My name is Alex Itin and I’m currently working as artist-in-residence at the Institute for the Future of the Book. This blog is a scroll on which my brain is splayed.

I am the son of an abstract painter and graphic designer from Basel, Switzerland and an actress/fiber artist teacher from Long Island. I have always felt that I have one foot in the old world and one in the new. In some very real way my work and life have been an attempt to make a synthesis of the dialectic that is my parents both as people and artists.

I made my first film in the fifth grade and won several national festival awards by high school. I had planned on going to NYU film school, or USC, or something when I accidentally discovered writing. It was so much cheaper than film and you didn’t have to get all messed up with actors. I spent the better part of five years trying to finish my first novel, “Heroes.”

It was never published, but I am still working with same basic characters that I started with at sixteen: Phil and Pat. They are the characters in “Arc Along the Watchtower,” my first motion picture e-book and “omEGG,” which I am continuing to develop.

In college, I started to feel that writing was removing my brain from my body and when I started to paint, I fell in love with it. It seemed to live between the act of writing and the act of filmmaking. It seemed like neutral territory. I was good at it too and had a lot of early success.

I was hanging next to my heroes (DeKooning and Kline) at The Allan Stone Gallery and my wearable art (painted hats and other accessories) was being featured in Vogue and Elle and on T.V. and movies, etc.

Life, however, is what happens while you’re busy making other plans, said the poet and my plans were interrupted by father’s battle with cancer and subsequent death. I’m sure there is a whole Freudian thing here, but some how the trauma of watching him die seemed to strip me of my ability to make a good picture. I forgot it all. It’s a long story, but I began to try to re-educate my hand and eye in the most basic and infantile (and cheapest) manner I could think of. I started ripping up books and drawing in the pages (it had been a warm-up exorcize I did in College). The only rule was that it had to be a book that I’d read and that I’d loved. There seemed no point in destroying something you were ambivalent about. I did thousands of drawings….most were terrible, but I began to find a new language of linked images. I experimented a lot with photographic collage during this time as well and I started drawing in public - alternative spaces - usually with a band or d.j. playing. If I was going to fail (make a bad picture) well I was going to fail publicly.

During such a performance I met Bob Stein who turned me on to the possiblitlties of digital publishing. It has become a central part of my practice ever since …the sort of glue that holds my eyes together. In some sense this blog has become an extension of my sketch books.