Hi, I’m Matt Schell. I’ve been making things for a number of years but they are sort of scattered across the internet and under different psuedonyms. Some of them should remain that way, but I think it would be nice to have a place to gather everything together under one name. I’ve decided to make this site for that purpose.
Names are funny. For me, using different names was a way to compartmentalize parts of my life in the era of the omniscient google robots. I wanted to be able to share certain things with certain audiences, and so doing it under a different name made sense. Now as I get older, I am starting to see all the different stuff I’ve done through the years as more of a single, spiraling path through art-work-space. I still don’t know where it’s going but as I move restless between mediums, technologies and modes of expression I realize that a lot of what I’m interested in carries with me, and a lot of the skills do as well. I feel like I need to do a better job of documenting that, and I also think that making the process more public is maybe a good thing. I value process as a key part of artistic practice but almost never document it. So I’m going to try and start doing that more, and doing it under my ‘real’ name or as folks in NY sometimes say ‘government’ name.
I’m re-reading the Earthsea books by Ursula LeGuin, who is one of my most favorite authors. I’m reading them to my sons as bed time books, working our way through a huge fat 1000 page compilation of them over many nights. It’s great. In them, knowing the true name of something is a form of power, which enables magic.
The names recorded by governments give governments a form of power over people, and so sometimes people chojose to conceal them, calling themselves nicknames, handles or artist names. The internet is a whole new genre of naming in which numbers, punctuation and symbols have all entered the world of names, giving us people like 21 Savage (21,21), who named himself after his semi-random Instagram user name and then carried that on to be his artist name for his chart topping rap career.
I made music under the name Matt Shadetek and before that Sozer.Sht when I was part of Team Shadetek with my childhood friend Zack Tucker. Soze was a name that I used in tagging graffiti growing up in Manhattan. Graffiti is a world built around names and beautiful or menacing or abstract depictions of them. Growing up with graffiti means that I still reflexively read and catalog tags everywhere I go on the walls, for example noticing that NY graffiti artist Nov took a trip to Berlin within the past few years and tagged the city here. His piece ‘World screaming Nov’ was a memorable one, on the side of the bridge at Smith and 9th St in Brooklyn. His autobiographical book Nov York is also memorable and disturbing, a desperate, stream of conscious, chaotic look at someone in the grips of chemical and artistic compulsion, violence and jail. I’m a fan of Nov as a writer and writer and enjoy seeing his name pop up in cities far away from our mutual home of NYC.
Lately (4 years or so) I’ve been working in the video game business. For this I formed a fresh psuedonym, Matt Mirrorfish. I also formed a company, Mirrorfish Media for that purpose which lives over at mirrorfishmedia.com, and I post stuff there sometimes.
I have an intermittent habit of writing daily in my journal after I meditate. It’s a good thing to do for me. I try to write three pages longhand. I got this from Julia Cameron, who wrote the Artist’s Way. The Artist’s Way is great and has many valuable ideas for creative people who struggle with creating, even if Cameron herself is a bit flouncy and dramatic. I recommend it, even if I find my recommendation to be a bit embarrassing. But the struggle to create stuff is so painful that any help we can get, or share is worth it, even if it’s a bit wincey at times. I am not too proud to accept whatever help I can get.
I enjoy the work of writer and marketing guru Seth Godin and he writes every day, short little posts. They are more oriented towards being helpful to people. Not sure if this will be like that. Currently I’m thinking of this as more of a livejournal sort of thing that maybe people will find value from, and that will be good for me for writing. I will try to not be too self-indulgent, but also no promises.
I may or may not stick to this, I’ve learned with maturity, so no promises in that department either. As I say to my kids when they ask for something I’m reluctant to give: “We’ll see.”
