One of the surest ways to infuse my existence with misery is to sit me in front of a computer screen for multiple hours on end. Unfortunately for me, this past week has been mostly that, and the next week will likely entail more of the same. Some days I find myself clocking in something like 12 hours straight at the computer. Needless to say, this is not the life of the artist one aspired to as a child, but it is exactly what the job necessitates (at least for me I guess) in this evidently despicable century. Most of these hours don't actually involve doing much in the way of anything creative.
– TSG Exhibition: The ask included proposing objects that can be pulled from the world of THE SOLAR GRID; objects that could potentially be fabricated and displayed within an exhibition setting. This meant going through the entire now complete graphic novel with a particular eye for the speculative objects that could ostensibly work, making note of them, and putting them all into a presentable proposal-ready PDF.
– The Podcast Series: Going over the video recordings of the episodes (wherein I interview Egyptian artists), each one an hour long, and identifying the moments in which the guest talks about a particular project. Make a list of all mentioned projects, email it to the guest so they can send back relevant imagery of said projects. Once received, email them to the video editor along with time-stamps that indicate where the images ought to be spliced in.
-TSG Archive: Two other things have necessitated going through my very unorganized history of TSG process documentation. And y'know, TSG took 10 years to complete, so that's a lot of unorganized history to go through. Which is how I stumbled upon this:
Giving a keynote presentation about THE SOLAR GRID at the Science Fiction Research Association conference held in Oslo circa 2022. Photo credit: lost (I'm so sorry!)
Of course, the above-mentioned projects haven't been the only reason behind recent computer-centric activities. There's also the usual stuff: email, accounting, flight bookings, etc.
My one piece of advice to young artists from here on out with be: Just know that it'll involve something like 70% admin, 20% actual creative work, and 10% putting out fires and/or wanting to die.