Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
It’s hard to explain, but it was very easy to be new at that... See more
making-meaning and
We celebrate the fact that most artists today have a huge portion of humankind’s output at their fingertips at any given moment, but we rarely think about the fact that exposure and abundance can also become a paralytic. Eno said he wanted to hear a certain kind of music, so he had to invent it for himself. Who feels the need to make new music, when you can almost always call up music that is completely new to your ears?
Sometimes when I watch my 8-year-old making music, I note how unencumbered he is by musical history and how free he is of any need to be original. He is happy, for now, to make music that is a parody of what he’s heard, and in the parodying, he comes up with his own thing. It’s new to him and that’s what’s important.
In fact, this is the great gift of children: everything is new to them, and so it can become new to you, if you let it.
making-meaning and
taste and
I stand alongside Chayka in looking for strategies to pushing in the other direction. But I can’t help rolling my eyes when he talks as if it’s any kind of novelty for artists (much less “influencers”) to find their visions stymied by commercial demand. Again, one advantage of the algorithmic version may be that it’s externalized in ways that become easier to spot and critique.
subcultures and
What we get instead is what Byung-Chul Hanmhas described as an "overheating of the ego." Pure individuality through momentary identification of yourself with an aesthetic, which exhausts us by depriving us of any real conflict or difference. What we consume online amounts to a cheaply reproducible set of vague designs. There is only an endless hall of shiny standees, of potential versions of yourself you can pop your face into as you go. Take the photo. And move on. The problem with this "aesthetic," as Silcoff so candidly shows, is that it is entirely a product of the internet’s selfie culture. Offline, these relations – the social construction of identity — were once mediated by something with a bit more give and a sense of reality.