Most personal websites describe their subject. I wanted one that behaved like its subject instead. Three decisions did most of the work.

A landing page after Sol LeWitt

LeWitt never drew his wall drawings. He wrote instructions, and other hands executed them; the idea, he said, becomes a machine that makes the art. The landing page works the same way. I set the rules: four points, a slow drift, a tendency to scatter when approached and to return when left alone. The browser executes them. No two visits compose the page identically, and none of the compositions are mine. The system draws; I only wrote the instructions.

Sol LeWitt's typed proposal for a wall drawing, a page of written instructions Sol LeWitt, Proposal for Wall Drawing, Information Show, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970

A wall of fine pencil lines radiating from the centre, midpoints and corners of a gallery wall Sol LeWitt, 4th wall: 24 lines from the center, 12 lines from the midpoint of each of the sides, 12 lines from each corner, from Wall Drawing 289, 1976. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

An auction catalogue as autobiography

The About page is a lot listing. Property from a private collection, estimate on request, a sale that closes in six days and never arrives. The auction catalogue may be the art world’s most honest literary form. Provenance, exhibition history, literature: a life reduced to what can be verified, then priced. Curators spend their working lives building value around objects. Turning the apparatus on yourself is only fair, and mildly uncomfortable, which is how you know it is working.

Benjamin Kändler on the phone at a London auction, taking bids Phone bidding at auction, London, 2022

A portrait after Thomas Ruff

The photograph at the centre of the page follows Ruff’s Porträts: frontal, evenly lit, expressionless, the grammar of the passport office. Ruff demonstrated that the format’s promise of neutrality is a fiction; the more standardised the image, the less it gives away. That suited me. The portrait withholds, and the catalogue text around it does the talking, which is roughly the arrangement I keep in real life.

Thomas Ruff portrait photograph: a young woman, frontal, evenly lit, expressionless against a plain background Thomas Ruff, Porträt (P. Stadtbaumer), 1988. Chromogenic print, 24 x 18 cm

Thomas Ruff abstract photograph: swirling saturated colour derived from processed source imagery Thomas Ruff, Substrat 38 II, 2008. Chromogenic print, 223 x 163 cm

The sale ends in six days, twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes. It always does.