what’s happening here — or rather what’s not happening here

I opened this blog back in 2007 as some­thing of a show­case-cum-port­fo­lio for my writ­ing as a free­lance jour­nal­ist in art, design and archi­tec­ture, part­ly to help me keep up to date with the world I was writ­ing about, keep my writ­ing skills honed, and part­ly to attract writ­ing com­mis­sions. This was at a time when it hadn’t real­ly hit print pub­li­ca­tions exact­ly how enor­mous was the devel­op­ing threat from online media. Now it seems obvi­ous. back then, just eight years or so ago as i write, it wasn’t tak­en seri­ous­ly at all, but then even broad­band still wasn’t com­mon, many peo­ple were still using inter­net cafes, and there were no smart­phones around, let alone 4G or fibre-optic high speed inter­net.

What start­ed out as an intend­ed show­case for me and my writ­ing, and, to a less­er extent, my pho­tog­ra­phy, has become an increas­ing­ly embar­rass­ing tes­ta­ment to my lack of activ­i­ty over the last few years. the rea­sons for this are com­pli­cat­ed. time, or the lack of enough of it is always an avail­able scape­goat. but that’s an excuse real­ly. my ‘day job’ took a greater toll on me than I ever realised at the time, and oth­er com­pli­ca­tions, which I won’t go into here, added to my dis­trac­tion from this great project of mine. So it’s time now. Put up or shut up. I’ve decid­ed not to shut up. The inat­ten­tive read­er will con­tin­ue, no longer be ded­i­cat­ed to the arts specif­i­cal­ly, but will be much more free­wheel­ing and broad than it has been. This is not to say that the arts will be ignored. Design, Visu­al art prac­tices, and the dis­course around them are still cen­tral to my inter­ests, but this web­site will no longer be sell­ing itself as a sort of seri­ous list­ings and crit­i­cal review. there are plen­ty of peo­ple and organ­i­sa­tions doing this already and doing it far bet­ter and more com­pre­hen­sive­ly than I have either the incli­na­tion or resources to do effec­tive­ly.