ATHORN IS BACK

02/23/26

I cannot express the level of relief that this page is finally up again. Hi folks. I've done a lot of remodeling and there is much more to be done, which i wanted to explain in this entry, if you'll bear with me.
First and foremost, athornathornathorn's liminal house layout is the same in essence, but i've now finally fulfilled my original dream for this site: that every single image file here has come from me and exists nowhere else on the internet. The website itself is now a kind of photo collage art project - all images were either found and edited out of my family's private photo collection, or were taken by me on my shoddy digital camera from 2007, and collaged together to create new spaces out of old objects. There are no discernible faces and no searchable locations. If there is an image of a house's exterior, that house does not exist in the physical world anymore. Many of the human figures do not exist in the physical world anymore. In fact, most of the interior objects don't exist anymore either. The resulting collage structures, likewise, do not and cannot exist.
I have lived in about a dozen homes in my lifetime, some of which have crumbled, some of which have burned down, some of which have been sold and remodeled to unrecognizability. I have also lived nowhere at certain points. When i first created this website in 2021, i was experiencing a grief so powerful it uprooted my entire life, entire sense of self and place. The artistic concept at the time was primitive but it was a way for me to distract myself by expressing (with the most time-consuming medium possible, html) that uprootedness, that desire for a home that was no longer there and maybe never was. At first, it was so immense as to be indiscernible, like a heavy blanket over the entire sky that no one ever knew you could peel back, and this was actually convenient because it allowed me to spend long sleepless hours in solitude learning code, photo manipulation, and music production, and writing songs that would eventually become the mournful tracks on my upcoming debut lp (more on that shortly). Then came a period of about four years where i was struggling far too much to work on anything. (Working in fast food didn't help either. I performed in a local band which was deeply transformative and probably lifesaving, but this was also a transient thing.)
I can't truly summarize how i got to a "better" place in life, but among other things (like getting treatment, finding love, developing a contentious and intermittently tortured but sincere relationship with a higher power), a restlessness and a horror began to stir in me, which was something between inspiration and a fear of losing memory. I, clearly, was looking at a lot of old photos. Over time, it became clear and horrific to me that my memory had deteriorated over years of lifelessness and intentional drifting, being too hurt to remember, too afraid to be present. I had effaced the memory of the people and the things i lost, i had given them nowhere to go. They did not exist anymore, not even in my memory, because i did not exist. But existence will insist on its continuance whether you want it to or not; and, most horrific of all, kindnesses and gentlenesses will inch their way into you until your gratitude is too enormous to bear. Love begs you back into presence. And in what felt like a single rapturous moment, it became absolutely vital to me to find presence again, to start moving toward something again. It meant the survival of all i had lost.

And so began my most recent project: to finish the website and, most importantly, to finish and release my first album (which will be "promoted" here eventually). The two have always felt intertwined to me. Both have been in the works for over five years, have the same themes, and are built on a philosophy of being completely home-made, personal, and sincere. At first i was endlessly frustrated that it was taking me so long to even learn the skills necessary to create my vision. Now, that's exactly what makes this so valuable and important to me. This sh*t is my magnum opus.
With that in mind, you'll see a lot of updates and continual revisions here from now on. It's important to me that the website is immersive and is deeply immersed with the music, which is how i discovered some of my favorite artists as a child (shoutout iamlights dot com); i also just really want to write on here. Over the last five years i have developed a really strong interest in theology, psychoanalysis, religious history, and anthropology, and i have many ideas i want to hash out here since i don't think an academic publication will accept me (which might be a good thing; i'm on the fence about it. The academia rant will have to come later.) This is ALSO closely intertwined with the music, believe it or not.

An important point must be brought up:
It's difficult for me to reconcile the idea of "posting" or "uploading" or even "promoting" a massive creative work to an increasingly hostile online environment - and when i say hostile, i mean that all forms of creativity are being increasingly overrun, stolen, hoarded, manipulated, commodified, and essentially totally nullified by artificial intelligence. Sorry to bring up a controversial topic, but it truly has put artists in a unique position ethically and philosophically (not to regurgitate every headline of the last 2-3 years). Edit: it's important to note that the problem is just as much about ai as it is about the fact that the internet has become increasingly synonymous with predatory consumerist marketing platform (and this, of course, is the primary reason why ai has become the threat that it has).
I'm as offline as i can possibly rationally be at this point. I'm not on social media; i use an MP3 player; i collect physical music, movies, and books (also lots of pdfs, wavs, and mp4s on an external drive, which i believe is just as valuable); i dumbified my phone so it can't even be used to check email anymore. Keep time on a watch, write notes with a pen and paper. Much of this is for personal sanity and productivity while i'm focusing on this project. It's also so that i never again get so caught up in maximizing viewership/listenership that i put out immature or insincere work. But the truth is, i have a soft spot for neocities. Not only that, but i still discover the majority of new music through bandcamp and rateyourmusic. It's incredible and special to go to a live show and witness music and then buy a physical copy of it - that's regardless of anything and i believe it's vital to keep that practice alive, too - but perhaps it's the tragedy of my generation that there really is a unique intimacy and specialness to discovering something in the far corners of the internet, this "liminal space" we grew up traversing long before algorithms made traversal easy. I'm not talking about letting the spotify algorithm decide your playlist for you, i'm talking about manually scrolling thru page after page on neocities or rym at random until you happen to come across something really sincere and profound from someone 300 miles away who only 5 other people in the world know about. (The value, here, being not level of novelty but level of humanness.) Or, hell, talking to someone you don't know in real life who is able to share something with you that you could've never found locally (this is the kind of thing that has invented new genres and movements for decades). Is this a dying practice? Is plagiarism and effortless prompt generation going to become the norm, to such a point that randomly discovered works can't be trusted? Are artists putting their work at risk by simply allowing it to be online? Is my acoustic guitar the only thing that's real and permanent? Can't take the damn thing to the afterlife. And therein lies the reality that, in creating anything, you have to be okay with it being ephemeral. You're not really cementing a legacy. You're not seeking immortality, and you can't own something you're actively trying to give away (i mean, even copyrights don't last forever). You're just describing the present. You're connecting with other people in the present. You're trying to pass the time in the present (in the way that feels most meaningful and ethical to you). I've lost far too many homes, physical possessions, and loved ones in my life to be holding on for dear life to a collection of artworks that i will probably find unimpressive in a few years. Honestly, i'm more afraid that artificial intelligence is going to immortalize (in its horrific frankenstein-esque fashion) something that i want to die, as is natural and proper and beautiful, but there is a point where i kind of have to say f*** it. Beautiful people still create beautiful things in this dying world, and that needs to keep happening. It means the survival of everything we are losing.

Well, don't mind my ranting, that probably isn't a very unique argument, and i recognize that this very art project is ethically paradoxical in regards to its relationship with technology and consumerism - i'm just going to have to let it be that way. Because i'm really excited to share my little acoustic songs and my little photos and my little writings with whoever will listen. Okay, that's all for now.