Brian Thomas Clark

@btc

Strategist/Producer/Collector

Digital Experience Director @risd

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In the artist of all kinds, I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found. This might account for the fact that we cannot conceive of an artist’s coming to the end of the task that occupies his whole nature.

Caleb Crain • On Not Being Found

creativity

D.W. Winnicott

My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom... To be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel... See more

Maria Popova • Article

awareness / mindfulness and songwriting

Nick Cave on Music, Mystery, and the Relationship Between Vulnerability and Freedom

mmm.page — Your Corner of the Internet

mmm.page

websites-as-expression

In their own way, that’s what Jeff Tweedy’s songs are usually trying to do, too. They can be beautiful but they’ve also got those holes, those scars, those gaping wrecking-ball dents, all of which speak to the immense difficulty but absolute necessity of trying to make anything beautiful at all. They let off firecracker blasts that illuminate the... See more

American Curmudgeon: On Jeff Tweedy

songwriting and making-meaning

II. Process

I overheard something nice around the office a few months ago.

“ You don ’ t reach a moment of digital transformation . You just keep transforming.”

Speaks to a lot of the nature of work projects, strategy, possibly life too (it’s certainly true in therapy, minus the digital part). Essentially it’s a more clever-sounding way of saying... See more

Judgement always wins

making-meaning

Salmon Theory 12/3/21

I’m fascinated with Coppola partly because she does different things very well, something I think we all strive for. But the way she presents herself and her work walks a perfect line between highbrow and approachable, never veering too far either way. She doesn’t deny her lineage or commercial success but maintains her artistic sensibility. Not... See more

Article

taste and

If I sometimes feel like my hard drive is full, then it doesn’t matter if what I’m adding to the drive is, on its face, soothing. It’s just more stuff, more data, more things to process. By adopting my friend’s elevated standard for what’s allowed in, I decreased the number of inputs, the number of demands for thought and work and reaction I was... See more

nytimes.com • Works of Art - The New York Times

taste and

When we are grieving record stores, mixtapes, old-school romance, and friends goofing around in ‘90s high schools, what are we actually grieving? Delayed gratification. Deeper connection. Play and fun. Risk and thrill. Life with less obsessive self-scrutiny. These are things we can reclaim—if we remember what they are worth and roll back the... See more

community and belonging

Tech-enabled tl;dr certainly has a place. There’s more content than ever and most of it is too long. But when everything is mediated by a summary, layers are being built between our brains and the thing itself, allowing something else—increasingly, AI—to interpret things for us.

The Summary Edition

making-meaning and digital life—digital cultures

When we mainline takeaways, blurbs, bullets, key insights, there is something lost. We are sanding down friction, muffling voice, removing tone, and accepting pre-fabricated meaning. Will AI-driven distilling get us closer to the thing itself, or further away?

These days, it’s increasingly clear to me that we have a new overlord: the Summary. Thanks to AI, we are experiencing the enshortification (sorry, Cory Doctorow) of everything.