Stage 05 of 9
Material
What is this made of, and why that?
Medium is meaning. Oil paint carries different history than clay, than code, than found trash. Pick material that the concept demands — not the material you already own.
Prompts to sit with
- 01What does the material say before the image does?
- 02Is scale part of the material choice — intimate, human, monumental?
- 03Does the process (fast/slow, reversible/irreversible) match the content?
- 04What are the ethical and environmental costs of what you're choosing?
Small practices
- Do a small material test — one square foot — before scaling up.
- Consider hybrid: hand + digital, sculpture + photograph, permanent + ephemeral.
- Cost, source, and store the materials before you start; friction kills momentum.
Follow one project throughAn interactive daf — A contemplative reader that keeps the argument — traced through all nine stages, in progress.A running example, one entry per stage. Click to expand.
Web, not print — the medium has to move. HTML and CSS for the page, because the daf's logic is typographic before it is interactive. The grammar layer is data (JSON over the corpus), rendered as marginalia that can be dimmed, expanded, or followed. No framework yet; the prototype should be legible in view-source. Fonts are the real material choice — a serif that carries argument, a second face that recedes without disappearing.