User:Themsen/RWRM3-6

Relation to Previous Practice

I've always been interested in facts, and at an early age I wanted to be an astronomer, horticulturist or paleontologist. I didn't much care for their foundation. Why am I telling you this? Because at an early age I did stuff: I read about facts, I went out into the fields of my village and collected fossils (there were alot of them). I made experiment of levitating magnets. I drew and made sculptures out of sticky-puddy, ofte of hads and huma figures. My favorite pastime was drawing hands and arrow trees, the trees which littered the countryside.

It took me away from a demanding social environment.

I collected stamps, hockey-cards, pokemon cards and pogs, funny jumping rubber cons. I built Kapla-castles. Building was the only social context where I felt safe. I built card pyramids. At an early age I followed my fancy, always being the kid all to himself. People like my girlfriend and my best friend, my step-brother took me out of my solitude. I grew vegetables one summer. I read and made things all to myself.

My mom used to say that when I was a baby she had to keep track of me as I would start to disassemble a clock or a radiator within five minutes.

Once I started school and studies became part of my life I did less. When the social and studies came in I began struggling with finding myself in a social environment. The first 5 years a went from being myself to trying to form myself to survive socially. I was literally an alien come to Earth.

I'm still struggling.

In my teens I began to read sci-fi, fantasy (David Eddings, Tolkien), horror (Goosebumps) and building Warhammer models, then painting them just for the sake of making and for the sake of imagining. In a hostile world I projected my own world onto it, perhaps to reconnect to a lost part of myself. My interest in fiction and building took me to immerse myself in MMORP games (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games) like runescape, World of Warcraft, Rubies of Eventide (now gone) and finally Planeshift. I retook my drawing, struggling with expectations from school-life and the online Planeshift community. I got alot of help in drawing and imaging the great fantastical beasts of Yliakum, which the realm simulated in Planeshift was called. I began texturing and drawing concept sketches for the developer team, meanwhile being in conversation with other artists and developers within the community. I learned how to take constructive criticism and how to filter it when applied to my images.

I began using digital programs such as Photoshop and Blender more out of necessity for texturing and adjusting the levels and contrast/light of my scanned images (I bought a cheap scanner).

I was taken in as a prospect developer into the planeshift developer team with alot of support from people who I'd learned to respect. I developed my own style, most likely shaped from my appropriation of drawing styles of the artists in the community. Somehow, in that community I took back some of myself. I became more focused, orgaized; with a purpose. My will for assembling and disassembling things was slightly back. I became a person people could respect. For this small moment, I lead people.

A will for understanding the things I make, perhaps to see myself again. To retake what I lost.

I'm still not socially adept, at handling the game of the social. The things I used to make was me, the process of making; meanwhile my mother was, and still is concerned aout my position in the social human-world. It's something I'll continue to struggle with, abridging my presence in the real world with the things I make and imagine.

I've been lost in the muddiness of the mental/social games of my species and family, and it's time I get back a part of myself. I've deserved it.

It's time I bring ack who I am as a struggling social hermit, a maker by birth; with lost, perhaps hidden needs for projecting what I am and what I think onto the world. A small impact is enough, a small push.

I'm still a scared boy, living in a dream of my own making. perhaps to shield myself me from the vicious reality trying to suck the marrow out of my bones. I want to fight back, make the world become my own making, together with people I love. So far the human-world have done just this, sucked most of the marrow out of my being - but I can still replenish. I can still fight back with the tools I've received along the way.

Trying to be a maker and a social animal at the same time I believe is hampering me, but making my work hermetic leaves nothing for the world to interact with.

I must stop being the dark matter, the neutrino (remote, invisible) - and become the matter, the light (radiating, present)