8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: Part 3 – Clicking In

The creative human fits into a bigger picture spanning the gamut of society, technology and tradition. The grit of creativity sometimes means grinding through external pressures and expectations, creating against the grain of the worlds in which we live and play, and existing beyond the vacuum of self.

Chapter List

  • Meta Creativity

    I blame the processors for the rise of meta creativity.

    It is us, too. It is our penchant for gossip and rubber necking at disasters, but I would argue that it wasn’t until the algorithm turned it into a cottage industry and a lucrative product that meta creative content blossomed like an algal outbreak in mountain lake through our feeds.

    Let me interject here with a definition. When I use the term “meta creative” I am referring to a genre of published media that falls somewhere in the uncanny valley between genuine creative works such as film, music, art, and literature on one end and critique-slash-analysis on the other end. In the middle there is a new variety of lazy, reactionary performance that often involves belittling, mocking, panning or otherwise pointing and laughing at (sometimes literally) the work of other people (and this is the important part) with nothing of value to add besides the raw reaction.

    Honest critique and analysis plays a vital role in creativity, and any art school grad will tell you that learning how to gather and act on genuine feedback is vital to improvement. 

    On the other hand, the kind of sloppy green screen overlay of a mocking primal reaction to something, positive or negative, serves very little besides its own self promotion and amplification on the work of others.

    It is a spectrum, of course. There is no perfect critique and there is no absolutely pointless meta creative reaction, but the algorithm certainly seems to reward the lingering gaze of any and all of us who stare a little too long at the simplistic emotional takes of reaction clips. 

    We’ve lost something for that, and I write that as both a creative soul and as grumpy old guy who knew a more supportive creative era, now passed.

    This is cross post from Of Poets & Processors.

  • Past Present

    Over and over I stumble across advice for creativity.  Heck, it’s the basis of this blog, isn’t it? Here’s what has worked for me, for others, for everyone else in the past, present and certainly will do in the future, too.

    Right?

    And the smart money, the guy who wants this site to be successful and to captivate you and to hold your attention would tell you that there are answers buried inside if you read deeply enough.

    The honest guy would tell you that creativity is just like any other job. You get out what you put in, and the effort pays off when you do the work.

    The fuzzy spaces between, though, are filled with an endless doubting void that slurps up every bit of advice, superstition, ritual, inspiration, and randomness distilled from the universe as possible.

    I’m just the guy sitting here telling you to embrace that uncertainty.

    Look at the advice.

    But also find your own way.

    Do the work.

    But embrace the chaos.

    Dig into ideas that shift your mind, body, and soul to new perspectives.

    But ride the efforts of a billion people who have gone this way before you.

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

  • Story Mistelling

    Beloved vlogbrother, Hank Green, has made or otherwise alluded to the point in a few videos[1] over the last couple years that sometimes the story is more interesting that the truth.

    Compounding this as an actual issue is that some people value the story—or the value of the story as a political tool, say—more than they value the truth.

    In other words: some people lie and invent stories to serve their own ends. Uh, no kidding, huh?

    I have written about storytelling on this site a disproportionate amount. I am planning on typing the word “storytelling” at least a few hundred more times before I stop posting here.

    So, it makes me wonder: have we reached a pivotal point in history where the art of telling stories is intertwined too dramatically and damningly to think of it anything other than as the dark side of the equation: is storytelling a tool for manipulation, lies, and propaganda?

    Well, yeah. Obviously.

    Though I don’t think Green’s point was meant to be taken as a call to abandon the ship of human tales and interesting fiction.  Instead, it was a call to vigilance.

    After all, I could theoretically bop someone on a head with the hammer and thus use it for dark deeds. I could also fix my fence with the same tool. The former use case does not mean we need to ban hammers. It means that we should teach ourselves and our children to be wary of people who bring hammers into places where hammers are not meant to be.

    In the same way we should teach ourselves and our children to be wary of fiction and stories implanted into places where they are not meant to be: politics, science, medicine, and more.

    Keep telling stories, of course. 

  • Pitch Brand

    I’m pretty sure I once missed out on an interesting job opportunity because my head froze up when the interviewer asked me if I could make his social media profile go viral.

    What does that even mean?

    I mean… I get it. He wanted a million followers. He wanted to be influential. Fame. Adoration. Social capital. He wanted to be known and heard with a notification tab that needed to be silenced lest it wake the neighbourhood.

    To me, the shy auteur and guy who values meaningful connection and measured interaction with real people, I found myself floundered by the question that came out of nowhere in the middle of a seemingly average job interview.

    They keep telling us we live in the digital era, but I often think they’ve got it wrong. We live in the influencer era: social media as invaded every aspect of every layer of our lives and we have all become no less than personal brands who spend the day crafting illusions of our lives to share into those spaces. Even choosing to not participate becomes a meaningful action, one that defines a person and commodifies their social footprint.

    Personally… I loathe it.

    But it is inescapable and pervasive—and the reality of our times.

    What’s a creative soul to do but figure out how to not get swept up in the digital river and washed away by the social networks.

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

  • Reality Thirst

    As insurmountable as the social media algorithms often seem to me, occasionally I break through for a few moments and sense the craving beyond.

    I started taking a lot of black and white photographs lately. If you are reading this post where I published it, on my blog, you may have noticed that each is accompanied by an often-unrelated black and white image. There is nothing particularly secret or hidden in the connection: I just like taking photos and was using the effort of writing here as a place to showcase some of my other (very human) work.

    As I was taking all these photos it occurred to me that I should be sharing them with others besides the handful of readers on this (very new and very obscure) blog project: so I started a fresh Instagram account, gave it a silly name, and started uploading monochrome pics, including many of the ones you can see at the top of these posts.

    Viral is the wrong word. 

    But there was certainly a gush of unprovoked interest in my photos.

    Raw. Simple. Often just fuzzy macros of textures from my yard and neighbourhood, these pics are not works of art. But neither are they slop. They are intentional snaps and observations collected from micro-adventures by yours truly. 

    And people flocked, are flocking, seem to be continuing to flock to follow and like and comment on those pictures. 

    It was a side effort that spun off from the main effort that has become orders of magnitude more public than the original. 

    People, it seems, are craving, yearning, thirsting for something real and interesting.

    This post was original posted on of poets & processors.