tzucasa – tzucasa

‘Pick n Mix’ at AMP Studios (also ft. the ‘Some Exhibition’ website)

It was kitch in the good way, I think!

Here I begin my reminiscence over the shows I took part in during university. It’s already been a year since I graduated, but since I had to shift focus on getting a job pretty much straight away, I guess I’m realising I didn’t give myself much of a chance to take it all in yet. This is all documentation – I don’t plan to post photos of my actual work on any social media sites so feel free to browse as if this was my portfolio.
Putting together the text in these posts alongside it all is really helping me sort out all of the memories I have tucked away in there and moving it to an alternative, more clarified space in my brain.
I’d attempted to write out summaries of what the shows were like in my previous website incarnations, but when I was to be concerned with saying the right things to supplement my CV, motivation never came.

My first year of university was grim with studios under heart-of-corona-times surveillance and control, and after the experience of my first DIY show, I’d looked forward to continuing that the most in anticipation for my time at university. The inability to go out there and be active with that was really disheartening.

Technically, the first show I joined wasn’t the one in the title. It was called ‘Some Exhibition’.
During this tragedy of our first year, we tried to do the best we could, putting on an online exhibition in the form of a website. (There was all this talk about how suddenly digital everything had become and I felt like I was understanding what they must’ve talked about during the ‘.net art’ era.)

But, I won’t go into much detail on it here, as all of us clutching onto the wonderful idea in one go meant the end result was a bit overwhelming and lost with too many different kinds of works bunched together; unsupported with no real overall psyche. Besides, I can’t find the damn site anymore because I lost the link! Does it even exist anymore? I don’t know. I managed to find the youtube channel though, so the video works are still alive. I’ll have to try and archive it all because who knows when YouTube will be gone.

I’ll only embed my own work here, but out of the other ones on the channel I liked ‘The Naked Mole Rat Dream‘ and ‘Becoming prehistoric – performed in my garden to no one in particular‘, in particular… (By the way, I’ll start to mention other people’s works like this and post photos of what I’ve documented so if anyone with their work on my website wants their stuff taken down or properly credited, please do get in touch.)

I tried to make something that was conscious of the medium/location(?) that was the internet, following the conversations described above, which was a lo-fi styled video collage. It started with making the soundtrack first, which I wanted to sound like a minimal performance of a national anthem of an imagined, lo-fi country. My main source of interest at the time was the sudden rise in casual nationalistic propaganda on social media which was very popular during the corona times, especially in the Japanese side of things. It was rattling me quite a lot because I was holed in and glued to what the media was telling me. So, I suppose that was where the imagery was coming from as well.

In concept, I think the website exhibition was a really nice action with a heart of initiative that I continually respect in the group that led it. (As far as I can see the same people are doing pretty cool things.) Ultimately people were just still too nice to try and ‘curate’ anything which would inevitably mean letting some people in and others shut out.

One good thing that came out of the pandemic was the collective need to have hope. It wasn’t a desire, it was a need.
We are human – when we all need something, we work together.
It’s sad that we only tend to be motivated by the lack of something and not to elevate, though.
And now it sounds like we just came out of wartime, doesn’t it…

Getting back to the main topic, I guess this show in the title had that added post-covid implication to me, too – A year later and people were allowed to be bunched up together in these two small rooms. One was dedicated more for music and the other for artworks.

Seeing a show come alive is super fun. In fact I think that feeling being in the middle of it is even slightly better than when all the people start coming in.
I didn’t really know any of the people who were showing with me, either. I’d been invited after the organizing artist apparently saw my work on the walls in the studio.
That felt obviously validating (even if it might’ve simply been because they needed more people to join!) and warm – we were there together simply because we all liked making stuff. That was the most important thing.

I also saw one of the artists perform her songs, and I remember really liking it. It was energized. This layer of performance put all the small pieces in the room together and I loved that alchemy of creativity.

Up until that point I hadn’t thought about acknowledging music as a real part of my creative practice and deemed it as separate to my ‘serious stuff’. It was just something I did to have fun and ease my stress. The soundtrack I made for the video above was intentionally ‘minimal’ because that seemed to be the only music allowed in the contemporary art scene. The music I made outside of my ‘serious stuff’ for the sake of it being music- with relatively clear melodies and no particular sociopolitical reason to exist beyond my own life, implies something ‘pop’. And that’s somehow always been a no-no in my mind unless it’s clearly backed up by something more dire.
That’s equally why me admitting that I’d wanted to be a manga writer as a kid in the previous post had been a no-no in my brain.
Even if the tutors and the few artists you personally get to know strongly encourage you to do whatever you’d like, if you were to be serious about being ‘an artist’ you’d hear that messaging loud and clear.

I still hadn’t (and maybe I still haven’t) gotten over being swayed by expectations.

My work here called ‘Pick n Mix’ is a collection of acetate prints with a bunch of digital illustrations of fictional moths. I’d read about how fast moths were evolving in nature, in line with how fast we were changing nature itself through our contemporary measures. I was interested by how comical some of these variants looked – one struck me as it looked like a 60s sci-fi illustration of a space jet. I also like that they were ‘moths’ and not ‘butterflies’… pests, who were trying very hard to survive, some species having to make themselves as menacing as possible to us humans.

To be honest with you there’s not much of a reason why they’re on the hangers other than 1. my fascination with flowing objects (similar to how paper is used in a lot of shinto or asian shamanic rituals to signify something divine) and 2. I was looking for a way to hang these prints so that they could in a similar way ‘flow’ in the air but without just simply using string to hold them up. They’re not just regular old hangers by the way. They’re baby-sized. That was important.

I also wanted the digital illustrations I drew to be shown in a way where light could pass through them because, when I was drawing these things, they were being shone into my eyes from the large light box that is the screen, and I always found it lacking when I simply printed the illustrations onto paper or canvas – It didn’t feel like it came out the way it was when I was making it, and not in a good way. There’s something about making something that our brains recognise as ‘things’ on the screen, controlling light pixel by pixel. It’s different to how it feels drawing with ink or paint, something that feels more substantial and physical.

(Seeing the photo of it up close I am pretty disappointed by how low quality of an execution this is – It sort of looked better in my memory. But I hope you can see where it could have gone if I took the time to change all the DIY plastic parts into metal clasps or something… That level of detailed care makes all the difference. Something I didn’t know yet. )

I had a friend I made around New Cross who at this point was a working artist have a look at my work, and they seemed to get the whole “evolution” thing as well as the faint comic/sci-fi vibes straight away, and so did my academic tutors and peers. It was quite interesting how differently people reacted to the idea of “evolution”. Some people (I think this is also an effect of the homo sapiens book that was pretty trendy) had this immediate negative reaction towards it, and some people seemed a little embarrassed to start talking about how amazing nature really is. I liked that contrast. I imagine the first reaction might also come from the fact that evolution has a lot of abusive implications beneath it, which is fair enough. But I noted on how nobody felt that free to be a child again and talk about how interesting this all was. I also didn’t really feel like I could come out and say “…hey, so, I just found the evolution of moths really cool, which is why I made this!” – I really wasn’t trying to say something absolutely groundbreaking with my work, ever, but there is this air in the fine art rooms that there needs to be something new about your work. Something that gives the work meaning, something that puts you apart from “arts & crafts”. Writing this now, I find it pretty poetic, that I was seeing that behaviour in action with work that was concerned with the competition for survival.

What would be groundbreaking is if artists could just be pure in their energy of love and intrigue, and bring back that child in all of us. I truly believe that is what art needs to do, even despite all of the academic learnings I did on how contemporary art has evolved from the hippie eras. (Now is the time to say, I do have a solid first in my degree and I did do all the difficult philosophisation involved, okay!) I don’t dislike academia and its findings, but I don’t like the system of academia disrupting artistic inspiration. I don’t like the system of academia contributing to society’s perception of serious art = misguided wandering. And, equally, as much as I am educated on politics, I still think the only thing artists can do is to be a beacon for people not to forget that we as humans are capable of working together. I like activism, but I don’t really think activism is art. Why? Because activism comes from a place of need, and not from a place of abundance, that is the love we could have for others. Art should be art to show people what could be achieved after the activism.

Now I’ll end this post with the photo above, which is an aluminium sheet with another digital illustration of mine printed onto it. I scraped into the sheet and creating this embossed linework on top of the print. The work involved for this was pretty physical, and it was tiresome grinding knives into the metal. It was quite fitting to the pained image I was depicting. It’s so obvious to me now that this was my subconscious admitting defeat to Freud again, with a body looking like its in agony in the shape of a vagina. I was making feminist art here, but I wasn’t aware of it. This is probably the better work of mine that was shown in the exhibition, because it’s genuine raw emotion that I’m depicting here – I was really going through it on a personal level exploring my sex and gender identity. I think the execution of this is pretty good as well, because once again, I didn’t even try to come up with this idea. It just sort of happened as it should, and I knew exactly what I needed to do to express this specific part of my psyche even if I didn’t realise the exact cause of it yet.

That’s great, but I hate this work. Probably because it’s just a manifestation of the hate I was feeling towards my own sex. I don’t think art should be like this. I think that the art that should be created is one that depicts the love I feel for my sex instead. And for me to get there, I’d first need to live that life.

A lot of people will tell BA students that they shouldn’t really expect much from their BA works, and not to take it too seriously as they would a masters for example. Of course, this has commercial reasonings too, in that most curators/gallerists would only take MA graduates seriously, but it’s more than that. I would slightly disagree with this general opinion and say that it’s best to take it as seriously as possible, because you’ll get to see and feel for yourself that there’s a dead end to it, and where exactly that dead end is for you as an individual. Put simply, there is usually not enough substance in the average BA student’s life to seep through into their work. For me, I think this lack is in the love that I am talking about. Most of us are still barely coming out of the egoistic self and so the work is equally incredibly self conscious and awkwardly egotistical.

What is it in the world that you love, when everything is telling you to be fearful and distrustful? That’s the question that I feel I need to keep asking myself from now on.

‘Pick n Mix’ at AMP Studios (also ft. the ‘Some Exhibition’ website) Read More »

The Era BC (Before College)

Diary, General, Personal / tzucasa

Since I’ve decided to be honest, I’ll admit something that would be incredibly obvious to most people when they see my work. It’s important for me to get it out in words, though, to overcome my embarrassment. My first dream… to go truly right back to the start of my creative journey… was to become a manga writer, and my main focus for most of my developing years was on conjuring up narratives, characters and worlds inside my head to try and manifest them in illustrated format.

My early ~ inspirations ~ were vintage to contemporary shoujo (=’for young girls’) manga, but the name wasn’t accurate to the content. Keiko Takemiya’s sci-fi works were a massive one for me growing up. So was Mineo Maya’s works, which I have no idea why my mother never censored me from, because his main series was a satire black comedy series drawn in an Aubrey Beardsley inspired-style about a diabetic dictator and his adventures with gay men working in MI6.

Anyway these particular selections were all actually very rich with queer and feminist history – at least way more than you would expect when you hear “pop culture magazines for young girls” – and this I can rant on about for ages, but I can leave that for another time. My mother inherited to me a lot of artistic inspiration, but it was and still is difficult to navigate this with her simultaneous typically East-Asian-First-Gen-Immigrant manner of insistence that I needed a job that made good use of my new access to Western culture to ultimately acquire good money.

The interesting thing about worldbuilding is that once you’ve gotten into a habit of doing it, they seem to live in your head forever. So I can very easily daydream about the various worlds which I set up for this even now like time never passed, which is both comforting and I think potentially dangeous. Maybe this is because I never managed to complete any of the stories. After I found out the reality of how taxing a manga writer’s life can be when contracted to these companies through the many anecdotes of ‘death through overwork’, I couldn’t see a future in it anymore. What’s the difference between ‘death through overwork’ on an office desk and one on top of a sketchbook? In hindsight, I think I just latched onto ‘manga writer’ as a dream because it was the first “make good money” dream I saw in media that involved drawing. But I was quite serious about it… as much as a tween can be. I even had the initiative to ask for a visit to the publisher’s of my favourite magazine once and kept submitting my oneshot comics to them. They only let me have a visit because I was visiting from shiny ‘Igirisu‘ England, though….

Once my childhood dream was shattered, I spent most of my time just drawing mountains of fanart up until around age 18, trying to escape from the aforementioned pressure to make me into a graphic designer – before I changed course entirely and got more hooked on playing in a band and making “beats” (I like to consider it music). I can’t pinpoint exactly when, and I hadn’t wanted to accept it for a long time, but my creative drive behind drawing as a skill probably more or less ended somewhere between GCSEs and A levels. Since then, it’s all just been a struggle trying to find the passion in it again.

ASIAGRAPH

One big driver in this was my repeated involvement in “ASIAGRAPH”, a yearly exhibition put on at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. I was 13 at the start and I sporadically continued submissions until around 16. This was the first time something I made was shown through a setting faced to the general public. The curator had invited me to submit artwork through a message on the popular Japanese illustration website ‘Pixiv’ – an equivalent to ‘deviantART’, and I was at first excited that in Japan, digital art was taken seriously enough to justify a physical exhibition at a national institution (and yes, I also loved that I could receive updated copies of CLIP Studio Paint as a prize).

*_{I never got to see the actual shows myself. Someone was clearly diligent on documentation so I’ve thankfully managed to find an exact photo of my very first work there years later}*.

But I suppose the same exact situation bothered me. I didn’t have the words or knowledge to fully describe it at the time, but I could tell that I felt uncomfortable with the way my work was being framed. Firstly, though I had made the curator very aware that I lived and had grown up in the UK since the age of 6, they always made sure to write “Japan” next to my name. I couldn’t understand why this was apparently as important as the work’s title. Yes, the first image I submitted, as you can see, is heavily inspired by Asian cultural symbols. The yin-yang motif, the moon-mirror motif, the koi fish. My first fictional stories were very focused on Japanese history, an interest indeed fuelled by immigrant identity confusion. For sure, this work was acting as a straight-forward love letter to my home country’s culture, but I felt misrepresented – I knew this work would not have been made if not for my switch in lived culture.

As well as this, I could tell that I was being praised on how profitable my work could become if I kept going. I honestly think this work by my 13-14 year old self looks rounds more professional, polished and technical than anything I’ve made since I entered higher education and those descriptors still enrage the rebellious 16 year old in me that I haven’t been able to deport out of my brain since it was born… well, maybe through this exact event. It was frustrating because the more disillusioned I was becoming, the more the adults around me were starting to become convinced that perhaps letting me be creative was okay.

Of course, now I understand that being put inside a ‘national’ gallery means being represented by nationality. And I clearly understand that this is not a route that I like. But I appreciate this experience for being a trigger in my need to verbalize the discomfort of being forced into self-orientalization through many layers of power, specifically in the context of East Asia. Writing this now I realise why I have been so sensitive to which inspirations come from which side of my two cultures, when really I wish I could see all art in a neutral way…

I don’t really think my experience being ‘an immigrant’ moving from Japan (a formerly imperialist-fascist country) to the UK (a formerly imperialist-fascist country) is really that significant to justify being the inspiration to all of my art, or what I really want to say/explore, since that word doesn’t even really point to people like me in today’s UK politics but I guess it’s undeniable that it’s not easy for a 6 year old to accept such a big change in culture and that it haunted my creative urges for a long time, maybe up until a few years ago. It kind of got strengthened back again during corona times since I experienced first-hand outright racist abuse with an intent to hurt me in a short-term series for the first time just walking around London. Before then it was all just very subtle undertones of discrimination that I had noticed. So I understand why a lot of people who share my race and background are bothered currently and I’m thankful people are out there talking about it. I also have sympathy for the international students who had to come here smack bang in the middle of that with a medium-to-fully developed brain that can understand people’s malice.

On the other hand, I think I’m also writing about this aspect of my childhood with a bit of ongoing bitterness because it makes me sad to see the creative people around me still stuck in this scheme of identity politics “representation” making artforms from their culture into a digestible form for the average ‘artsy’ middle-class-to-elite audience to cultivate intrigue. Unfortunately it’s one of those ‘if you know you know’ kind of things but my point is if a work involves “themes” that a stupid 13 year old can draw into a piece like above then it shouldn’t really be automatically mysterious to you; just because it shows a circle half filled with black and the other half in white instead of some judeo-christian symbol, it’s not suddenly more valuable… And a lot of people like me need to realise that, this intrigue which comes along with what it truly is, the lack of will to understand us as anything similar to themselves, is not something to take pride in. Also, they’re probably never going to viscerally understand that your criticism of a certain kind of pop in your post-war culture is equal to a criticism of All American Globalism. It’s always going to be seen as our problem, unless you get rid of all abstraction, by which point it becomes too political.

National Student’s Art Exhibition

By the end of sixth form I didn’t even know what to make anymore. I had to make stuff for my grades, and I knew painting was the easiest way to get marks, but I just hated painting. (I ranted and ranted about hating it vocally in my classroom and that was unlike my usual quiet well-behaved student self. I feel pretty apologetic towards my art teachers from back then since they basically had to see me awkwardly and only semi-successfully hiding mini breakdowns, with my only tool for emotional coping getting stuck.) I think it shows very well in the painting here that was still almost mechanically sent off on submission by my school, shown at the mall galleries… My one is the sort of modernist-style one without any character whatsoever, in boring brown, sepia tones and cold harsh lines.

Honestly I think it’s great that there are “National Student Exhibitions” because in format I don’t think it’s much different to your average commercial painting auction. Matter of fact these works were all ‘on sale’. I remember the opening night started with some guy in a suit and very round glasses (at least in my memories) waddling over to the podium to speak about the investment made into the creative industries by the government and how much capital it’s made. By this point I was juggling lots of creative career options and being a painter really was a high contender but I knew if this was meant to be my government-subsided initiation into that world then I wasn’t going to take it.

Goldsmith’s Summer School + “Omission”

By the point that I was meant to start thinking seriously about my university choices I was dying to be allowed a space to just be myself again. After a lot of research I was dead set on Goldsmiths being the one. CSM strangely smelled of the commercialisation I was trying so hard to run away from (though I still applied and worked hard enough to get accepted by them through, I don’t know, some sort of Stockholm syndrome). The Slade was a bit too stiff looking and I still hadn’t overcome my other trauma of forced painting just yet. And I didn’t really understand the character of any of the other universities.

If the summer school is still ongoing and it’s anything like the one I went to I recommend applying to it to a lot of prospective students, even if you’re not obsessed with entering the university like I was for some reason. It’s a nice break away from everything and a good reminder that there’s a whole world of art outside of your academics waiting to greet you. (Though my actual opinion of my experiences being a real undergraduate student at Goldsmiths is still to come through separate blogposts…)

I’ll save you from seeing my first attempt at conceptual art at this summer school which was nothing other than an expression of self-serving catharsis to “do it because I can” (but hey, that’s Dada, right) – but the best thing to come out of it was probably the invitation from Lucas, a studiomate at this short term ‘residency’ if you could call it that who had decided to put on a group exhibition in Peckham which I assume was following some advice from the tutors there. I guess it’s quite normal for artists to experience a lot of DIY shows first and then to dream about more ‘official’ or ‘established’ forms of shows but I suppose I already came to a quick conclusion that I wanted nothing to do with ‘established’ shows at that point subconsciously, because I was excited about this one post-the other two above. People just saw students playing about but I saw agency in it. We were choosing where to put our works and how – we were the ones advertising it in a certain light. It was titled ‘Omission’… and had a long depressing artist’s statement about being omitted from society or something super cliche. But I remember it in a very fond light because as naive as it all was, we were all just being honest, really.

Being honest – is an important thing for me here, because although these blog posts may seem to be nothing other than personal accounts, to me, putting this on my website in public for anybody to see is sort of my way of actively detaching myself from this path of self-production that is fed to us as a necessity when we are still so vulnerable and young. There were a few other instances of my work being in public during these years, like my slight attempt at political messaging in a blue-red-and-white painting of bankers drinking outside their pubs ironically being hung at the walls of the Bank of Cyprus through school relations as an honorable mention, but I wanted to specifically focus on the things I’ve put on applications and artist CVs in the past.

This is my confession booth moment, aimed towards soothing my slightly younger self, by revealing what those names and titles and location names actually entailed for myself emotionally, rather than to try and insist that I am a valuable young artist with a lot of expectations backing me up.

Still, having written it all out of course I am thankful for the experiences I got. It’s impossible to understand that something isn’t for you unless you see parts of it in action.

The Era BC (Before College) Read More »

‘Truly Y2K’ & the Filosophy of this Website

General / tzucasa

(No, that’s not a typo – My reserved Japanese blood coupled with my infiltration of an upbringing in Middle-Class London can’t handle declaring that I have any sort of ‘Philosophy’ with a Big P. But here it is anyway.)

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It’s 2023 and everyone’s talking about the scary advancement of AI technology, wondering whether they’ll lose their jobs any time before their retirement, while fashion and pop culture seems to see a comeback of the shiny and whimsical, pastel to neon plastic aesthetic that cased the now-obsolete technologies we grew up with. Pictures of stars from back then with their flip phones feels nostalgic enough to be endeared about, and it’s been coming for a while. I’d also been fascinated by similar textures for most of my art school years, the transparent, to be precise. I don’t feel that I’ve been able to express exactly what it is that I feel for these things in my work, and it seems to be this oncoming nostalgia that is coming in the way between what I want to say, and the viewer’s perception of these materials and textures.

So I blurted out the ‘Truly Y2K’ manifesto as above. I tried to promote this post on instagram, and for the first time I got a rejection from Meta. I guess that’s only natural when the post could easily be taken as a call to get off of their own platform. (Not exactly my point, but lesson learnt.)

It felt quite nice to get a big “NO” for once, when it seems like nothing you do can really be punk anymore in this age.

In practice, what I am doing to try and be ‘Truly Y2K’ doesn’t feel that drastic.
It can pretty much be summarised in the one sentence seen in my post: “Be anti-smartphone, it’s not smart to do everything with two thumbs and a finger.”

I have shut away my smartphone, and after some experiments with a bunch of secondhand ‘dumb’ phones, have settled for using a flip phone made for seniors (Doro DFC-0270).
In my day-to-day bag I usually carry – the flip phone, my MP3 player, my wallet, my keys, my diary/notebook, my sketchbook + pen, my digital camera and my emergency makeup. If my brain feels awake enough I might carry a book around.
Unfortunately, for my day job I need to use a laptop, but other than this, I only access the internet through a desktop at my dedicated computer-desk and made sure the machine is too heavy for me to carry around the house.

However I suppose that this is important to me in quite a personal way and I thought I’d share the background of it – it’s probably a very relatable story for the average nerdy creative kid growing up in the same generation as me.

I was born in the year 2000, so I am basically emulating what I saw my parents doing when I was a little kid. I wanted to find a balance between sounding like a rich completely-detached-from-reality ‘zen’ yogi who can afford to go “completely off of the grid” and forever being stuck in this goo between the real and the digital. Saying that, I am aware that there is somewhat of a time lag between my childhood and the childhood of the average kid around the block in terms of ‘digital’. I guess also that I naturally jumped into the role of ‘creator’ with a very small ‘friendly-audience’ outside of my physical reality showcasing what I made without really realising it early on, as this was before the trends of tumblr and instagram.

Coming from a Japanese family with a few of its members being involved as a cog in the wheel in the making of the first very digital home-gadgets, it made it so much easier even in 2006 for my family to have access to the internet as well as a range of other surrounding creative gear, despite being pretty skint after the big move to London. To some members of my family, this was something to be proud of and I was very much encouraged to explore this new world; to get ahead of everyone else… (welcome to the contemporary twisted-americanised-nationalism rooted in the carcasses of 80’s Japan.) So, here was little me at maybe 6-7 years old discovering the internet and computer-generated works.

It might sound deadly but it wasn’t all that bad. Thankfully my parents had enough brain cells to 1. not allow me to have personal accounts until I was about 9, and most importantly 2. teach me what information was deemed as private-private-private. I quickly found a bunch of friends on there.

The first thing I did was make a blog on this Japanese website called ‘ameblog’ where I shared my early artistic explorations of MS paint and Paint Tool SAI. This carried on for many years until I changed my main focus to the up-and-coming YouTube, where I recorded ‘speedpaints’, videos that were made by fast-forwarding a digital screen recording of your digital art making and slapping on a pirated MP3 of your favourite songs. I’ve been getting stuck drawing away on paper ever since I can remember, but much of my first experiences of ‘creative experiment’ came from this activity, of being an anonymous member of the web medium.

Though we were all kids, we were quick to try and emulate what was most available to us as reference – what we saw as pop and ‘official’; and a lot of us were getting really close to professional techniques in a very short time, at very young ages. (Foreshadowing.) With my spongey brain I could research how to do what I wanted pretty much straight away. I also sent private messages of adoration and got replies from my living favourite artists! Pirated versions of software were flying around and I loved experimenting with different mediums for practically free. The fantasy of The World Wide Web was still there, and I loved talking to random people from all over the world, fully utilising what I gained from school – my newly learnt language of English.

But suddenly it was time to start getting serious with my academics. I was known as the one who could use the computer in class, and I wasn’t very shy about showing people my creations, so I naturally got pushed into the “Graphic Design” route. If ambitious, why not a programmer? If not, maybe an editor working in TV?

Biggest turn-off in the world. At the ripe age of 13 my creativity was burnt out entirely from the core.
Yeah, maybe I’d have been a genius on Adobe Illustrator by now, coding all the websites if I was left alone, but alas. It was also around this time that all of my classmates were starting to actively use the internet as well, and that was the line being crossed for me. I loved being an anonymous blob in the sphere, but I couldn’t stand the people around me knowing what I’d put out there. And it was quite literally right at their fingertips…

The rest of my school life was me trying to run away from ‘marketability’ as much as possible. I focused on painting, and then I tried to make my art as incomprehensible as possible, but didn’t feel any of the true ecstasies of creativity in such a tight box of abstractions. I then tried to merge painting and my precious digital, to find a mid-point between ‘digital illustration’ and ‘fine art painting’, but to most of my teachers, everything done on a computer was dirty.

This is pretty much how I found myself at Goldsmiths College, where I saw that the digital was not vehemently scorn at, but was also not seen as some sort of easy-money-making advancement. I believe I saw quite a lot of peers creating visual manifestations of similar nostlagias around me during my time there, where they were trying to poke at the machine that had once opened up such a world to ‘do it again’ despite it is gone. But like I explained, I am not at all satisfied with the body of work I came up with, and I think that the fault lies in the fact that this act only becomes possible after deciding that “it is gone”.

Things can be a lot simpler.
By ‘aestheticizing’ my nostalgia for this era of the internet I’m just stupidly contributing to the same energy as the big brands. Afterall, what I want is to feel is that connection between likeminded individuals only made possible through this technology, to feel inspired by the things I see again, without feeling the threat of commodification. It is also about having access to a free plotting space on the big land of the internet and that is made quite impossible by design on most of the biggest websites. These things aren’t made possible by recreating images. This is what I wanted to perhaps discuss with a lot of the artists around me who handled similar themes, but I was too afraid to go there when I hadn’t come up with an alternative solution myself. But this is perhaps my first step in this direction.

As described before, ‘abstraction’ feels to point to something completely different in this post-meme world, and I don’t really like it. It doesn’t have the same whack-in-your-face effect as it might have in eras and contexts past.

I also want to point out that, while nostalgia for specific eras of the internet is not something that can only be felt by people my age, I think that it hits me and certain generations or groups harder because the it is the foundations of our creativity. This is as fundamental to me as pen and paper, and it sometimes went so far as to feel like I had been robbed the freedom of speaking the language I developed with because it automatically ‘comes off a certain way’.

I’m making this website in this way, going back to my roots; not in a polished painterly artist portfolio kind of way, and not in a get-rich-quick blog-scheme kind of way, because I don’t think the potential of having a very creative and thoughtful internet experience alongside healthy physical lives is gone. I am forcing myself to allow myself to be unconcise yet direct and honest, to be unpolished yet specific. I am quite aware that this will probably not reach a lot of people and most won’t bother to read, but I would very much like to keep focus without looking for ‘engagement’ that isn’t engaged at all and only bet on the very few who might resonate with me.

The problem is that we only surround ourselves with ‘content’, only taking a chance on what looks familiar.
The problem is that we give up because “it’s all the algorithm”.
The problem is that we believe the world’s value = number of views, not that the institutions are trying to enforce it.
The problem is that artists are at the end of the day still making instagram shorts, and still buying the new iPhone “because we can’t do without it”.
The problem is that it’s an ‘all or nothing’ attitude, where artists feel like they’re only free if they’re quite literally touching earth (though no hate on clay for that matter!)

Institutions are always going to be institutions. It doesn’t matter whether it was before web 0.0 or after.

Think of me subscribing to big old WordPress and writing these things as the equivalent of buying secondhand fast fashion items. It’s trying to navigate ways to be better despite being a very insignificant individual within the big dooms of the world. If you’re going to give that clickbaity article on how we’re entering the world of Asimov some time off of your day, maybe give my blogposts a try?

Even better, if you are a creative living in 2023, maybe pause to think about how you currently showcase your own! If you end up trying something different to the way it is now, let me know – and I’ll be sure to do more than just a single click of a heart icon.

This website is still very much messy and under construction because I’m doing it very DIY (will alert when it’s all done!), but please enjoy seeing it build.

Alongside just my silly little website, I have been having (a much needed) creative crisis as I have thought my main medium of illustration out to run dry of hope, for now. I suppose this website is sort of like the very first step in letting myself start a bigger experiment. After this I plan to write retrospective thoughts on my past shows to say a small fond goodbye to the very rigid format of them that I had pushed myself into. As you can tell I actually have quite a jumbled and combobulated thought process for everything. It feels quite good to be able to just release them into the void like this again.

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Author name: tzucasa

‘Pick n Mix’ at AMP Studios (also ft. the ‘Some Exhibition’ website)

The Era BC (Before College)

‘Truly Y2K’ & the Filosophy of this Website