grew up surrounded by drafting supplies, tools, and the means to create while asking how and why things get created.

Templates and technical drawings fascinate me. Maps that try to reduce the real world into diagrams and diagrams whose reductions resemble maps. Deciphering the gradated patterns of existence into something meant to be digested at a glance and rendered into the physical.

What does community mean to the people who erect its bones? There are things you cannot digest from far up and outcomes you cannot predict from a plat map. People come and go, neighborhoods rise and fall, and the language of urban planning tends to sweep the immediate and personal under the rug.

As a teenager, I'd spend every weekend either on my bicycle exploring or cutting holes in the pages of my journal. Creating pieces reminiscent of streetmaps and circle templates that evolved as the pages turned. Using what I scrounged from my parents to color them in or just cutting them out from whatever found material I had. Then riding around in ambling circles thinking about the structure of the city. Staring at houses rolling by and wondering who lived in them and why.

I never came up with any good answers so here I am still 30 years later - still wandering, still searching.

this week’s internet rabbit holes

• Uranium glass brake light covers

• ASM6 assembly for DIY NES/Famicom ROM files that can then be glitched

• Thoracic Outlet Syndrome exercises because this random radiating tingliness in my left arm can’t be ignored anymore

• International Naval Review 250 aka the New York Harbor is getting flooded with tallships for July 4th and I am kinda stoked

• Trying to shoehorn a personal gallery website into Notion which is incredibly time consuming but seems to be working

linkdump

• A gorgeously designed article about day to day life on the world’s most remote island.

• How 11 deaf men helped shaped the space program.

• Tom Waits and Massive Attack collaborate on a new anti-war song titled Boots On The Ground.

• “The backyard steel of 1958 looked like steel. It was not steel. Today’s backyard AI looks like AI. It is not AI. A TypeScript workflow with hardcoded if-else branches is not an agent. A prompt template behind a REST endpoint is not a model. Calling these things AI is like calling pig iron from a backyard furnace high-grade steel. It satisfies the reporting requirement. It fails every real-world test.”

closing thought

“Some things are so inherently stupid that any time you spend deciphering them is your fault” - Ray Ratto

Sincerely,

John P. Spain

had a to-do list but has no idea where it is