Back in late August, I drafted a post entitled Things change (or, Montaigne and the Open Web) for the Reclaim Open online conference. The event took place this week, mostly while I was travelling to and in Barcelona.

My good friend Bryan Mathers took it upon himself to draw an image for all of the blog-a-thon submissions, including mine, and then put together this blog post as a way of making sense of the submissions.

I hadn’t quite appreciated the format until it started to unfold before my eyes – but essentially, a blog post was syndicated via the conference site every hour, with a chat available for people to comment alongside the post. This was interesting for a number of reasons. As it was an online conference, people were in all the timezones. This meant that I could come back the following morning and have a look at the posts that I missed. I could take my time, skim over some, re-read others, jump down a rabbit hole… This felt like the web that was when speeds were slow and we weren’t in the rush to make or consume content like we are today.

The blogs were all on a loose theme of rewilding the open web and I’d already created artwork for the conference having absorbed some dialogue from the organising team. I tried to capture a landscape of the blogs as they appeared, attempting to take each title, and from the blog post get a steer on what I should draw.

Source & image: Visual Thinkery