About
The name
tawôw there is room · welcome ka-tawôw there will be room
ka-tawôw is a modern turn on the Cree word tawôw. Where tawôw says there is room (present-tense) or welcome, ka-tawôw puts it in the permanent future: there will be room. Room made and kept, not offered once.
That is the intention behind the company name: creating with inclusivity in mind & creating with legacy in mind.
The person
I am Ovid, a web developer and designer based in Poundmaker Cree Nation. I build and maintain websites for artists and cultural organizations, with a particular focus on getting work off subscriber-based platforms and into the hands of the people who made it. On request, I will also prioritize Canada-based servers and hosts to keep your data north.
My background crosses databases and programming, mathematics and engineering, fine art and design. I am an early adopter and I have a propensity to pick up tools in my field when they are first released and gain the comfort to teach others to wield them.
I have been building for the web since 1992, long enough to have watched several generations of platform come and go, and to have seen what happens to the work when the new platform appears.
Why this work
Your website is an archive of your life's work. It holds documentation of that work that may not exist anywhere else: installations taken down, performances that happened once, catalogues that were never digitized. When a platform raises its rates or shuts down or changes its terms, that record goes with it.
Open-source, self-hosted sites are not a technical preference. They are the difference between a record you keep and a record someone else keeps for you.