Spirit & Glitch is owned and run by Alex Maki-Jokela.
Alex is a mixture of artist and engineer who values creativity alongside optimization, curiosity alongside ambition, and community alongside individual achievement. In past lives, he has been a mechanical engineer, a industrial manufacturing project manager, a hardware reliability engineer, several different flavors of software engineer, and has moonlit as a installation artist, an extremely unskilled unpaid actor, a genderfluid drag-wearing dancing whirlwind, and a somewhat nihilistic but good-humored truck driver. He's built multiple LED art installations, including helping lead the engineering team for Dr. Brainlove, and derives joy from negotiating with the entropy deities to bring unrealistic project ideas to life. He is continuously interested in finding ways use the cutting-edge technology that the San Francisco Bay Area produces in service of the subversive weirdness and underground art that drew him here.
Spirit & Glitch is the continuing culmination of years of aesthetic exploration - exploring what it means to dress expressively, to embody femininity, masculinity, ferocity, gentleness, and how liberating it feels to have one's outer appearance match how one's inner narratives. It's also the product of spending a year exploring the technical and creative limits of turning neural network tools such as fast-neural-style (link) into extremely surreal paintbrushes. A lot of the aesthetics in Spirit & Glitch clothing are made using neural network techniques that evolve by the day and that Alex and his friends enjoy experimenting with.
Alex believes in moving past the startup guru ninja wizard pirate trend of "Zuckerberging it" and minimizing aesthetic expression. He spent most of his life doing this, and had a series of experiences that led him to realize that owning and playing with his aesthetic was a way to open up worlds of creative potential. He derives joy from encouraging other humans to explore the possibilities of their own identity and aesthetic expression.
In his free time, Alex enjoys short walks through SOMA, creating adventure and art out of optionally monotonous situations, and exploring the edges and depths of firsthand human experience.