8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

A
BLOG
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Fail Bots

    The algorithm does not care if you succeed and in fact may want you to fail.

    Have you heard of the algorithm? We toss that term around like it has a deep history and long roots into our culture, and in some ways it might, but the algorithm itself is our newest creative barrier and one designed for the very purpose of siphoning the worth from everything you make.

    In their unchecked wisdom, the architects of our modern global communications platforms realized two things. First, they understood that the firehose of random creativity that emerged from millions of people posting to the internet was more enchanting when churned into curated maelstrom. Second, they learned there was money to be made from turning the creative efforts of those millions into a commodity labeled with the soulless term “content.” To engineer this transformation of art into corporate value they birthed complex mechanizations to sort and shuffle, scrape, churn, prune, and cultivate, all if it extracting the worth of human creativity into a storm of placid, flaccid… ugh… content.

    If you participate, that is if you make “content” then you will feed the algorithm and for a while you will feel as if you have achieved success. But rather than nurture the soul as art and creativity is meant to do, you will only enslave yourself to that mechanism.

    On the other hand, if you make things that do not fit neatly into the digital slots and grooves of the algorithm, that system will almost certainly work against you. It wants you to fail because you give it no literal value.

    But know this: you give the rest of us that value instead.

    The algorithm wants you to fail, so prove it wrong.

  • Says Who

    Not many people are going to give you permission to make something… and bluntly, you shouldn’t need it.

    Don’t get me wrong, if it is dangerous or could hurt others—be that financially, morally, physically, or personally—then you should really reconsider your creative efforts.

    But if you are out there wanting to be the one who is creating, making, and sharing, and more so, are yearning for the art of making stuff because it might result in interesting, beautiful or wonderful results, then your permission-seeking mindset might turn out to be an unnecessary barrier holding you back.

    I write about these things, I spill affirmations of this sort, precisely because I have been a permission-seeker my whole life. I am old enough now that (mostly) when I catch myself seeking such permissions I have a stern internal monologue and give myself a good talking to about submitting to those behaviours. But I get it—because that notion digs into you like a relentless infection of spirit and you may never be rid of it. All you can really do it wake up every day and remind yourself that permission will never be given, nor should it even be required.

    And I’m not giving you permission here, though it might very much seem like it. 

    Rather I am writing this to nudge you towards dismissing the very need for it.

  • Thawed Inspiration

    Spring is nigh. And I don’t know what the world looks like where you live, but where I spend my days winter is a bleak, snowy realm that hides the world under a chill blanket whence we await spring and the warmth and the inevitable thaw that comes, too.

    With thaw comes melt, plentiful puddles, and the revelation of all the things that had been covered in snow for months and months reappearing again. Often they are a caked and cruddy, sometimes little more than trash, but occasionally reminding us that there is work to be done in bringing summer to its full glory.

    People far smarter than I have been seeing metaphors in the seasons for long before I arrived and will do so long after I leave, but I will reiterate the point: spring, literal or figurative, is a time of renewal. The world, the mind, the heart, the soul— they all melt eventually and buried under the frozen realm is often surprises of once forgotten things.

    The Blankwraith may be a demon that freezes our creative selves, but even his power is subject to the thaw of inspiration. Even he tires, and ideas emerge from under the snow waiting to be brushed off and dealt with.

  • Critical Commodity

    Minding the gate are too many unworthy of the task.

    If you are a creative, and anything like me, you too often go online to see the unfiltered criticism of so many gatekeeping Shadowtrolls. Performative dismissal of the work of others has become something of a cottage industry online, an entire genre unto itself filled with dark aspirational influencers whose sole contribution is unfiltered judgement.

    Criticism is essential to any art form, but open critique meant to foster the talents of a creator who has hung their work out for public adjudication is vastly different than tearing those same offerings to shreds while glorifying the corpse of someone else’s creative efforts. Shadowtrolls feast on the pain of the latter, giving no value to the community they critique and farming adulation from those who giggle at the imperfection of others.

    Art is always imperfect. Even the rare examples that we hold up as so are also the source of flaws and must be subject to evaluation to particular tastes. 

    Criticism is inescapable, and I am not here to simply say it shouldn’t exist.

    Rather, as a creative who is among those offering our own imperfect samples to the world, that when met with the ravings of a Shadowtroll seeking to bar the path and slam the gate closed, we should do something besides hear and recoil at the critical rage. We should make our own evaluations of the source of those barriers and judgement, and discard such opinion with a ferocity met equal to the unworthy.

  • Ten Diamonds

    Jokingly I would tell people who liked my photographs that I was not so excellent at taking pictures as they suspected: after all, I only ever showed them the good pictures.

    But then it wasn’t exactly a joke, either. 

    See, I think there is a difference between expertise and amateurism, and explaining it is tangled up in my own creative efforts. I am an amateur artist, an amateur photographer, an amateur musician. And I am confident in claiming so because the difference between amateur and expert work isn’t always the output, but rather the effort required to be consistently good at the form. 

    I can make good stuff. But I am admittedly inconsistent.

    In photography I called it my one-in-ten rule: if I took ten pictures, one of them was generally pretty good. Again, I could make good stuff, just inconsistently.

    Inconsistency has a way of nipping you in the backside when you take on a gig to photograph an event, or are asked to sketch with an audience, or need to stand on a stage and play an instrument. Noodling in your basement and occasionally having a terrific night is fundamentally different from  performing on demand. One is the realm of amateurs with wisps of talent, the other is the domain of experts.

    And really. I don’t mind being the diamond in the rough, but admitting there is often much more rough than diamond is also about admitting that you can do these crafts for merely the enjoyment of them, too, and that’s not a joke at all.