A film photo I shot in Tsitsikamma National Park, South Africa

You could shoot it on your iPhone in 4K. Instead you hold up a 2005 Sony Handycam you found at Goodwill for twelve dollars. The footage is blown out, the colors bleed, and the audio crackles.

A film strip of photos I shot in Bolinas, CA

The Texture Rebellion

The Panasonic PV-L352 and Sony CCD-TRV camcorders are selling on eBay for three times what they would’ve cost new. TikTok accounts with millions of followers post nothing but camcorder footage of ordinary life.

A film photo that I shot in Bolinas, CA

Bedroom pop deliberately runs through cheap interfaces and stays unpolished. Shoegaze, a genre built on burying melody under walls of distortion and fuzz, is in its biggest revival since the early ‘90s. Listeners like when the artist leaves evidence that a human was there.

The album cover for my debut album, be~long~ing, with shoegaze and dream pop influences

(Listen here)

Film photography is becoming as common as iPhone shots. Kodak Portra film has doubled in price. We crave light leaks, soft focus, and grain so thick it obscures the subject.

A film photo that I shot in Bolinas, CA

The Beauty of Grain

We’ve come to equate beauty with smooth surfaces and perfect proportions.

In Plato's Symposium, Socrates argues that beauty is a single Form of which all beautiful things are copies. So beauty has one source. For Aristotle, beauty is inherent to the object: the rose is beautiful because it’s a rose, and the body is beautiful because it moves the way a body moves.

A film photo that I shot in the Vatican Museum

Each time technology attempts to perfect, a counter-movement reaches back toward beauty. Grunge answered the synthetic sheen of ‘80s pop. Brutalist architecture rejected modernist polish. The white marble statues from the Greeks and Romans were originally painted in vivid colors. We mistook erosion for aesthetic intent and glazed over originality. Aristotelian beauty is in existence and Platonian beauty is in the unreproducible. While these two views are at odds with each other, neither requires polish.

A film photo that I shot in Rome, Italy

We’ve been fed the infinite scroll of visual perfection, enough that it has become invisible. Humanity reclaims beauty through the imperfection and distinction of grain.

The Pixel as Grain

The most beloved indie games of the last decade, Celeste, Undertale, and Stardew Valley, are pixel art. Low resolution is not a symbol of cheaply made, low-quality gameplay but, rather, a constraint for the artist.

Screenshot from Stardew Valley

Roblox, with its chunky avatars and janky physics, has more monthly active users than most AAA titles (see my article, “Roblox is Dada”).

Pixelation leaves room for imagination.

The Death of the Grey House

For about a decade, the millennial grey interior aesthetic colonized everything, devoid of color and personality.

Example of a millennial grey house

Designers are leading a movement toward color, pattern, and real wood materials. Paige Wassel, an LA-based designer and former prop stylist for Architectural Digest, champions spaces that feel lived-in and layered: sturdy vintage furniture reupholstered in a fabric you personally picked out, pillows with rich colors and patterns, art with intentional matting, and lamps with a warm glow.

Paige Wassel in her LA home, left. Wassel’s office, right (https://www.ouroborosarts.com/interviews/paige-wassel)

The last decade of interior design erased craftsmanship. A mid-century credenza from an estate sale was the culmination of a woodworker’s lifetime achievements. Are we losing the ability to make these beautiful artifacts? We must cherish the remnants and encourage a future generation of artisans to flourish.

Going Against the Grain

Alysa Liu won Olympic gold in figure skating and became a worldwide sensation. Ilia Malinin, known as the “Quad God,” stumbled on his expected gold medal performance.

Ilia Malinin’s backflip during his Olympic short program performance in Milan 2026

This has not stopped his fiery, cutting edge skating. During a “Stars on Ice” performance in Anaheim, CA, I witnessed Ilia do four backflips in a row. The backflip was banned by the ISU in 1976, deemed too dangerous and a violation of skating’s rule that jumps land on one blade. The ban was lifted in 2024 but the move still earns zero points.

In a sport where one hair out of place costs you a deduction, Ilia skates in jeans, to rap music, and throws the backflip anyway. The trace of a risky human choice over by-the-book polish is the mark of artistic beauty.

Aura as Grain

In 1935, Walter Benjamin wrote about what he called “aura,” the quality that makes an original feel different from a reproduction (an echo of Socrates’ intuition that beauty lives in something singular).

Walter Benjamin’s “aura” has carried into today’s slang. “She’s got aura” acknowledges that a person isn’t fake and can’t be manufactured.

A film photo that I shot in St. Helena Bay, South Africa

Grain is how we see aura. A hand-shaped surfboard has aura. A house full of found objects and bold color has aura. A lo-fi recording has aura. An algorithmically mastered track doesn’t.

The Grain of My Hands

I shape my own surfboards. I learned from YouTube tutorials of variable quality, most filmed in someone’s makeshift garage. The boards I make have minor asymmetries and tool marks. I find them easier to grasp than the machine-shaped boards. The grain of my hands is in them, so I understand the way they are meant to be surfed.

A surfboard that I shaped in San Diego, CA

Me, surfing the surfboard I shaped

***

The night I hung ten

A couple weeks into learning to figure skate, I unlocked the hang ten while surfing.

This was after years of cross-stepping up the board and losing it. Years of feeling the tail lift and bailing. Years of watching Joel Tudor clips and wondering what secret body knowledge he had that I didn’t.

Joel Tudor hanging ten

A few weeks after I started figure skating, I paddled out one evening at my local surf spot. I caught a left, walked up the board, hung ten, and held that beautiful moment of balance with the wave.

As I was falling asleep that night, I asked myself why the feeling of hanging ten felt so familiar. I realized it was the same balance I’d been drilling in my one-foot glide on the ice, that feeling of pushing off and making micro-adjustments to stay stable.

On ice, that point of contact is a blade four millimeters wide. On a longboard, you’re balancing on the nose and directing the fin.

The fin is a blade

A figure skate blade works by cutting into the surface of the ice. The pressure of that thin edge generates enough friction to melt a microscopic layer of water beneath it. You’re gliding on water, not ice.

Thumbnail from “Physics 25 Properties of Water” by Michel van Biezen on Youtube

A surfboard fin cuts through the water in the same way. The friction between the water’s surface tension and the sharp fin is what gives you hold, direction, and glide. Without the fin locked into the wave face, you can’t noseride. The fin is skating while you stand on the nose.

Both sports are made possible by a blade engaging with water to produce glide. One frozen, one liquid.

When you shift your weight on a skate blade, you’re moving between the front and back of the rocker (the curve of the blade) and tipping onto your inside or outside edge. When you’re trimming on a longboard, you’re doing the same thing through the fin: adjusting the angle of the board in the wave face, the depth of the tail, and the degree of rail engagement.

The only difference is that ice is solid, so in figure skating your body becomes the surfboard attached to the blade.

Falling in love with ice skating

There’s an absurdity about getting frostnip at the rink the same day you get a sunburn surfing at the beach.

But the first time I stepped on the ice, I recognized the feeling. It was the same pull I felt the first time I paddled out into the ocean. The glide was familiar. The conversation between me and the surface was one I’d been having my whole life, just in a different language.

Team USA’s Isabeau Levito in 2026 Olympics

I think every longboarder would love skating if they tried it. Longboarding’s emphasis on trim, flow, and quiet balance maps directly onto figure skating’s fundamental vocabulary of edges, glides, and weight transfer.

Alysa Liu’s stoic surfer mindset

At the Olympics, Alysa Liu demonstrated a flow state quality to her skating. Her interviews on mindset reminded me of a surfer. She talked about being happy to skate, no matter the outcome.

Alysa Liu in viral 2026 Olympic showcase skate to “Stateside” by PinkPantheress

Surfers have this saying: “It’s always worth it to go out.” Even when the waves are bad. Even when you don’t catch anything good. The act of showing up, putting on your wetsuit, and paddling out is enough.

The real instigator of this mindset is the Stoics. You can’t control the ice. You can’t control the ocean. You can only control your response to the surface you’re given.

In surfing, no two waves are the same, so the surrender is more pronounced. You read, react, and adapt in real time. If you wipe out on a ten-foot wave, the ocean is indifferent to you drowning.

Nathan Florence wiping out on a wave in Tahiti

In skating, the ice is more consistent, but your body is the variable. Your edges feel different every session. Your balance shifts. You fall, and the hardness of the ice is just as unforgiving as the ocean’s currents. Both sports punish rigidity and reward surrender.

But there is an important divergence: figure skating is extraordinarily technical in a way surfing isn’t.

Intuition meets precision

You cannot wake up one day and do a double axel without a coach. Knowledge in figure skating is sequential and non-negotiable, unless you want to break a leg. Surfing is wilder. You can learn by tumbling until you learn to keep your weight on your back foot while turning. I shaped four surfboards by watching shapers, learning the physics of surfboard dimensions, and trying it myself. Nobody is building custom figure skating blades in their garage.

One of my surfboards, mid-shape

The two sports train different kinds of knowing. Surfing trains intuition, since every wave is different. A surfer develops an embodied sense of when to pop up and where to be on the wave. Figure skating trains precision, a technically correct execution of movements with little margin for error.

Me on a wave at my local surf spot, riding a board I shaped

When you are a surfer that figure skates, intuition and precision collide. The surfer’s feel benefits from the skater’s control, which is why I can hang ten now. I had the intuition. I’ve been reading waves and positioning myself for noseriding for years. What I was missing was the precision: the proprioceptive awareness of exactly where my weight sits over my feet at every millisecond.

Who figure skates and surfs?

I didn’t set out to cross-train. There is no article about ice skating improving noseriding. I walked into the rink after watching the Olympics and felt an otherworldly pull.

As far as I can tell, nobody has written about this connection before. The surf world’s cross-training conversation begins and ends with skateboarding. The figure skating world doesn’t think about surfing at all. And that makes sense because how many people are waxing a longboard in the morning and lacing up Jackson Freestyles in the evening?

My two foot spin a couple weeks into ice skating

***

Gen Alpha is growing up immersed in surrealist worlds that bewilder most of their elders. But brainrot playtime would be quickly recognized by Dadaist artists.

The New Cabaret Voltaire

In 1916, artists gathered in a Zurich nightclub while Europe tore itself apart. They called themselves Dadaists. Their project: destroy the very concept of art that led civilization to industrialized slaughter.

Hugo Ball recited gibberish poems on stage. Duchamp submitted a urinal to an art exhibition. Tzara told people to make poetry by cutting up newspapers and pulling words randomly from a bag.

There’s a Roblox game called Steal a Brainrot that recently drew 24 million concurrent players in a single day. Players collect grotesque creatures with pseudo-Italian names like “Bombardiro Crocodilo” and “Tralalero Tralala.” Then they steal them from each other. The graphics could be rendered on a PlayStation 1.

Dadaists would recognize brainrot as a collective refusal of inherited aesthetic hierarchies. Steal a Brainrot resists interpretation by design.

Post-Huizinga Play

Hugo Ball, Dada artist

Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) explains how play is the foundation of culture. Civilization doesn’t create play. Civilization is play, crystallized into institutions.

He conceived of the “magic circle” as a sacred space where ordinary rules suspend and new meanings emerge. Inside the circle, a touch becomes a tag. A brainrot becomes a thing to steal.

Roblox is the largest magic circle ever constructed.

80 million daily users. 22 billion hours per quarter.

Brookhaven RP has 58 billion visits. Kids adopt each other, form families, go to school, talk about their real lives. Then they close the game, go to actual school, and talk about Brookhaven.

Roblox Brookhaven RP Youtube thumbnail from “Little Wonders TV”

Huizinga argued play exists separate from “ordinary” life. For Gen Alpha, the boundary dissolved. The magic circle isn’t a space you enter and leave.

Post-Benjamin Aura

Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” predicted that mass reproduction would destroy the “aura” of authentic art. Photographing the Mona Lisa infinitely withers her aura, the ineffable quality derived from presence before an original.

“i”-Bild, Kunsthaus Zurich

Roblox is 40 million games, all user-created, all remixable. There is no original. The entire substrate is reproduction.

And yet, users customize avatars obsessively. They remember the time their friend betrayed them in Steal a Brainrot and typed “MUST BE MY LUCKY DAY!!” before disconnecting.

Benjamin thought aura required an original object. Roblox proves it only requires presence. The art is in play.

Platform as Folk Culture

Folk culture emerges from communities, passes through informal transmission, changes with each telling, belongs to everyone and no one.

“Venus beim Spiel der Könige” by Johannes Theodor Baargeld (1920), Kunsthaus Zurich

Roblox’s most popular games weren’t made by Roblox Corporation. They were created by teenagers. The platform provides infrastructure. Users provide culture, which is an undefined collective property of the network.

Dada in the Digital Age

The Dadaists wanted to destroy the distinction between art and non-art, creator and audience, sense and nonsense. Some say they failed. The art world absorbed Dada, canonized it, put Duchamp’s urinal in museums, and carried on.

Roblox is a gallery of games for the people. There’s no central authority that pushes the meaning of games or decides which ones are good enough to play.

“Wat is Dada?” by Theo van Doesburg (1939), Kunsthaus Zurich

How will dada fail this time? Does irony curdle into nostalgia? Does the ad algorithm become the curator?

I feel like a failure for growing a tumor.

Not because these things don’t happen. Bodies break in ways we don’t control.

I feel like a failure because the self that grew the tumor is no longer functional. That version of me is gone. A new person was born through the process of growth. This uncontrolled cellular division threatened my physical body but also rerouted my way of being.

“At least it’s over now,” someone told me after surgery.

Half of my colon was removed to cut the tumor out. I still live with daily pain, exhaustion, and quieter symptoms that don’t photograph well.

It will never be “over.”

There is no ending to something that mutilates your body.

Is that how we define things, in a clean beginning, middle, and end?

In American media, we produce defined plot endings. This makes creative experiences easier to contain. But there is a different path, one which I’ve noticed in Japanese storytelling.

Poster for “The End of Evangelion,” 1997

In Japanese anime, the journey of the characters are emphasized, whether or not they reach a plot-driven goal. Often, these stories leave me unsettled. After they are done, they live in my mind space and persist beyond the bounds of their physical viewing. This feels closer to reality. Bodies don’t obey narrative structure.

I see the reassurance of “over” as the hope people reach for. To me, it feels hollow. Being told it’s over makes me feel like I’ve failed at healing because it doesn’t feel over. It makes me wonder if my continued struggle means I’m missing something obvious. But I don’t think I am.

So why does surgery have to be the end?

The removal wasn’t the end of the tumor. It was the beginning of healing from it. And, a year later, I’m still at the beginning. Healing is not an event you complete. It’s a condition you live inside.

I will always have scars. I will always digest differently.

A few of my scars from my surgery with Intuitive Surgical’s Da Vinci robot, with art overlay

Since surgery, I’ve become acutely aware of digestion. Not just of food, but of everything.

People. Books. Media. Weather. Exercise. Sleep.

There was a rupture in my most basic mechanism of intake and absorption. Nutrients, yes, but also meaning.

I feel more fragile now. Less able to tolerate what I don’t like. Hungrier for what sustains me. Weaker without a steady supply of essentials.

Part of my healing has been discovering: what are my essentials?

Beauty. The ordinary kind. A stone I found on the beach that lives on my desk. A body wash with a scent that reminds me of a tropical island. Art on my walls that acts as a portal into my friend’s inner world.

Fruit. I went a few days without it and felt hollowed out. Maybe because it never hurts my stomach. Maybe because it’s proof that the world offers sweetness without modification. Fruit is perfect as it is. I want to be more like that.

Passionfruit that I grew in my backyard

Love. I need more of it than I ever have. It sustains my days. It keeps me from collapsing under chronic pain.

Creation. I used to override this need with external accomplishments. Now, if I don’t create, it feels like a boa constrictor tightening around my soul. Creation can take many forms. More things fall under its definition than outside it. The only requirement is that it comes from me, even if it reaches beyond me.

Ableton file for one of my songs (released under the alias pixel.surfer)

Warmth. I no longer tolerate the cold the way I once did. It settles into my bones and lingers. I surf cold water daily, so my tolerance may still be high. But the warmth I receive must now match or exceed the cold I take in.

And what do I no longer tolerate? Usually, the absence of these things.

My magnified sensitivities are new, and maybe that’s why I feel like a failure. I am no longer who I used to be.

The failure isn’t me.

It’s the old version of me that couldn’t survive.

Honey cake with lemon curd and whipped cream celebrating the summer solstice

My dedication to each artform is not singular: one act is an imitation, then an evolution, of the other.

Part I: Physics of sculpting

These three disciplines require a general understanding of objects’ physical properties.

For surfboard shaping, the outline, bottom contours, and wide points of the board are guided by hydrodynamics and wave behavior. The other half of the shape pulls from a glimpse behind the curtain, an inkling of the wave rider themself.

Page 3, Ocean Surface Waves: Their Physics and Prediction by Stanislaw R. Massel

3d-modeling differs since you can choose to defy physics. Still, to create meaningful objects for most games, virtual models benefit from being grounded in real-world principles.

Shaping clay is intensely reliant on physics. Any ceramicist will tell you that if you throw a bowl too thin at the base, it will collapse under the weight of its own form.

Big bowl I threw

Part II: Succeeding in your craft with patterns

Artists in these fields emerge when they navigate the confines of physics and manifest a piece of their internal world.

Jar I made: before bisque fire and after glaze fire

While throwing pottery, I experiment with different forms, anything from sharp edged jars to the curved necks of vases. Some pots never survive the wheel. The clay will always find a way to remind you that dirt and water’s physical properties ultimately limit the imagination.

But, when you throw a form that survives the wheel, trimming, bisque firing, and glazing, sipping coffee from your own hands turns a mundane act into a moment that brushes the edges of the human condition.

Coffee in a mug I made

At the wheel, I catch myself comparing the movements of my fingertips to extruding in Blender. Resizing a face in a 3d-model is the opening up and out in pottery.

Resizing the face of a cylinder in Blender

The wood rib that I use to shape a cup on the wheel matters as much to me as the blade that shaves the mid-line stringer of a surfboard. Yet these tools are not as accessible as Blender’s keyboard shortcuts.

Wenge wood pottery rib that I made

I have been able to achieve some level of success within these three distinct sculpting crafts. I believe that my creative products demonstrate an ability to trace patterns across fields.

I call upon my cross-disciplinary knowledge to find a parallel route, wherever I go.

Ancient Etruscan pottery seen in a museum in Verona, Italy

Planter I made, inspired by Etruscan glazing designs

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I had little idea about the process of making surfboards but I knew I wanted to make one.

I was living in a secluded beach town in the mountains of Northern California, and did not come across anyone in the community who was a shaper. I spent hours each night watching videos and reading articles about shaping/glassing from both professionals and backyard builders.

My first step involved gathering tools, a blank and building a wood surfboard sanding and glassing rack.

Using Shape3dx, I visualized the elements for my board and printed out a template.

Design Elements

• squash tail
  theory: blend of hold (through the rail line) and easy release (off the corners)

• true 50-50 rails
  theory: water wraps the rail, creating suction/hold and smooth transitions. smooth & stable trimming.

• a little bit of nose rocker
  theory: helps the drop-in on faster, steeper waves

• glassed in wood fin
  theory: heavy wood with no friction from a fin box == stable, drive-y, smooth ride with less chatter

• fiberglass rope leash loop
  theory: bringing back old-school style and appreciating the art of glassing

• flat bottom
  theory: flat bottom == faster paddling and speed to balance out the steadier elements

Glassing

On the top lam, I took too long to saturate the e-cloth and ended up sanding the entire layer back down to foam.

I glassed in some flowers on the second round of top lam.

Then, I glassed in the wood fin.

I made my leash loop out of fiberglass rope.

After a hot coat and some wet sanding, The Water Bender took its first trip into the ocean.

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