I think working in sound design taught me a lot of tricks, like fading audio in and out or switching sound sources to create variation. Almost all of the music I worked on had to loop, and many sound effects had to loop too, like a person sliding through snow, a pencil constantly drawing on paper, or a machine gun firing. That gave me a kind of head start when I moved into working with visual loops.

I think I’m always searching for the best of both worlds, or maybe a balance between two extremes. Most people find nature calming, the quiet without traffic, ambulances, or planes feels peaceful, and being able to see the stars and the Milky Way is inspiring. At the same time, I’m lucky to live in a moment where I can enjoy that and still participate in online culture, even earn a living through it. I’ve always been a bit of an internet junkie and enjoyed creating things and sharing them from a distance. I used to perform music live and loved that energy, but more recently I’ve enjoyed the anonymity of making art online and seeing how people react in that space.

I was definitely more excited to interact with the NES Nintendo Entertainment System than I was with the first personal computer I came across. Games were the original inspiration for my love of retro computing, but eventually the open-ended exploration of messing with settings and trying to create things on early computers also really grabbed me. Blocky pixels and the glow of a tube TV or computer monitor have always inspired me, along with pixel art in general. That’s why I enjoy early Windows and Mac icons, they’re pixel art too, even though I never thought of them that way when I was younger.

I probably see them as both. Even if I hadn’t chosen the name Perfect L00p, I think I’d still be working with loops. I’ve always been enamored with cinemagraphs, those scenes from real life that seem still and moving forever at the same time. Or looping bits of pixel art, like leaves falling from a tree endlessly, or a room where the TV is flickering and the fan keeps spinning. There’s something about the timelessness of a loop that fascinates me. There’s also the challenge, there are a lot of ideas I can’t pull off because I can’t make them loop, but there are also many that do work as loops, and the loop itself becomes part of what makes people interested.

But like any other artist or creator, I’m also competing with every other interesting thing people could be looking at on the internet at any given moment. And as our attention spans shorten and our sense of novelty keeps changing, sometimes high contrast, high saturation, and a lot of frenzied visual activity can cut through that noise. It can get people to look just a little longer and wonder a little more.

In the history of human culture, whether it’s food or inventions, there have been a lot of mistakes that ended up becoming something good or even something people desired. In music, for example, think about a guitar amp that was turned up too loud and distorted. Originally people were just trying to get a clean, loud tone and they didn’t like the distortion, but eventually we all came to love that sound. Then musicians started finding new ways to create distortion on purpose.

I think glitches are a visual example of that. These messed up or damaged systems can end up being things that make us feel something good or even something we want to see more of. Sometimes a glitch can make you nostalgic for something you never actually experienced, but you still feel it when you see it. Whatever that feeling is, I’m always interested in exploring it.

I definitely have dreams where I’m running from something and it feels like I’m moving in slow motion, but whatever I’m running from isn’t. Or sometimes in a dream you’re trying to fight someone off, but your punches are in slow motion and weak. There’s something about that kind of inescapable situation that I love, because I think we all feel it from time to time.

Even in real life, when you do something dangerous or exciting or scary, your memory can interpret it as slower than it actually was. If you’ve ever jumped from something really high, it feels like it takes forever to reach the ground, even though it happens just as fast as anything else. I think there’s something in how we interpret those moments and how, in our recollections, they can feel slowed down or looping. And realistically, I think these memories or dreams or concepts are just very well suited to be represented in a loop, so I’m more likely to explore them than things that aren’t.

I would say it’s both. I love listening to history podcasts and learning about things from the past that I never knew, and I also love imagining what the future could look like. One thing that always stands out is how, in hindsight, horrible mistakes and problems seem so obvious and avoidable, but when you’re living through them, they feel inescapable - like an unstoppable slow-moving iceberg.

Something that reoccurs is how our perspectives and beliefs inform the inventions and technologies we create, but those same technologies and inventions also end up shaping our beliefs. There’s definitely a trapped or cyclical feeling in that. And if you look at history, the number of technologies that started out utopian and ended up creating dystopian outcomes is high.

I think Runtime Artifacts continues to push that idea forward visually in the same direction I’ve been going. Conceptually though, while working on the series I sometimes wonder if instead of personifying being a computer, I’m really representing people stuck inside a system. I honestly don’t know for sure. Maybe it’s both.

I feel like it’s a natural continuation. The more I learn and the more experiments I create that end up being aesthetically pleasing, the more I feel like a chef who’s comfortable with a wider range of spices and herbs. In this series, I’ve mixed and matched software tools in a more elaborate way than I have before, and I think that gives it a sense of being something unique and hopefully special.