Start of my digital garden

I grew up with the internet in the early days of AOL chat rooms accessed by a dial-up modem. I was among the first to have access to Facebook as a closed network based around college campuses when your friend group online was just a little directory of the people at your school. 

When I was fresh out of graduate school with a salaried job, I bought my first “smart phone”, an iPhone, and I could check my email everyday all day anytime anywhere. I thought it was so special. I remember showing it to my coworker who said, “You’ll never go back”. At the time I didn’t understand the weight of what he said. I had been without a smart phone while my friends had been using them for years. I was a late adopter to a smart phone and I couldn’t imagine that it would somehow “spoil me”. That I would never go back to an earlier form of cell phone like the prepaid flip phone I had in undergrad. Back then, I felt like reverting back or opting out of smart phone technology was easy and possible.

I am reflecting on how technology has changed and how my engagement with it has changed over time. How it has changed my brain, my attention span, my creative focus, my precious creative focus that must be tended like a slow burning fire. How our access to everything and people’s access to me is mediated -demanded- through this little pocket computer with a crisp picture on the screen. 

I am glad that now, by spending far less time on social media, my brain has started to revert back to maybe my pre-smart phone way of thinking. I do a lot more “thinking about thinking”, how my thoughts take place, how deeply I can let my mind wander, how opening up space has me noticing things both big and small, like the aperture on my nervous system has opened wide. And of course the generative thinking and ideation that my mind does, has always does, is back at full speed turned all the way up here in 2026. 

I am figuring out the best way to capture my thinking and tend my digital garden in hopes of making a new different (or maybe old) way of sharing my work and presenting myself. It feels new and more authentic because I want to share my work and present myself for fun, because it is part of a creative life as an artist to have a point of view and to want to express that point of view. The internet, (yes! The internet!) was supposed to be a place for self knowledge and deep exploration. Remember how we used to talk about ‘surfing the web’ because we would kinda click around and follow our curiosity through various links and resources and people’s half finished little ideas and projects. That was fun. 

 I just know that I want to be visible so that people who are interested in my work and my point of view can find me. Thank you for being here.