About Me

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I’m Max, I work in communications, build digital things, and spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about how systems – political, technical, and cultural – actually work. This site is a mix of portfolio, blog, and public notebook: a place for projects, half-formed ideas, deep dives, and the occasional tangent into the outdoors, design, or whatever I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole about recently. If there’s a theme, it’s curiosity – and a refusal to keep things neatly in one box.

About the site

I started this site several years ago when I was still at university studying fine arts and most of what I had to show was spec work (projects made to open doors). I enjoyed the making side of fine arts, but I was always more interested in the thinking around the work. Even with simple prompts, I’d try to add context – like drawing the natural world not as it looks to us, but as it might under extreme magnification, or making a video where we weren’t allowed to edit, so I filmed a TV screen running a live slideshow and manipulated grain and contrast using the TV’s own controls while recording everything in-camera.

I didn’t always get great marks for that kind of approach. Sometimes work that felt carefully thought through landed flat, while much looser, more instinctive pieces were received far better. That wasn’t wrong – it just told me something about myself. I realised I cared a lot about context, intent, and effort, and about whether work was doing something beyond just existing. So I left fine arts and moved into communications instead. I still really like fine art, and I’ve got a lot of respect for people who commit fully to it – I just couldn’t see myself spending years building a traditional art portfolio. This site has grown alongside that shift, and it’s never really stopped changing.