Exploring My Own Process in Three Minutes
Me, on the making of Me.
For nine months, this newsletter has aimed to serve as a "collection of culturally relevant stories," each one intended to weave together art, philosophy, and the human condition. It has been a space to contemplate process - not just as a means to an end, but as the subject itself. I’ve used it to wander, to teach you and teach myself, investigating how others memorialize, reference, and iterate their way toward meaning. These reflections have led me to explore my ideas and connect them in new ways, pushing me deeper into the stories I tell and the ways I share them…
…and then I took a break. Not from learning or thinking or doing, but from producing more online content. I realized that my own process isn’t about answers. It’s about questions. What am I trying to understand? What connections can I draw between seemingly disparate elements? How can those connections invite you in? And where else can they exist?
Lately, I’ve been drawn to the gaps that our online presence can’t fill. There’s something irreplaceable about the physical world like how a room transforms as people gather, or the texture of conversation unmediated by screens.
As a woman obsessed with process, I started reflecting on my own: here, in my work, in my thoughts, in my life. I thought about how “offline” the experience of producing my most recent letters was - by design - but how funny it is that, despite it all, their final fate was right here, online. The internet, as a space (not as a collective), isn’t very fond of the process I so deeply love. It’s really good at delivering the final product, wrapped in a bow, but it forever disregards my favorite part. The best part.
For both of the interview-based letters I’ve shared—the first on furrier and designer Altobello, and the next on sculpture artist and video game designer Tim Nicholson - it was important to me that they were the result of offline conversations, rather than emails filled with Q's looking for A's, transactional exchanges.
Conversations that were preceded by the exchange of phone numbers, a date, a time, preceded by emails with a deck attached, preceded by direct messages on Instagram, preceded by a follow in response to my interest being piqued and my desire to know more. It started online and it ended online, but the in-between was special.
This letter that you’re reading right now was largely inspired by a direct message that I received, here:
…after sharing this snippet of an interview:
The video was recorded on my MacBook, my backup, if you will, while I chatted on one phone and recorded audio with my second phone—an extreme but necessary precautionary measure, as the audio from one of my prior interviews was nearly inaudible. Below is the transcript of that same call. You can’t make out the words when you look at the photo because there are just too many, or maybe there aren’t enough. What it represents is near and dear to my heart. It’s the result of a connection—an exchange of our thoughts, memories, and ideas—in this case, 8,626 words' worth. A connection that I did my best to build into a story, a testament to pass on to the next person, hoping that even the most seemingly insignificant detail would stand out, influencing their thought trajectory.
My own desire to be offline has been exacerbated by what I’ve been consuming lately: books, articles, conversations, and art that all point toward the intersections of physicality, process, and meaning. More specifically - and not-so-surprisingly - I’ve been diving into works that explore the philosophy of making. Many of them are old sources of inspiration (originally existing offline, but now online), my personal fixations, that have greatly shaped the direction of this project, like the Whole Earth Index (more on this later, but their slogan was “access to tools, ideas, and practices”), and a plethora of videos posted on the Eames Office YouTube channel, particularly Dinner Party Sequence from their presentation at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, a twelve year old post with just ten thousand views.
I’m fascinated by the thought of my evolving perspective over the next 24, 48, 72 hours because I wrote this letter, because I saw a film that pre-dates my existence by 25 years, or because of this chapter in Practices of Looking - An Introduction to Visual Culture that I found as a scan on the University of Texas’ website…
…or this brilliant chat between Steve McQueen and Donna De Salvo, during which he speaks on his discovery of cinema in his late teens, has been top of mind…
…or some of my scans from Creative Director, Yuki Yagi’s, curation of archival books and printed media housed at the vowels Research Library here in NYC.
I’ve been zeroed in on how these influences interact and shape my own perspective. All of these moments contribute to the evolving dialogue in my mind. Each letter I produce and publish is an experiment - a way to test ideas, to synthesize what I’ve been learning, and to share it with you in a form that sparks curiosity. There is beauty in the transient—a fleeting story, a post liked and then forgotten—but there is also a search for something that asks to be revisited.
My fascination with process has shaped every aspect of this newsletter. Every letter begins with an idea. Sometimes they’re fully formed, but more often than not, they’re a reaction to something. But I want it to be more - to be bigger, and to be better.
Beyond, but starting with these letters, I’m interested in what happens when a story unfolds in multiple dimensions - when it’s not just something you read but something you feel, consider, and carry forward into your own explorations. I’m excited to expand this project in the months ahead and bring it to third-spaces. If you’ve been here in a bid to support this project, you’re already part of this process: the interplay between thought and thing, between what is imagined and what is made real.
RRR | Related Reading Resources
Related Reading Resources is a collection of the articles, videos, and websites used to inform this letter. I hope you can find valuable takeaways.
RRR | ENO Documentary
RRR | Vowels Online Archive
RRR | Static 2009 by Steve McQueen
RRR | Process Theology