Cover graphic breakdown

P.S. for Did I make this?

With all kinds of art, the intentions and interpretations of the artist can be far from the interpretation of the viewer. Collage art has an interesting added dimension to this because it’s bringing together a bunch of pieces that each have their own meaning and story behind them.

The cover graphic for “Did I make this?” has some stories behind it and is ultimately pretty visually dense, and I thought it would be a fun extra to go through and break down the specific components and what I was going for in combining them.

The overall vibe I was going for was to represent different forms of human creativity, machine “creativity”, and expressions of authorship. So here’s a breakdown of all the pieces and how they tie together with that theme:

1. The main part of this composition is a picture my Dad took when we installed a series of “tree art” pieces I created for the summer camp I used to work at. Each cabin at Silver Lake is named after a different local tree, and I had run a session teaching kids about their cabin’s trees and taking clippings to make spray-paint shadows on small plywood squares. It took me a few years to process all the pieces, laser-cut the tree names, and figure out assembly… But it felt really good to be at camp installing them in the cabins. I love camp, and it’s always special to leave a mark there in a tangible way.
2. My partner Samm and I have now combined our end-of-year journalling rituals. She got me writing on a few reflective prompts, and I got her picking a few pictures each year that represent major themes that tie the year together. This picture is a polaroid she took of me while we journalled last December 31st.
3. This is a picture from one of my Sunset Sessions with Good Company in Downtown Kitchener.
4. This is a picture of me coding something at Café Myriade, my favourite café in Montreal.
5. I turned this frame into an infinite recursive image of the piece itself. There’s enough going on in the image I don’t know if it stands out, but this is my favourite part of it.
6. The background is a screenshot from my game Last Days, which was the starting nexus of a lot of these complicated feelings about AI empowerment and authorship.
7. This is a Microsoft Paint drawing I did when I was five years old. The drawing turned into the cover art for my Dad’s computer science textbook Robots: Learning to program with Java. (The textbook introduced students to programming by writing instructions for a little robot navigating a 2D plane collecting lightbulbs.) This is one of my very earliest digital footprints, which I explore in my zine Digital Ephemera.
8. This is an image that came up on Google Images to represent vibe coding. It’s one human hand and one robot hand. Very on the nose.
9. This is another Google image search, of a robot hand puppet. It was originally from an Instagram account that was obviously run by AI, and posted “fun crafts for kids.” I spend so much time and mental energy trying to do the right thing… It always throws me for a loop when I remember that there’s people out there just straight up grifting.
10. Another Google image result (of questionable provenance), this time a hand puppet of a human artist. Is it too on the nose? Probably. Do I know exactly what I meant by it? Not particularly.
11. The empty space in these frames is just an abstract binary wallpaper.

What you see is not the original digital collage, it’s been through a glitch art process. It is very thematically related to the original post, but is a whole postscript in its own right. Follow the link below if you’re curious!