Hello World

With the recent advancements in “Artificial Intelligence” tech, I find myself wondering whether we’re living in a post-blog era, or simply submerged in such overwhelming saturation that the very meaning of the term has dissolved.

Part of my indecision comes from struggling to tell the difference between a view that fairly reflects reality, and my own tendency towards old-man-yells-at-clouds thinking. Born in the 90s, my relationship with the internet remained faithful to what it once was (or perhaps never truly was), rather than the current abomination. Nothing is more deeply Repellent-To-Me™ than the corporate version of websites that used to be maintained through sweat, tears, and IRC groups that seemed incapable of sleep. The refuges that still exist are nostalgic, reactionary, and often insular, frequently maintained by people with no historical relationship to the technologies they are trying to emulate. In the end, they feel like little more than cheap digital cosplay.

So where does this blog stand?

Somewhere at the complete opposite end of a Medium, a Substack, or (God help us!) a column in Observador.

Above all, I want a space where I can gradually dump whatever comes to mind, in a way that might eventually be useful to other people. Something that can resonate, echo, reverberate with the ideas and thoughts of whoever passes through here.

This website has existed for several years now in different forms and structures, with different focuses. But the latest version (the one you’ll find while reading this in 2026) is deeply inspired by Barry Truax and the World Soundscape Project. Not only because of the way they looked at and listened to the world, but also because of something I once saw Barry do during a lecture.

I had the opportunity to attend a course taught by Barry Truax at the University of Aveiro, focused on composing with spatialized soundscapes. It completely transformed the way I listened to, used, and created soundscapes in my own composition, but that’s not why I’m mentioning him here. What I saw Barry do (forgive the familiarity) was use a website clearly built in the 90s as the foundation for his lectures.

As someone who, throughout a PhD journey, repeatedly made and remade the same PowerPoints to teach similar classes (constantly losing track of files scattered across USB drives and hard disks, clouds and emails) it felt like waking up to the future, except this future needed protection against moths.

What was truly “taken” from us with the shift toward personal pages on Instagram, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, and others was the ability to cultivate our own digital garden somewhere on the internet. Like all private gardens, these were amateurish, clumsy, asymmetrical, full of obvious mistakes, but made with care. The curated and “purified” version of the artificial flowerbeds created by those platforms is the worst possible version of what once existed: plastic flowers placed on the grave of the digital Wild West.

As an artist, the idea that whatever I create as an online presence is completely homogenized by a faceless corporation with no clear rules is deeply uncomfortable.

So, inspired by Barry, I decided to rebuild my virtual garden, tidy it up, and start filling it with new cheap ideas, portfolios, lectures I’ll give, lectures I never gave, fragments of projects, and so on.

Finally, it’s also a process that encourages discovery. It helped me rediscover my passion for browsing the internet, which is very different from hopping between the same three or four websites. I came across creators and projects that were profoundly inspiring, and which led me to do something I also enjoy doing in my musical work: hiding secrets and small jokes wherever I can. This website has at least two hidden sections, purely for my own amusement. If you find them, enjoy exploring.

What will become of this blog, I honestly don’t know. I have a terrible track record of starting pages like this and slowly abandoning them. I hope to be more consistent this time, though with the birth of my daughter approaching, I expect posting frequency to become rather sparse from July 2026 onwards.

If you’ve read this far, thank you, and I hope whatever follows will be worth your time.