IF IT’S ALIVE, FEED IT is an improvisational manifesto about the art of open attention. IF IT’S ALIVE, FEED IT is a lifestyle magazine for aspiring time travellers dedicated to the design, creation, and conservation of imaginary gardens and living pillars. IF IT’S ALIVE, FEED IT is filled with inspirational ideas for renovating your psychic space. IF IT’S ALIVE, FEED IT is a survival manual for earthbound artists swimming in static. It’s an out-of-scale map to a four-dimensional timeline, a support structure for mental shelter that I’m constructing as I go. IF IT’S ALIVE, FEED IT isn’t excited by artificial sentience. IF IT’S ALIVE, FEED IT is turned on by forms of organic intelligence. Super-organic. IF IT’S ALIVE, FEED IT is hot for the mega-natural. IF IT’S ALIVE, FEED IT is a sibyl singing inside a cave on an outer asteroid. A series of signals sent through the atomic veil, like seeds wrapped in ribbons. In rhythms. I do my best to unscramble the fragments.
This newsletter launched in May of 2021 with a project organized around reading and writing through the TAROT deck one card at a time. I thought of this as a way to examine the relationship between images and storytelling. I thought it would take me seventy-eight weeks. It’s been almost two years and I still have, as of spring 2023, a dozen cards left to go. As I return to this series after a long and unexpected break, I’m also thinking about how I want this newsletter to evolve after I’ve written my way through the whole deck. I’m thinking about audience, I’m thinking about subject, I’m thinking about purpose. So much has changed since I started this newsletter one year into the global pandemic, jumping into the labour of it with a mix of naive whimsy and feverish rigour. As I sketch out a plan for what’s next, I’m considering time, scale, resources, commitments, and longterm goals.
NOTE: As of February 26, 2024, the TAROT FOR ARTISTS series archive has been archived behind a paywall.
