Tinkering is fun. With a little knowledge, some practical sense, and imagination, it's possible to assemble impressive things. It's neither noble nor revolutionary, but it's one of the best ways to learn how things work and break, and the result is always unique, even if it's often only half-functional.

Tinkering lets you build with the lowest acceptable mastery of the underlying discipline. In a world where every idea has supposedly already been theorized, it gives anyone who isn't the best in a domain the chance to create unique things across an infinite number of fields.

Recently, I've realized that among all the creative activities I've pursued, most were more or less forms of tinkering. I tinkered with music through sampling for over 10 years and spent countless hours tinkering with code to build websites and applications in recent years.

During the last four years, I've worked to improve my photography practice, aiming to capture the beautiful compositions that catch my eye (my bio explains this clearly, I hope). Thinking about it, photography is the most tinkering art, because most photographers capture the world we all live in, and their talent lies in how they arrange the light, colors, and shapes to create beautiful images. Few of them invent the light, colors, or shapes they capture. This gives photography a unique place in the arts, as theoretically anyone could take the same picture as a great photographer, but 99.99% won't.

I've spent a lot of time pondering why and how photography qualifies as art, what makes a photograph a piece of art, and whether my own photos are art or just content. I still don't know.

Unsatisfied with this question, I started considering how to tinker with photography as a way to bridge that gap. Surprisingly, I realized that no major photographer has used their photographs to create mosaics. Thanks to AI (which makes software tinkering so easy), I've built a program to do just that. Even though my goal is to eventually create them physically, this project lets me tinker while dreaming that I'm creating art. And I like it.

eyesobscura

This post isn't coined and not mintable, if you want to support you can get a few of my creator coin on http://eyesobscura.vercel.app or on zora or participate in Real[ter]ity auction, starting at 0.0003eth or get a few of my photographs on https://rodeo.club.