This website has been an enduring creative project shared between myself, Daisy Sanders, and Alex Turner, since March 2021. It goes live 31st January and officially launches 10th March, 2025. (Please forgive the bumps and bugs until then!)
We took significant time and consideration building and layering a dancing web-world to share my artistic work. It is best viewed and explored on desktop. Read below some poetic insights into the process we shared while making this site.
Lara Dorling (asking and listening): How did you work together in the three years?
Daisy Sanders (talking and resting): Well, it was 2021 in March. It was nearly four years ago.
Alex Turner (remembering and reflecting): Right, wow. Yeah.
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Alex: I found notes from our initial meeting. I have a big circle around where you said “a portal for my words and values” as well as ”shape and movement rather than lists and words.”
Daisy: I wanted my website to be different to a usual web space… I wanted it to feel like it was moving and that it was embodied, because my practice is dancing.
We had a conversation about “how do you make a website feel physical and intimate and handmade”. Then you sent me to look at other other ‘web worlds’ that I felt good in.
The combination of those two things started to shape a pretty grand vision of a website that was interactive and tactile and then… Alex had to figure out how to make it happen.
Alex: I think there's some really steps in between all of that though.
Daisy: Oh so gradual. It was so gradual.
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Alex: I had made one website before.
Daisy: And how many have you made since?
Alex: Maybe thousands.
I can see that looking through all the code now… a learning process…
I knew the feeling of wanting to have a space to publish to that is your own. I think the word space is very important there - that it feels comfortable, a good representation that aesthetically and visually can communicate the multitude of things that you're involved in.
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Daisy: When you enter my website there should be a meeting with the artist, you’re meeting the feeling and the tone of who I am and how I work. It’s not about selling anything. But it also needs to function as a place I can send people. There's always been a tension with how raw and interpersonal I want it to feel, and then the formality of inviting future professional opportunities.
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Daisy: I reckon about 18 months, maybe two years in, Alex came over and said “I'm gonna teach you how to code!” It was learning a new language! My head hurt.
Alex: You just reminded me that essentially it was all HTML static yes… that's the only way that I knew how to do things. It was literally built from scratch, from a handwritten HTML, to then learning PHP and in the process trying to make a portal for you to be able to enter your work in simply.
Lara: …this whole thing of it being a practice…
Daisy: One tier is: we’re making the website, another tier is: Alex is taking so much care to make the interface that I work on feel good for me. So that adding to my website becomes a pleasurable future practice, something I want to go and do, to build an archive of my work.
Lara: …this website is a whole work. All the steps, the moments and feelings you come to in the development of some sort of sharing. You learn how different people go through their practice, how they translate or how they relate. There’s so many meeting points. From adapting your body practice (Daisy) into more of a digital practice (but still it's through your body) or from your (Alex) sound / music making / mathematical thinking shifting into digital… to then create this living thing together. There’s so much dancing that happens!
not rushing, allowing it to unfold slowly
finding each other’s language
balancing practical realities with poetic aspects
translating physical concepts and visual ideas to digital layers
writing by hand, scanning in (triple the time and effort)
reflecting / co-building / care and patience
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Daisy: The matrix of my roles as an artist, plus my projects and how they are connected… do you remember the first PDF I sent you with all the columns? Then what we did, with switching notation, to feel that the website is choreographic?
D: the circularity
I work in circles
so the roles are in a circle
and the projects are in the middle
and the projects move
and they're linked to the photo
and they're linked to the title
and it's kind of like
they're choreographically
like
dancing
with each other
and affecting each other
we were making visual the feeling of dancing
and the feeling of interconnectedness
and choreography
…and that also took a lot of time for Alex to figure out in terms of programming!
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Alex: An interest for me is systems and systems design, how one can feel like they're collecting information or points that are relational but also in ways that can spill… ohhh… talking of spilling
A: for me to practically figure out
how to weave everything together
in a way that's both narrative-ised
as well as having modularity
and iterations
of different iterations
of the same work
and working with many types of people
it's really fun (D: so glad you found it fun)
yeah it's incredible, it’s incredibly fun!
you work also with organisations
in ways that are playful
so there's a lot a lot of easter egg aspects…
L: can you tell me what an easter egg is?
an unexpected aspect or something
the little things, hidden
that you might stumble across
playing around in this website
Alex: I’m interested in the balance between directing people towards information versus presenting a site where they can wander around themselves.
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Alex: We have been working side by side the entire time. For other proposals or other things the typical framework is that you get your brief and the information, pose questions, extract the information…
Daisy: …if we work together in a way that resists extraction and productivity (or something) it's in service of a website that is familiar enough a digital space but is also opening the edge of how that could feel. You’re actually in an artistic space…
Alex: …and we don't subscribe, it doesn't subscribe, to the speed and delivery of the digital world, like, it's actually resisting that on purpose.
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Daisy: I feel really quite a deep bond. I know you in this intimate way because I've had to pay such close attention to how you're talking to me, how you’re thinking, then work out how I'm thinking and how those things talk to each other.
Alex: Yeah. There’s this collecting and processing work that takes a while. Communication. Learning to listen and think in a totally different way. I know how long these things take. I knew what I was in for.
What I'm trying to say is… friendship. A recognition of capacity to act and work together at a particular point in time. You know, I like hanging out with you Daisy. Wandering. I think there was a nice… lostness.
Lara: That beautiful thing of allowing a process to grow you, rather than trying to finish the process.
Daisy: That’s why it's hard to launch it… because I don't really want it to end.
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D: trying to surrender to the fact that we'll never be finished
that I'll always have more things I could talk to Alex about
feel vulnerable putting my work in a digital space
(probably I resisted for ten years because I don't think it belongs there)
so this, in my opinion, this is the only way I could have done it
the only person I would have entrusted with opening my dancing-resting-world into a web archive
A: for me an image would be…
maybe just a full stop…
but then the thing lingers…
and then it's a comma,
learning to settle with things that are ongoing
