#artefacts

Anyone working with digital art knows the distinction between the file in which the work is actually made, often in a proprietary format, and the file exported for publication. Using PNG for graphic material such as typography, lettering, and flat shapes, while choosing some form of JPEG for photographic material, is therefore nothing new.

You may also have seen some of my notes on ImageMagick, such as Figuring Out a New Workflow Pipeline Based on Asset-Type Processing. There, compression appears mainly as a practical decision made before an image is uploaded to social media.

However, after leaving a comment beneath a graphic work by @jacobjoaquin on Instagram, and while writing this post to accompany its Tumblr repost, I understood compression differently. Just as I have used a handheld scanner to deliberately distort a printout, texture, or surface, I can use image compression as a method of image-making. Compression does not merely reduce or damage an existing image. Its artefacts can become part of the intended result.

they say that someone else's presence in your mouth stays for about six minutes from the last time they kissed you, that bruises from teethed affection fade after two weeks, that the skin replaces itself every twenty-seven days, and that muscle memory can last a month or a decade or a lifetime.

there are some rules to leaving something, or someone. for starters, restrain from talking about it to everyone all the time, save it for your five best friends only. don't sulk around in public after the first month, after which, all sulking must be restricted to drunk nights, bed pillows, and the bathroom floor. do not agree on the whole being friends deal, especially if you were best friends, especially if you still love them. do not mistake instinctual care for a sign of mutuality, good people always care about others. and do not kiss the hand that lets yours go, do not make a fool of yourself in hopes of redemption.

always remember, whether you are the one that leaves or the one that is left, keep walking. let the distance grow before turning back around. let there be enough space in between for new flowers to breathe. a garden rebirths itself even if left forever alone. soil grows stronger roots in the after-events of death and decay. here, you may choose to frolic in the weeds in a few years, but its best advised to just sit and watch the bloom. remember to keep walking. do not overstay your in-between welcomes. leave politely and in peace.

the flight that i am leaving on has a weight limit to it. and here's is what i can carry with me.

a number. a passcode. about 98mb worth of storage in my phone. a single overpriced earring. thirteen seashells from your trip to the beach two years ago. a sunflower that never dies. a silver sliver on my wrist. my hands. my skin. my bones. a couple of tattooed kisses that are due to fade in twelve days. a lighter and some candles. a box full of bills unsettled. a few papers to write more shit on. a ghost. a bag full of anger and well wishes.

Ocarina (ceramic grayware; 11.4 cm [4.4 in] high x 9.2 cm [3.6 in] wide x 4.4 cm [1.7 in] thick) in the shape of a standing zoomorphic figure wearing a crescent headdress, by an artist of the Tairona people. The Tairona (also spelled Tayrona) lived in the La Guajira and Magdalena provinces of present-day Colombia until the arrival of the Spanish, who nearly wiped them out in their hunger for gold; the survivors withdrew to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. Their present-day descendants, the Kogi people, still use ocarinas like this one today.