Slow Change

A few days a week I commute for several hours on the train.

I spend more of this journey than is healthy trying to connect to some semblance of the internet.

I’d love to be an offgrid guy, but I struggle to last minutes, let alone days offline.

There is a section of the track when I know there’s nothing, just 3G and tunnels, so I invariably give up, stop trying to connect to Bandcamp or YouTube or Discogs or Twitter or Instagram, and turn to the few wavs I have stored locally.

Often when I reach this point especially on the journey home, I'll draw or animate on my phone; usually in Procreate Pocket, a pared down but mostly fully functioning mobile version of Procreate. I don't have a pen or an Apple pencil or anything for my phone, so its all just finger painting, on a wobbling tiny screen as the train rattles along, listening to music shuffling in the background.

Thats the scene.

It so happened the other day I was listening to Slow Change by Bobby Hutcherson, when I started this project.

It wasn't a project, I was just idly finger painting on my phone, deep in the cosmic vibes.

I've been reading

Amie McNee

’s “We Need Your Art”, and I am at the section where she instigates a two week reset. McNee suggests we make a small achievable piece of art on the daily for two weeks, a few words, a small drawing, something achievable, then half it.

Lower your expectations and keep showing up in order that you can learn to trust yourself. It feels like a really nice idea.

After I’d roughly animated this vibey island while listening to Bobby, I decided this could be perfect for my own reset: 5 frames, 3 colours; maybe I'd just try and do it again, in another app on another day.

So the next day I traced it off, reanimated it, and added a constraint. I did it with straight lines only. Then on the third day I took that second version into the looping vector software we use for hidything, and added transparency and fill to it. The next day some displacement, the day after that some dither compression.

On it went, and I started to enjoy how the original animation corrupted and changed over time, the bouncing from one programme into the next felt like a decaying signal, or the childrens’ parlour game Telephone, how whispered secrets change with every telling.

—

Before my birthday I’d offered people an airdrop, a free edition, and asked wether they’d prefer something made in Looom, Procreate or Fantavision.

DagieDee

asked if these were the titles of the artworks themselves, rather than the prevalent software I tend to use to make them, and I realise I need to be more explicit about some of the different processes I dally with.

As the poll was tied, for the airdrop I made this 3 frame boil, a revision of my first ever H=N objkt, using 1 frame drawn in each software.

The seed of this Slow Change exercise is here:

As I kept doing this thing they've got more and more abstract as the weeks have gone by. I’ve jumped in and out of Deluxe Paint, Blender, the trusted Photoshop Lasso, my old spar After Effects.

For one of them, I tried to recreate a raster to vector process, half remembered from 2001 ish. This directly references my first ever experience using an Apple Mac, transforming our scanned drawings into perfectly tapered and scalable maths, and the shifting from process to process or app to app that constitutes so much of the alchemy of digital art. God bless Adobe Streamline, much missed.

I had a chest infection, two weeks became three, etc etc, yet it’s been a really enjoyable process, and people have seemed to genuinely resonate with it.

I ended up making the final one on the same train journey home, which felt so fitting, and I am now so hooked on this process that instead of my phone I did it on my laptop, slipping off the retractable shelf thing where you're supposed to put your drinks and your sandwich, as I tapped away at the trackpad trying to finesse that risograph effect.

For much of the journey, with my music shuffling in the background, no internet connection, not a thought about trying to get online, just in the process of making,

I've also included an extra, redrawn take of it for this months Sloth zine, because why not draw another nine identical islands when you’ve already drawn so many …

Thats the Slow Change.

Had another tune been playing in the background, it could have been called Dweller on the Threshold, or something by The Blue Nile.