March on The Field Blog

If you need the website, it is not public art

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:30:00 +0530

I have been working on several web-based projects recently. Thinking about how the web shapes access, who it serves, who it leaves out, and also building some things of my own. So when I find myself asking whether a sculpture needs a website to justify its existence, the question feels less like art criticism and more like something I have been circling for a while now.

I wrote some time back about how the Gibbs Farm collection, with massive sculptures set amid rolling green hills, is open to the public a few times a year. It is a generous project, and I genuinely admire it. But something has been nagging at me recently, some of the sculptures in public spaces do not make sense unless you have already read about them.

AI is for the stuff around the stuff

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:54:00 +0530

I spent a late night last week getting Noto Sans to load correctly across 16 languages in a Rails app. Not the most interesting part of the app I am working on, but just font subsetting and an efficient asset and resource pipeline config. Hours on a thing that has nothing to do with why the project exists.

That is when it hit me – every job has a core motion. The thing underneath the job title that actually makes the work work. For me, it has always been about sitting with ambiguity until it turns into something coherent. Reading a situation, finding the frame. Whether it was designing through the UX process or structuring a policy report now, the skill was the same. That part, I want to keep doing by hand.

Climate grief is not dramatic, it is Tuesday

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:44:00 +0530

There is a specific kind of scroll that I have started recognising. You are on your phone, half-awake, not really looking for anything, and then there it is. A forest somewhere. A coastline. A number that did not use to be that high. You keep scrolling. That is it. No gasp. No crisis. Just a small, quiet lowering of something inside you, and then you keep scrolling.

I used to think grief was supposed to feel like something. Like you would know when it arrived. But this thing that has been accumulating but not announcing itself. It just settles.