Reflection on My First Completed Conceptual Piece

Reflections in a Wooded Pool by Robert Hills

I wanted to write a reflection after my first completed conceptual piece, read it here.
I think, conceptually, this piece was pretty cool, so I wanted to share that.

How did this piece start?

I wanted to find a way to spice up Notes. I see many people on Substack complaining about the feed and how it’s no different than Bluesky or any other microblogging platform. So I’ve been thinking of ways to make the feed more interesting. An idea I like is that of a restack rabbit hole that leads to magical worlds of knowledge, so I wanted to play around with that idea.

What did I come up with?

Releasing an essay via Notes is old hat. I wanted to make sure restacking was involved. I had two choices: I could restack the essay backwards, but I didn’t like that because I was trying to simulate a live event, where the essay unfolded. If someone was reading along, one Note every 15 minutes for 7 hours, they weren’t just starting with the end of the essay. Wow, spoiler alert.

That’s interesting. Why did you release the Notes on a 15 minute schedule for 7 hours?

The main reason was I didn’t want to be banned for spamming 28 Notes in a few minutes. Even if I wasn’t flagged as a malfunctioning bot, the algorithm would have really limited the reach of 28 Notes going out at once. That was my first thought. Then I realized it really added to the effect of a piece on memory for it to take time for the essay to build the way memories build. As the Notes went out, the post that became the full essay also grew in real time, so you could have hypothetically arrived to find half an essay.

If I were to do something like this again (though I think once was enough), I would have spent more time making the post interesting from start to finish. It did have a hint that an event was coming for its first 11 hours before the essay began being built.

This was a conceptual art piece. Can I explain what that is and what made it that?

Conceptual art is built around an idea rather than an object, and the meaning comes from the structure of the experience. This was more than a piece on memory. The journey of the art mirrored the way memory works. The branching paths of the essay represented the neural network pattern of the brain on a micro scale. The essay was scattered as Notes to represent the way memory ties together scattered instances and events into a cohesive whole. I think the coolest thing was that, in order to read the full essay, you had to rely on your device’s memory by clicking through all the restacks and then hitting back to read the full essay.

What was the trickiest thing?

Figuring out how to allow people to choose their branching path when going back through the restacks. I wanted to have one start point for the four splitting essays, but you can only restack one Note, so I couldn’t restack four choices. I think my solution with the comments worked well, though.

What is the biggest takeaway from this project, personally and conceptually?

Conceptually, I think I proved that there are creative ways to use this app to release conceptual artwork, procedural art, participatory art, or time-based art. I see more value in proving a platform can hold that kind of work than in any one post performing well.

As for personal takeaway, it was fun to do a large-scale project over a 48 hour period. It was a nice test of my own skills to research, write, and conceptualize a piece, then take it from start to finish quickly.

But while that was cool, the most interesting thing was what I learned from having a 15 minute release timer per Note. I was painfully aware of the clock. Everything I did got squeezed into a 15 minute window and, as such, I felt rushed all day even though I wasn’t. It was actually surprisingly distressing. I’m a strong believer in feeling your feelings, so my baseline for stress is super low. This was surprisingly stressful in a similar way to when I used to work and had to schedule every part of my day: every meeting, then “okay great, I’ve got 30 minutes to power through some work,” then another meeting, then I need to talk to this person, call that person. The whole thing reminded me how fucked up it is to have every aspect of your life scheduled. Thank god I’m not doing that anymore and am just artificially stressing myself out on a Saturday as my job now.

Not to be dramatic, but I’m more of an enemy of time now than I was before.

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The Muse Credit for this post goes out to JJ Coventry who bravely read the essay the way it was intended, one of my oldest friends on Substack they write awesome travel blogs you should check out.