Brian Thomas Clark
@btc
Strategist/Producer/Collector
Digital Experience Director @risd
Brian Thomas Clark
The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web.
Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?
By contrast, when “everything is at our fingertips” — when art is compressed into the same omnipresent and infinite digital non-time as every random piece of internet garbage — I think that we’re left feeling incomplete on some basic human level, like we’re the practitioners of a vibey old religion whose rituals were all but erased, and whose... See more
Streaming is an affront to God
making-meaning and
And so, when people valorize these kinds of outmoded media, and outmoded acts of endurance and devotion, I don’t think it’s just about empty nostalgia. Because these are touchstones and processes — precisely in their inefficiency — by which people can open themselves up to transformative experience, and honor the depth and fullness of what art means to us.
The content marketers who will have a place in the new normal will be the ones who never approached content as a product, or publishing and distribution as “output.” They think about it as a means to an end, and see content as part of a system rather than something created in a silo and optimized for search engines.
If you know enough about... See more
If you know enough about... See more
Miles Jennings • The Content Marketing Middle Class Is Dead
It’s not that anyone is forcing us to humiliate ourselves; it’s that we’ve come to equate being known with being exposed.
Humiliation Rituals
Brian Eno: why I sculpt sound : "The thrill of making music is not when you succeed in meeting the brief, but when something happens that you hadn’t expected — some moment of synergy when you put together two or three familiar things and something emerges that is much bigger, more complex and surprising. The feeling at that moment — 'now I’m... See more
Smiley Shields and Blue Noise Dithering
idea-sex and
When Elliot protests that he can’t just do nothing, he is seeing and judging himself from the perspective of a culture that looks with disdain at anything that smacks of inactivity. Under constant self-scrutiny as to whether he is being sufficiently productive, he feels ashamed when he judges himself to have come up short in this regard. But this
... See moreI do not blame anyone but myself for this. This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself. But I am looking now for software that insists I make choices rather than whispers that none are needed. I don’t want my digital life to be one shame closet after another. A new metaphor has taken hold for me: I want it to... See more
Ezra Klein • Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I’m Sorry I’m Leaving You.
Ok, here goes: I realized that the quality I value among the most highly—if not the most hightly—in an artistic collaborator is conviction. A lot of words are thrown around when it comes to creative work: trust, community, "gift" in the Lewis Hyde sense, sincerity, etc. But conviction is different—it's belief in what you are doing, being driven to... See more
Weekend Epiphany
making-meaning and taste
Joanne McNeil All My Stars Oct 11, 2022 newsletter