Today I released the code behind my e-ink price tag art project. You might remember my hesitation about making the code public when I first announced my Walm-Art project. After one of my Instagram animations got over 2 million views the amount of people interested in the code pushed me over the edge. Now anyone can use the same code as me.

Before going any further I need to start with disclaimers and cautions. There is risk that people will use the code for questionable purposes. Heck, some people think me putting my art on these displays is sketchy. So I want to at least try to give some guidance to people who want to use the code.

My biggest recommendation is to source your displays responsibly. It’s tempting to rip a price tag off the shelf but if you want to put art on a price tag there are less disruptive ways to do it. Walking around the store you will probably find one on the ground or on a shelf not being used. These tags serve a purpose and shoppers get annoyed when they can’t find the price of things. Be respectful of the people shopping.

It was important to me that this process be non-destructive. Popping open the price tags is easy enough, you just wedge something thin into the edge of the case and it will open with pressure. Once it is open you can access the ribbon cable which is how you send images to the display. Once your image is on the display you reconnect the cable, close it up, and the display is still fully functional. When you re-attach the display to the “rail” in the aisle it is once again connected to the store’s system. It gets power from that rail and it will “phone home” to get instructions from the store’s dynamic pricing software. It may take a moment, but the screen will redraw automatically with whatever price was previously on the tag before you made art on it. Keep this in mind if anyone wants to hassle you. No harm is done, the worst someone can accuse you of is causing a minor inconvenience.

I don’t advocate leaving the store with price tags in your pocket. Here’s an alternative: Rather than leave the store with the price tag, my code runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero which has wireless capabilities that allow you to put art on a price tag from inside the store. Yes, you might get some odd looks from customers who see you popping open a price tag from your shopping cart, but that’s a small price to pay.

Note that the code won’t work on every store’s price tags. It works on Walmart displays but even that is not a guarantee. I’ve seen differences in the tags at different Walmarts in my area so these are not universal. If you try a tag from another store expect it not to work. One sure sign that it won’t work is if the ribbon cable can’t be disconnected, preventing you from accessing the display directly.

I also want to point out that you can buy price tag displays you don’t have to get them from store shelves. People sell them on eBay by the lot. You can buy new ones from China on sites like Alibaba. Or you can buy fully supported versions on Amazon from brands like Waveshare.

My final disclaimer is that I don’t offer support of this code. The code is AI slop, not production ready software. I suggest you use it the same way that I created it – with patience and the assistance of a coding agent. I’m not a fan of AI, but for code the benefits are undeniable. Here’s what the interface looks like:

Now that I’ve hopefully talked you out of following in my footsteps, here’s where to find the code and additional documentation:

Github repo: E-Ink ESL Image Uploader

If you decide to embark on this adventure I’d love to see what you make. If you can help me improve this open source software, all the better.

Stay creative. Sincerely,
Ade

The Poudre River Trail passes on the north side of town and takes you through some quarries and abandoned industrial spaces. Old vehicles and machinery gets parked out there and left to erode. I’ve ridden the trail before and always wanted to re-visit it to appreciate the textures and distressed surfaces up close.

I don’t recommend trespassing. Sometimes people ask me why I don’t just Photoshop the textures. One person saw my butterfly animation and asked if it was generated with AI. I don’t actually know how to answer these people. I can’t imagine creating my work any other way, the thought of faking it disturbs me. There is only one “right way” to make something like this, and it’s the hard way.

Something I heard recently has stuck with me. Elliott Earls says,

“Evidence of commitment.” I like this definition of art. It’s unsexy. It doesn’t rely on having the right tools, following trends, getting the right education, waiting for permission, or having the blessing of traditional institutions. You do the work, you do it the best you can, and when it’s done the object contains the proof. You put your sticker on it and walk away.

It reminds me of the mantra I preach to my boys: work hard and act with integrity. No, the irony is not lost on me. I talk about integrity while smuggling price tags out of Walmart and violating no-trespassing signs. That’s where the commitment part comes in. When you are truly committed to something, there’s a good chance you will end up breaking rules. Judgements of good and bad are beside the point.

My favorite part of this adventure was when I came across a clump of sunflowers in front of a sky-blue wall. The paint was pealing in cloud-like patterns behind the blooms, the perfect resting place for a butterfly trapped in a sticker, pressed against the wall of an abandoned prison, lost in the middle of nowhere. No human will ever notice it. And yet it is part of something bigger. When combined with the other frames, the story comes together. Here is the result of my Greeley trip:

Thanks for following my work and supporting me. Stay creative.

Your friend,
Ade

I’m calling my latest experiment The Walm-Art Project. The idea is simple enough: use the digital price tags of stores as canvases for my animations. The execution turned out to be much harder than I bargained for. This is the story of how I got it working.

I’ve been fascinated by e-ink displays for a long time. If you’ve been following me long enough, you might remember the e-ink display integration on my digital Polaroid camera that printed on receipt paper. Unlike color displays, e-ink has a dull pixelated surface quality that I think is really lovely.

If it’s not obvious, e-ink is the technology beneath the digital price tags in your local chain stores. Inside a price tag is an e-ink display attached to a circuit board. The board has wireless components that allow the store to update their prices remotely. Yes, the potential for stores to dynamically change prices based on a personal profile is very real, the infrastructure is already in place.

The tags only need power when they redraw so there is no battery inside. Power is provided by the rail that they attach to. There are metal contact points on the clip of the tag so once they are detached from their rail the store can’t update or track them. As far as I can tell.

So how do you get an image on one of these displays? It is theoretically possible to send images to these screens wirelessly, leveraging the same technology as the store. Realistically, however, unless you are a network engineer, the easier path is to physically connect to the displays. The plastic cases open relatively easily with a little pressure on the edges to release the plastic clips.

Once the case is open you can examine the display and the board it is adhered to. The display is connected by a ribbon cable that sits in a clip on the board that is easily opened. The ribbon cable is the same size as what is common for hobbyist e-ink displays. When you buy these displays they come with a “HAT” that you use to communicate with the displays.

The question is, can a regular e-ink display driver communicate with a commercial price tag? No. Not out of the box. But with custom software? Yes.

One thing I’ve learned is that e-tags are not universal. Even the tags from the same chain stores at different sides of my town are slightly different. So all I can say conclusively is what works for me, not that I have a universal method that will work anywhere. For what it’s worth, I was able to get the display running with a “Waveshare 2.13inch E-Ink Display HAT” that I bought on Amazon. Your mileage may vary.

Often e-ink displays are powered by Raspberry Pi’s. If you plug a price tag display into a working hobbyist setup, you won’t get an image. You might get a jumble of pixels, however. That was my first signal that this might be possible. The next step was to write code that changed the random pixels into pictures.

Although I’ve released a handful of apps over the years, writing code is not my specialty. My code may be garbage but I am stubborn as a mofo and when undertaking a project like this determination is a virtue. Once I saw the screen light up with random pixels I knew sending images was possible. That’s all I needed to fuel the marathon coding sessions that followed.

I won’t bore you with code details, I’ll just say that the documentation for these boards is basically non-existent. Stores don’t want you doing this so they make it hard. Luckily, coding agents make it easier to brute force your way through the trial-and-error necessary to make these boards work. I bounced back and forth between Claude and Codex, maxing out my token allowances during marathon coding sessions. After a week of banging my head against the wall, I finally broke through. It was the first time I’ve had an LLM actually thank me for not taking its advice to give up.

Am I going to release my code? This is a tough decision and for right now the answer is no. The reason is I am not sure how much risk I put myself in if I do. I am already in gray territory by putting my artwork on displays without permission. I actually think sharing code is the right thing to do, I just want to be cautious. I’d rather not be responsible for popularizing the theft of e-ink displays if I can help it.

Is this legal? It is important to me that what I’m doing is non-destructive. I am not adding any code or modifying the boards. They are completely unaltered aside from the brief electrical signal that moved the ink on their displays. When a price tag with my art on it is plugged back into the store’s rail, it will “phone home” and be updated with new instructions that wipe out my art with pricing info. It’s like it never existed.

The first artwork I wanted on the display was something that let me test the black and red ink of the displays. The idea that naturally came to mind was the scene from Schindler’s List where a girl wearing a red dress provides the only color in the otherwise black and white movie.

I’ve gotten a couple trolling comments on my choice of subject matter which is to be expected. If you aren’t offending somebody you probably aren’t doing something right. No, the girl in the red coat is not a political statement. But there is something interesting about a movie about the holocaust being displayed on the price tags of the world’s largest retailer. You can choose-your-own-adventure with the meaning behind it, I’m not one to push an agenda.

The girl in a red coat is just the first of many ideas I have for this medium. Be sure to follow me (@ade3 in Instagram) so you can see the series as I release it. Here’s the final video so you can see the entire version that I posted:

Yes, this is an extension of my work with receipts. I love the re-purposing of symbols of consumerism. I enjoy the ephemeral-ness because it’s too easy to be fooled into believing art is forever. I don’t love the idea of museums or galleries. That’s where art goes to die, I’d rather be lost in the aisles of a supermarket than hidden in pristine tombs of the art world. My mantra is “beauty hides in plain sight.” Maybe the next time you are at the store my art might be right there waiting for you to notice it.

Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade

Deniz’s contemplative music is a perfect reflection of my “beauty hides in plain sight” mantra. To me, that’s what the No Such Thing video is about, rediscovering the beauty around us, hidden in the ordinary. When you pay attention, beautiful things jump out of the invisible background of our lives and comes into focus.

The short film is made up of 741 pictures of ordinary objects. The themes flip between 16 organic and urban objects. My process involved exploring Colorado in search of things that could be stitched together to tell a story. When I found something promising I would circle it trying to align the pictures by hand as closely as I could. Then back on my computer I meticulously aligned each photo so that they stitched together perfectly.

The first time I made one of these 360 degree animations was in 2008. I was working at an advertising agency trying to figure out a way to make RVs worth looking at. I wanted to make them spin but they don’t make turntables big enough. The solution was to park the RV and take photos in a circle around it. After aligning the photos together the giant boxes appeared to “spin.” To prove to myself the idea was feasible, I went outside and took photos of my Toyota Corolla. Here’s what that very first experiment looked like:

The challenge with this technique is that each frame has to be aligned as close as possible to the photo before/after it to make the spin smooth. If you don’t want backgrounds, each object has to be manually cut out. The process quickly becomes very time consuming. After clipping hundreds of RVs out of their backgrounds I burnt out on the technique. But I kept the idea in the back of my mind, waiting for the right opportunity to try it again.

Fast forward to 2026… There’s a silo in my town of Loveland, Colorado that you can see for miles in any direction. It was the perfect object to revive my old technique. I spent a day walking around the silo, aligned the images, and posted it on Instagram.

People liked the results. One of the people who saw my silo animation was Deniz Cuylan who was working on his third solo album, For Luca. He reached out and we brainstormed ideas for how we could use the technique for a music video.

The inherent flaws in the handheld camera technique has an unsettling quality to it. The imperfection of the alignment, the jitter caused by time gaps... your brain has to work a bit. It is both satisfying and uncomfortable.

His new album was created after Deniz lost his dog, Luca. As we brainstormed we imagined the camera representing the point of view of a dog, circling the objects with energy, glad to be outside and spending time with its companion. I think that’s a lovely metaphor.

My favorite part of the video is the section with the cell phone tower. The video started with a stick, cycled through trees, before landing on this “man-made tree,” the invisible object powering the devices that keep us indoors and lonely.

If you liked the music video I encourage you to follow Deniz and dig deeper into his music.

Thanks for making it to the end of my story. If you aren’t already following me on Instagram, that’s the best place to catch my unorthodox experiments the moment they roll out. It’s an honor to exist in your inbox and feeds. If you like what I’m doing, a likes/share/re-stack goes a long way to helping people like you find people like me. Stay creative.

Your friend,
Ade

This is the story (and secret behind) my “Moth in a Balloon” illusion. Let me get the how-to out of the way so I can get to the more interesting topic: Where do ideas come from?

To bring you up to speed, I’ve got a video on Instagram that has a chance to be the most popular thing I’ve made so far. As of today it has 1.2 million views, 122k likes, and 23k shares. Crazy.

Compared to my more time consuming productions, this one was simple. It was made with only a balloon and a projector. As you know, I try to share my process whenever I can. I’m honored when people try my odd experiments. But with this moth in a balloon thing I’ve been torn about whether or not I should share how it’s done. It’s not that I’m trying to keep a secret, it’s a fear that when people see how easy it is to create they won’t like it as much. You know that deflating feeling when you learn how a magic trick is done and the joy fizzles away? Maybe it’s better to keep a secret.

Last week I finally made a how-to video. You can watch it here, but here’s the gist:

It starts with a clear, latex balloon. Not white, but a clear balloon. I put a projector behind the balloon and just off camera. The projector plays a video of a white insect on a black background that continuously loops.

Unlike a pepper ghost illusion which uses a reflector inside objects, the balloon is empty. The secret is that the balloon itself is what is capturing the light. Because the picture is hitting the back of the balloon it feels like the bug is inside, floating.

I’m not doing any projection mapping or anything complicated. It’s simply a captivating illusion performed with just a projector and a balloon. The hardest part is finding the right angle between your camera, the projector, and the balloon.

With the boring tutorial out of the way, let me talk about ideas...

Here’s where ideas come from…

When explaining where ideas come from you can’t be too scientific about it. Ideas tend to disappear if you squeeze them too hard. It’s best to approach them slowly so they don’t drift out of reach.

People think they’re rare but ideas are so common they are practically worthless. They float around us constantly. They’re so ordinary that we take them for granted.

Kids are drawn to them for obvious reasons, but it’s unclear why grownups avoid them. I suppose at some point they realized life’s not a party. Maybe their childhood curiosity flew away never to return. They secretly long for their gift but refuse to open themselves to hope. Instead they carry needles, preferring to deflate other people’s joy rather than suffer loss.

You can buy them fully formed but they usually come with strings attached. An idea can only protest being pulled down by strings for so long. Held in captivity they surrender, sink to the floor, and give up the ghost.

Ideas circle the earth powered by hot air and brave pilots willing to let the wind pick the destination.

They’re best when enjoyed with a friend, bouncing back and forth, never touching the ground, an unpredictable game of chance, laughter, and collaboration.

No, they aren’t always fun and games, sometimes they explode when you least expect it. Other times they deflate so slowly you won’t even notice until all that remains is a shrivel of their original selves.

Every once in a while you get a good one. Oh, the thrill! It’s as if a glowing creature has appeared from some other dimension, blessed you with it’s ephemeral beauty. Enjoy this while you can. Don’t lament when they’re gone, just be glad you held it for a brief moment.

Stay creative.
Ade

You awake in a world of perfected digital technology. You feel no pain. Pleasure is unlimited and takes any form you imagine. All friction has an antidote. Effort is optional and generally considered irrational.

You have infinite options. Your mind is plugged in to this machine and it is the interface you use to control this world. Thoughts become objects. Anything and everything can be reshaped by idea prompts.

If you choose, you could dial the pleasure knob to 11 and cruise along in bliss for as long as your heart keeps beating. Alternatively you could use the technology to make things. This is the avatar you’ve chosen, you are an artist. As a creator you invent world after world. Each iteration gets a bit better, closer to the pictures in your mind.

And yet you are dissatisfied by what you’ve made.

The closer your creations get to perfection the more hollow they feel. No matter what you do, you never feel ownership of these simulations. Deep down you know, but you can’t bring yourself to face the fact that it’s the machine doing the work. Not you.

You overreact and do the unthinkable. You turn the technology off.

In a blink, the real world comes into focus and all the frosting and sizzle that felt so real an instant ago disappears.

Your digital experience is replaced by gray, pain, and confusion. Without the masking effects of the technology, your sensitivity inputs overheat. It hurts.

The air stings your lungs, the light burns your eyes, the texture of fabric grates against your skin. You are a soft, low-res reflection of the identity you cultivated in that digital world. You wobble around the space awkwardly, like a newborn animal finding its legs. You aren’t sure you can survive here.

And worst of all out here you are not an artist.

It’s at this moment that you realize what the perfect technology has stolen from you. Your reliance on the machine has become so great that you can’t function without it. You realize that surviving out here would require you to start over. And yet, that idea is strangely pleasant in a way that the digital work never felt. It’s a terrifying realization because you know that now you have to decide.

Will you turn it back on?

Thanks for reading. Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade

It doesn’t mean to, but our rational mind blocks creativity. It’s always correcting grammar, keeping us on task, trying to intimidate our rivals, and to impress mating prospects.

By the time you’re an adult, the rational brain has a firm grip on everything you do. Some people’s personalities are so consumed by this mode of thought that they have forgotten how to think any other way. These tend to be joyless people, devoid of humor, utterly predictable know-it-alls who lack a capacity for originality. You are probably thinking of an actual person in your life that fits that description. But most of us still possess the playful part of our brain, our thoughts bounce between unavoidable adulting and childlike musings (even if we keep our playful parts private). My theory is that this is the place where creativity originates from. I’d go as far as to say that creativity and play are so intertwined that the words are nearly synonyms.

It’s easy to let your rational brain take the lead. Logic is easy, it’s the other side that needs a boost. We can always turn the logic knob back up, but when we are trying to stay in creativity mode, we have to find a way to keep our rational thoughts quiet.

How do you avoid the clamp of rationality from squeezing out the space where creative ideas spring? Strange as it sounds, we need to practice turning down the rationality knob and allowing looser and looser logic. Or to put another way, we need to allow ourselves to play.

You’d think play comes easily. It doesn’t. At least not after puberty, after the fear of embarrassment cripples our willingness to experiment. It’s like physical fitness, if we don’t exercise our “play muscles” atrophy and our minds get brittle as we lose creative fitness.

“But Ade, I can’t play all day, I have a serious job that would fire me for goofing off.” True, play is frowned upon in work environments. Turning down the logic knob of your brain sounds like suicide to non-creatives. It’s sad because the only thing that can unblock the sludge of most jobs is an environment where creative ideas are welcome and novelty is rewarded. But it’s not impossible and I’ve written about it in a few places that I will point you to:

1. Playgrounds of the Mind (from my book)

2. Caution: Workers at Play (Medium)

3. Things you should never say on your resume #3 (LinkedIn)

It sounds like bad advice, but be illogical. Because the first act of creativity is an unjustifiable decision to entertain the irrational. To validate the absurd. To willingly fail. To walk directly into the discomfort, directly violating your logical mind’s warnings and participate in absurdity. The first leap is excruciating, but once you’ve transitioned to play mode, the binds of logic fall away. To your surprise, you will find hidden delight that defies reason.

You can’t stay there forever, but when you return to reality you will carry the gifts of novelty, energy, and originality that would be impossible to attain by normal rational thought. And armed with new ideas you can let your logical mind do what it does best: put the finishing touches on things and organize the logistics for getting your crazy idea in front of people.

Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade

This is part 3 of sharing reworked excerpts from my unedited interview with It’s Nice That. Part 1 talked about where inspiration comes from. Part 2 was about creativity traps. Today I talk about constraints. The boring kind that are easy to under-value. Because that’s where the magic hides.

A hard part about creating original work is picking your subject matter. How do you decide? It feels like you should only pick exciting things. But you look around and you can’t see anything that rises to the level of being worthy of selecting as a subject. It zaps your motivation when you can’t even decide what is worthy of your attention. Constraints can help.

Self-imposed constraints can be anything. Maybe you constrain your songs to only be recorded on tape. Maybe you make a rule that you can’t use paint brushes. Maybe every photo you share needs to have a bird in it. It literally could be anything, and the harder the constraint, the more interesting it will be. This is counter-intuitive but true. People will respond better to your work when they can recognize the constraint and then watch you play inside that box than if you change direction drastically from project to project. And you will find freedom inside the constraints because you can iterate and work towards mastery instead of fretting about what you will make next.

The constraint I’ve chosen is that my animations must always loop as seamlessly as possible. This constraint lower my expectations when it comes to choosing subject matter. Instead of starting with incredible source material, I force myself to look for things that I can make seamless loops from. I am trying to hide the beginnings and ends of the animation so it can just repeat infinitely without hiccups. This really limits what I can make because most videos don’t repeat like that. Birds, butterflies, dancers... these are easier to loop because they naturally have repetitive movements.

The harder subjects are humans, but they are much more rewarding because when you loop a human it takes on greater meaning. The woman taking out the trash, her job never ends. The spinning dancer never gets a break. The runner never arrives at the finish line. The coffee drinker’s cup never empties.

I just finished an animation of a boy on a bike who crashes into another bike. But the bike he crashes into is actually his bike from earlier in the same animation. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to representing the absurdity of human activities... we keep making the same mistakes over and over and over.

Does the mundanity of these moments makes them more interesting? I’d like to think so, but I’m not sure. My animations can be very visually intense, almost strobe-light like. I think that’s what grab’s people’s attention. I have this fear that people never get past this surface level and arrive at the more interesting ideas. They might just hit the like button and swipe by. But it’s there, hiding in plain sight if people want to see it.

Constraints force you to find creative ways to outdo yourself. I am always remixing and looking for a better angle for things. There’s a definition of creativity that I’ve latched on to that says,

“Creativity is taking two unrelated things and watching what happens when you force them to collide with each other.”

I’m always on the lookout for surfaces that I might be able to let my animations collide with. I collect material without having a clear idea about what I’m going to do with them. It takes a while for ideas to incubate. For example, every time I flew on an airplane I would steal the safety card from my seat. I didn’t know what I would do with them, but they were interesting to me. Recently I used them in an animation where air travel artifacts are combined with a goose in flight.

Finding interesting aspects of ordinary things changes how you experience everyday life. You’ll find it harder to ignore small, seemingly insignificant details. I have worked as a graphic designer and UX designer as my career and this is an occupation where you are always identifying and trying to eliminate the tiniest of flaws. And you are trained to identify the “why” behind things by noticing details most people never think about. What’s different about my creative practice from my professional life is that I allow myself to appreciate things as they are without hunting for flaws.

I used to be more of a perfectionist. I am constantly reminding myself not to over-engineer things. I’ve learned that the flaws and normality of our surroundings is far more interesting than synthesized perfection. Polishing things to perfection is easy, finding the beauty in things as they are without needing to change them, that’s the real challenge.

For people who feel like their daily routines are repetitive or uninspiring, here’s my advice. If you feel uninspired by your situation you are not alone. Sometimes there are tasks that are just going to be a grind. And not just a grind, but often your attempts to inject beauty into the process are going to be actively opposed by the people around you. I wrote a book called Art of the Living Dead that’s a guide for creative people struggling to survive in a world that wants to destroy their creativity. The metaphor is zombies, because that’s what it can feel like. Finding beauty in the mundane shifts the horror show into something transformative. If you feel stuck, the fix might be more friction, not less. Because constraints have a way of unlocking new pathways what previously seemed blocked.

Thanks for reading. Stay creative.

Your friend,
Ade

Imagine this. I get an email with a question about working on a project for VICE TV. A scam? I hop on a video call and before I know it I’m offered the opportunity to spend a week in Brooklyn creating my animations all over New York City. My dream project fell into my lap.

Clearing my schedule wasn’t a problem since I’d been laid off from OpenText 13 days prior. The timing couldn’t have been better, actually. I had about 3 weeks to prepare 8 animation sequences. Each sequence was 18 frames. That sums up to 144 stickers. To cover myself with backups, I doubled it to 288. Plus I made a stack of VICE logo stickers and I ended up with 350 stickers to unleash on the city.

My normal method is to have a single sheet of all the stickers in the sequence. The problem is that these sheets are prone to blowing away and are awkward to carry around. For this adventure I switched to little flip books of stickers made from the non-stick backing of shipping labels stapled together. This worked great because they were pocketable and kept the animations in order. I finished the sticker prep the night before my plane left.

My plan was to explore the city by foot, bike, and Subway. I thought I packed light, but after my first day lugging 2 tripods and a big bag of gear I needed to shed some weight. By my last day, all I carried was my phone, stickers, and a tripod. I’ll make a separate gear post if people are interested, but for now I’ll just talk about what I saw and did.

On Monday I woke up early in Williamsburg and got my first look at the city by daylight. I pointed my bike at Dumbo and started navigating the streets. I barely made it around the corner before I dismounted and started taking pictures. Everything was covered in graffiti. Everything. Here’s a mail truck for example:

As humans we are always on the lookout for signs of danger. We get used to clean neighborhoods. Spray paint on walls becomes a signal we associate with mischief that gets whitewashed before people have a chance to notice. In my home town of Loveland, Colorado the graffiti is usually ugly. There are occasional spots where skilled artists are practicing their craft, but mostly it’s embarrassingly juvenile. Half the time their four letter words are spelled wrong. In Brooklyn the graffiti is so thick it loses the “dangerous” signal midwesterners like me assign to it. But in Brooklyn it’s part of the fabric of the city, a proud symbol that the city is owned by everyone.

I love texture. In Loveland I have to seek it out. In Brooklyn it’s everywhere. And not just graffiti. The buildings are aged. Signs and ads are everywhere. Everything has worn to a patina that retains the marks of all the people who have worn it down. But this doesn’t feel like damage. I came away feeling like New York City was the world’s largest machine, a public utility that retains the character of the people who use it.

I quickly realized I would never make it out of Williamsburg if I stopped to take pictures of every beautiful surface. This meant riding my bike on the road. I bike in Colorado regularly and still this was scary. Most bikes in NYC are electric. Mine was not, which meant I was the slowest cyclist on the street. I did witness one accident, an e-bike hit a slick spot and slid into a wall. He was wearing a helmet and walked away from the crash but it could have been fatal.

I don’t like being a tourist. My preferred way to see a city is to wander. I felt obligated to see the Statue of Liberty but other than that I didn’t see sights. I had a loose itinerary. I explored Dumbo and Brooklyn Bridge Park. I visited a skateboard park under Williamsburg Bridge. I took in the murals Bushwick. I saw the Navy yard. I took in Greenwich Village, Gotham Park, and Gleason’s Boxing Gym. I took the subway to Coney Island where I made a sticky note animation. I ate a donut in Central Park. I didn’t see any shows, museums, or games. This was the right choice for me.

You may recall my sensitivity issues and how I managed them when I explored Las Vegas. While I did wear noise canceling airpods, NYC is so active that it wasn’t really safe to tune things out. In NYC the car horns aren’t just for road rage, they are an important safety signal that allows bikes to travel inches from traffic. Construction is everywhere. It’s loud but tuning it out is dangerous.

When the subway passes everything shakes. You can’t tell from the animation below, but this is a skateboard park below a bridge where the Subway passes overhead every few minutes.

How did I manage the sensory overload? I endured it. By the end of the day my senses were fried. But there is another component here that I hadn’t realized before. I spent most of my trip lost in the work. I had not connected the dots between being in a flow state and how this might relate to over stimulation. My new theory is that a state of flow pacifies my sensory system. Things that normally overwhelm me practically disappear when I am in the zone.

Here’s a comparison. If I were to see a Broadway show, my sensory system would be on fire. My dressy clothes would be irritating my skin. Standing in line would be torture. The theater seats would be torture. The show itself would be tough to sit through. Sights, sounds, smells… my body shifts into fight or flight mode. And yet, here I am on a bridge, there are cars below me, bikes passing me constantly, and a subway is flying by. I’m not even wearing noise cancelling headphones and I’m calm as a clam. I don’t know how to explain it other than my flow state pacifier theory. Perhaps this is why I crave the flow state, it is my way to escape the “danger” signals my nervous system overwhelms me with.

As I prepped for the trip I stressed about the amount of people in NYC. Normally I like to get away from people when I work. A person putting stickers on things is suspicious in small town Colorado. What would it be like when there are people everywhere?

Exactly four people asked me what I was doing in the five days I spent putting stickers up. One was a film student. Another was a photographer. The other two were walking their dogs. And I’m not counting the cops. I’ll get to that later.

Everyone is in their own world in NYC. They have places to go and they are constantly bombarded by things way more interesting than a guy with a camera. I was essentially invisible. Once I realize this, my social anxiety went away. I gradually shifted deeper and deeper into crowds of people. Nobody cared.

Above is an extreme example. I’m on the side of the Brooklyn Bridge for about 30 minutes taking pictures of the cracks in the paint. Hundreds of people passed me and not a single person questioned what I was doing.

Crowds of people can appear out of nowhere in NYC. I found a good spot for stickers that seemed relatively isolated. Little did I know that there was a school around the corner. A fire alarm was pulled and in seconds I was surrounded by a swarm of teenagers. I joked that it was a flashmob appearing to promote my tiny art show.

Honestly, the subway intimidated me. It wasn’t until my last day that I decided to go underground and give it a try. Like cycling in traffic it just took getting used to. And now that I’ve done it I understand the city so much more. Sure, there are questionable characters on the subway. And yes, I did see a large rat crawling under the tracks. But it’s just crowds of normal-ish people trying to get from A to B. And there were police nearby keeping things safe. This is where I get to tell you about my run-in with the law…

I wanted to put my stickers on the walls of the subway. A favorite song growing up was A Poem on the Underground Wall which tells the story of a graffiti artist who writes profanity on a subway wall.

I found a spot that felt relatively protected from the waves of people. It takes about 20-30 minute for me to do a setup like this. My first attempt went smoothly. The second time I tried it two police officers respectfully informed me that I couldn’t do that there. I politely asked if I could finish taking my pictures and they informed me that the problem wasn’t that I was taking pictures it was that my tripod wasn’t allowed. It impeded traffic, which is understandable.

Those of you who’ve followed me for a long time remember my Infestation project. My reserves of insect prints are practically empty but I couldn’t miss a chance to leave a butterfly, cicada, and dragonfly in New York. The butterfly landed on the pier of Coney Island. The cicada nested on the S of a subway sign. And the dragonfly infested a Donald Duck poster.

I also came home with a modest stack of collage material. Advertisements are pasted on walls, layer upon layer. I couldn’t resist bringing some debris home with me. Like so much I do, the plan comes later. I observe, gather, and reflect on things and inspiration may or may not come. Time will tell.

Normally I leave my stickers where they land. Since this project is associated with VICE TV and could potentially be considered vandalism, we decided I should remove the stickers after I photographed them. At first I was a bit disappointed by this. I wanted to “leave” my mark after all. My opinion changed after I started removing them. Often when I pulled the stickers up they would pull chips of paint or bits of debris off the walls. As I reclaimed my used stickers I realized that I was collecting artifacts of the city that I was bringing home with me.

I’m still figuring out what to do with my collection of used New York City stickers and the city debris they cling to. I’ve got ideas. Perhaps I’ll give them to paid subscribers. It’s a good metaphor though. I thought I was going to New York City to leave my mark. It turns out, the city is what left its mark on me.

If you’re wondering where you can see the finished product on VICE TV, it’s coming. I think the first animation is about to be broadcast in the coming days. The next one will be used in connection with the Brooklyn Film Festival at the end of May. I don’t want to preempt the official releases, but I will be posting things on Instagram (@ade3) as they get released to the world.

Thanks for reading. I’m so glad I can share this experience with you. Stay creative.

Your friend,
Ade

Continuing from my last post, this is part 2 of my unedited interview with It’s Nice That. Part 1 explains where inspiration comes from. Like I said, it hides in plain sight. The follow-up question is how do you learn the skill of finding hidden beauty/inspiration? Is that even possible, or is it just a special talent reserved for artists? Yes, creative discovery is a skill that can be learned.

The design school I went to taught ways of seeing that were developed by an artist named Reinhold Marxhausen. My ideas of finding beauty in the ordinary are just restating his philosophy. Marxhausen said, “You have to work at seeing. It must be an aggressive act of visual curiosity.” The challenging words there are “work” and “aggressive.” What does this mean? When our eyes are open they are “on” so it seems contradictory to have to work at it. We either see something or we don’t, right? And what does it mean that seeing is an “aggressive act?”

But when you actually practice “seeing” you eventually realize that this isn’t a passive activity. The act of seeing actually changes the world. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually extremely practical. Take the example of the garage sale stickers I described in my last post. If I hadn’t actually “seen” them they would be lost in a drawer or the trash. Seeing was the first step of transformation. I believe that this extends beyond just art. Anyone in search of innovation, originality, and reinvention needs to be able to see the world differently. The way to get there is to practice seeing. And anybody can do it.

What’s the best way to get better at seeing?

There are many traps that we can fall into when we want to find or create something beautiful. Both of these are very modern, very American, and so mainstream that it feels blasphemous to even question them.

One trap is the temptation to buy new gear. We love tools. It’s so easy to believe that if we just had the right camera, the right software, the best instrument... we’d be able to make something beautiful. You end up spending all this money, it shows up at your doorstep, you open the box, you try to make something with it, and then... disappointment. We put the gear in a closet and feel ashamed. We blame ourselves for not having talent. We give up.

Another trap is strategizing our way to creativity. The rest of our lives revolve around comprehensive plans, why would creativity be any different? So we make a goal to be creative, convert that goal into a plan, schedule the steps, and align everything in preparation for your masterpiece. This is a perfect recipe for writer’s block. You sit down to execute the fool-proof plan and nothing comes out. And again we end up blaming ourselves. It’s not the plan’s fault, there must be something wrong with me! And we give up again.

How do we avoid traps like these?

Inspiration or “The Muse” as Steven Pressfield calls it in The War of Art doesn’t care about your gear. It doesn’t work on your schedule. You have to sneak up on it. If you find yourself stuck, here’s what I suggest. This is some very un-American, anti-modern advice. Do nothing. Seriously, do nothing. Your phone will beg you to pacify your boredom. But just sit there and observe yourself. This will feel very uncomfortable, like you are wasting time. But just be alert, patient, and curious.

You are waiting for dissonance, for something on the fringe of your awareness to trigger your attention. Here, at the dawn of consciousness is where the embryo of creativity can form. Be open to the mystery hiding in the 99% of your surroundings that you are blind to. You can’t predict where this will take you, but something will surprise you. That’s why I say beauty is hiding in plain sight.

This sounds redundant, but the thing to pay attention to are the things you notice. The reason you noticed it is because it broke through your filters. Pay attention to the tiny “that’s interesting” moments. Some part of you is curious. Indulge the curiosity and see where it takes you. It might be a dead-end, but that’s not failure.

Can anything become interesting if you look at it closely enough?

Definitely. I like to say, “The more you look, the more you see.” Sometimes it takes a change of perspective. You might need to experiment with different ways of shining light on it. Get closer or farther away. Flip it in a mirror. That doesn’t mean you will always strike gold but you’re guaranteed to see something you’ve never seen before and to come away changed.

Thanks for reading. I’ve got one more post in this series. By the way, if you want to see the version published by It’s Nice That, it can be found here. And stay tuned for the story of my recent trip to NYC. (Spoiler: it was awesome.)

Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade

Today I’m pointing you at a new article from It’s Nice That titled “Hiding in plain sight: how do creatives find inspiration in everyday life?”

It was an honor to be interviewed for the piece, and I think the gist of what I wanted to say survived the editor’s knife. I was asked good questions and the author did a good job of boiling my 2,000+ word stories into a concise article. But for the sake of the long-form fans, I am going to share my full answers with you. I’ll break it into chunks, this being the first of maybe 3 posts.

The thing everybody want’s to know is “where does inspiration come from?” It gets asked in various ways, but that’s the prize we are all after. The assumption is that artists have an answer. We try. We lie. And sometimes we actually have a nugget of wisdom that can unclog the creative block that we all suffer from. I can’t promise you a breakthrough, but here’s how I think about it…

Question:
Your animations on receipts take something incredibly ordinary – and often discarded – and turn it into a site for storytelling. What first drew you to receipts as a surface to work on, and what interests you about working with something so fleeting?

Answer:
I had this experience where I pulled a receipt out of my pocket and there was this beautiful abstract texture on it. It took me a little while to figure out that it came from the hand sanitizer station that was placed next to the self-checkout lanes. The alcohol in the sanitizer has a chemical reaction on the thermal properties of the receipt paper. It was an oddly profound moment when a virtually invisibly ordinary object jumped out of the “auto-pilot” of my mind and became a fascinating, and surprisingly complex technology. Unlike normal printing, no ink is added to a receipt. Heat turns the receipt black, almost as if it is pulling the image from within the paper.

The other thing about receipts that I love is that they are both extremely personal and completely worthless. I love the idea of my art existing on top of documents that record the hamburger’s I’ve eaten or the diapers I’ve purchased. We’ve been trained to believe that art needs to be made with archival paint on pristine canvases. That’s a fantasy designed to sell art supplies. It’s way more interesting to use real artifacts from your actual life and transform them into something special. And if it doesn’t last forever in the tomb of a museum? Who cares. In my opinion the ephemeral should be more valuable than the eternal.

Question:
You’ve spoken about the idea that “beauty hides in plain sight.” What does that look like in your day-to-day life – when do you feel like you’re noticing something others might overlook?

Answer:
You only have to discover hidden beauty once or twice before you start to wonder, how much beauty am I missing because my auto-pilot is filtering it out? But learning how to turn off the auto-pilot mode is a lesson I have to learn over and over. As much as I want to be aware of my surroundings, I am constantly missing things. Here’s a mundane example...

My wife tackled the tedious task of organizing a junk drawer. After she was done she had a little pile of those things that you don’t want, but you just can’t bring yourself to throw out. She handed me a packet of garage sale stickers and asked if I could use them. My instinct was to throw them out, the last thing I wanted to think about was a garage sale. After all, I’ve got important art to make! Luckily, they sat on the table long enough to actually notice them. I mean REALLY see them. I don’t know how many times I walked by them before it struck me that the neon colors are actually interesting. So was their shape. Once they went from the periphery of my attention to the center I could finally ask myself, “What could I make with this?” And then I was off to the races.

To be continued in part 2…

Thanks for reading and supporting my practice. It’s a joy to have you following my work and sitting with my words. Stay creative.

Your friend,
Ade

P.S. I still have some prints left from the garage sale sticker project. Message me if you are interested in purchasing one, or if you are a paid subscriber I’ll send you one for free.

Guerrilla art is typically not appreciated in office settings. I tried it anyway. This is the story of how I used Post-it Notes and some psychology to get people in my office to embrace creativity.

A quick psychology lesson. Indulge me…

Are you familiar with the halo effect? It’s a psychological situation where you associate positive feelings about something based on unrelated surrounding events. A practical example is sugar. The person with the candy jar on their desk is not just being generous, they probably intuitively understand the halo effect. They know that sugar makes people feel good and some of those good feelings rub off on them. It also activates the impulse for reciprocation. The person bringing donuts knows that the gift is worth the expense for intangible reasons.

I was studying biases when the idea of drawing candy struck me. I was trying to solve a problem. For the average person, working with a designer can feel risky because it pushes them out of their comfort zone. Creative solutions are uncertain, break patterns, and are unproven because of their novelty. Most people give creativity lip service but when it comes time to choose, they pick perceived safety every time. Could the halo effect help me get more traction with my colleagues? It was worth a try.

I theorized that if I drew pictures of candy it might have the same effect as a candy bowl. My plan was that every time I grabbed a piece of candy I would take it to my desk and draw it. This had a nice side-benefit of reducing my candy consumption because drawing takes time. I didn’t want these drawings to be too precious so I drew them on sticky notes which had the added benefits of being bright neon.

When someone was away from their desk I would sneak over, stick the drawing to their monitor or cubicle wall and walk away. They would return and discover an anonymous gift. It was sugar without the calories. But it also left a bit of joyful residue in its wake. The halo was linked to artwork and novelty from the design department.

The office started to fill with sticky notes of my candy drawings. Eventually the word got out that I was the person behind them. It got a little awkward because I couldn’t get to everyone and naturally some people felt intentionally left out. But also there was a sense of anticipation that at any moment something fun and one-of-a-kind could appear and break up the cubicle monotony of corporate life.

When Covid hit people left their sticky note art behind. I had a chance to visit the empty office. While I was there I walked the rows of cubicles looking for my candy drawings. When I found them I would steal them. The cleaning crew would inevitably take the blame, but who would complain about stolen sticky notes? The halo disappeared.

Did I activate the halo effect? It’s impossible to say. These things can’t be measured. For those of us who have endured life in corporate jobs it can be hard to maintain your creativity. One solution is to separate your creative life from your day job. Another option is to watch for little ways to subvert the workplace emptiness in unexpected ways. Perhaps a small drawing on a sticky note is the tiny jolt of joy that your co-workers need to survive another day.

Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade

P.S. If this essay feels a little different than my normal ranting that’s because it’s a remix of something I wrote for LinkedIn as part of my Things you NEVER say on your resume series. If you’re curious, you might enjoy these additional no-nos. Don’t ever say:

• “I’ve developed a reputation for being anti-AI”

• “I have bad ideas (and take unnecessary risks)”

• “I like to play games at work”

• “I might be a pyro”

The first time you identify a hole where a word should be you dismiss it as a fluke. But hit these voids enough times and eventually you realize there are holes everywhere. The landscape of language is not a comprehensive map, it’s barely a loose net of definitions that humans are obliviously lost within. That thick Oxford dictionary seemed like it was cataloging everything. In reality it just catalogues the limits of our minds, the things we can say, the thoughts we can think, and the objects we can make.

When you are young it is hard, perhaps impossible, to think without words. They might not fully realize what they are doing, but when youth invent their own slang, it is because they have entered the stage of development when they see language as malleable for the first time. They are stepping out of word prisons and experiencing the fresh air of expanded consciousness. Unfortunately, most people grow out of this phase, step back into their cells, and lose their keys.

Examples of word prisons? Political parties, professional titles, artistic styles, musical genres, organized religion — anywhere that words slice our minds into controllable chunks, you will find word-thinkers primed to point out when you’ve stepped outside the orthodoxy of language. But let’s stick to creative word prisons, the things preventing you from making something original. Can this be fixed?

A sure sign that you’ve found a boundary of word prison is when you hear “you can’t do that.” Sometimes it is a voice in our head that utters these words but often it is our co-workers, friends, and family.

“You can’t” is different than “You shouldn’t.” The difference is that “shouldn’t” has reasons behind it. “Can’t” might be true, but it’s often uttered by people who haven’t actually pushed the limits of what’s possible, no, they are trusting in the meaning of their word prisons.

“You shouldn’t” can be helpful. But “can’t?” This infuriates creative people because we are the most likely people to be aware of, and question our word prisons. We recognize when the only reasons behind the “No” are only the definitions of words. And it makes our blood boil. In these situations you aren’t brushing against real constraints, you are being blocked by words that have become permanent structures in the collective human mind. It is easier for people to block you than to change their definitions or to make mental shelf space for something completely new. But all you get is “no.”

Here’s the secret that will help you destroy word prisons. Just as the definitions of words are invisible chains to the people held in their prisons, the limits to what you can do are also invisible. There is absolutely no reason you can’t break the rules. Once you see the walls of the prison you can simply walk outside. There are no locks holding these bars closed. There doesn’t have to be a word for your endeavor before you can begin it. That doesn’t mean you will succeed, but the asking permission part? No. You don’t need permission. Step outside the prison and make something the naysayers can’t possibly imagine or replicate.

Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade

I sold some art this week. Feels good but it forces me to wrestle with an old demon that I still haven’t defeated. How do you reconcile your “day job” with your creative practice? This is the story of my struggles to get paid to draw pictures…

I almost got kicked out of art school.

It’s a story I’ve never told before because it hurts too much. Graphic design really was a dream job for a kid who wanted to grow up to be an artist. And when it looked like that dream was ending it crushed me.

One day coming up the stairs in the art building I overheard two professors talking. It was after hours and they reasonably assumed they were alone. But I practically lived in the art building so I got to hear them arguing. I quickly realized they were talking about ME. I listened to one of them run me down. The other defended me. At some point I broke down in tears and revealed myself. I thought my dream of becoming a graphic designer was dead.

College was mostly easy, especially the art classes, except for one. Illustration. My problem wasn’t lack of artistic skill. I could draw. No, it was something else. Back then illustration was the primary skill of a graphic designer, if you couldn’t do it you might be in the wrong program. I think my professor took it personally when I struggled in her class. She knew I could draw, too, and misunderstood my struggle as rebellion. And truth be told, I was rebellious. I was constantly breaking the rules of the assignments to try and find a creative angle to boring problems. My professor told me that in the business world this would get me fired. So she “fired” me by giving my assignments low grades. She would have kicked me out of the program if she had her way.

But why? Why did I struggle to draw in a commercial setting? There was something inside me that resisted illustration. I loved to draw, but put it in an assignment that mimicked a commercial requirement checklist and it felt like my fur was being rubbed in the wrong direction. I froze up. I still do.

Luckily, the other professor was the head of the design program and he saw potential in me. He created an alternative path, volunteering to teach me in an independent study situation where I could focus on photography and digital illustration to get the credits I needed to get my degree in design. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I wouldn’t have a design career if this professor hadn’t helped me.

Despite my struggles with illustration, I actually do find myself drawing at work. The images in this post are sketches that I used in storyboards that help my teams align around the people and the problems our products helped solve. Without the rest of the storyboard they feel empty, like a cartoon without a punchline. And if you look carefully you might sense my hesitation to commit to the format completely. It’s as if a rebellious student is trying to spend as little time as possible on the assignment.

The irony is that my day job has fizzled to a halt. I could blame AI and its ability to draw pictures better than I can. But just as most corporate careers are spiraling into irrelevance, the people who are doing something different are on the rise. It’s almost as if my rebellious graphic design instincts were right all along. It’s not about following the rules, it’s about finding creative ways to work around systems.

Perhaps I buried the lead here, but I am looking at ways that I can unify my creative practice with something that resembles a career. This Substack is part of that puzzle. You will see me experimenting soon. I want to deliver handmade art and unexpected ideas to paid subscribers in a way that doesn’t feel like a commercial exchange. I can’t announce anything yet, other than to say that I will make it worthwhile to be an early supporter if you want to get ahead of the game. Stay creative.

Your friend,
Ade

I am writing this from a rock. Behind me my truck is pointed at a silo with a camera sticking out the window. Every few seconds it takes a photo. The hope is that after a few hours I will have a timelapse that shows the clouds sailing over an industrial section of Loveland, Colorado.

I lost my job Tuesday. Corporate layoffs, blah, blah, blah. I wouldn’t mention it except for the surprising response I’ve gotten from my obligatory “Hey, I got laid off, too, can you refer me for jobs?” status update on LinkedIn. Of course I didn’t say it the standard way, you know me, I never miss an opportunity to shake the box.

My rebellious post struck a nerve. I’m going to share it here because I suspect there is something happening that you might be able to use in your mission to change the world. Or at least it might help you survive these crazy times. I said,

“F the BS. Yesterday I lost my job. I’m supposed to add that green outline to my headshot and post a humble brag about how I’m energized about pivoting to my next adventure. Gross.

This time around I want to abandon the robotic protocol where we twist our professional lives into yawn-inducing bullet points. That’s what AI is for. Yay?! Instead, I’m just going to tell stories. Real, true stories that prove I’m a flawed human. That’s what you’ll get when you hire me, I’m just putting it on the box so you see the ingredients before you make the purchase.

I’m going to call this series, “Things you should never say on resumes.” It’s going to be fun. You should follow me because what’s better than watching somebody struggle to be human in public? Wish me luck.”

At first I just thought people were being nice. But now that this post has over 35,000 impressions, I think my unorthodox approach might have stumbled onto a bigger trend.

Until recently the standard advice is to model ideal professional qualities and show how you deliver value. Find a pain point, deliver a solution, and don’t burden people with your personality. The more you conform, the better. Unexpected ideas scare people. Nobody really cares about you, they only really care about themselves. Faster, cheaper, predictable… to win you find a pattern that works and stick to it until you’ve squeezed every drop of profit from it that you can. It’s hard to argue with the results but…

What if the standard advice just stopped working? And what if the AI revolution isn’t a slop apocalypse after all? What if we look back and realize we weren’t entering an age of synthetic domination, instead it was the jolt humanity needed to re-discover what actually matters. Perhaps it’s the start of a new appreciation for the daring humans who refuse to let their lives be digitized, homogenized, and converted into data metrics.

Could it be that people are sick of the emptiness of our pristine digital lives? I’m starting to believe that humanity has flipped some sort of collective switch. The age of personal optimization could be over and now we are collectively rooting for the folks who reject the standard advice and defy expectations. Now is the time to be different. It’s a perfect time to try things that might fail. Point your camera at the clouds and see what happens.

Of course I might be imagining the whole thing. I hope not.

But that’s why I’m sitting on a rock waiting for my timelapse to complete. It’s the kind of activity that doesn’t make any sense in 2026. And yet there’s a chance that pointing a camera at the clouds might be the start of something different, something nobody could see coming. Thanks for rooting for me.

Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade

Later this week I will open this “giveaway” to all my subscribers …

Read more

I think you need some optimism today so I want to share why slop is the best thing that’s happened to artists for as long as I can remember. If I do this right, I can send you into the weekend feeling hopeful about being an artist in the age of generative “art.” Here are 10 reasons to be thankful for the slop…

1. We have a new word

Having a new word to describe bad art is more important than it may seem. More than an insult, “slop” is a new way of framing conversations about quality. It’s a stake in the ground that avoids the wishy washy language that formerly gave low-quality art a pass because we were afraid to hurt people’s feelings. Patience for relativism has run out. Art is art. Slop is slop.

2. Revaluation of ALL art

All the signals of what makes art “good” are being recalibrated. Sounds scary, but haven’t we been asking for this shakeup? Yesterday, modern art induced eye rolls from normies. Shock value doesn’t work like it used to. Art has been on the verge of irrelevance. Thanks to slop, there is a return to valuing the skilled creators with interesting ideas who have genuinely mastered a craft. We needed this.

3. Reverse outrage benefits artists

There is real backlash to AI generated art. People are furious and vocal. The anger has a reverse benefit because when human-made art is produced people notice it, acknowledge it, and praise it more than they would have pre-AI.

4. Sensitivity to fakery has never been higher

Advances in CGI desensitized us to the point that we can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake. Until recently, if something was beautiful we assumed it was Photoshopped and move on. But now our fakery detection systems are on high alert. If it smells too perfect we are skeptical. And now when something is “obviously human” we applaud more readily.

5. Death of perfection

Finding flaws used to be how people ranked art. If you saw a “mistake” you could assume the work was done by an amateur. Now that’s flipped. Perfection is less important than the clues that identify the work as created by a real person. And the pressure to be a brand instead of a human? The requirement to make work that is realer than real? Disappearing.

6. Job loss of the “slop-adjacent”

I hesitate to take any pleasure in someone losing their job, but creators in “slop-adjacent” areas are obsolete now that AI can do it. The fakers are being weeded out of the ranks. Generic stock photography, PowerPoint sludge, marketing spam… the bottom tier of commercial artists will either need to upgrade their skills to transcend the slop or find jobs in another field. Taking shortcuts doesn’t pay what it used to and there has never been a bigger gap between the artists doing the work and the imitators.

7. Less chasing expensive tools

Artists love new gear as much as the next chump. Cameras, computers, monitors, peripheral tech… the justification for the constant upgrades has been that better gear gets us closer to perfection. But when perfection is replaced by authenticity as the ideal, the pressure towards more megapixels and megabytes is less urgent. We still love our gear but perhaps our tool lust can be directed to more interesting less computer-dependent toys.

8. Less software required

Photoshop, Pro Tools, After Effects, countless plugins… whatever software you make art with has seemed necessary. You pay a subscription, upgrade to every new version, and shackle yourself to your computer. But today people want to know that you are real and the less “professionally produced” your work is, the more they relate to you. That doesn’t mean it has to be low quality, but you don’t have to hire a film crew, video editors, and audio engineers to build an audience. We can’t step away from our computers completely, but access to professional software is less mandatory than ever.

9. Stronger communities

It might be my imagination but it feels like we are more connected to the artists we love than ever before. They see our comments, interact with us, and we feel like we are a part of movements that matter. That is not a result of generative AI, it is a result of humans doing what we do best: connecting around the creation of original art. Hopefully this only increases as humans shun the slop.

10. Uncopyable still wins

My advice, and I don’t hear enough people recommending this, is to be skeptical of the doom predictions about what AI will do to artists. It might actually be a golden age for creators who don’t depend on AI. Double-down on the things that make you uncopyable, the messy, flawed, idiosyncratic parts of life that prove you’re human. That will never go out of fashion.

Thanks for considering my top 10 list. Am I crazy? What did I miss? As always it is an honor to exist in your inbox and feeds. Thank you for your support, subscriptions, restacks, and likes. Stay creative.

Your friend,
Ade

Today I invite you to take a walk down memory lane with me. Exactly 15 years ago from tomorrow I made my first post as @ade3 on Instagram. Yesterday I made my 2,000th post and it seems like some reflection is warranted. A lot changes in 15 years.

I’m not going to repost all 2,000 photos here but I’m also not going to hand select a best of list. To tell the story I grabbed 20 screenshots of chunks of time that represent where my head was at over the years. This is the story of my evolution as an artist, the grind of working in obscurity and the unexpected payoff of years of development. So let’s get into it. Here is my story told through the lens of 15 years and 2k posts on Instagram…

In 2011 Instagram was just finding its legs. The filters felt fresh and sharing photos felt social in a way that Flickr never did. I loved it. Facebook hadn’t purchased Instagram yet and our iPhone 4’s had cameras that took decent pictures. For my part I liked sharing pictures of toys on my desk at the ad agency where I worked.

In 2010 there were no algorithms. No influencers. You knew everyone in your feed personally. So you shared snaps of your kids, inside jokes from the office, and slices of your day. Instagram got a reputation for people snapping photos of their lunch but these little moments were a tiny window into the lives of your friends and family that humanity had never experienced before. Back then it truly connected us.

In 2013 Instagram was still in its infancy and I was making apps. My Ghost-O-Meter app had won an award while my photo filter app Grungy failed to get traction. The idea of Grungy was a belief that people would want to “grunge up” their photos with distressed effects that add scratches, burns, and discoloration. Not so much.

In 2014 the curl of a stretched rubber band appeared on my feed alongside the birth of my son and the announcement of my first book. Most of our lives are either too personal or too trivial to throw on Instagram. But occasionally a moment of beauty emerges from the mundane. And sometimes a life event is so huge that you have to share the news.

What I wouldn’t give to have the energy I had in 2015. I was training for marathons, chasing after my boys, and in hindsight life was so stress-free. Remember when we could post little snippets of life to Instagram without it carrying the anxiety or hypnotizing spell that the algorithms deliver us today?

As I prepped for an art show in 2016 my feed filled with artifacts of my process as I reworked screen prints from college. Despite these images having been online for a decade they still only have around 5 likes a piece. Zero comments. And yet they never felt like failures. They were there for people to see but that feeling of “if nobody likes it I’m a failure” was not a thing yet.

In 2018 I was entranced by the second generation Apple Pencil. I made a drawing app that recorded my pencil movements and began documenting my camera collection in colorful drawings that animated as they redrew themselves on screen.

In 2019 I ditched the digital drawing in favor of a pen and sticky notes. I would draw ordinary objects on sticky notes and leave them in random places. It was very polite graffiti that asked people to decide if it was art or trash.

I was flattered by how long a sticky note would survive in places they didn’t belong. Many of them lived in the office where I worked. When the pandemic hit the building sat empty for months. On rare visits to the office it was surreal to walk around the deserted cubicles and see my scribbles still clinging to monitors and whiteboards.

In the early days of Covid I was writing and creating illustrations for User Zero. My trip to run in the Boston Marathon was cancelled but I kept my head up. I began experimenting with pinecone shapes. First I placed pinecones on solar paper to capture their outline. Then I would trace the shapes and cut them out of paper (or sometimes 3d print them). Then I’d hold them up and photograph a textured background that showed through the hole. These never really went anywhere but they planted the seeds of the sticker + textured backgrounds that I am doing today.

Pinecones evolved into stencils of a camera. Armed with baby powder, magnetic stencils, and a spray bottle, I started my graffiti career the same day George Floyd was killed. It seems like there is some irony there but I’m not sure what it is.

I’d like to say that my art hasn’t been affected by the “world burning” that we live through but it is impossible to block the news out completely. The first time I felt the numbness was when the Twin Towers fell. Back then I was climbing in dumpsters photographing the beautiful textures I found in the garbage. I felt so useless, it was impossible not to question the value of my art in the shadow of the war on terrorism.

I share this because I know that world events have a way of zapping our creative energy. It doesn’t have to kill your output. Keep writing. Keep making art. It’s not trivial, our creative practices must persevere.

In August 2020 I finished my camera made of coffee stirrer straws. This is the first project that actually caught people’s attention. For the first time I was getting follows from strangers. I believe these were my first posts to hit the 100 like milestone. Unfortunately when the initial hype blew over the likes and follower count went back to a trickle.

In April of 2021 receipts make their first appearance in my feed. At that time I was building a digital polaroid camera that had an e-ink display and printed on receipt paper. The magic of thermal paper captured my imagination, I love the fact that the image comes from heat instead of ink. Usually we think of pictures being added on top of paper but with receipts it is as if the image lives inside the paper waiting to escape.

Receipts evolved into shipping labels and I developed a technique for making prints using a combination of alcohol and heat to activate the ink held inside the labels. The pandemic was still in full swing so I made prints from masks before shifting to flowers and leaves as subject matter.

As I continued to refine my thermal printmaking technique I began printing with insect corpses. I also began making collages of faces using the scraps of shipping labels that I was accumulating. I called these faces my “Inner Demons” and mailed them to my friends as Halloween gifts.

In 2023 my first Kickstarter was successfully funded and my “Infestation” was released into the world. I used a cicada, dragon fly, and butterfly to create hundreds of one-of-a-kind prints. It was so energizing to be working on a project that people had invested money to see me complete.

In April of 2023 the first receipt animation appeared in my feed. It used imagery of a spinning dancer from Eadweard Muybridge. It is worth noting that this did not go viral. Today it still only has 54 likes. In other words it is invisible. I reposted a better edited version of this two years later that has over 1,000 likes. I’m not saying this to flex, rather I think it is important to remember that an “overnight success” is rare. It can take years of refining an idea before it gets traction. Likewise, this set of images contains my first attempts of sticker animations on dumpsters and signs. The best one has 34 likes despite being 90% similar to what I am posting today. I actually said something like “This is my last one of these sticker animations, they are too much work” at one point. Yes, I gave up. Ideas take time, often years, to evolve. If you are a creator grinding for attention, hang in there. It will pay off some day.

In 2023 I put the thermal paper experimentation on hold and began playing with cassette tapes, ghost pepper illusions, learning basic electronics, and video synthesis. Again, you can see the seeds of what I am doing today with balloon projections in this work. But it’s not work, it’s play. Hopefully that’s what you see in these snapshots of my back story, when I am creating I am having fun.

I used my thermal printing technique on an apple at the end of 2024, not realizing it would represent a turning point for my Instagram account. It started out as a Birthday gift for a teacher friend. I recorded a voiceover talking about how important failure is to the creative process. To my surprise it went viral and my tiny Instagram account started to gain real traction.

The experience of my coffee stirrer camera had taught me to be skeptical of temporary inflows of traffic. Just because you get a moment in the spotlight doesn’t mean those people will stick around. But my account grew steadily and by June 2025 it looked like my success wasn’t a fluke. I refined my techniques, shared as much as I could, and began to figure out what worked and what didn’t.

Which brings us today. I am more energized than ever and motivated to keep making interesting creations for you. I have so many ideas. Thank you for your support over the years and I hope you will continue to enjoy what I’m doing for another 15 years.

Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade

You may remember my frustration when my work was copied by Higgsfield AI and posted on their Instagram feed without attribution. BTW, thank you to all of you who trolled their post with comments. It warmed my heart.

Anyway, yesterday I got an unbelievable email. I’ll share it with you with the names X’d out. It said:

Good day, Ade Hanft! My name is XXXX, and I represent XXXX, a company working with bloggers and influencers. Our new client, Higgsfield, would be happy to consider collaborating with you as part of their upcoming advertising campaign.

What needs to be done:

Create a dynamic, visually striking video showcasing the power of Higgsfield’s Kling 3.0 feature. We’d be happy to work with you, as we believe you’re a perfect fit for this advertising campaign!

Could you please let me know your pricing for one Reel + a link in the bio for 5 days, and also the price for a Story separately?

I look forward to hearing back from you and hope for a long-term collaboration!

Warm regards,

XXXX

This is one of those moments in life that make me feel like I’m living in a simulation. I mean really?! I’ve made as much noise as I could to get the attention of Higgsfield. In addition to telling the story here and on Instagram, I used LinkedIn to try and get the attention of lawyers. I even tried messaging the CEO directly.

Crickets.

Then out of the blue I get an email from their advertising agency interested in a collaboration, oblivious to my past encounters?

Unbelievable.

You can imagine the elegant profanity that filled the first draft of my response. But as I pondered my options I realized that rage is only one of the ways I can respond to this situation. One of the most world-changing mind hacks is realizing that you are in control of how you feel. It doesn’t seem like it in the moment, but rage is a choice. Snark is a choice. Patience is a choice. So with that in mind I would like to tap into the intelligence of my readers. What would you do in my situation? Would you advise me to:

A. Don’t do anything.

B. Get upset and keep making noise.

C. Prank them and go along with it.

D. Use it as an honest educational experiment and share findings.

If you have a moment to hit “reply” I’d be curious what you think. It doesn’t have to be a long message, it can be as simple as saying, A, B, C, or D. Alternatively, the comments are open and you can weigh in there.

I’ll let you know if this adventure has additional chapters as they unfold.

Stay creative. Your friend,

Ade

When software lets you instantly replicate any visual or musical style it can be hard to feel like you have real ownership over what you create. Today I am going to show you how to print your own Super 8 film. It’s unlikely that this is something you would ever want to do. And when you see how much of a pain this process is, you might be even LESS likely to attempt it. But understanding why something like this is valuable might unlock some ideas, especially if you have found yourself overwhelmed by the unlimited capabilities of modern software. When every style and trend is just a click or prompt away, how do you create something authentic and new?

Brian Eno made this observation:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”

This prediction may have seemed questionable in the past, but the years have proven it to be absolutely true. To meet the demand of people trying to replicate the flaws of past technologies, software “solutions” lets you emulate whatever obsolete machines you are interested in. It’s very popular, perhaps 99% of all creations nowadays use synthesized versions of something that at one time didn’t require a computer. From guitar pedals to sample packs, and from apps to generative AI, shortcuts have become the norm. The practice of simulating “flaws” of past tech is commonplace and practically unavoidable for computer-bound creatives.

Here’s the problem… When the creative process gets reduced to picking the plugin that matches your mood, how do you make something original? You become a slave to style. When you have an infinite menu of software options that imitate real-world techniques you never penetrate beyond the superficial surface layer in your work. Understanding why something looks or sounds like a relic of another time is optional, and most people aren’t willing to do that work. Creators end up like passive tourists, visiting stylistic museums without ever understanding the culture and nuance behind the exhibits.

I predict a backlash to the practice of style mimicry. Now that generative AI makes imitation easier then ever before, people are beginning to crave the original and authentic. When humans smell shallow copies, we are becoming increasingly less likely to applaud. I might be wrong, but my hunch is that part of what has driven the popularity of my work in the last year has been my rebellion against shortcuts. Which brings me to my recent exploration of Super 8 film…

Here’s why Super 8 is intriguing to me. It’s not because I’m a filmmaker. Maybe someday. But the thing that caught my attention was the prevalence and affordability of Super 8 film projectors and film viewers. While the cost to actually shoot on Super 8 film is expensive (3 minutes of video costs around $150) the machines used to play the films are cheap. Any film that was worth watching has long since been digitized leaving the gear to collect dust in closets and attics. If you watch the thrift stores, garage sales, and Facebook Marketplace you can find Super 8 film cameras and projectors for next to nothing. But what can you do with this obsolete gear?

As I said, shooting video on Super 8 is expensive. Is it possible to get digital video printed on film that can be played on an old projector? I searched for a service that would allow me to go from digital files to analog film. If it exists I couldn’t find it. There are plenty of services for scanning Super 8mm film and providing digital files, but it doesn’t go the other direction.

Pause. Somebody reading this is yelling at the screen, “BUT WHY?! The whole aesthetic of Super 8 is more than the film, it’s the cameras, and the lenses, and the artifacts of film spinning through a machine. You’re wasting your time!” Yes, I hear you. Remember, my goal is not to mimic an aesthetic. Software can do that. My goal is to create something new. My favorite definition of creativity is to force two unexpected things together and observe what happens when they collide. Part of why I embrace scanners, receipt printers, balloons, etc. is because interesting things happen when you use technology in ways that they weren’t designed for. Unpause.

Since I couldn’t find a service that allows me to print Super 8 film I was forced into plan B. Make something myself. What follows are the steps I took to print my own Super 8 film using the resources I have available to me. Is it a perfect solution? No. But it sort of works. So let’s get into it…

Step 1: Printing the Film

There isn’t a printer that can print directly on Super 8 film, but it is possible to print on sheets of transparent material. Transparency sheets are affordable and readily available. They come in versions that can be used with inkjet or laser jet printers.

The big limitation here is resolution. The image area of a Super 8 film is tiny. It’s not even 8mm, the actual image is only 5.46mm×4.01mm after the sprocket hole is accounted for. If your printer is capable of printing at 600dpi, that means your image only has 129x82 pixels of data to work with. Even doubling to 1200dpi you are only talking 258x164 pixels. In other words, the image quality of homemade Super 8 film is going to be much worse than normally processed Super 8 film. What gives?

The difference here is that real film is recorded with light captured at the microscopic level. A printer is working with dots of ink or toner that take up more space. This might be a deal breaker, especially if you were hoping to emulate actual Super 8 resolution. My guess is that this the reason why a “digital to analog film printing service” doesn’t exist. Physics makes it really difficult.

But what if we accept the resolution constraints? Well, this is where things get interesting for me. When you enlarge a tiny printed image, lots of details appear that you don’t see with your naked eye. Every dot of ink becomes visible, tiny blemishes are exaggerated and you end up with a new visual texture. It looks like this:

The visual texture is going to be different depending on your printer. For comparison, you can see below the difference between my inkjet and laser jet printer. How do we explain these differences?

The inkjet uses ink (duh) which means it is working with a liquid. The laser jet uses toner (a powder) that is heated up so that it fuses to the paper. This difference is why you need to buy transparency sheets that work with your printer.

My laser jet printer is a Color HP MFP M182nw. It has a maximum resolution of 600x600 dpi. My inkjet printer is a Canon ET-8550 which has 5,760 x 1,440 dpi. These numbers would seem to give my inkjet a huge advantage over the laser jet. My experience showed the opposite, however. When magnified the Laserjet has much more interesting printing artifacts (dot patterns!) than the inkjet. Perhaps my inkjet transparencies aren’t as good as other brands. Your results may vary, but in my case I am proceeding with my laser jet.

But how do we actually convert the frames of video into a strip of film that can be printed? The answer is that each frame needs to be manually aligned one at a time. It’s tedious. With a vertical height of 11 inches, you can fit about 68 frames in a strip. Horizontally you can fit around 15 frames or more. You’ll need to connect all the strips later on, but we’ll get to that in a future section. If anyone wants to attempt this, just reach out and I will gladly share my Photoshop file as well as the film template I use in the following steps.

Step 2: Cutting Film Strips

Now that we have our video printed on transparencies it is time to cut out the film. The tool I have is a Cricut Maker. I made an SVG that was the exact size as super 8 film. I loaded that into the Cricut unsure of whether its die cutting capabilities would be able to cut out the tiny sprocket holes. It actually did pretty well.

The challenge here is getting the Cricut to line up exactly with the pre-printed transparency. I need to put the transparency on the cutting mat at the precise place where the blade will cut. To do this I used the Cricut’s pen tool to draw the film shapes onto the mat. Then I used that drawing as my guide for where to stick my strip from the transparency sheet. Then I switch the template from “draw” to “cut” and the blade will slice exactly where my template was drawn on the mat. In theory…

Even with this alignment, there is still enough wiggle room to make this really difficult. Every time the mat loads there is a chance it will shift ever so slightly, causing the frames to be misaligned. We are working at the scale of millimeters so tiny misalignment can force you to start over.

Rather than print the entire transparency sheet at once, I do it one strip at a time. I cut each strip out leaving enough room on the edges to tape it down to the mat. The tape is necessary because the stickiness of the mat isn’t enough by itself to keep the film from coming loose mid print.

Making things move challenging, every time you print you will end up with all the tiny sprocket hole scraps sticking to the board. Imagine manually removing 68 clear specs of transparency from the mat between prints. Conversely, you could leave the sprocket remnants on the board and use them to help align the film strip. This sort of works, but it also increases the likelihood that the film will detach mid print or not make clean cuts. It’s kind of a pick your poison situation.

Step 3: Connecting the Strips

Congratulations, you made it to step three. Let’s assume you ended up with 5 strips of 10in strips of video. Now you have to connect them all into one long 50 inch strip. If I did the math right, that’s about 18 seconds of video when your projector is running at 18 frames per second.

To connect the strips you need to carefully trim the strips so that they can be taped together without messing up the spacing between sprocket holes. You could try to do this manually but there is a tool that will make this much easier. Search for a “Guillotine Super 8 Film Splicer.” It will cost you $20 or more on Ebay but it is worth it if you plan to undertake this project. It helps in a few ways. First, it has a cutter on one side that is spaced exactly so that the cuts maintain the right spacing between the sprocket holes. Second, it holds the film in place while you tape the ends together using the tape from the tape holder. Mine came with old tape, but since this isn’t meant for archival quality, regular scotch tape would do the trick. Finally, it has an arm that swings down to cut the sprocket holes in the tape after it is spliced. Here is a picture of it in action.

Step 4: Play the Film

Finally it is time to see the final product. If you have a Super 8 film projector you could run the film through it. It will fly through pretty fast, so don’t blink. To try to reduce the amount of loading and unloading you could try to make your film strip a loop by taping the beginning to the end. This takes some experimentation based on your setup.

Another way to see your Super 8 film is to use a film viewer. These are basically small screens with a light that shines through the film as you manually pull the film through a gear mechanism that also acts as a shutter.

The final option is even more manual, and it is the path that I find most satisfying. There are a couple of toys of the past that had Super 8 film in them. One was the Fisher Price Movie Viewer. The other was called a Micro Movie Viewer.

The Fisher Price Movie viewer was a popular toy that had lots of cassettes containing various popular animated movies from Disney, Warner Bros, and Sesame Street. You turn a crank by hand to advance or rewind the film. You hold it up to the light and watch the video play. It works amazingly well and is a pure joy.

The Micro Movie Viewer is smaller than the Fisher Price toy but works on basically the same principle. Instead of hand turning a crank there is a small motor inside that is powered by an AA battery. The film selection available for this toy tend to be live action instead of animated shorts. Below are a coupe video showing the Micro Movie Viewer in action…

Inside the film canisters for both these toys are loops of film so they can play indefinitely. This seems like an ideal way to play your homemade Super 8 films because once you get the film in the canister you can plug and play. Unfortunately, getting your film inside the canisters is an exercise in frustration because things have to be just perfect to avoid jams. But I can confirm that it is possible!

Finally, I want to share a hack that converts the Micro Movie Viewer into the world’s smallest film projector. If you drill a tiny hole in the plastic on the side of the viewer you can insert the bulb of a flashlight through it. This sends light through the film and back out through the lens of the viewer. Place a white piece of paper in front of the light and you can watch your movie without squinting. It’s a bit hard to describe, so check out this Reel to see the world’s smallest film projector in action:

This wraps up my experience with making my DIY Super 8 film. This is a process I will continue to refine and experiment with. If you decide to give it a try, I would love to learn from your experience. And if you made it to the bottom of this post, we are two of a kind. Consider subscribing if you don’t already.

Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade