Why I Keep an Atelier

By day I make serious things for serious reasons, and I am glad to. But a person who is only their profession is a tool left in the rain. Somewhere there has to be a bench where you make things for no defensible reason at all.

This site is that bench. Atorie — アトリエ — is the Japanese borrowing of the French atelier, a workshop. Not a gallery, which implies curation, and not a studio, which in English has started to mean a company. A workshop is humbler: it is a place where things are made, some of them badly, and where the making is the point.

So the rules of this place, such as they are:

• Photographs go in the archive because light keeps happening and someone should write it down.
• Instruments go in the lab because a small tool that works is one of the most cheerful objects a person can make.
• Notes go here, because thinking in public is a way of finishing a thought, and because someone else's half-thought has often finished mine.

Nothing on this site has a metric. Nothing is A/B tested. The ambient sound in the corner is not "increasing session duration"; it is there because a room with a breeze in it feels different from a sealed one, and I wanted you to have the nicer room.

If you keep a bench like this too — a shelf of small things made for no reason — I would genuinely like to see it. The internet was supposed to be mostly benches. It still can be, one quiet room at a time.