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Nervey Drawings → I had a back injury a few years ago that goofed up my L5 nerve root pretty badly. No more football or hula hooping for me. Looking for ways to improve my situation I read up on nerves and found an article claiming that drawing with your opposite hand can help regenerate damaged nerves. So for about a month every morning while the kettle was boiling I drew objects in my kitchen with my left hand. That’s them above. Over time the drawings were getting better I think and I was enjoying it a lot. That was until I read another article claiming drawing with your opposite hand can REALLY DAMAGE your brain. So now I’ve stopped and I’m a little bit scared. I was planning to gather all these drawings into a little book, perhaps riso printed all in red (to represent the left side), but then I thought about the climate disaster and using up resources and all that kind of stuff so didn’t go any further with this.

View more of the drawings below.

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Apple has Siri, Amazon has Alexa and I have Alice — my very own personal A.I. assistant. Go chat to her now right here. Also you can read an interview I did about her with It’s Nice That.

Part of the inspiration for this site was a quote from Douglas Copeland along the lines of ‘machines are increasingly talking about us behind our backs’. I loved the idea that our machines might someday bitch about us, just like humans do. The other thing I was interested in was the role of personal websites. Most professionals populate their social channels with their work these days, leading me to question what else could a website be? Anyway, hope you enjoy.

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Speaking Emojis 😀 🔈

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I've been meaning to do this for ages. I uploaded nearly two hours of voice messages Gary Goals received in 2014. Whack 'Gary Goals Voicemails' into SoundCloud to hear them. Or clicky this linky. Some funny/strange stuff there. I've not turned the phone on since 2014 so probably a lot more gold out there. 👂☎️⚽️)

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Flat Earth. Using the iPhone’s built-in spirit level app to prove that the world is indeed flat.  🌎

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Nowhere Like Home. Creating new landscapes from streets in different countries that share the same name. The video above takes the left side of Grosvenor Road in Bristol, England, and butts it against the right side of Grosvenor Road in Dublin, Ireland, to create a new inter-dimensional Grosvenor Road that has different cultures, peoples and laws either side of the street. Crossing the road is like crossing ideologies.

This fella is Main Street in Buffalo, USA, set with Main Street in Bray, Ireland. I like this one because each side of the street would have a vastly different time zone and weather system. It could be a warm summers night on one side of the street, and a cold, rainy day on the other. In the future, when we all live in the cloud, I wonder if we’ll be able to construct our own digital worlds in any way we want? Like a patchwork quilt of places that are important to us. Yikes.

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Goofing around with Ireland again

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County colours of Ireland. 🇮🇪

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10 kinds of waiting. A quick celebration of an unwanted visual language. The language of inconvenience and digital dead-time. 

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Just finished a project called ‘Cold Hands, Warm Hearts’ with my buddies Studio PSK. We created a series of playful igloos for a London Design Festival exhibition called Water. Will upload more info and better images real soon. I did an interview about it here.

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Puddle selfies from around a rainy London. Shallow.

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I took the old ditty It’s a long way to Tipperary and visualised it using the direction data and icons from Google Maps. Each specific direction makes a nice poster too. Maybe there’s more in this idea to be investigated.

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A suite of clocks I made for my bedroom wall. Time zones within time zones. Now there’s always a Karl that’s late, early and bang on time. 

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This is a lot sadder compared to the stuff that usually gets posted here. I re-worked John Cage’s 4′33″ using silence from more recent, sombre sources. 

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I had myself a nice day out recently. I visited London’s top ten tourist attractions (according to Trip Advisor), and took a picture of a selfie stick at each location. I’m not sure yet what form this project will take, but it feels like there’s a nice friction going on between personal space, public space and digital/social space. Will post more about it as soon as I know what the hell is going on. More on how this started here.

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Europe’s drop-down border.

There’s a long post-Brexit scroll coming.

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No loading for the eyes, but lots of loading for the brain.

I was on Instagram checking out Manchester International Festival’s account (which looks brilliant btw). There was a bit of a glitch and none of the images loaded for me. Instead, I just got broken image icons and lots of different captions.

I found this way more fun! Trying to imagine the scenes and people described in the captions. I started thinking that maybe there’s a nice little project in this—like an Instagram account that only describes surreal scenes and scenarios—but then I remembered someone has done something like this before (or at least I think they have, I may have dreamt this).

I heard about this book years ago but can't find a trace of it anywhere. Nor can I remember who told me about it, or where I was. Anyway, my brain tells me that someone was publishing a book of the ‘100 Most Famous Photographs Of All Time’ (or something along those lines). Working with a designer they laid each image out on a page with the title, date and credit underneath. A nice and simple format.

When it came to publishing though they hit a major roadblock in the form of image and usage rights. Yikes. Undeterred the author made a brilliant decision, to publish the book exactly as was, but remove all the photographs. 100 pages with nothing but small captions towards the bottom of the page. The logic was that if they were indeed the 100 most famous photographs people would already be familiar with them. The captions alone should bring the images into people's minds. And if not the photographs would be easy enough to find for curious eyes. What a brilliant accidental idea.

If this book wasn't a dream I'd really love to own it. Any tip-offs greatly appreciated.