Writing
2026
- Floriography
A blue hydrangea meant frigidity in 1884 and gratitude now. The language of flowers turns out to be a mistranslated pun, and ninety-eight dictionaries have been arguing about it ever since.
- The things a certificate won’t teach you
Eight Google AI courses, four things I built, and a question about what deserves to exist when software gets easier.
2025
- There is only advertising
A reply to Suzanne Pope, fifteen years on.
2022
- The pitch ends. Your head doesn't.
A pitch becomes your whole life while technically remaining a job you're doing for a few weeks. It's a lot of emotional weight for a PDF.
2020
Syndicated from Medium. Kept as written.
- One tool and one panther
Running my own drawings through EbSynth — an early experiment in letting a machine animate a hand-made thing without letting it take the wheel.
- Chatbots save lives
Written in the first months of 2020, when a chatbot was the thing standing between overwhelmed services and the people waiting on them.
2019
- Let the world tell your story
Finn Astle is a creative storyteller, writing and walking every day, this story covers four continents, roughly 2,000 days and many many people.
2018
- The glow of TV as fire
A television carried into the abandoned cities of Inner Mongolia and into Beijing, still playing, with nobody there to watch it.
2016
- Just a number asking people to call
Ten metres of LED strip suspended as a giant mobile number. The people who called from underneath it became the soundtrack.
2015
- Two white guys carrying a fountain
An antique Greco-Roman water fountain, carried into the middle of the Simpson Desert along the route Burke and Wills got lost on.
- In order to propose
Two animations for Cordrazine, back after their 1998 debut. One in soft grey-lead so the lead singer could propose. One inverted, which went to air on Rage.
2014
- Moving in unison but not connecting
Made after a friend died, commissioned by the Melbourne anatomy museum and shown in the room displaying the body parts.
2013
- To be kept in Mind
The filmmaking component of my final media certificate. It got 50 out of 50.
The poems are elsewhere, and kept quieter.