Somatic Studio
A year's journey coming to an end and throwing some creative play back into a re-aliving internet
This year has been full of unexpected journeys, experiences, and insights; so it feels pretty fitting to end the year with an unexpected conclusion to something I’ve been thinking about for most of the back half of the year.
With that, let’s take Shorsey’s advice to set the tone, for you, the reader. To come up to speed with something I’ve been thinking about before you jump into an experience that I’ve been ideating on for a while.
Forming an idea
Since the summer, I’ve been curious about how I might be able to share more of my photography work that I’ve accumulated and haven’t used social media as a mechanism to posting them. I’ve probably made half a dozen substack draft posts to showcase and provide more details about this year’s photographic explorations, but just the act of filtering images to a static gallery or post (even outside the bounds of social media) felt too constricting.
One of my favorite experiences in the absence of posting to social media is showing folks my images live and in person. This experience would allow me to pull up different images throughout the year that might interest them or share a more detailed story of my experiences and explorations, but there was something that always felt a bit clunky and that was popping in and out of images in different albums or worse selectively picking out images in a gallery to show someone the photos I want them to see.
On a parallel track, this YouTube video has really resonated with me this year. The first time I saw it I just felt this overwhelming sense of joy remembering what the internet used to be for me and others in my generation. A place of creative exploration before the fangs of capitalism dug it’s teeth in and everything became intricate walled gardens, an echo chamber for toxic thoughts, and a space that was largely filled with a facsimile of human joy rather than a uniquely human curated experience.
Building something new
So there’s something there in this blend of ideas. A interactive tool or experience for exploring and navigating my favorite photographic work in a way that doesn’t feel encumbered by a traditional image gallery, social media, or substack post. With a sprinkle of what if I made something just for fun, just for folks to play with, even if only for a little bit.
My work at FloQast as a Product Design Manager has me thinking a lot of the day in relational databases and informational systems for accounting workflows. So it was a natural jump for me to see if I could use some of our modern AI tools for me to build something for myself.
On a bit of an exploratory tangent one weekend I played around to see if I could make something that I’ve been thinking about.
Within a few hours I had a concept stood up in Google’s AI Studio that could allow me to ingest images, add relational tags, and navigate a dynamic collection of images in new ways. Then the whole system crashed and I had to rebuild it from scratch, but this time I built out a product requirement document and used that as a foundation to build a new interactive image gallery platform.
Within 45 minutes I was up and running with this initial concept.
Even in its initial version there was something to it. It wasn’t super complex or in-depth, but the interactions from image to image was something I haven’t seen before. It felt fresh, alive, and there was a ringing in my soul to dive deeper.
I added some complexities to the image tagging and built a system that could ingest more images that were stored on a GitHub project page. With this added complexity and depth it felt like I was at a spot to gain some feedback from friends and co-workers. Where I was super keen what parts of the interactions sucked them in more with my ultimate goal to just be a lightweight experience for my friends to play with my images in a new way.
The initial feedback rounds were interesting. There was clearly something there for how folks could navigate the images in a new way, that initially captured a sense of surprise and delight, but one piece of feedback I kept hearing is that people wanted to go back to the view of seeing all the images at once almost ripping the magic out if the exploratory nature that I was aiming for.
With a few iterations I came up with a new concept that could create a visual reference of the associated image without giving away the entire collection of images that were baked into the experience and creating a deeper sense of exploration.
Now that there seemed to be some legs to how the user was exploring the system I wanted to add some more detail to the images themselves and almost create a sense of the user creating some sort of unique artifact of their explorations.
Over a few nights I iterated on this concept of the experience and once again felt that there was something to it but it wasn’t in the exact direction I wanted it to land on.
But by being able to play around in this space for a while I could see where I wanted it to head. To me, it felt like there could be some intention to make this experience harken back to traditional photography image contact sheets where someone could get a sense of what the photographer was thinking about the images they were collecting and had the intent of presenting.
This is the change in direction that really felt like it pulled the entire experience together and made it feel like it was something I could bundle up and share with folks by the end of the year (just a few days away).
It gave this experience a much more human feel, prioritized the exploration, and ultimately left folks with about 5-10 minutes of experiencing my art in a way that I felt never existed in the world before.
For the next week I put my head down to clean up the experience and get it into a publishable state for people to play with on their desktop, iPad, or mobile phone.
There was a lot of refactoring the code to be more performant and snappy, so much detailed work on making the app responsive across different devices, and little micro interaction adjustments to create something simple, fun, and playful.
Releasing my Somatic Studio
And now I get to share the idea I’ve been playing with in my head, my photos that I’ve been collecting, and hopefully add something to our collective internet field that feels more alive, creative, and new.
I’m calling this little app concept my Somatic Studio.
You can access it via this link.
If you’re on an iPad (my favorite mechanism for viewing) or an iPhone you can do a little trick from the Safari web browser to turn it into a full screen experience on your device as if it was a stand alone app.
Click this link to open the app in your Safari browser on iOS
Click the share button
Select “Add to home screen”
Add the app to your home screen and click it to open it.
Capitalism and AI’s increasingly walled garden
My largest accomplishment with this project is just getting a fresh sense of an idea that metastasized over half a year and seeing something come to light that adds something fresh for my friends to play with and hopefully leaves a more positive mark on the future of our collective creative experiences.
I don’t think I could have come up with this idea if I was continually sharing my images this year through mechanisms and platforms that make us all think in posts, galleries, likes and shares. I’m also beyond grateful to live in a time where I could use free resources to make this idea come to light quickly.
This experience also shed light to me on how vulnerable our future is as capital is increasingly moving to make these AI tools organizational intellectual property and hidden behind a subscription paywall. There could be so many ideas rattling around in folks heads that could dramatically change what our technological future looks like, but the accessibility to these tools is increasingly coming with a larger cost and barrier to entry. There is also an increasing environmental and societal cost of using these tools that are being built in a completely unregulated environment that above any societal positive change is largely just continuing to extract wealth upwards.
Maybe, just maybe, there’s a possibility for a more alive internet filled with little creative experiences that can be populated via folks with unique ideas and concepts that we can immerse ourselves in. But it’s going to require more of us to know what this type of technology is capable of, choosing to use it in the right ways, and advocating for more regulation and guardrails to ensure it’s adding to our humanity rather than just making the wealthy more wealthy.