What's That? Another Podcast!

Ars Critica is one of my latest podcasts. A show exploring the fundamental questions of art through philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory. Talking about everything from art as ontology, to Walter Benjamin, to Fluxus, and that one Haitian & Puerto Rican artist everyone still loves.

Listen today on Spotify and subscribe to Substack for interesting reads, photo dumps, and more.

                           Ars Critica Podcast

Announcing Public Utility Podcast.

Pleased to announce my new podcast, Public Utility. Produced by Amarii Productions Inc in part with Common Grounds Press.

                                 Spotify • Castbox

Public Utility is a new series by T.P. on public space, material culture, and the cities we’re still figuring

out how to share.

Listen to Episode 1: Public Space After Ownership on Spotify, Castbox, and Podbean today.

journeys in the northeast / 2026

                     view full sized images here.

Seven Samurai (1954) d. Akira Kurosawa

 

https://tubitv.com/movies/100051686/seven-samurai?startPos=2

Street Paper, coming Fall 2026.

Pleased to announce my next book and first poetry chapbook "Street Paper", coming Fall 2026.

"Street Paper is a premiere contemporary poetry chapbook by artist and writer T.P. After a 10 year hiatus from spoken word poetry on stage and print, Street Paper is the thinking individual's ode to the mundane, a love letter to the Midwestern experience, and choice words to onlookers, passersby, and those that sneer at radical zen"

Available June 2026 at commongpress.etsy.com

Film Rec: The Blancheville Monster (1963)

Awesome classic Italian gothic horror film that's taken lots of inspiration from Hammer Films and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher's.

https://boxd.it/1pmC

(watch it for free on Tubi)

Granular Synthesis 001

Check out my new track, Outer Rim.

Listen to outer rim by TP on #SoundCloud

https://on.soundcloud.com/yhPk7d9ZOmX0Gz7Fgr

Listen & purchase on Bandcamp.

https://normalsandrecords.bandcamp.com/track/outer-rim

Conveying galactic communication between machines.

Critical Reflections - The Sensory City: The Embodied City

Modern cities increasingly ask us to move through space without fully experiencing it. We navigate through maps glowing in our palms, absorb information through screens and signage, and pass through environments designed for efficiency rather than intimacy. The contemporary city is often optimized to be read quickly instead of felt deeply. In this process, something essential begins to disappear: the embodied relationship between people and place.

To inhabit a city is not simply to look at it. A city is encountered through sound, texture, temperature, rhythm, atmosphere, and memory. It is experienced through the pressure of concrete beneath the feet, the echo of transit tunnels, the warmth of sunlight reflecting off brick, the vibration of passing trains, and the subtle shifts between shadow and illumination. Urban life has always been sensory. Yet contemporary urban environments increasingly flatten those experiences into visual information and digital interaction.

The modern urban landscape is saturated with surfaces designed to attract attention while discouraging engagement. Glass towers mirror one another endlessly. LED screens dominate public squares. Transit systems reduce movement into data points and directional arrows. Public space becomes navigational rather than experiential. We move efficiently, but often without presence.

This shift has psychological consequences. The constant illumination of screens and artificial lighting produces a condition of perpetual stimulation. Cities rarely become dark anymore. Storefronts glow through the night. Advertisements pulse across buildings. Notifications follow us into transit stations, parks, and sidewalks. There is little room left for silence, shadow, or perceptual rest. Exhaustion becomes atmospheric.

At the same time, urban soundscapes are changing. The city once carried a wider range of acoustic textures: footsteps, conversations drifting through open windows, mechanical rhythms, distant music, birds layered against infrastructure. Increasingly, many people experience public space through headphones, privatizing sound and insulating themselves from shared environments. The sonic identity of neighborhoods becomes harder to perceive. Listening itself becomes fragmented.

Yet sound remains one of the most powerful ways we understand place. Every city carries its own resonance. A subway platform reverberates differently than a narrow alleyway after rain. Concrete absorbs and reflects sound differently than stone or wood. The body constantly interprets these conditions, even when we are not consciously aware of them. A city is partly constructed through echoes.

Touch is equally important. Materials communicate. Weathered handrails, rough concrete, oxidized metal, cracked pavement, damp walls, and uneven stone all carry traces of time and use. These surfaces remind us that cities are lived environments rather than seamless interfaces. Contemporary urbanism often removes this tactile complexity in favor of polished, sealed, and frictionless surfaces designed for maintenance and visual branding. In doing so, cities become smoother yet emotionally thinner.

The embodied city resists this flattening. It values sensory diversity over sensory control. It recognizes that atmosphere shapes emotional and psychological life. It understands that architecture is not only visual but physical. A meaningful public space is not merely attractive to look at; it invites presence. It allows the body to slow down, notice, and participate.

This is not an argument against technology. Digital tools can increase accessibility, connection, and communication. The problem emerges when digital mediation replaces sensory engagement rather than supporting it. When every urban interaction becomes optimized for speed and visibility, the city risks becoming emotionally distant from the people who inhabit it.

Analog experiences persist because the body still requires them. Walking without immediate destination. Sitting in public space without distraction. Listening intentionally. Holding printed matter. Photographing slowly. Touching materials worn by weather and time. These actions are not nostalgic retreats into the past. They are attempts to remain perceptually alive within increasingly overstimulated environments.

The future of public space may depend less on smarter interfaces and more on recovering sensory intimacy. Cities do not become meaningful solely through infrastructure or information systems. They become meaningful through lived encounter. Through atmosphere. Through memory. Through the quiet accumulation of physical experience.

To feel a city is to recognize that urban life is not only something we observe. It is something we inhabit with the entire body.

inkling.

 "Impressions" as my next book and first long form publication is meant to involve and embolden the written word as a healing mechanism for the psyche.

I've taken selected works from my unreleased chapbook "A Negro Sun Sets South" but initially had no intention to publicize any of them. I believe that there should be space in the world and in the studio to be raw, obscene, and furious. Publishing free verse and spoken word becomes an obligation to enchant the reader sometimes. As if I give a fuck to be pleasant at others discretion...hence the title.

...well, here's a pager.

Notes on Material Ecology - 001

 4.28.26

Notes from "Humane Ecology - Eight Positions"

Robert Weisenberger, essays by Risa Puleo + Alena J. Williams

Ecology - the entire science of the relationship of the organism to its surrounding environment

Greek origin: Oikos (home)

- shares roots with the disciplines of economics, suggesting a related system of exchange among living things

"Ecology presents a web of life that encompasses all of us"

"If nature suggests an idealized, unchanging construct, then ecology acknowledges actual conditions, differentiated by place, and a history of constant transformation"

- Ecology informed to the social sciences and Haeckels endorsed a system of race science and ideas about environment that reemerged in Nazism 

-> Chicago school of sociology; human populations seen as homeostatic systems subject external disturbances by begin "invasive species" often figured as immigrants or people of color 

Humane Ecology - everything is connected but some connections are ineluctable & others elective 

(ecological relations in symbolic form - inert media to make images & objects that trouble common conceptions of nature)

Welcome.

 Hello.

Welcome to my artist website, research hub, & digital studio. 

If you'd like to keep up with my practice beyond this community, here are some other web spaces of mine to look into.

Instagram: https://instagram.com/taj_pollard

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@freelife970

Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/IeOdjIGq6I3Ta6Qzim

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/tajamari

Are.Na: https://are.na/taj-p

500PX: https://500px.com/tajamari

Signal Theory Radio: https://www.mixcloud.com/signaltheoryradio/

Buy Me a Coffee: https://ko-fi.com/tajpollard

Common Grounds Press: https://allmylinks.com/CGP