This week’s session was hosted by Steve, who has more experience with the more on the business side of things than the artistic, so he gave us a more objective reality on our practice. His main point of advice was to diversify what we are doing in order to cover as many bases as possible, being able to make commercial sound work in different settings for different mediums, as to spread ourselves throughout as many income sources as possible, as obviously working purely on art for a living is not a realistic living. He also gave us some pointers on starting our own business, which I found interesting for the possibility of self-employment, which I have never really thought of as a tangible goal before, but it was in all honesty, a bit daunting and difficult to digest since it was so stark with the business element. I had difficulty following after the session got too statistical, but he gave us a good list regarding who to contact regarding grant applications and overall good advice.

I started working on my site today. I made a domain using Neocities, as I previously mentioned, since I already have knowledge of how the service works and how to create a site in HTML, the domain being papertears.neocities.org, which is a reference to The Haters’ Paper Tears 7″ and relates to the previously mentioned entropy obsession. I just didn’t want it to be a domain name that is my real name, I don’t like that idea of the “business” being a monetisation of myself as this kind of cartoon-ified version of myself rather than related to what I am making and doing creatively, I know perhaps that is a misstep on my part but something about this being a public connection to my real person to what I make online rubs me the wrong way, I would rather it be the other way around so that those who know the real person will know the art from that, if that makes sense.

Anyway, I asked my friend Laura for some help on the site formatting since she helps a bit with my other site, and she helped me understand the importance of creating format prefaces in the style section so that I can format the page without it being this overcomplicated cluster, kind of creating these presets I can reuse throughout the site. I don’t think the site has to be too complex. I mentioned previously that there should be this balance between professionalism and creativity with portfolio sites, but I should first be focusing on what I am actually capable of, and expanding on it later, as I don’t particularly have any crazy ideas or really want it to be particularly difficult. I wanted to see if it was worth having an alias or release list like other artists do, like on Steve Roden’s site or Joe Colley’s having this really extensive list of releases and labels is beneficial but, as I mentioned with the example of Lucy Johnson, I quite like the segregation of work rather than having everything all in one place, I don’t think I would want an employer to see everything as a lot of it from when I was younger I would not want to be representative of the rest of my work. Regardless, the site is functional now. The next step is to do these drafts of my bio and project descriptions and articulate exactly what it is that I do now that the site is in a state where I can just fill in whatever necessary information, and it looks quite nice, all things considered.