The word analog is fragile.
It’s difficult to use without disclaimers, caveats, or immediately clarifying what it is not.
For some, it has come to mean nostalgia.
For others, purity.
A rejection of the digital, or a fetish for an obsolete tool.
Film superior to pixels. Vinyl over files. Paper instead of screens.
That isn’t how I use the word here.
Most of my professional and personal work is made digitally. I write on a computer. I photograph with digital cameras. I listen to more music through streaming services more than I do through interacting with physical mediums.
None of this disqualifies the work from belonging in this library.
What matters is not the medium, but the mode of attention.
Analog, as I’m using it, describes a relationship rather than a format. It refers to continuity instead of interruption.
To spending time with something long enough for it to change you.
To work that isn’t exhausted on first contact.
To returning often enough to gain new meaning.
In an analog circuit, information flows continuously. There are no hard breaks. No clean compression into neat packets. Something is always carried over—noise, warmth, residue. The tactile connection. The object itself.
That is the mode I’m interested in: the act of reading, the act of listening, the act of returning.
Digital culture is not the enemy. Speed is.
Feeds reward immediacy, not intimacy. For me this limits retention. Work appears, performs briefly, then disappears beneath the next. Context collapses. Memory shortens. Attention fragments.
A library operates differently.
A library assumes:
that you might come back
that meaning accumulates
that proximity matters
that not everything needs to be current to be relevant
You don’t visit a library to be impressed. You visit to spend time.
Linden Analog Library holds my own work and the work of others because influence is not a one-way transaction. Making and collecting are part of the same practice.
Writing sharpens looking. Listening reshapes language. Consuming develops taste.
Other people’s work becomes a reference point, not a pedestal.
Some posts here will be long. Some will be fragments. Some may be a single image or a short note pulled from a longer process. This is intentional.
Some posts here will be long. Some will be fragments. Some may be a single image or a short note pulled from a longer process. This is intentional.
One thing my forty-year-old self is finally learning: not everything needs to declare itself finished.
Some things only need to remain in use.
In that sense, analog is not a technology or a format.
Here, it names a way of working and a way of keeping: attention held over time, work allowed to age, and meaning shaped through return rather than completion.