People who meet me as a web developer are often surprised to learn I make art, and people who meet me as an artist are often surprised to learn I write code. To me these have never felt like separate lives. They are two expressions of the same impulse: to take a system, learn what it can do, and push it somewhere interesting.
I'm based in Berkeley. For most of the 2010s I made abstract paintings and collage. More recently my work has moved toward generative AI, photography, and digital media. The materials keep changing while the underlying interest holds steady — I am drawn to art, technology, nature, and culture, and to the places where they bleed into each other.
The through-line
If there's a single thread running through everything I make, it's an interest in process, form, and meaning — usually in that order.
I tend to start from a process and let the picture emerge from it. A collage is a process for recombining things that didn't belong together. A photograph is a process for noticing. A generative series is a process for exploring a concept through hundreds of variations. Most of the time I'm building a system and finding out what it produces.
This is probably the developer in me. When you write software, you think in terms of inputs, rules, and the whole space of outputs those rules can generate. I look at art the same way. The individual piece matters, and what interests me even more is the territory it came from.
Why the tools keep changing
I move between mediums freely. Paint, a camera, a diffusion model — they're all instruments, and each one has its own character, its own opinions about what it wants to do.
I mean that as a compliment. A good tool pushes back. Collage taught me to work with accident and juxtaposition. Photography taught me that framing is a decision and that most of the work is in what you leave out. Generative models taught me that you can have a real creative relationship with a system that has its own aesthetic tendencies — that you can direct it, or step back and let it surprise you.
When a new tool shows up that can do something the old ones couldn't, my instinct is to learn it. The skills that matter — seeing, selecting, knowing when something is working — carry across all of them.
Working in series, curating at scale
Most of my work happens in series. I'll stay with one concept — a kind of figure, a parameter range, a visual territory — and generate or shoot or make far more than I'll ever show. The work that gets published is a small fraction of what gets made.
The discarded pieces are the exploration that makes the good ones possible. A lot of what I actually do, day to day, is curation: generating or capturing a large field of possibilities and then developing the judgment to recognize which ones are alive. After enough repetition, you stop being able to fully explain your criteria and you just know it when you see it. The series teaches you its own standards.
I've written more about that idea in Series as Practice, and about how it plays out specifically in AI work in AI Art and the Question of Authorship.
What I'm after
What I'm after is simple: to make things worth looking at, and underneath that, to understand the systems I work with well enough that I can take them somewhere they wouldn't go on their own.
This blog is where I'll write about that work as it happens: the series I'm making, the ideas I keep circling back to, and the occasional technical thing I figure out and want to write down so I don't forget it. If any of it resonates, get in touch.