PROCESS &
EXPLORATION
2025
Not A New Beginning - It Just Ended
Welcome to the first issue of my digital scrapbook/zine. I’m getting started on my New Year’s resolutions early this year - by curating a space to display my work. Actually, it’s less about the work, and more about the process and exploration - as the title says. This project is intended as a way for me to combat the gnawing feeling I constantly have that:
1. I take on too many hobbies and so achieve mastery in none
2. My interest in a hobby fades too quickly to produce results
3. I never finish anything
I think this is a feeling many people share, particularly those with a polymath spirit. I’ve come to realise this is partly because the truth of the matter is that I enjoy process and exploration over finished results and mastery. I often prefer breadth over depth - which means I try out many things, often abandoning them once I’ve proven to myself that I could master something if I really wanted to. I’m trying to embrace the idea that my skill lies in finding resonance between channels, rather than depth in any one. And I’m trying to remember this by having something messy and unresolved to show for it.
Sticking with my love for liminal spaces, and living life dangerously on the edge of a boundary, this is intended as neither a public nor a private space - not something I’m truly ready or willing to share, but equally not something I’m able to keep quiet.
The issues are intended to be a very loose collection of ideas, projects, thoughts, writing, photos, drawings, code, buildings, design, hobbies, and any other toy I pick up and toss away - more focused on documenting process and exploration than on producing a finished product.
In an attempt to replace those three initial false concepts, I’ve decided instead to redefine my notion of success as:
1. Valuing breadth over depth, and resonance between channels
2. Not valuing mastery-for-its-own-sake, but valuing exploration - and recognising that exploration does not produce polish or confidence, but it does produce fragments and taste
3. Creating a space (here) where work accumulates rather than vanishes - where the process is the result itself
REFLECTIONS & SHADOWS
REFLECTIONS & SHADOWS
It's only in looking back over my creative output this year that I've been able to see this consistent theme - I take many pictures and recordings of reflections and shadows. In the dance section later on, you'll see how I used my shadow as the expression of the dance instead of direct footage. Reflecting (excuse the pun) on why this is, I think there is something fun about how hidden the form truly is. With the dance footage, it becomes a kind of quest to try and resolve what was happening in the original. It gives the viewer more to put together, and that makes it unexpected and fun.
When I think about data, or software, or the internet, or quantum computing - or even language and expression themselves - I often ruminate on how "lossy" these channels are. Information never truly reaches its destination undisturbed. Sometimes I think about how lonely that is: the thoughts and feelings inside your head sit there alone, and despite your best efforts to eject them into the world, they leave only ripples of intention - shadows - and never the "real" thing.
This also connects to my interest in maths and physics - and in particular to ideas of projection and mapping: what happens when you move something from one dimension to another, higher or lower, and what information survives that journey. (Side note: one of the first popular science books I ever read, when I was 14, was Hyperspace - and to this day I think it’s had a profound effect on me.) A projection is never neutral. Something is always lost, compressed, or distorted in the act of mapping - but sometimes something else can be gained.
Dancing with shadows is, in a sense, a deliberate flattening of form: a three-dimensional, moving body collapsed into a two-dimensional trace. But that loss is exactly what makes it fertile. The viewer is handed an incomplete signal and asked to do some of the work themselves - to mentally project it back up again, to imagine the missing depth, weight, and intention. In that way, the shadow isn’t a lesser version of the dance; it’s a prompt - a collaborative act between what is shown and what is reconstructed.
I think there's also an element of self-preservation here too. If you hide some of yourself back, you leave room for people to interpret it, and thus absolve yourself of the pain of truly being seen. Who can say whether the original dance was bad? Who can really judge the outline of a nipple in a shadow, if you never really saw the whole thing? It was 2025, for god's sake - can't a woman take a provocative, sexual selfie and broadcast it to the world without judgement?
Perhaps this is why I'm drawn to these liminal forms - reflections, shadows, fragments. They exist in the space between what is and what might be. They suggest without revealing, invite interpretation without demanding it. In a world that often feels too exposed, too immediate, too demanding of clarity, these half-seen forms offer a kind of refuge - a space where meaning can be constructed rather than consumed.
I speed-built an outdoor shower in time for our annual party — the largest structure I've probably built solo out of wood (the polytunnel was metal). I also sorted a complex irrigation setup in the polytunnel, providing water to several gardens, the new shower, and the chickens.
I always thought he was the one who moulded me into something. I was water and glass. I just became what he made me. Now, he’s becoming what I made him.
I'm not sure I did desire him. I desire a version I used to make up in my head. It’s just that he made up his version of me too, and they were close enough that we fell over each other’s incantations relentlessly.
He was sand in my eyes, salt water at the back of my throat. A hot, delirious day. Too many afternoon drinks in the sun. Life drifting around you—you can’t think straight, but it doesn’t matter. You accept the pace of it. The heat continues into the night, and in the morning you wake unsure where the dream began, or which parts were real. Did he touch you in the middle of the night, or did you imagine it?
Every line he writes, I read it my way. I know I write lines ambiguously for him. We've always been too far apart in our closeness, given each other too much interpretive room. He takes, and I give. But he gives me a silhouette to fill in the details, and I take the creative license I need.
there's a life to live,
regardless,
B
my skincare routine and got a cool haircut bc I'm a cool guy
BERLIN
February 2025
A Shoutout to the Boys in my DMs
Genuinely the best insult of the year
I imagine you got lots of attention from guys when you were younger, because you have a good body, and maybe that made you a little tired of guys complimenting you on your looks. But once you got a bit older, in a bigger pool, like, you're not hot enough to blow anyone's mind, but also not ugly enough to be anyone's dirty secret.
I feel like average isn't accurate though. Like, you're not plain. I'd notice you if I saw you in public, but I imagine it would vary day to day as to whether that would be in a good way or not. You have a great arse, but you clearly put a lot of effort into it because you hit 30 and suddenly realised guys were less interested in you, I'm guessing?
You also cut your hair shorter because you "don't care about whether guys like it or not", and then were secretly a bit disappointed that whilst it kind of suits the vibe you have going on, guys were indeed less attracted to you. But of course, you definitely don't care about that
My Self
"The only thing that stops me breaking you is that I care about you."
When you let yourself be broken wide open, there's a difference, isn't there, between those who like to pick up the pieces and those who don't. Some people take you to the point where they could break you, but don't — just to show you they can. Others take you to the point, and do, for the same reason. There's a difference between those who pick up the pieces and those who don't.
And when you've gathered them together and reassembled them, doesn't the light pass through the cracks differently? Every experience turns you. Information passes through you in new ways as time moves on; you feel the cells inside you renewing, turning over. Aren't intense experiences just a faster pace of change — when it's always change, anyway?
Is the breaking simply change past some irreversible critical point, where the form shifts unrecognisably? There's not enough of yourself left to hold on to from before — but isn't that the thrill of life? The thrill of playing games in performance. Some of us desire the next character to play.
