about

Greetings. My name is Nick Normal and ‘WordPress (the button!)’ is one of my ongoing projects.

Why buttons? Why WordPress?

I grew up heavily interested in diy punk ethics. As cliche as it might sound, buttons were a major part of this upbringing. They are small, but they are containers of truly powerful energies. I used to make buttons for friends, bands, events, etc. and would setup distro at shows, selling my homemade buttons. I’d say I’ve made well over 20,000 buttons. But it was always the conversations that erupted from the distro, from the buttons, even the button-making[1], that I was really interested in.

Later, now, as an artist, I look at buttons differently. I look at them as being carriers of these potential conversations, as small but versatile objects capable of expansive fields of communication. They are cheap to manufacture and can be controlled completely by me, the artist, which is an important ethic to take up in today’s landscape of proprietary control of most of our senses and our labour.

WordPress is a simple, light, but extremely flexible publishing mechanism. But it needn’t strictly be used for daily, weekly, monthly, publishing and archiving. It can be used to create simple ‘websites’ to convey static messages. It is open-source, it is meant to be tweaked! There are hundred of flavours, or themes, to satisfy any aesthetic pallette. I find it nice to think that WordPress can be modded up to sell a meager button!!

Footnotes:

[1] that’s a shout-out to my homeboy Josh Picker and the fellers from El Gordo’s Revenge; remember the ghost in my CD player that ate that Subhumans CD!!!