8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [10] People & Places

How culture, opinion and truth shape the stories we tell and the art we make.

Chapter List

  • People Places

    I am writing this from within the abyss of the political dark ages of the mid twenty-twenties. 

    Nationalism is in a kind of haphazard resurgence. The media is faltering. Artificial intelligence is clouding the internet with a seemingly unlimited supply of slop and misinformation.

    It is dire.

    And artists have this important role to play: continuing to make stuff despite the inanity. 

    Despite wars. Despite clashing cultures. Despite self-dealing politicians. Despite generative algorithms pumping out dead-on-arrival content.

    And to top it all of, half of the people that could read this will discount it as the words of a man sitting across on the other side of a funhouse mirror making up a reality they disagree with. We can’t even see eye to eye on that anymore.

    Culture is opinion. Opinion is truth. And truth (whatever that might be) has always shaped the stories we tell through our words, sounds, music, and art.

    I write this very blog in competition with countless algorithms that will fight to ensure it only get seen if it generates money for a shareholder somewhere, profit for a corporate bottom line, or revenue for someone who is probably not me.

    We are humans caught up in a system and we are treading water in a creative torrent that we can barely understand. The abyss is below. The sky is above—so long as we can keep our heads above the flow of society.

    Under the category of People & Places, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Uncritical Content

    At first I was casually avoid it, but lately I’ve been actively blocking and aggressively veering my personal algorithm away from it: complaint baiting. 

    Sloppy critique often starts off as sincere criticism. I imagine so, anyhow. I would like to think that many of the types of armchair film critics and technology buffs and gaming reviewers started off with a genuine interest in doing artistic criticism.

    Rightly defined criticism and critique are invaluable aspects of the feedback loop for artists and creators. One of those difficult but important skills any artist must learn is how to take critique and learn from it without crumbling under the perception of negativity.  Good critique, after all, is not anger or dismissal or ridicule: it is important information to help someone redirect their effort and improve it on the next iteration or attempt. 

    Yet, social media has become rife with what seems to be more of something I would call complaint-driven content. It disguises itself as critique, but rather than offering insight or nudging the artist in a slightly different, presumably better direction creatively… it rails. It gripes. It complains. It mocks. It leeches off the work to make something ugly of its own that was never intended to lift or improve or offer even critical support of the original.

    I have to assume there is an audience for that, and an audience means clicks and revenue.  The capital-driven feedback loop never fails in this regard.

    I also have to assume the only recourse towards weakening its grasp on society is to each do our parts in ignoring it, blocking it, and discouraging it through our lack of attention.

  • Never Enough 

    I recently came across a social media thread that got my head churning. 

    A person whom I follow, a prolific nature photographer, had received a comment from another of his followers demanding—demanding!—that he reveal the location of the photograph. He posted screenshots of their conversation and it went pretty much exactly how one might expect a dialog between a proud creator and an entitled audience member might escalate into digital fisticuffs. 

    Such is the nature of making anything for a large audience these days, and the the online market in which we all abide merely seems to amplify it as it sends our work to the furthest reaches of culture and opinion. This, and a long list of similar reactions I’ve had personally with people online lately, illustrates a point that has been gnawing at me: you can never know what your audience expects from your art.

    In this case, the photograph was beautiful and interesting and since it was shared for free with tens of thousands of people one would have thought there should be little to complain about. In fact, one would have thought the creator had been more than generous giving away their work. But the person who complained was aggrieved and argued that the photographer was required to go one step further and provide geographic coordinates for the location of the photo.

    Why?

    Unclear.

    But I’ve seen this effect emerge with increasing frequency.

    What you believe to be generosity and quality, giving one hundred percent for very little in return is viewed as insufficient by an invisible audience.

    And you can choose to agree and shrivel at the criticism, adapt to the feedback—or just keep doing what you are doing.

  • Opinionated Facts

    My opinion is not fact.

    Elsewhere, I do a lot of writing about critical thinking and evidence-based inquiry. That is to say, I am curious about curiosity and the mechanisms by which we learn, know, and believe things to be true.

    If they are actually true is an entirely different matter, of course.

    I was watching a video the other day, a review for an audio product of some sort, and after a lot of “shoulds” and other such recommendations by the host he looked right into the camera, his voice changed tone, and he solemnly added the caveat to his entire product rant saying “…but my opinion is not fact, it’s just my opinion. Do your own research.”

    What a great thought.

    This concept of opinion versus fact too often, in my opinion, goes unsaid.

    A lot of us making and creating and sharing find it easier to do so without the burden of evidence or absolutes. We write something and then hang it out there for evaluation, all the while never adding that asterisk of self-checking: adding, perhaps that this is just an opinion, my opinion, and I stand by it, but you should make your own judgements after all. 

    This is my opinion, everything I write here, all the advice and so-called insight. My ideas. My thoughts. My scribbles. My notions, and all of it based in my singular experience. It’s not fact, unsaid as I often leave it to be.

    Take it for what it is worth. Nothing more, nothing less.

  • Right Wrong

    I want you to disagree with what you read or hear on this project.

    I’m not trying to write cozy aphorisms to make you comfortable in your creative pursuits. I want you to squirm a little when I tell you that your skills might not actually be as important as you think they are, that gates are not meant for keeping and that responding to market forces, meme-culture and focus groups are at best vapid and hollow, and at worse patronage to a soulless master.

    I want you to object. I want you to rethink. And then I want you to adjust your perspective a little bit even if you roll your eyes at my presumptive arrogance on the topic of your skill.

    If you take away anything from reading these posts or listening to my podcasts you should be a little irked that some random guy could have the gall to call your boardroom-style pursuit of personal brand and textbook-grade art and commercially viable chord progressions anything but magical. 

    Comfortable is complacent. 

    Clean is boring. 

    Perfection is the pursuit of the placid and flaccid.

    Following the rules is the domain of algorithms and what AIs now seem to do best. Not you, tho, do you?

    Wrong is more right than you want to admit, and I’m willing to punch you in the creative gut if it helps you realize that simple notion for even a few moments.