Late December, I was streaming on Twitch while on vacation in Maui, and I had an idea to do a 31 day stream of doing art. Initially I thought of it as a joke, but the more I talked about what I could do, I started to think about what it could be. Holy moly, could I really do this? So along with my mod extraordinaire Ynotibox we both decided to give it a go together.
I wish I could tell you that it was easy, but when you’re trying to create something in real time for folks you don’t get to see, it came be a little scary, sort of like driving somewhere without a map…and a bunch of funny people in the backseat. I popped up for 31 days straight with the exception of January 2nd because I was travelling back to SF (the thought of streaming while at the airport did cross my mind), and no time in particular. Usually it was around 10PM at night for at least an hour…or two. It sort of depended on when the piece was done. I did my best after every piece to post it on Instagram nightly. Some nights I was just exhausted and wanted to sleep.
Each night had a theme:
And we just talked, and talked, and talked about the theme, asked questions, pushed each other to tell us more. It was revealing, honest, and funny. You learn a lot about people, even remotely, when they are being vulnerable and sharing out loud. You also learn that representation of people of color and diversity of every kind are severly lacking in the spaces where we looked for photos (I would search for photos at the chat’s request and they would also send links to pics). There were hardly any large people or people with disability. There were also rare photos of people of color. It was interesting to search for ‘woman working’ and have few results that were at the top level of Black women. Why is that? /s
I learned, as a streamer, that building something with a community takes work, and it takes being someone that provides value (interest, space, engagement). And sometimes I might have only two people chatting away but that’s good enough for me. When you start to worry about numbers, it loses something. The organic-ness of what I try to do on stream is important to me more than numbers. You’ll notice when you see the art (link below) that we started out as hand lettering, but we moved on to try to create art together. I felt insecure about my artistic ability and thought we could try something new. The first night we tried freemix.com and well, it borked in the middle of the stream, and wow is that awkward. It’s all good though. I don’t mind failing in front of folks, if anything it was nice to be real and not panic. We found another solution that we wound up using for the remainder of the challenge (Adobe Spark).
I would like to do another month-long challenge, but not sure where I want to go with that right now. I did learn a lot this go around, and it does have me excited to do the work. Maybe I’ll see you?
Check out the art we created here.