Bend to be unbendable

I think it’s time for another piece.

We are in a blurry sphere of massive unknowns. Or it certainly feels that way.

But my partner and I have been hiding away in the worlds of games and Avatar the last airbender. I have been additionally hiding in massive amount of tutorials on 5 million different 3D softwares.

When I finally finished watching Avatar Aang, I was really sad. I don’t know why.

Let me try to work it out here. 

Maybe the avatar world is so engrossing that I felt by the end when Avatar and his friends save their world, I was hindleg kicked out and thrown back into my own real world of chaos. Protests, covid. Injustices, Insincerities, obliviousness. Every time I walk out the door, I’m sure to be upset by another human being.


Today is June 23rd. 
We have been in forced lockdown plus self-chosen lockdown for almost 4 months. We have witnessed political catastrophe one after another spurting from the core of one nation, then from the core of another. I want to look away, erase my identity completely. Not just national identity, but human identity altogether. That’s how ashamed I feel. 

But, I have to move forward. 
So in the physical things that I’m doing. A large part has been experimenting with the digital art world. Seeing what others are making. Trying out different tools. An existential question emerged last night: do I like games in my own right, or is it influenced by people around me? 

Why do I like game as a new contemporary art form? 
What do I want to achieve with it? To work? 

Do I just want to sculpt a creature?
Do I just want to concept design an environment?
Do I just want to rig and animate? 

Or do I actually want to be the person that create that entire interactive experience, yes, with coding included? 
But will it be in the game commercial format where expectations are becoming constraints 

Or am I here to understand all the expectations, so that I can break them? 

But how, I am just one. 
I signed myself up for the true undergraduate degree that I had always wanted, and not what society wanted. 
I am an artist. I was educated by the Metropolitan Museum, as well as all my travels (all four nations). I understood from my other undergraduate school how vain the world can be. 
It feels like betrayal to just learn game art to get a job and serve the commercial hunger of digital capitalism 

I can’t let the silicon valley spirit take me over either. 

If I define game art as an art form that I relate to in my own right, how do I want to grow it, or grow with it

I can’t turn back on the philosophical self that I had been, that’s what had gotten me to where I am today. The introspection and endless questioning, and taking action upon those questions

If I can bend one thing, what would that be 

I know it’s ringing in my ear, arrrrt teeeech, +++++
Fuse them, release
Let humans experience, in some way impactful enough, that I no longer would feel ashamed behind human.. 

Let me contemplate further on this this summer

I’ll come back in the Fall with some new thoughts
(i had an incredible liking towards Dolphin atari 2600 game. the face of da vinci also lurked in my fuzzy brain recently. Maybe it's saying something. Don't say no to tech, use whatever you can to get whatever the contemporary experience is needed to deliver)