I Put A Spell On You: Spellbook (plus an overly wordy essay on why this festival matters to me)

Mediums

• Book (read below for a bonus story about where this comes from)*

• Hot glue + silicon molds

• Tissue paper + mod podge

• Plastic bones

• Acrylic paint

  
  

  

  
  

13 Days 13 Shorts 2026: By Any Mediums Necessary

My goal for this year's 13 Days 13 Shorts is not to choose one medium and stick to it for all prompts as I usually do. Instead I will follow where the spark of creating takes me with each prompt, utilizing various mediums as they inspire me and invoke any sense of joy. I'm dubbing this year - 13 Days 13 Shorts: By Any Mediums Necessary.

Why Does This Matter to Kelsey?

I'd like to share the "why" behind my art this year. Disclaimer, if you are an AI-enthusiast, or my company's CEO, you may want to stop reading.

I work in tech and have worked in the industry in some capacity for nearly two decades. It was always a place where innovation and creation were valued and many skilled people filled roles to shape amazing technology that could do so much to help humanity, make people's lives better, create delight, etc. Unfortunately, the last few years in tech with the rise of AI have become increasingly alarming, dehumanizing, and soul crushing as I watch industry "leaders" all around me buy into the delusion of replacing human skill and talent with artificial "intelligence" that can only regurgitate what already exists in a sloppy half baked output that the rest of us with actual skill have to clean and fix up continuously and pretend to be ok with it so we can keep our paychecks, all while the elite cheer from the sidelines thinking they are innovative geniuses and the ones left doing the work are replaceable by robots. I'll also add that I am a product/UX designer, which means my skillset is one of creativity, intuition, critical thinking/problem solving, and understanding human behavior - none of which can ever truly be replaced by a robot. While I don't think the mentality of replacing humans with robots will be a lasting change that actually suceeds in any real way, living through it has been a tremendously difficult experience and one I battle with every day. So that brings me to this year's 13 Days 13 Shorts and a revelation I had a few weeks ago.

I feel like this year it's even more important to me to CREATE as much as possible. Creating helps keep me grounded in the reality of being a human. Creating is something only a human can truly do - make art that is personal, full of soul, clever, always evolving, interpreting ideas, following that creative spark - no robot can ever actually achieve this. So to me, every creation by me, and by any other human, is one more stance taken against the current state of the world.

*The book used in this spellbook creation is a book all employees of my company were given upon employment - a book written by the CEO who is currently wreaking havoc with delusion and causing me frustration and anxiety every day. It was kind of cathartic to make this into a piece of art that makes me smile instead of a book collecting dust that makes me annoyed every time I see it.

If you read this far, congratulations! I wasn't planning to type this much backstory, but I got a bit carried away. I figured my fellow creators in this festival may share similar sentiments, and seeing all of you creating every year has given me hope. Because of this festival, I end every October with a newfound faith in humanity and the goodness of the world of humans. We may be messy, we may be prone to failures and catastrophe, but we are still human and only we can create.