Life had been a fascinating venture until early 2019, but by the time that year had strolled to a close, there was nothing pointing to the next steps of our pursuit.
We were, for all purposes, lost.
We knew the metaphoric 'winter was coming' for us, but the manner in which the entire world was engulfed in it across 2020, was something to behold.
Rudderless, in barren lands of the lockdowns that followed, there was little choice but to confront ourselves with a question:
'After a 5-year roller coaster ride of a life, and 3 major products induced into coma or death, what was next for Zen Black?'
There was no answer to this question, but there was a lurking, uncomfortable, silence.
We knew from past encounters that asking such a question was symbolic: a sub-conscious indication that the exploration of a new world had already begun.
The duties were now merely being transferred to our conscious mind to do the required work.
For the next 3 days we poured every bit of internal doubt & discomfort onto a whiteboard — we felt knotted, hollow and nauseous, as we couldn't answer a single subsequent question that came up in those sessions.
It became increasingly evident that existential dread is never a call for intellectual analysis, and we'd have to 'create our way' out of this fog instead.
Without visually representing our life's foundations, the next steps (towards anything important) were not going to be revealed to us. It was time, once again, to leap into the unknown.
The future-past
On previous adventures, despite heading into the eye of the storm, there was the spark of an idea or purpose to ignite us.
This time, there was nothing.
Just a blank digital canvas, the unanswered questions from our brainstorming sessions, and realizations from years gone by to act as a scaffolding for the ensuing pursuit.
There were of course many overlapping realizations, but the one's below turned out to be most relevant for whatever came next:
- We'd curated other peoples ideas & work before, but we needed to take on the greater challenge of curating our own life & work.
- With personal expression on the net having become terribly generic (in aesthetic & structure), the trance of copycat narratives had to be broken.
- We needed to create something unapologetically for the health of our soul — other people's expectation be damned.
With our questions and realizations in tow, we set about building in this new world.
The whole situation above was like walking through a Portal. And a Portal by nature is never what it seems — it's unpredictable.
Although we hoped that upon taking the first steps into this unknown, we'd quickly glimpse the future & build towards it, once we began channeling the ideas & arranging the pieces it showed us the past.
This was not a joyful revelation of events.
Did we want to revisit the past? Hell, no. Yet, having committed to finding the answer as to what's next, we had to do what was required. If we had to visit the past, heal from it, and work our way backwards through the timeline, this would be the price to pay.
But this wasn't going to be a process of slow cooked reflections: We had gotten to that stage in the project where (now 2 or 3 months in), our creativity was about to hit overdrive. Our past would therefore have to be explored at a very intense tempo.
It's hard to articulate what the feeling was like, to be in manic creative flow, while simultaneously deconstructing our selves through our past, and transmuting the pain into something truly beautiful.
In a way it became a surrender to an emergent process, and across eighteen months, this pursuit helped bring this new Zen Black to life.
And somewhere within this trip of combining catharsis with creative euphoria, the cues to the (broader) future were also revealed.
The price paid for the unpredictability factor, however, was steep.
It wasn't just a psychological & emotional re-acquaintance with the past that would eventuate. In the 2nd half of building this project, some of the harshest circumstances from our past re-manifested in our physical reality.
As part of the dejavu gift basket, there were tough personal betrayals, another battle with shady realtors (agents), and once again we had to move out of our beloved home.
It was surreal to experience all this in a condensed period of time.
The ripple effects were so crazy that we were forced to move into a tiny cabin with no heating in the middle of winter, while eating nothing but potatoes and rice from a microwave for the subsequent months.
We were stuck in a box in a crazy old man's backyard, who screamed violently to himself all day. It was a nightmare come alive.
All this, in the midst of a brutal & prolonged covid lockdown, while navigating a dangerous road of instinctive non-compliance against psychopathic authoritarians.
We had not a clue how we'd survive from one month to the next. But having written enough about our life's past madness in the Adversity Series, we'll abstain from describing the newer series of events in any greater detail.
What we couldn't deny however, was that all this was happening for a reason. We had entered the portal of our own volition, and we had to find our way towards closing the loop. Despite being stretched on every level: Intellectual, creative, technical, spiritual, physical, emotional and material, this project had to be seen to its conclusion.
We had to show our respect to the muse for not abandoning us across the entire period of this monumental creation.
Muse meets Tech Magic
When we looked at the questions from our brainstorming sessions at the very beginning of this process, we couldn't do much with them.
Transferring them onto a screen and parsing through lines of text was deeply uninspiring, so we knew we needed to visualize these questions in a different manner to spark something up.
A stroke of synchronicity led us to a software called Miro that allowed the questions to be represented visually in different categories, which changed the lens through which they could be seen. Instead of just questions, they now became nodes that could be interconnected across a large digital whiteboard.
And once this avenue was unlocked, the muse decided to show up, and the ideas were unleashed in a fury!
The ensuing process became a tug of war between containing the insane flow of ideas (in shaping individual concepts), and the patience of piecing together the big picture.
There is something to be said about accepting the non-linear flow of creativity: To internalize the phrase 'never before its time'.
We could never force a concept towards a finish line. Sometimes they had to be left alone for months, before the right moment would open the floodgates, and everything would go from 'stagnant to complete' in a very short span.
Clarity of big picture was also given to us slowly: With each line written, each image designed, each visual interaction calculated, each animation brought to life. But there was always an inner knowing that no matter what, it would all somehow come together.
One of the unique aspects of this project is that it wasn't built in pages or sections; it was, instead, built in scenes. The storyline and the philosophy gave the scenes depth, the offbeat ideas gave them an edge, and our engineering nous allowed us to infuse it into a platform.
There were no cheap frameworks or stale (popular) paradigms utilized in giving us a leg up. Vital ingredients had to be created from scratch.
If what you find on the screen now feels refined, it's because there is a graveyard of NO's behind it: Thousands of lines of text, thousands of images, and innumerable concepts that were worked through, and then cast aside.
The focus on refinement was relentless; yet, the big picture never suffered for attention or care.
But what made all this truly possible on a technical level was the magic of low-code tools*.
Hard to believe we kept away from this space a year longer than we should have. It was our own fault, because we had put too much implementation responsibility in the hands of our developer's in years gone by.
In this instance, with no one else involved, we had to dive head first into this rapidly developing space. We had a sense that this aspect of the web had evolved to a point where, you could now build something pretty wild, despite not knowing how to write code.
We also felt that if someone possessed expansive creativity, they should not present their work from within a creativity-stifling tool like wordpress.
For all its usefulness in allowing non-technical folk engage more extensively on the net, wordpress has been inadvertently responsible for holding back higher levels of creative expression on the web by a decade.
This is because it's not just a tool, it's a paradigm, and too many people are trapped inside it.
Since we refused to use wordpress of any of it's other one-dimensional relatives, we began the implementation through a low-code app called React Studio. But with it's clunky UI and workarounds, about a month into the implementation we hit our limit.
We realized we needed a tool that was both, more sophisticated, and more flexible, to do justice to what we were channeling through our muse.
This is when another lovely bit of synchronicity happened: While looking for a solution to a React Studio bug in a forum, we stumbled upon a discussion where someone described their experiences with a platform called Webflow.
Our search had instantly come to an end.
The right software for the right intention, when combined with the freedom of imagination, can truly lead to magic.
We fall into a category of being able to read code to a reasonable degree, but we cannot write & structure code from scratch. But having interacted with code a lot in building our previous platforms, a tool like Webflow became powerful in our hands.
What it allowed us to do was really quite special.
Once we crossed the barrier of competency with the general functionality offered by it, as long as we didn't take no for an answer, we could implement pretty much any idea that came through.
And in quick succession, other amazing tools began flowing in. Where we couldn't do something in Webflow, we could do it elsewhere, and then infuse it back into the main platform.
Having a natural intuition for finding great software in the market before it takes off, has always been a useful talent at Zen Black. Having discovered Davinci Resolve, Rotato and RunwayML early (but not gone deep in), we had the perfect opportunity to dive off the edge. Of course, adding the well established Blender, Cinema 4d, After Effects and Affinity suite meant, we collectively had power tools in our stack.
If the idea presented itself as relevant, we just had to find a way to bring it to life. It was a relentless experience of learning everything in the deep end, conquering one technical challenge after another, and pushing the boundaries as far as we could. Considering we'd barely used Video production or 3d software before we began this project, it was deeply satisfying to fuse them together with the end product.
The Product Philosophy page on the site and the Art page creations are a fantastic example of this.
[*Coding with LLMs wasn't part of the landscape when this post was written. Possibilities of low-code have seemingly been surpassed.. into a higher realm.]
The Third axis
Like most people who build things, we piece together solutions from many different areas to produce something that works. But what separates us is in our ability to transfer a living philosophy into the heart of a technical implementation.
Polaroid and Apple were about the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology. Zen Black is the evolution, through opening up the 3rd axis: Of Personal Meaning. In a template-filled world, it's a rare thing in a to combine quality of thought, refinement of the written word, original aesthetic, and a depth of values & experiences from an offbeat life within a Product.
If you, as the recipient, possess creativity, technical ability, or even curiosity, you'll appreciate not only the breadth of this work, but the subtle delights littered across the landscape. Of course, you'll notice mistakes and inefficiencies too — but that's what happens when you build while learning.
Now, there are many sub-conscious reasons that underpin this type of a pursuit, which cannot be deciphered by us; let alone, expressed to others via the lossy medium of words. It's likely, our attempt to provide an insight into "the process" here therefore has been futile.
Having to explain the manner in which we follow our instincts across strange lands, hardly fits into a replicable framework for someone else's benefit.
This project should be indulged simply as 3-dimensional experience: A story, a visual expression & a living philosophy baked into an interface — with a 4th dimension made available to you: of your felt sense.
This was the only way for us to express our hard-to-label sensibilities & an unconventional life path.
At the end of the day, we're just a medium for life to speak its message though. Maybe we're being molded for a purpose we can only to be understood looking back.
Who knows?
What's clear to us is that we're not at the stage in our life to look back on some grand purpose uncovered. But we can certainly reflect upon the last couple of years, to observe the closing of some loops.. and the start of newer adventures.
As for the loops, we're proud to see our creation through to the finish line; especially, after recurrent failures of the past decade. The level of resistance, and the obstacles, both externally and internally, were so deeply satisfying to overcome.
The last 10% of this project would not have been possible without a grant by the NEAR Foundation. The interesting validator was that they felt Zen Black was "a very cool" undertaking — the intangible mattered. That bit of support helped us finally cross that repetitive obstacle (of resource death), which in prior years had killed each major product in the home stretch.
We're also grateful to have re-visited the tough times from our past during this particular trip. It helped us re-connect with the spirit of trust and dignity, so we can now work towards bringing them back into the folds of society.
A special thanks to our friend David for forwarding that trust more than once through the second half of a dark 2021. There was something powerful in this which cannot be put into words 🙏.
In closing, and keeping in line with the theme of our journey, life has handed us the next clues: Anti-Expert and Trust Coin. If we haven't described them in any great detail, it's because we let products reveal themselves through the process of building — not by over-thinking the magic away.
It's how we do it best.