TraceLoops a “persona that is understood to be the entirety of yourself.”

You recently directed and animated the music video for Fiona Apple’s song “Shameika”. Were you familiar with her music? What was the process like and how did it feel working with 5 time U.S. Billboard charting singer, Fiona Apple?

I was familiar with her music, but after she first contacted me I started spending a lot more time listening to her work. The process was pretty straightforward, she was very nice, encouraging and generally supportive.

Would you say it’s different to make a physical piece of work rather than digitally? Which do you prefer?

It is different working physically than digitally. One isn’t better than the other, but I tend to prefer working physically because it’s more comfortable for me and there’s a stronger sense of connection and ownership for me when the work exists at least somehow in a physical space.

How long does a one minute video take to make?

That varies wildly. You can have a one minute video that takes a day or one second of animation that takes a month. Typically, I can get a few seconds of animation done in a day, but it really depends on what the subject matter is.

You look like you stay booked. How do you pace yourself?

I do and don’t stay booked, paid work comes and goes. I keep myself busy by having routines and basic goals set out. I try to make something everyday. When I am busy with paid work, something I’ve found helpful is testing things early. There are things that should work in concept, but fail completely in implementation, so relying on those assumptions without trying things out can really mess up projects. I’ve also found that work almost always will take longer than I think it will. If somehow it takes less time than I think it will, that’s extra time for me to do whatever.

What would you consider to be your biggest collaboration?

The Fiona Apple video is a substantial one, it’s the longest animation I’ve done that doesn’t repeat in some way.

Spotify canvas has come out about a year ago, since the release, have artists been contacting you to make the 8 second long canvas videos?

I have had some artists reach out for work that is smaller in scale than music videos, instead “music visualizers.” Those tend to be something of a catchall, where the looping animations can be used for canvas videos, youtube, instagram, tiktok, twitter, etc. There’s some editing and formatting that has to be done for each of those platforms for optimization, sometimes that’s my responsibility, sometimes it’s the artist/their team or the agency.

I see that you stream on Twitch daily at exactly 3PM EST, how has Twitch increased your growth and connections?

I’m not always there exactly at 3PM EST, I’ve gotten a little looser with that precision after months of streaming. Streaming has increased some bits of growth and connections, pretty small numbers, but it’s exciting and interesting to talk with people around the world. Streaming for me has been a form of accountability as much as anything else. I say I will be doing something and that something has an audience that I have made a commitment to, it also keeps me on task because I don’t randomly start watching TV while streaming.

When I think of Twitch, I immediately think of gaming. How is the artist community on Twitch?

From what I have explored, the artist community on Twitch primarily centers around video game and video game-adjacent culture. There are a lot of people who make pixel art, artwork of existing intellectual properties, furry art, 3D modeling, and similarly contemporary spaces. But there are people who make things using more traditional processes, painters, potters, printmakers, etc. I haven’t invested the time and effort to really explore the community in depth.

Seeing you in action, you have a lot of skills, is there a new skill or hobby you’d like to take up?

I’d like to be better at cooking.

How has social media affected your career growth? Has it affected you mentally?

Social media has helped my career growth significantly. It’s an ever-present thing, but I think I’ve managed better to separate myself from it in the way that I treat TraceLoops as something I do, but not me personally. It’s a lot to be a persona that is understood to be the entirety of yourself. I wouldn’t fare well if I were an influencer in that capacity. I like having some space.

Do you put together all the products in your shop yourself?

I used to make everything, I still pack and ship most of it. Last year I wanted to print a coffee mug for my brother in law and in the process found out about direct-to-garment printing, where there are no minimum orders, so now most of my shirts are printed by a company that provides DTG printing. I still prep all the designs and files, but my shop is a mix of things I make/ship personally and a fulfillment service. The descriptions of items on my website are clear about how things have been produced.

I found you through your flower and leaf cuts and also your scans as well. How did you get the idea to do those cuts and what has the initial response been from them?

The first time I distorted things by scanning was probably in 8th grade after putting my face on a scanner to see what it looked like, eventually realizing that flatbed scanners scan things by a sensor moving, so if you move things while the scanner is running, they get distorted. A few years ago would have been the first time I distorted things incrementally as frames of an animation. That would have most likely been my hands.

I have messed with cutting up images in different capacities. I was messing with cutting up linoleum blocks after carving to print one off pieces, messing with the assumption of printing being one of many, but making unique pieces using the same block. Those ideas were inspired by exquisite corpses. I was also looking at the work of Lola Dupre and Kensuke Koike, collages made from either one image or from multiple copies of the same image. I found the work of Jiří Kolář while looking at more collage artists. There are a number of works by Kensuke Koike that rescale single images by rearranging elements, specifically one where he put a photograph through a pasta maker to create strips that are then rearranged, cut again, and rearranged to ultimately make four approximate versions of the original image. In experimenting with collage works, I tried reversing that process by taking four images and compiling them into one larger image. That’s what the cut flowers are. Those works make me think about different ways images are scaled and reformatted, how much information is skewed and adjusted to fit in spaces, algorithms that determine what information best represents the intended visual representation of a photograph. I like showing the cut up collages up close to highlight the halftone patterns because they relate directly to methods of representing information while actually being an abstraction, formatted for a specific use and instance rather than a direct copy of the original image.