8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: creative explorations

Chapter List

  • Avant Garde

    For a strange week in April my algorithm feed was full of videos, commentary and analysis about a curious French-Canadian music duo called Angine de poitrine [1] who, it seems, have washed ashore upon the cultural zeitgeist.

    Perhaps it is merely that my endless wanderings through the musicians internet have biased my perception and have only just momentarily shone a light on this thing and I am, as usual, a few steps behind in noticing. And certainly, I am in no good position to comment with meaning on the music itself, a microtonal eruption that has been described by others as noise, dissonance, or unlistenable. 

    I quite like it—and I bought an album and added it to my everyday playlist. I’m listening to it as I write this, in fact…

    Which is all for me to say that what I may be more qualified to comment on is the creative leap that such experimental projects embody. Angine de poitrine is the doing of something that I have merely being writing and thinking about: bending the rules, creating something unique, and experimenting outside of the traditional definition of marketable, sellable, commercial art.

    Succeeding, to boot.

    And while I’ll caveat that some of that aforementioned commentary I’ve seen on the duo has (unfairly, I think) framed the effort as merely a weird marketing gimmick, I would argue that such accusations miss the point entirely: that there is a tension in the heart of every true artist, trying to stand out and do something novel while simultaneously fitting in just enough to survive in a world that values standardization and commercial viability.

    Occasionally someone figures out that balance and it is a glorious cacophony.

  • Anything New

    I never really learned to play the piano.

    That is, sure, I could jab the keys and grind out a mean Chopsticks as well as the next ten year old, and sure, we had a little keyboard propped up in our living room when I was growing up, and sure, I could poke a key or two at a time to feel out a song. But I never took lessons, never practiced scales, never learned chords, and never did anything besides fumble at the ivories.

    I have been trying to remedy that in 2026, and my days are incomplete if I haven’t sat down at the keys for at least half an hour each day.

    I recommend learning something new. Anything, really.

    Acquiring new skills can sometimes unlock a powerful ability that you never knew you were missing until you found it. A new perspective, a new way of looking at old problems, or a new bit of insight into the otherwise mundane.

    And you never really know what that will be until you try to acquire those skills.

    When I took up running I started to see the world from the perspective of footpaths and interconnected trails.

    When I learned watercolour paints I suddenly saw colours in a different way.

    Now when I get my head around the piano and chords I listen to music differently, hear the shapes of things when I watch movies, and get a bigger sense of sounds that dance around genres of music.

    Your experience will vary.  But you will experience.

  • Eyes Ears

    If you were to ask me about the most basic requirements of creativity, I may suggest that observation and awareness of the universe are about as fundamental of a skill as there is.

    We are in the middle of a weird space and time in the timeline of creative pursuit. At no other point in history has the average person been able to have access to so much inspiration, feedback and educational content. Simultaneously, society has fostered these massive generative content engines we often call artificial intelligence and are using them to churn all of that into an output that ranges from the curious and interesting to the negligent and slop-laden. 

    I doubt that there has been a time in history that equals this for the opening of eyes and ears to the complexity of what it means to create.

    And yet I also think that there is very little new—and where new does squeak through the cracks of Xeroxed regurgitation of commercialization and generative language models and social media influence it squeaks through when a person notices something interesting the piques the ineffable nuances of our brains. We observe and think and churn and ponder. And what comes out the other end may be interesting and beautiful. It may be creative. 

    At the heart of all those other things is knowing that what the ghost in the machine can accomplish is now no longer distinguishable from human skill, but that seeing and listening and feeling are a core skill yet uncaptured by an algorithm. 

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

  • Doodling Inspiration, two

    (Continued from Doodling Inspiration)

    Once I get past the idea of seeking quality in my art, I often find that doodling is a kind of meditative randomness that drives me creatively.

    Doodling is different than drawing, of course. Drawing and sketching in my mind implies an external subject, and turning what one sees into lines and colour on the page. Sketching is the act of replacing a camera with a bit of ink or pencil lead. 

    Doodling, on the other hand, is the freedom of the pen on paper to explore shapes and express notions that are mere thoughts in our own heads. It is generative. It is creation from ideation into shape and form upon a blank canvas. It is something from the intangible and ineffable. It is an outlet for our deepest minds to express themselves. 

    I have been re-reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes[1], a controversial book of pop psychological theory that speculates that consciousness arose from the conversation that happens inside our own minds between the two lobes our our brain. 

    Whether you buy it or not, its central premise of Jaynes’ book relies on the notion of two plus two equalling five: or that is to say, that the union of two things is often more than the sum of its parts. 

    In as much as my doodles combine with my fiction writing to make more than the sum of their parts, a mental creative union of something perhaps just as curious and interesting as consciousness itself, no?

  • 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.