Hi, I’m Shields, and EJECT.WORK is the new identity of my creative practice. Here you’ll be able to find documentation of my work, along with process journals and other writing. You can browse, subscribe, or reach out by emailing shields@eject.work. Read on for more context—
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
Shields Shannon Ekundayo Reddy shields@eject.work 2024