About
Ten Thousand Shards (TTS Digital)
TTS Digital is the operational hub of Ten Thousand Shards, this being the culmination of over three decades of work across disciplines and cultures. This recursively developing repository bridges focused practices in wheel-thrown pottery, street photography, and Japanese-English translation, connecting them to archival research, editorial design, experimental film, and situated practice in quest of new ways of seeing, saying, and making in our increasingly digitized world.
At its core, the project develops and experiments with systems-oriented visual, conceptual, and procedural vernaculars that enable it to think through questions concerning the conditions of possibility for authentic experience in an age largely defined by the immediacy of technological abstraction. Initiated as a long-form graduate research project, Ten Thousand Shards takes that training and framework to task, demanding that it simultaneously facilitate thoughtful questioning, committed craftsmanship, and creative collaboration across disciplinary and geographic boundaries. And yet, even as it decries the detrimental effects of excessive digital abstraction underway today, TTS Digital ironically works precisely through that mode, never against it—in fact, unable to work against technology since it is always-already embodied and expressed through human being itself, worn, app-lied, and attached, extending our reach. But the app lied, see? Time, attention, and craft are yours. TTS, then, digitally (en-)counters the digital claim on authentic ways of living with craft by preparing portals through which practice might pass and reclaim its rightful place in hand.
Ten Thousand Shards claims to offer nothing in the way of ‘authentic experience,’ this, by its nature, being a matter of singular, personal work and quest. What it offers is its own series of abstractions from practices which themselves have deeply informed this particular quest—one from which I hope you might find a few shards of inspiration suitable for building yourself a cipher-machine and blazing your own new trails. —:c:—
