Maze of Shadows

December 31, 2023

September 11th, 2022 - 12:20 to 6:45 pm - Santa Cruz, CA

Documented here is a pleasant if relatively uneventful trip myself and a few friends took to visit the UC Santa Cruz campus and Its Beach. There are also a few shots of Toa Nuju Metru, who I gleefully posed feet in the sand like a warrior rising from the dunes. Here I am reduced to an infantile state, stuffing toys in my pockets to carry with me in case I get bored on long trips, occasionally setting them down in dirt or pavement to capture my imagination in a photograph. My friends laugh at me now and humor the very unadult thing I’m doing, assuming there is some quirky or semi-ironic twist to this behavior that makes it acceptable. Little do they know that I desire deeply to reignite the uninhibited, raw energy of story-telling that I held in childhood; when now I place my toys in the sand and only feel embarrassed, and my imagination is dulled, cauterized, and neutered.

I had a dream where I sat on the floor of my first childhood room. I was the age that I am now, and the door was shut. Beyond my lap was strewn a massive assortment of toys formed into a chaotic battle arrangement just as I had loved to create as a kid. In those days, when the lore of my Lego was extensive, I would reenact intense collisions of opposing forces in battles that surged in momentum. There were small victories and an encroaching defeat that nearly overwhelmed our heroes before a sudden eucatastrophe would rescue them from the jaws of death. Here in the dream, I was an adult replaying these childish scenarios, moving my toys about, and straining my voice as I spit profusely for the desired sound design: implosions, explosions, quick breaths of silence before eruption, cries of soldiers in pain, the yell of a charge. But in reliving my childhood play, I felt no sort of liberation, only a shameful temptation that I was indulging. Every moment of play I felt that I should stop, that I was unraveling, that it was unbecoming of me. I was losing myself, drunk in some sort of sin that overwhelmed and dulled my inhibitions. I was enthralled in the play, but my eyes glazed over as I swung spaceships about in the sky like I was sleepwalking. At some point, I reached a climax and collapsed with my toys on the floor. Some unidentifiable figure stood at the door, and I remembered myself and my embarrassment, though it was not so much that I felt ashamed. Rather, I was resigned to my adulthood, knowing that whatever fun I had just experienced was not the equivalent to the passion I carried as a child, and that I had best leave it be.

This dream came to me only a few days ago despite these photographs being over a year old as of writing, but I thought these things then as I do now. Then it was buried in hidden, subconscious corners.

The Lost Splendor of the Cherubs

August 24, 2023

September 17th, October 1st, 2nd, and 4th, 2022

At this point, I was using my Sony Mavica as much if not more than my professional Sony a7iii. The converging trend of liminal space art with my increasingly blunt, candid photography seemed destined to be a parallax slowly closing in onto one fixed point. Much like the Vaporwave genre, the liminal space movement articulated an unspoken reality that always existed in the ideas surrounding my art. As was the case before I discovered this genre, I dreamed of the same surreal, vacant architecture, same lonely classrooms and endless meadows, but now I had an insatiable desire to photograph within the dream space, more specifically with my floppy disk camera. In the waking world, I had such a bad habit of neglecting to bring a camera with me when opportunities arose that this frustration carried over into these dreams. I would find myself witnessing amazing vistas with no way to photograph. I had to reinforce the habit of bringing a camera around when I was awake so that I could train my sleeping self to do the same. Even so, my frustration could be just as bitter. I might become aware of my dream and feel upset knowing that no amount of shooting would bring these photographs into the real world. I'd sometimes shoot regardless, hoping through some dream logic that by sheer exertion, I might will these photographs into reality. Drunk off the nectar of sleep, I often covet these deluded hopes of transmuting sleep matter into wake matter.

Apart from the standard empty corridors and closed playgrounds, I found the Mavica was great to bring to parties and concerts where the overwhelming strobe lights in the damp, seedy atmosphere lent itself to these messy candids. It was also such an absurd camera that it often caught the attention of the artistically-inclined (that or I would forcibly bring it up). I suppose I could say it was a good icebreaker if I had any skill in carrying a conversation to begin with.

The photographs in this album are held together in a single floppy disk at around 1.45MB. For context, I would not be able to fit a single JPG from my smartphone onto its memory. The limitations of old computer hardware is amazing to think about in relation to our massive file sizes today. Even more strange is to stumble across neglected files on used disks that date back as far as 1995. As someone who is old enough to have aged alongside the internet, but too young to remember a time before it existed, it's strange to witness digital objects older than myself. The Digital with a capital "D" feels too suspended in time to be perceived as a relic. A digital relic pre-dating oneself may perhaps be comprehensible to a younger generation, but I suppose I'm not quite young enough to have that perspective.