Hi everyone, I'm James Paterson aka Presstube. I'm a British born Cana­di­an based in Montreal. I've always loved drawing, but de­cid­ed to start doing it everyday when I was 12. As a teen I would bring a sketch­book with me every­where and draw con­stant­ly - at school, at parties, every­where. It was like my own private Narnia Portal and if I'm being honest it was also kind of a se­cu­ri­ty blanket.

I started publishing my art online in the form of Flash ani­ma­tions in the late 90s, got majorly into code in the 2000s and have been sub­merged in the weird and wonderful world of crypto art for the past year, which feels like 100 years in crypto time :)

Drawing is the central pivot point of my process. It's where I dig the deepest and where things get the most personal. For me draw­ing is a spiri­tual prac­tice and without it I don't feel quite right in the world.

Animation is a soothing, highly repet­i­tive activ­ity that feels a bit like draw­ing & knitting made a baby.

Code is where any idea can be broken down and turned into a func­tioning machine through pre­cise use of lan­guage and logic. It's pure alche­my and the most im­por­tant art medium of our time.

For me, on a good day, all three of these medi­ums meld seam­lessly into one. Sometimes sculpture and paint­ing also join the party, but they are a bit second tier compared to the core three.

I am quite process driven rather than planful. My favorite way to work is to follow meandering chains of ideas and have them lead me to unex­pect­ed des­ti­na­tions. For this to work well it's best not to have dead­lines or ex­ter­nal pres­sures. A free spirited set of ideas operate on their own sched­ule and don't like to be forced. Years ago at the con­clu­sion of a heavy hitting psy­che­delic trip I was left chew­ing on the phrase “open up time and space and beauty will emerge”, and I've been trying to take that advice ever since.

While my process is fairly inbred and self referential I also get all kinds of ins­pi­ra­tion from the global art com­mu­nity - es­pe­cial­ly these days from the vivid under­ground art scene taking place on the Tezos blockchain.

The first TOCA ME in 2004, that was almost 20 years ago! It looks like we are going to spend our entire creative lives connected :) - that makes me happy.

Amit Pitaru and I met at a con­fer­ence in London in 2000 only to discover that we lived a few blocks away from one another in Brooklyn. We be­came fast friends and cut our teeth to­gether over the course of many years and many different collaborations.

At the heart of our work together has always been the cre­ation of bespoke creative tools. More specif­i­cally, ex­plor­ing the feedback loops between making one's own tools and prac­tic­ing with them: “Up and down the ladder of ab­strac­tion”, as Bret Victor would say.

Most of Amit and my projects feel a bit like in­vent­ing a weird new musical instrument then prac­tic­ing towards enough expertise and comfort with it to play a single big concert, then putting the instru­ment on a shelf and moving on to the next thing without looking back...

There are too many to list, but I'd say my personal high­lights are Rotten Fruit Tardis, Nun Tit Oracle and NormanVR.

My fa­vorite pro­jects in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Amit Pitaru so far are probably Rhonda and Chain Reaction.

My fave commercial projects were making pro­duct pro­to­types on the design team at FiftyThree (also with Amit Pitaru), where we were cre­at­ing kickass draw­ing tools, and working as a creative director at B-Reel where I made a hilar­i­ous video game called Space Janitor which never saw the light of day but was one of the most fun projects I've ever been a part of.