8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [11] Science & Politics

The weight of representation and creating when your identity seems political.

Chapter List

  • Linked Out

    There is a flavour of professional writing which I find myself trying to avoid veering into.

    If you’ve ever been on that professional networking social media platform you know exactly what I’m talking about, those articles that talk about leadership, career growth and always seem to find a new way to write an article called what I learned about insert-business-trope-here from insert-random-life-experience-there.

    On site, those articles get lots of likes and reshares, but off site many assume it is all a lot of performative mugging, a bit vapid, and almost certainly driven by a lot of generative AI.

    So when a guy like me sits down to write a daily article on creative motivation or skill development or artistic niche hunting, it would be real easy to drift into the lane where all those aforementioned articles persist.

    That’s not my goal.  Far from it, in fact. It’s the reason I don’t pepper this site with advertising. I want to be more than that. Better than that. And in fact if I were to suggest that what I’m doing here is writing articles with that similar flavour but also with a lot more homespun sincerity and (what I’m hoping is) experiential insight then you might be closer to understanding where I’m coming from with this writing project.

    Still, the problem remains: writing optimistic micro-essays about creative pursuits is a genuine niche and one that has drawn the ire and ridicule of many who see it, when poorly or hastily done, as an disingenuous to the spirits of voice and purpose and method.

    It becomes just more slop.

    But I think I can avoid that.

    After all, just because fast food commodified and ruined the hamburger, doesn’t mean you won’t find a delicious example of one somewhere else, right?

  • Hot Toast

    I have been finding myself tired a lot lately and (without getting into the gritty politics of it) I think it has a lot to do with the state of the world these days.

    It’s a problem of multiple levels: geopolitics are nutty, local troubles are swirling, and even my own personal day-to-day struggles with identity, aging, and finding a fit in society weigh on my mind.

    Every one of these things takes up space in my brain, running in the background always, day and night, like an app that you can’t uninstall from your phone, and eating up battery life.

    By mid-afternoon I’m toast.

    We can’t escape our worlds, and one of the biggest struggles that anyone who tries to create and make and share faces today (and has probably faced through all time and history) is that we live in a society that demands a certain share of our mental battery.

    It is inescapable.

    Politics. Society. Climate. Culture. War. Famine. Economics. Life and death.

    None of us get to park our creative selves into a bubble and create outside of reality, no matter how much we might convince ourselves of the opposite.

    I don’t claim to have a strategy to deal with it, to fight the feeling of burning toast in your soul, but I do think that accepting the reality of that fact might be a big first step.

  • Creative Positive, two

    (Continued from Creative Positive)

    I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

    The darkness is insidious. It is sweet like raw sugar upon the tongue, lighting up our emotions with an ability to draw us in and feast upon our time and energy.

    You may be reading these words—all of them, the blog and every post and every image and all the adjacent works of public performative creativity that goes on around it—and pondering the purpose. 

    I have a hundred reasons to write and create and sketch and make and build and do interesting things. But I have a very short list of reasons to share: it is, yes, about money and brand and fame, of course it is, it always is—but it is also about balance. It’s about holding my little patch of digital ground against the darkness. 

    It is about creating human-made ideas and sharing them into the ocean of slop.

    It is about being a net-positive in an electronic sea of rage.

    It is about finding the good of the world and launching it back into the universe for something bigger than myself.

    So long as I have hope that the world still needs something bigger and brighter than the dim shadows of this societal chasm we seem to be traversing I will get up each morning and try my best to find something positive to make …and share.

  • Creative Positive

    I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

    Our feeds, all of them, are filled to the brim with algorithmically pushed trash.

    Some of it is important. Some of if drives awareness of injustice and tragedy. Some of it sparks action and reaction. Some of it is vital to understanding the world, society and the universe.

    But creatives have an important role to play too: positive balance. 

    It is not our jobs to join the rage.

    It is our job to balance it all out, to remind people that there is beauty in the world worth fighting for, and it is our job to maintain the flame of art and story and music and hope in a wasteland of anger and AI slop.

    It is so easy as an artist to reject the darkness of these platforms and avoid them, and I have struggled myself, even recently, trying to understand my role there.

    The way I see it? Our role is not to repost angry memes, or rant about authoritarian politics, or even rage against the machine. 

    Rather, our role, the creative’s role, is to keep playing the music of humanity in all its forms and make sure when the dawn returns there is still a bit of our humanity left to remind us why we were fighting the darkness at all.