8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [02] Knots & Blocks

Unlearning what society probably taught you about talent.

Chapter List

  • For Granted

    How does one recognize one’s own biases?

    Look, society has you in a headlock, and that’s not always a bad thing. I know that I happen to live in a pretty great time and place. We have political quarrels, sure. And there is a shitload too much inequity in the world, but personally I’m wrapped up in so many layers of protective society that it is easy to take it for granted.

    But taking something for granted can have both positive and negative vibes.

    Bias comes in all forms, and this has never really been a political or a social studies project so my preference to examine it a little closer hones in on the art of it all.

    And maybe that’s the best place to start anyways: beginning with something low stakes, like how we think about art or music or photography, is a helluva lot easier on the soul than reevaluating our social, economic, and political biases, huh?

    This also isn’t an instruction manual. I’m not going to itemize how to squint your eyes at just the right angle to see a new perspective or pinch your brain down a route that let’s you outthink preconceptions. I’m merely going to suggest that bias is both insidious and abundant in most of our lives. You can probably start recognizing it if you care to look for it, and starting with low friction notions about, say, that hobby you love so much can probably make you better at recognizing and accepting bigger biases. 

    Society is a wonderful thing we built, but we’re still humans who have the power to ask questions about why we do things the way we do—and if art was meant to expand the mind of the audience, whose to say it can’t expand the mind of the artist, too? 

  • Bell Tolling 

    There is something genuinely important about pre-established patterns, of course, but I also think that the conversation should not end at a wall of conventions.

    I have been reading me some Sylvia Plath recently, specifically The Bell Jar[1], and the tragic author’s particular style caught me off guard. It was a random pick, hitting different from my normal fare, and an unexpected treat. Specifically it was so much more modern feeling than I had expected. The writing is personal, poetic and visceral, and I would suppose likely bending perceptions and expectations from a female author of that era. I was captivated.

    Now I don’t know if this rings true in the particular case of Ms. Plath but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that she was probably not following what passed for conventional patterns in fiction of the early nineteen sixties. 

    Those early years of the cultural revolutions that shook up western culture are often only visible via media artifacts and what remains of music and television and media that prevailed from that decade, particularly to those of us who missed the sixties by a decade or two.

    It is also probably the case that we remember her work not merely because it is twisted up in her personal story that ended in sadness shortly after The Bell Jar was published. 

    But too, I think, it might be that Ms. Plath broke down walls of conventions and stepped outside of the expectations of popular patterns to mark her own voice and style. I think she was probably setting trends in how her literature opened up in honesty to her readers, bending rules that had likely been finger wagged at her from the start.

    Those old styles defined an era, but styles change. None of what has come before is ever so sacred that we can’t try something new. She did.

    She would have been an artifact of that era herself, well into her nineties had she been around today, and maybe, well almost certainly, interested to see that a style she embraced, maybe even pioneered, was an inspiration and a convention itself sixty years later.

  • Banger Trap

    If there was a simple and obvious way to credit the ephemeral wisdom of random video clips that pass through ones feed in the middle of an evening doom-scroll session I might write the exact coordinates when and where this particular term crossed my screen. 

    The notion of a “banger trap” pinned down something that I had been thinking about a lot lately as I scrolled through the endless posts by countless technically excellent photographers posting their best works.

    All of those pictures of perfectly lit sunsets and amazingly hued mountain scapes and perfectly focussed wildlife glamour shots were technically awesome. Amazing. Aspirational and skilled.

    And yet they made me feel almost nothing.

    I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and my mind was on repeat saying: yup, yup, seen it, yup, lovely, yup, yup…

    They are all very skilled photographers and will likely have successful careers selling their talent and their banger content. But after seeing the same perfect photos more times than I can count and the abundance of kudos and praise? Well, it strikes me that it starts to seem like little more than a factory product, mass produced and polished.

    Instead?

    Show me something real. Show me life. Show me imperfection. Show me something I see everyday in a different way that gives me a new perspective on the mundane. Show me more than perfect.

    I get it. Showcasing our technical best work is a calling card of skill and experience, but it’s also a trap: a snare line upon which it is easy to trip and snag, that the banger is the ultimate and final stage of making great art. 

    Because I don’t think it is.

  • Knots Blocks

    How does one go about unlearning what society probably taught us about talent?

    I know from personal experience that almost everything I believe about what it means to be good at something is wrapped up in an expectation from an audience: an employer, a customer, a friend, or even a parent (reaching right back to the beginning.)

    As I write this collection of words and parse out the various topics I want to explore I realize that I have already written a lot about those very expectations and how to first recognize them and then later prioritize how much heed they should be offered.

    Even as I was sitting down to write this I had just come off a few moments of drinking some tea and scrolling through my social media feed. My favourite feed these days is a collection of photographers promoting their work. And yet noting just how rigid the conformity is within the confines of that feed has been nagging at something in my mind. Every post is some glamorously lit epic nature scene or a broody black and white bit of urban street photography or a smiling family squared into the frame with a rustic backdrop to set the mood. Kudos abounded for those posts because, yes, they were solid works of technical skill—but also, maybe, perhaps because they fit into a mold of social expectation and consumer value. 

    Are those guideposts for other to follow? Or is there something mundane lurking in aligning creative outputs with social expectations? 

    Under the category of Knots & Blocks, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Digital Analog

    Flip-flopping between digital art and physical media—and often the fuzzy spots in between—is a dichotomy of form that is something quite unique to the modern world. 

    As the fidelity of our digital tools improve many (if not most) art forms have found analogs in the digital realm: words, photography, design, sound, and sculpture to name but a few. 

    I consider myself an artist, and one who has (more recently as my access to powerful computer tech has increased) often started in the digital realm before investing in the physical tools to try my hand at the so-called real version of it.

    Why buy expensive paints when I have an app on the device I already own?

    Why purchase a space-consuming musical instrument when I can noddle on my laptop with some free software?

    But I also wonder: how has being a digital-first artist affected me? What is the effect on my approach because I have not needed to overcome that initial struggle incurred by the costs and barriers of physical media? Does the creative approach from using technology suffer because the media is more forgiving, erasable, redo-able? Is the technology a crutch or a learning tool?

    I can’t redo my approach, and honestly there are forms I would never have tried without first attempting with the safety net provided by digital modes. But what was the effect of that on my skill and my mind?