Hi, I'm Erick.

Hi, I'm Erick. A lot of people on the internet know me as Snowfro. That name came from a snowcone stand I started in college called Snowfro Refreshments. I had a huge curly afro and spent the summer serving snowcones on Guadalupe Street in Austin, right across from the University of Texas. So yes, the name I use for all of this came from a college snowcone stand. Somehow it stuck.

The way I want this site to feel is pretty simple. Imagine we are standing next to one of the pieces and you ask me what is going on with it. I am not giving you a lecture or reading the wall label. I am probably pointing at some tiny thing, going off on a tangent, remembering another detail halfway through, and maybe admitting that part of the idea was a little ridiculous. That is much closer to how I actually talk about the work.

I grew up around color because my family imported ceramic tile. I spent years looking at glazes and gradients and all the weird little differences between tiles that were technically supposed to match. I was also the kid taking apart electronics and copying QBasic programs line by line without fully knowing what I was doing. Honestly, that still describes a decent amount of my process: get curious, take the thing apart, mess with it until something interesting happens.

Most of my work starts with something almost embarrassingly simple. A squiggly line. A pixel guy. A block heart. A few slashes. Then I keep messing with it and suddenly there is a whole system underneath: hidden controls, physical instructions, a game that takes months, or a network full of little people sending signals to each other. I do like the complicated part. I just don't think you should need a manual before the work can make you smile.

Blockchains showed up because I was trying to solve a very specific problem. How can a digital artwork stay alive, belong to someone, and still be the actual code instead of a screenshot of the code? Obviously that world came with a truly exhausting amount of noise. But the useful part is still useful to me. A piece of software can be collected, preserved, played on a Game Boy, stitched into thread, or handed to somebody else without turning into a dead image first.

So that is what this archive is for. I am putting the projects here one at a time, along with the parts people usually don't see. It will probably never feel finished, which is convenient because neither do most of the projects. Hopefully it feels less like reading about the work and more like I am standing there looking at it with you.