before runescape and myspace, aol instant messenger (aim) was really formative for me as a kid, spending time online with friends.

there were three things you could use to express yourself on aim:

- a screenname
- a profile (it usually had song lyrics in it, or inside jokes, or a "<3 [your middleschool girlfriend/boyfriend's name]
- a buddy icon

so, for this work, it's 100 randomly selected buddy icons grouped in a 10x10 matrix, pulled from 'badassbuddy.com', from mid-2002.

i accomplished this by using the wayback machine (since badassbuddy.com is no longer online) and a python scraper using selenium.

i think this is cool because buddy icons influenced online culture a lot. and looking at a tapestry of them transports you back to 2002 because you can really feel where we were culturally and mentally as online people back then.

because i am not a great illustrator, i like crudely and quickly drawing out the face, first with the eyes, then the nose, then the mouth, and then putting a cigarette in the mouth and drawing the smoke wisping up. it gives the face dimensionality with a very limited # of strokes and there's something very cathartic about doing them.

for this one, it's like a sibling yin-yang situation, my smoke makes you(r face) and your smoke makes me. there's lots of ways to interpret it, all of which i enjoy.

i generally draw these frantically in bouts of frustrated excitement, kinda like how i play chess, and very seldom the strokes come very fluidly and you hit the line with your pen in this crazy way that makes your brain see an angle or emotion to the face that holds so much information in it. those are the best. most of the time it's a draw, crumple the page, draw again thing.

i used to stay in this house across the street from a park during covid, and i was only supposed to be there for 2 months, but covid hit and it ended up being like 6 months.

i had very little to do and was absolutely determined to learn how to produce and use a daw. before then, i had written about 20-30 songs, good songs, but i since i couldnt produce they sounded pretty bad.

so i'd spend like 8-12 hrs every day in this house producing. when i would get super strung out from learning ableton, i would go on a walk in the park and come back to the computer. i did it every day for the full 6 months, and at the end of it i knew how to produce pretty well and was proud of myself.

the day before i left the house, i sat across the street in the park and took out a pen and paper and sketched the house meticulously. i imported the vector lines into sketch, colored it, and then removed the vector lines to leave only the colors and shapes, which you are looking at here.

the first digital art process i used was to import my pen and ink drawings into vectors using adobe capture, and then import it into sketch and mess with it. this one was an image that was in my head one morning, a soggy matchbook -- i drew it, imported it, messed with the color and added the liquid component. what you see here are the lines of the pen and ink drawing as vectors, along with the shapes and colors.