who is catdya?

Catdya is my pen name. I'm an artist and writer with a bachelor's in English linguistics. I write poetry, essays, reviews, and original fiction. I illustrate original characters and occasionally craft and sew. It's not uncommon for me to pick up a new hobby or skill to create a dream project; I learned how to make a website (c. March 2025) because I wanted to post annotated poetry (like genius lyrics).

This website is both portfolio and personal website. Since social media platforms have been increasingly hostile towards artists while pushing for short-form "content" unaligned with my work, I decided to set up a space where I won't have to worry about algorithm changes or "shadowbans." My style and medium of choice changes with the times. I've no consistent "art style" or "personal branding." I've given up on making myself palatable for "consumers" of "content" and instead focus my time on creating art I would like to see more of.

To state the obvious I'm in no dire situation to be able to focus full-time on art while not aggressively monetizing & marketing it. Frankly, I've tried both selling digital goods and participating in the convention circuit, yet I have no internal motivation to continue to paywall my art. I enjoy community, trading my zines and stickers at conventions more than I do making a profit and crunching numbers. The end goal of this life-long art "project" is to leave a legacy I'm happy with. Not something that needs to immediately pay off during my lifetime; just a small fingerprint on a cave for future explorers to briefly shine their torches on.

Besides my backlog of art, I also talk about the things I love. I love pastel purple and mustard yellow. I listen to a lot of genres but I like edm, jazz, and rock the the most. I play mostly indie games on my PC, many are "casual" games or farming sims. I also adore visual novels and interactive fiction. Vampires are a specific fixation of mine, along with reading fictional nonfiction books. I tend to be a "slow" reader, but I enjoy the process of reading and reviewing regardless of time constraints.

It's impossible to reduce myself or my stance into one neat webpage, but I have attempted to write a manifesto with regards to creating art specifically.

Manifesto

I. All Art is Political (or: stance)

“ex nihilo nihil fit” - nothing comes from nothing
  • Art cannot exist without underlying context. Art is not created in a vacuum
  • Art cannot not say something; attempting to omit any statement is a statement itself
    • “Apolitical” “art” is unconcerned with not only the human condition, but the medium through which it is expressed
  • Art divorced from politics and history creates vacuous artists with nothing interesting to say
    • Art that does say something must balance what is said and how it is said

“When substance predominates over style, it is crude. When style predominates over substance, it is pedantic. When style and substance are in balance, then you have the higher man.” — Analects 6:18

II. Copyleft (or: art belongs to culture)

stand on the shoulders of giants
  • Current copyright law benefits corporations by design. Lobbying is done extensively for longer copyright periods
    • Digital platforms favor copyright holders (however legitimate) when resolving notices and takedowns
    • Individual artists pay hefty legal fees against corporations to “protect” their art and resolve false claims
      • The solution is not to make bureaucracy more accessible or smaller scale; bureaucracy is the problem.
  • Orphaned works and unclear or uncooperative estates under long and strict copyright laws rob the current generation from archiving, distributing, experiencing, and building upon older work otherwise shareable
  • Art benefits from iterations, commentary, parody, subversions, and recreations
    • Fair use is a reasonable stopgap inasmuch as IP holders are reasonable
      • They are not

I believe that art, like knowledge, ought to be accessible. Art, however guarded or exclusive, will always be a product of society not belonging to any one individual or entity. Ancient, pre-writing stories built upon a rich tapestry of culture and society as it did not belong to any one author; these stories became cultural heritage—and as UNESCO puts it—a global public good[1]

Until copyright laws are reformed or abolished the best way to protect usage and distribution of art is paradoxically by applying copyright and modifying terms. Public domain allows anyone to distribute work proprietarily; Copyleft aims to preserve freedoms in distributing work while disallowing derivative works to be exclusive or use “all rights reserved.”

Art solely “made” by me (excluding collaborations and fanworks) are licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 by default. As for code, feel free to copy whatever Iive bodged together[2]

[1]: Situasi Hak Cipta Sastra di Indonesia by Koalisi Seni (2026) [2]: See Credits page

III. Death of the Author (or: the problem with stan culture)

  • Art takes on new meaning on the receiving end of things
  • Readers, viewers, listeners come into a work with their own baggage, lived experiences, and frameworks possible to dissect the work further
    • Artists cannot dictate what is “read” from the finished work. There are strong arguments and weak arguments for readings, but once art is shared, authorial intent should not override the main arguments of a reading
  • As much as an artist's work may feel like a part of them, the artist is not the art; the art is not the artist.
    • Artists must distance themselves from their work, learn to accept good-faith critique, and learn to develop their craft
      • E.g. critique of a confessional poem for its technique should not be read as “invalidating” the poet's trauma
  • “Good” artists can create “bad”[3] art. “Bad” artists can create “good” art. Separation of author and art is crucial for this concept
    • Creation and consumption of “(un)problematic” art is not a litmus test for morality for it gives both creator and “consumer” the chance to offload critical thinking and reflection by relying on heuristics.
      • E.g. “That person makes bad art, therefore they must be a bad person!” “I only consume good art, therefore I am a good person”
  • Art can be a medium for catharsis, exploring taboos, and subversion.
    • However, the presence of subversive ideas alone does not give a work more merit
      • E.g. a subversive idea executed poorly is no better than a well-executed cliche; a half-hearted poem about the taboos of menstruation does not elevate it beyond criticism (see: I. All Art Is Political 3.1)
[3]: “Bad” meaning both “of poor quality” and “morally evil”

IV. Generative AI (or: do your own thinking)

  • I create art for myself; my creative process is also a process of self-discovery and growth. I do not outsource the chance to develop my style, taste, and artistic repertoire to a machine
  • The process of art creation surpasses the importance of the end “product's” quality
    • Creating art should force you to reckon with personal biases, lived experiences, mortality, and worldview—something AI cannot do or possess
    • Berating AI-generated output's quality does not tackle the core concern of its use; we have seen image generators improve drastically since the DALL-E days without addressing ethical and moral concerns
    • It is also problematic to assign the virtue of “soul” behind an artwork; who decides who has a "soul"?
      • E.g. is a hand-drawn racist cartoon strip better than AI-generated food bank posters on the basis of the former having “human soul” put into it?
  • That being said, my gripes with GenAI do not include environmental impact[4] and copyright infringement (see: II. Copyleft)
    • Due to the abundance of permissive licenses for code and the general propensity for a computer to be able to compute, I am less likely to pass judgement on someone for parsing or troubleshooting code using AI[5]
  • I do take issue with cognitive effects of AI dependence, human biases being laundered as “neutral,” power concentrating in large tech corporations, managerial decision-making power being given to biased algorithms in an attempt to remove the human in the loop, etc.[5]
  • For transparency: the creation of this website was assisted with AI tools for troubleshooting and parsing primarily JavaScript and Nunjucks (for 11ty)[7]
    • Otherwise, my art does not use generative AI technologies (unless you consider natural language processing in grammar checkers "AI," but I digress)
[4]: The meat industry uses more watera than generative AI.b If your gripe with AI includes land usage via building data centers, keep in mind growing animal feed is the leading cause of deforestation.c If your concern also includes worker mistreatment in training AI—well, you also know where this is going.d I find that focusing AI's footprint buries the lede when talking about climate change. Even if you say meat is “still food” you miss how resource-heavy farming and slaughtering meat is compared to protein-heavy crops like beans and lentils.a:2 I am not a vegetarian, though I try to cut out beef, it would be disingenuous and hypocritical of me to use water use as a gotcha against AI when there are other moral issues to be addressed [5]: Given that you know what you're doing and don't vibecode entire codebases for public or shared use [6]: Magnifica Humanitas (pars. 100-111) by Pope Leo XIV [7]: Stack Overflow is good and all, but programmers are fucking insufferable. I don't blame anyone who'd rather turn to a clanker to ask basic HTML questions
a: Mekonnen, Mesfin M., and Arjen Y. Hoekstra. "A global assessment of the water footprint of farm animal products." Ecosystems 15, no. 3 (2012): 401-415. b: Li, Pengfei, Jianyi Yang, Mohammad A. Islam, and Shaolei Ren. "Making AI Less Thirsty." Communications of the ACM 68, no. 7 (2025): 54-61. c: Ritchie, Hannah. “Drivers of Deforestation.” (2021). (link) d: Compa, Lance A. "Blood, sweat, and fear: Workers' rights in US meat and poultry plants." (2004).

V. Further Reading and Resources

  • “The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (link)
  • “YouTube's copyright system isn't broken. The world's is.” Tom Scott (link)
  • Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 Deed (link)
  • “What is Copyleft?” GNU (link)