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WHAT THE DARKNESS GAVE ME
A Memoir of Survival, Leadership, Loss, and Self-Discovery
Joe Prillmayer learned to survive before he ever learned how to live.
Born with a congenital heart defect, he underwent major surgery as an infant and again as a child. But surviving his body was only the beginning. At home, he faced a different kind of danger—one that taught him to read moods, anticipate violence, disappear inward, and endure what no child should have to understand.
By eight years old, survival had become instinct.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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Life on the Edges, an artistic project using early 20th centry constructivism and modern animals and concepts.
It's a world where only animals and objects live, humans have somehow dissappeared, and the animals are left to explore a world not made for them at all.
HOW TO KEEP A HUMAN
What happens when being cared for becomes being owned? How to Keep a Human is a fictional illustrated handbook for robots, following eight instructions that turn ordinary care into confinement, identity erasure and control. I built a custom Recraft Style from Ivan Bilibin’s folkloric illustrations, using their storybook language to make the cold instructions feel disturbingly familiar. Enormous scarlet-and-gold robots dominate softly colored humans, while the cheerful handbook typography makes each rule more unsettling. The series ends with an open door and a human who no longer tries to leave, asking what acceptance costs when belonging requires giving yourself up.
I teach non-technical people how to use tools like Descript, YouTube and AI, and I've noticed that every new tool spawns a new species of behavior.
In the Library of Congress I found Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1904), a set of chromolithograph plates by Adolf Giltsch that turned boxfish, spiders and hummingbirds into symmetrical scientific specimens.
I built a Recraft Style from three of those plates, cropping out the captions and page edges so it learned only the stipple, the ochre and rust palette and the cream paper.
Then I used it to document the wildlife of the modern workday, from the Muted Ostrich to the Inbox Hydra, as if a 1904 naturalist had discovered them.
It's a field guide to the creatures we've all become, one I wish existed when I started teaching people to stop doomscrolling and start creating.
