(mirrored from https://www.instagram.com/shields.up/, hence the slide saying that this site you’re currently reading will be updated soon, but also I have a more in depth post I’m working on)

We may speculate that the dominance of the “photo dump” on instagram and similar platforms is a response to a common experience: exhaustion at the prospect of continuing to curate regular, smaller posts intended to construct or maintain the performance of a successful and full life. We find these oversized dumps of imagery representing months or even years of a users life cathartic as we ourselves feel the pressure of our photo roll continuing to build up a backlog of significant experiences we have yet to document online for our real and imagined audience.

The sense of obligation to document and paralysis about doing so is rooted in the dissonance of on the one hand craving the dopamine hit of likes, comments, validation and perception, and the platform age anxiety that it will all sink without a trace in a hostile sea of algorithmic feeds without generating any of the attention one craves.

In this author’s experience, the swelling photo roll is accompanied by a folder full of in progress and unpublished creative experiments, each of which buzzes with that same dissonance. Is this my best work yet? Will it fail to be seen since I’ve been “so shitty about posting”? Should I wait for a bigger project to use these forms and ideas? Should I be selling this somehow? For the sin of insufficient hustle, am I damned to obscurity?

Written without much editing or reflection on the author’s couch prior to their daily morning walk to the bodega to get a Red Bull, a routine they adopted to force themselves not to rot during their summer 2025 severance vacation.

[Original stored at Zora]

ARCHIVIST, BROKEN is adapted from ARCHIVIST, an individual work from an unreleased series which was intended to be submitted into David Rudnick’s Tomb Series via the Recovery system (described here)

The unreleased series is titled “20 Evocations” after Bruce Sterling’s 1984 experimental short story “Twenty Evocations”, and is itself a kind of visual bootleg fan fiction, an alternate take on the concept of the Tomb Series.

📖

Sterling’s short story is written as sequence of twenty very brief sections, each no more than a paragraph or two, momentary flashes of experience spread across the protagonist’s life, each seemingly disconnected, but together building to a sense of a whole, an imprint of identity, memory — a hyper-compressed literary technology which acts as a way to experience this life on fast forward, and as an elegy as it ends at the conclusion of the text.

💽

David Rudnick’s Tomb Series is 177 illustrations of MiniDiscs, which each bear, though their visual variations, symbols, and titling and grouping into thematically connected houses, a token of Rudnick’s formative experiences, influences, and convictions. Rudnick has spoken about the desire to create works which act as vessels to cary forward those immaterial and sublime things to the future.

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20 Evocations, is like the Tomb Series made up of illustrations of obsolete hardware storage. Rather than MiniDiscs, this series depicts 5.2” magneto optical disks, an older family of formats chiefly used for archiving files in the days before abundant external hard drives. They are illustrated in 2D, in this case using vector drawings, gradients, simple effects, and some procedurally generated textures. The series was originally conceived before Recovery was even announced, intended to be distributed in the active (at the time) Tomb Series Discord server. Like the mother series, each of the 20 Evocations illustrations would reflect, explicitly or poetically, formative personal influences, deeply held values, fragments of thought evoking an unseen whole of the artists life.

When Recovery was announced, with its goal of creating a community governed platform of “culture building culture”, it lined up perfectly. ARCHIVIST, a disc which bore the emblem of the Tomb Council, was intended to celebrate this.

However, Recovery’s exciting and active beta launched just before a dramatic shift in the on-chain art landscape, the downstream cultural impacts of the colapse of various web3 organizations collapsing, leading to a dampening of activity and interest, and creating economic barriers to minting new work. When Recovery’s front end stopped functioning, the project and community seemed to go into a kind of hibernation.

ARCHIVIST, BROKEN as a piece of art is intended to express this moment — a storage device for the meaning condensed around the Tomb Series, damaged, functioning partially, producing artifacts when read and accessed, but, hopefully, still recoverable.

It is set to mint for free, as has become expected in this post - peak NFT moment, an edition of 177 to reflect the number of original Tombs.

The team behind Tomb Series has expressed the intention to bring Recovery back online, at which time the full series of 20 Evocations will hopefully be proposed and released.

[originally posted at Mirror]

Ross (Lonefront) and I had worked together on a previous iteration of his website and various other ideas. He approached me with the task of helping create the identity of his new label, Uncoiled, and with creating the artwork for the first release, which then quickly extended into the next, UNCOILED 00 and UNCOILED 01 respectively.

I used a typeface I had been developing based on inspiration from 80s era AUDI vehicle livery called “TURBO” to create the initial version of the UNCOILED logotype (Ross has chosen to move away from this logotype in most usages more recently to something he worked on with the other designer who was able to nail his vision for the interlocked figures seen on the label B sides, but I still have a soft spot for this version)

I worked in Blender using node-based textures to create complex fields of mostly non repeating, fractal-like 2D splashes for the first release, EXEGESIS I.

The images coming out of Blender were rendered with transparent backgrounds in order to allow for flexibility as they were overlaid on carefully selected CMYK colors for the printed packaging.

Some real overkill in the early process as I got down a rabbit hole creating illustrations of the 12 inch record for mockup and visualization purposes.

The second release saw me expanding some of the Blender workflows to create an actual 3D object which was rendered from both sides for the front and back of the jacket. Again exported transparently so we could nail the vibe with background colors after the fact and avoid having to spend hours re-rendering for last minute edits.

Overall a hugely satisfying set of project to work on, and Ross is a fantastic collaborator with clear visions and instinct but also very game to explore and discover new ideas in the playful, hands on process of iteration and design that I favor.

Happy to say the next release is in development. I’ll update this post with future documentation.

You can listen to and purchase digital versions of the label’s current catalogue at their bandcamp. Physical editions sold out quick, so if you’re interested in having the next one in your hands, sign up fro updates:

https://uncoiled.bandcamp.com/

Shields

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I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting some kind of project using the name and iconography of the eject symbol for a while now — it was going to be a solo music project, then a possible duo, then a label, then a series of on-chain works…

I’ve always been fascinated by the way semiotic objects (a given name, a symbol, a logo, a pictogram, etc) can start empty of meaning but for a tiny point of intention from its source, and then attract and absorb more and more layers meaning over time, like a singularity bending memetic spacetime around it.

Much of the iconography and language my online presence is surrounded with functions like this for me, from the Shields logo seen often on my instagram and also tattooed on my arm, its smaller simplified asterisk that you see as my profile pic on many of these platforms, the name Shields itself, even my own given names. The aesthetic elements I incorporate into many of my works, turbulence fields, pixels, dithering, and halftone screens, etc.

The eject symbol has become one of those for me as well. I’ve become fascinated with its uncertain origin along with the other now universal media control icons, its association with increasingly lost physical media formats, the tactile experience of pressing the eject button on a tape player, hearing the kachunk and removing the fromerly empty container object that the machine has compressed meaning onto, as well as the dual meaning of eject as a mode of high speed emergency exit.

“.WORK” comes in because “.audio” and “.art” were both expensive as domains and entirely too specific and narrow. I distractedly jump from visual art and design to music production and sound, to self taught type design. And I have an unavoidable compulsion to treat the act of writing twitter comments or sending texts to group threads as critical high level composition and long form essay writing, which has been enough to make my friends yell at me to start a ‘blog’ in the year of our lord twenty twenty four.

So EJECT.WORK here on substack will act for now as my portfolio, proper documentation of my WORK in one central place for the first time in years, as well as a probably sporadic process journal, possibly a launchpad for other projects. You might know my stuff from Instagram, or Twitter, you might be one of the few people who knew about my Mirror site at https://mirror.xyz/shields-up.eth, which I’ll migrate the most important work over from over time, or from my music mostly under my older Plot Twist alias via a few labels like Philthtrax, or my activity on the Tomb Series discord and the currently defunct RECOVERY project.

Wherever you came from, you’re here, might as well

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Shields
Shannon Ekundayo Reddy
shields@eject.work
2024