why did you make this?
about a year ago, my friend maru asked if i had a personal website that she could link to on the digital notebook that she was putting together. the only one i had was the one for moon II, but that one hasn’t been updated in years, nor do i want to update it much anymore. i did mention that i had this domain registered to use as a personal website but never got around to actually making the site, though… and that was enough to make me think that maybe i should use it.
then, much more recently, we were talking about her notebook again and, after snooping through and seeing how well it turned out for her, it brought me back to wanting to finally make this site a reality. it had been something that i’ve wanted to do for many years anyway, and had even completed versions of it a couple times prior, yet i shrunk away from publicizing those because of the personal nature i wanted a site like this to take on.
but i feel like now1 is the best time to finally do this. no matter what happens, i finally have a support network of people who care about me, and who don’t plan to throw me away just yet.
approaching an ethos
anyone who has bumbled around notetaking circles will eventually come across the adage of working with the garage door up. it’s bandied about as one of the reasons why it’s good and healthy to create a digital garden. having others around to see your thought processes means you can both get feedback from passersby and potentially inspire them to start thinking about these issues too. everybody wins!… at least, in theory. it works better for some topics than others; it thrives in the world of concepts and methodologies.
but art feels different to me. it can be approached on those grounds, but there has always been a more receded and elusive aspect to the creative process which involves the mesh of emotions from which the work sprang forth. so what happens if you want to build your garden at this level?: to draw your paths from the raw neta which inspires the creative work – to trace back past the process of gestation toward the messy, crude, compelling act of conception itself? at that point it becomes more apropos to say that such a digital garden would be more akin to working with the bedroom door open, in ways both salacious and mundane.
i see such an approach as going hand-in-hand with the manifesto i wrote for paralogue, if now with the lens moving from the perspective of the observer to that of the observed. so, i decided to make this site as a miniature-scale replica of cauldron from which the forever soup is drawn.
into the labyrinth
still, there is one artistic approach that i want to implement here, which is to attempt to present a digital garden from which the reader only has visibility of a limited vantage point at any given time.
this came about for a few reasons, the first of which being that displaying the entire site layout ruins a bit of the fun of exploration. the idea that someone could go to the sidebar and see everything that’s in here struck me as not just demystifying but as highly impractical – where would you even begin? wouldn’t it be easier to start with what catches your eye among a few options and travel onward from there?
the second is that, keeping with the theme of tracing how inspiration points are sparked and developed, it seems most valuable to explore the labyrinth by following the chain of references, as that was how it was created in the first place. for instance, maybe listening to an album sets off a chain reaction that leads to a different way of viewing one’s own identity. and even if the latter is the “more useful” product, ripe for even further distillation one day, i’d rather not try to erase these intermediate steps which led to this point.
the third is, well, rooted in my own skittishness at putting something like this online in the first place.
Footnotes
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as of summer 2025 ↩