Ten Thousand Shards | TTS Digital
TTS Digital is the operational hub of Ten Thousand Shards—the culmination of nearly four decades spent working across disciplines with people, places, and ways of making a living a life. 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. Delay and detour, deferment and digression, doubt, divergence, and disappointment constitute both the conditions of our questioning and the means by which we work through it. Here, experience isn’t given but must be made.
Initiated as a long-form graduate research project, Ten Thousand Shards takes that training and framework to task, demanding that it simultaneously facilitate thoughtful inquiry, committed craftsmanship, and creative collaboration across disciplinary and geographic boundaries and all that these entail. 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, unable in principle to work against technology since the technical and the human are radically co-implicating and co-constitutive moments of being, as such. As such, we discover that we are as we make with tools worn and applied, carried and attached, each ex-tending and in-tending our reach.
But The App lies. Time, attention, and craft are yours, mine, ours, now and evermore. So let us instead make, be, and do difference as TTS digitally (en-)counters the digital claim on authentic ways of living through craft by preparing portals through which practice might pass and reclaim its rightful place digitally-analogically in hand.
Know that Ten Thousand Shards claims to offer absolutely nothing in the way of ‘authentic experience,’ this by its very nature being a matter of singular, personal work and quest both for and at the risk of love and life itself. Rather, TTS offers its own series of abstractions from practices which themselves deeply inform this particular quest—abstractions 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. Besides, it’s all the same in the end, and yet the journey remains yours to make, so tread lightly, hold your heart, and always walk hard. —:c:—
