8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Tag: social media

Chapter List

  • Inside Outside

    What is creativity anyhow? I’ve been writing this blog for over eight months now and I don’t think I’ve actually sat down and written a proper definition—but is that even possible?

    Is it a good thing to be creative? Is it natural or purposeful—or maybe just an unserious pursuit?

    It’s curious though: my social media feed has picked up on the idea that I’m interested in the topic and so routinely it is peppered with bursts of commentary on creative lifestyles, both positive and negative. 

    And with many questions, I think maybe the negative jabs shine a brighter light on understanding the notion.

    Your results may vary, but my received negativity seems to shine through that little screen and mock the very idea of a middle aged guy trying to do art, learn an instrument, or write a novel. The universe, it often seems, finds the notion of artistic expression little more than a privileged extravagance for those less serious among us. 

    Why am I not feeding the gaping maw of capitalistic pursuit? Why am I not spending time earning or investing or consuming? Why am I telling stories and taking photos?

    None of this is a thing I can answer in one post, but I do know that creativity is not an idle excuse to avoid something “real” or “productive” but rather—and for most every self-defined creative person I know—foundational to who they are. It is who we are. It is the shape of our soul and the way we meet the world each day.

    All the rest of it is the mask we wear.

    Under the category of Inside & Outside I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Influence Less

    Look, it’s a blurry line between being someone who wants to make stuff and share their creativity with the world on one side and being someone who wants to be the main character of the internet on the other.

    Blurry, but not invisible.

    I personally struggle with my own identity on the modern internet. I make stuff for the joy of making it. I write stories because I feel the very human need to be a storyteller. I draw and make music and build games because I am compelled to use the half of my brain that is steeped in creative urges to do those things. 

    The tepid pool of what becomes popular for all the wrong reasons, though, is a little sad.

    I see reels that are staged or commercial or generated or simply rage bait.

    I see posts that reek of corporate pandering or identity grooming or culture shifting.

    I see profiles that are bots or resume acts or cons or worse.

    It’s all fake.

    What is to be done about those?  Nothing, maybe, but looking away and being better than that, not stooping to that grade of duplicity, treating people everywhere—your audience and the people around you in real life—with the respect they deserve. Maybe that will help a little.

    It’s old fashioned, but here’s the real:

    Be genuine. If you are out there making stuff that is fake or even whiffs of influencer-grade performance, just… don’t. Be better than that. 

  • Duty Bound 

    Reactive sharing killed my motivation for a while. 

    I was making art through a prolific period of newness. I was amped about sketching anything and everything. I was painting daily, though so little of it was anything but practice art and rough drafts.  But I was damn proud of it, and after I’d finish a piece I’d lay it out on a table and snap a pic with my phone and upload it to Instagram.

    Reactive.

    Oh sure, I got likes. Mostly from impressed family members or friends who were easily impressed by student-grade art attempts by someone they knew.

    None of of it was terrible, of course, but none of it was gallery grade either.

    I wasn’t sharing my best. 

    I was sharing everything.

    Reactive sharing.

    Draw, paint, dry, pic, post. (And sometimes I barely even waited for the dry.)

    It killed my motivation.

    Posting became performance.

    Performance became duty. 

    Passion became obligation to feed the algorithm.

    I remember going for a long walk one chilly winter evening because the pressure had built up in my heart around this sense of responsibility I felt to the dozen or so people who were liking everything I posted, and it was driving me nuts. I wasn’t even enjoying it anymore. I was walking and thinking, thinking and walking, and I decided there in the snowy streets that I was going to break the thread. I was going to stop posting art.

    I wasn’t going to stop making art, but I wasn’t going to push it out into social media because doing that part of the creative process had gotten out of hand and was ruining the joy for me.

    I still draw. I still paint. I still make something that I’m excessively proud of and I’ll post it, but I do it for the right reasons, I think, and skip the duty to perform almost entirely these days.

  • 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.