joyful flow state

I love a simple problem. They feel like a gift to quickly solve. With my work focused on a twenty years old open source project, I’m finding new ways to think about and work on longer term ideas. Some problems that remain and that arise are exceedingly hard to solve as a result. There might be a reason no one has figured out a solution in a decade.

It reminds me about some reading I’ve done on the impact of offering 20 year grants to address a problem rather than four 5 year grants. For big, intractable problems giving the advantage of time and a runway to work on addressing the roots is invaluable instead of a more narrowed 5 year focus repeated four times over, never sure if the funding will get renewed. There are pros and cons to both of course.

All of this is to say that I’ve been paying special attention to that which gives me a joyful flow state. Inevitably a burst of energy follows in these moments. Sometimes if it happens with a really good book I get so excited that I have to put the book down and go write about all that’s swirling through my head or call someone up to chat about it. The Museum of Block Art (MOBA) continues to be a big driver of this momentum and inspiration as a side project. Using the same software I spend my days toiling over in a creative, unserious way expands my relationship to the work, both energy and perspective wise.

In any case, I’ve been messing around on and off for a few months on a couple of different art pieces when, after a long day of work, I decided to dive back in to create a new piece called “Ranges”:

While I can’t recreate it from scratch, here’s a sense of what I did to make it:

• Snagged one of my photos from the Dolomites, free for anyone to use from the WordPress Photo Directory, and put it into a parent Cover block.
• Added in four nested Cover blocks, put the same image inside each of them, and set each to a fixed background.
• Made each nested Cover block the same size.
• Used Colorzilla (a Chrome extension) to pull colors out of the photo and applied each as one of the colors of a duotone filter for each individual nested Cover block.
• Messed around with border radius controls.

Part of the fun of MOBA and using WordPress to create this art is that the entire point is that others can reuse the piece, recreate it if they want, and know every detail about how it’s made. It’s truly meant to be art that makes you say “I can do that!” and, perhaps, “I want to know how to do that”.

This piece is inspired by my trip to the Dolomites, where I took this photo, and the way the mountains jutted out so wildly and beautifully. I wanted to capture the feeling of the way the mountains were revealed in different ways, at different angles, and at different times of the day.