Subjects:
- all (19)
- artistic research (13)
- biosphere crises (1)
- caves (1)
- digital art (8)
- dioramas (12)
- essay (3)
- exhibition texts (2)
- hart magazine (1)
- ideas (4)
- media archaeology (8)
- published (4)
- rants (6)
- transhistoricity (8)
- txt NL (2)
I am Alexandra Crouwers (Netherlands, 1974) a visual artist and artistic researcher based in Belgium. My work approaches the theme of extinction through a cultural lens, focusing on the sentimental, sardonic, and absurd dimensions of the crises. Since the early 2000s, I have been experimenting with an array of digital media, ranging from monumental digital video installations and augmented reality to conceptual projects involving, for example, emoji proposals and a custom font.
.txt is one of many attempts across the decades to organise and collect a selection of my various writings. This self-hosted blog is a response to the dominance of large, ethically challenging companies, as well as the general enshittification of social media.
The texts revolve around culture and generally originate from the question of why and how art has become such a crucial part of human existence. Topics covered by .txt include transhistoricity, contemporary (media) art, (media) archaeology, and speculative ideas. To follow new posts, bookmark this page.
Welcome to .txt
Posted to LinkedIn, May 2026.
Hey, hello! With social media in crisis and general platform enshittification (bots, ads, popups, ai, privacy breaches, and whatnot), I have been looking for a way to share my thoughts in another fashion. Lo and behold: it means the return of the blog! We are talking about a good, old blog on a self-hosted WordPress site. No data harvesting, no advertisements: I am not interested in monetisation. I am barely interested in an audience!
In 2005, while still on MySpace, I began a Blogspot blog which I updated until roughly 2012. I used it to track works in progress and to promote exhibitions: it functioned as an elaborate newsletter for my artistic practice. But of course, Facebook had a much wider reach, and I increasingly used my account to share short texts and essays there, rather than on my blog. Some of my posts were even picked up by other platforms and published in edited forms. Meanwhile, Blogspot (Blogger) went to Google, and (much like Google+) slowly was forgotten. I never used Tumblr much – which I regret deeply – and am trying to remember the names of all other platforms and accounts that came and went over the decades, but most are lost in the dusty corners of the web.
After I left Facebook in 2021, I was stuck with Twitter and Instagram – both of which are unsuitable for my meandering posts on artistic research, media archaeology, and other topics. Unfortunately, Mastodon and Bluesky have similar limitations, and out of desperation I ended up publishing some of my writing here, on LinkedIn, of all places.
But my thoughts are sometimes much longer than LinkedIn accepts, and I recently set up a Substack, with the intention of gathering all of my fragmented but backed-up texts there. However, it would mean dealing with another (unpredictable) platform, and I am just tired of it – and I am certain that I am not the only one.
In 2019, I set up a dedicated blog for my artistic phd, but with all the twists and turns the trajectory has experienced, I never saw it through. I tried adding selected texts and posts to my existing website, but it clashes somewhat with the website’s role as a portfolio – it also is expansive enough as it is, if I add more, I am afraid visitors will not see the forest for the trees.
This post evidences that I like to use up some space for my writing: I have finally (ha!) arrived at announcing my new blog, .txt, which will be updated regularly with new – and old – posts. I am editing some of them in accordance with progressing insights, and it is not nearly done yet, but in the spirit of using internet networks for sharing works in progress, here it is: https://lnkd.in/eKRjSAVT
(PS: I added buttons that should make it easier to share posts, but I am not sure if they are really better than just copying and pasting the links into the social media of your choice. Which I do, by the way – I never use ‘share’ buttons. Maybe I should get rid of them.)