On the one hand, the kid shouting at the park is the latest fruiting body of an immortal superorganism that's older than dry land.

On the other, they're sticky and smell a little like pee.

My work is a tool for paying close attention like this. How can I experience a moment with the direct, fresh awareness that makes a good haiku?

The words and pictures themselves are a kind of waste product of this process. It’ll be fun to see if, like the waste oxygen you’re breathing, they have unintended consequences. Maybe they’ll start a fire.

pictures

I make all my pictures with code. I sit with my cute little computer at my cute little table and a cute little drink and I try to be really curious about what the computer gets up to.

At the same time, I try to pay attention to my body. How’s my heart rate? Am I sweating? Do I have to poop? I’ve noticed it’s surprisingly hard to breathe deeply when I look at a screen.

Sometimes I fail at being curious, and instead parts of me show up who are afraid that this piece sucks and that I’ll never make anything good again.

But I love those parts just as much as the rest of me, so when they show up I spend time with them instead.

words

cameras only know how to record what light is doing, but I use words to take little snapshots of anything. Morning breath, scraping my knee on a rock, the uncanny duality of a kid enthusiastically blowing snot bubbles while being the crowning glory of billions of years of evolution.

I only give myself a few words for each one, so I use ambiguity, wordplay, and grammatical improprieties to squeeze out a little more juice.

When I have a picture I’m ready to call done, I go back through my pile of thousands of these little things and find a few that do something when put next to the image. One becomes the title, and the other three become the body text. Each one gets its own color.

contact

I love getting emails. Please feel free to write me at luca@lucaaurelia.com. I especially encourage you to write if you’re making something and want your first reader / listener / taste tester, but really I’m happy to hear from anyone.

land acknowledgment

I grew up on the unceded territory of the ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ (Tsalagihi Ayeli) Nation, commonly called the Cherokee Nation in English.

The first draft of this page was written on the unceded territory of the Lekwungen peoples in Matoolia, now called Victoria, British Columbia.