Over the past several years I’ve spent a lot of time (actually wasted a lot of time) thinking about my website and how best to update it. It’s interesting that what starts as an asset - meets our needs and has a lot of excitement attached to it - over time can morph into a barrier to change. Because I knew how, I’d built my website from scratch and it worked really well…until it didn’t. Then, those skills became a box that I found myself in. Because I knew how many problems there could be in the process of changing - I froze. 

One of the big issues was dealing with my email…you can’t take the past with you when you move hosts…so I had to face, that at the worst, I might lose my entire history. Yes, I’ve tried archiving them, but more than that, I’d had to face the fact that the digital environment isn’t really interested in saving my past. That’s the truth with our digital images as well - my film archives are fairly stable - assuming that fire or earthquake don’t get ‘em, I’ll still have all of those negatives decades from now. But my digital images…those maybe a different story…and maybe that’s ok. 

On the super+ side, it’s been so much easier to treat the site as a living organism and post whenever I want. The best part is adding my new love… animation - I am transfixed by the process of adding time, events and sound to my still images. A friend (thank you Jonna) remarked that what was unusual about my animations is how they contrast from my still images, which are very quiet and still. It actually took me a while to realize in the animations that I could allow nothing to happen for a bit…allow the viewer to settle into the scene before something happened. It’s good to have a new road to journey on.