Squared, type, colored and crocheted

Fantastic art by Guy Whitby and his Flickr account and Instagram. I am blown away.

Having lived through the latter half of the 20th century and now into the 21st-century one of the biggest transitions in my life has been the technological evolution from an analog foundation to a digital platform. My youth was spent without computers or mobile phones yet the transition to them being such a vital part of my life seemed effortless and mandatory. Only now as our world becomes touchscreen dependent do I reminisce upon the buttons I used to push. Perhaps I will miss pushing buttons when they are all gone? Perhaps in the push of a button there was something more tangible than the brushing of a touchscreen. Though buttons to me also suggest the en masse world in which we currently live. They are made in factories in their hundreds of thousands they are not unique, they are not special. And now these buttons are relics of an analog age. Perhaps I draw a parallel between discarded analog devices and my own mortality. For I too one day will become discarded and irrelevant, just as my once treasured Sony Walkman was reverentially discarded. 

The second role an artists can perform and a role that I believe is far more difficult is to make something simply beautiful. 

Regardless of its context and regardless of its comment on the society the artist lives in. If you can capture true beauty it will live forever, because true beauty is hard to destroy. And Beauty can come in many forms. There can be beauty in sadness. There can be beauty in ugliness. Beauty can be confronting and beauty can be sublime. Beauty can be merely the manifestation of a thought.