I’ve gone back to the well to turn an analog painting into a piece of net art.

I think a lot about time. I think about the strange nature of experiencing linear but relative time. I remember 3 months of summer vacation from school yawning out over the year like it had no end. Today 3 months blinks by and seasons suddenly change. I think about my hour-long train ride to work in Seattle and how long that ride is and how much time it costs me but how the experience of that ride is a fleeting vague memory.

When I woke up in Monica’s guest room, jet lagged and confused, I felt for a while like I had stepped out of time. Good travel can do that.

For this piece I wanted to capture this room again and express the feeling of time passing and thoughts bubbling up. When I was hunting around for a domain name for the work, guacamole.tips was hilariously available. An entrepreneurial person might turn this into a SEO rich link bait farm slathered in ads. But to me, it was just the sort of random brain flotsam that I had while waking up slowly in that room. So scribbled notes and ghosts of ingredients appear with the change from day to night.

Process

All of the imagery was created using Procreate on my iPad. Text was hand scribbled with an Apple Pencil. The components are composited and animated using CSS3 animation and blend modes. The entire piece is executed as a simple ReactJS application.

Browser compatibility

All modern browsers should display the painting. Microsoft Edge does not currently seem to support CSS3 blending modes. I don’t care. While MS Edge is a great improvement over traditional Internet Explorer, it’s usage is a rounding error compared to mobile Safari and Chrome. Besides, I build for the future, not the past. Speaking of Internet Explorer, it will probably not work at all. I don’t care. I didn’t test it. Netscape Navigator 4.0 won’t work either.