You Are Real (and so is your neighbor)
sometimes we don’t know what will resonate until we share
One of my favorite things to do on the internet is fall down the rabbit-hole. Sometimes through music discovery, sometimes by looking up a strange word I recently encountered, other times by nudging the algorithm into a new area. The algorithm is lovely when you pick up something new. Suddenly, they don’t know you anymore and they have to start throwing things at you to see where you want to go.
A couple of days ago, I watched a handful of DITL of small business owners videos mixed with one chat about how to break into the art industry today (neither of which are in my normal rotation) which lead to suggestions of art studio tours, and branched off into various art themed videos.
This is when it got good.
Among the artist advice and studio tours, I found this video essay called ‘finding value in obscure art’ which meandered through art/photography/manga references I was wholly unfamiliar with and went on to describe my favorite method of music discovery, and break down those walls we put up that art has to be hard. It has to be good. It has to be perfected. The whole essay felt like the kind of encouraging talk you’d get from a friend entirely too late into the night when you really should be sleeping but you crave just a little more time to connect. It left me wanting to do something, just to try it. Highly recommend.
This lead to this video essay suggestion, The Importance of Real Things, discussing our relationship with physical media, especially books, and the not-owning of media lately. As a kid with VHS and cassettes, and so many CDs growing up (shout-out to the boys over the course of my dating years who burned music playlists for me), I felt this. This hit an interesting combination of nostalgia mixed with pragmatism and sadness. The digital world seems to have eaten the real one. It is also really creatively shot, you should watch it just for that.
One of my favorite points in that essay though was a small aside to remind us that despite the digital dystopia of social media, both parties on either side of that interaction are real people. I cringed a little thinking about how AI really muddies this water, but at the core, the internet is still capable of connecting people.
In that video, he recommends this talk given by Jack Conte at SXSW, The Death of the Follower and the Future of Creativity on the Web. Somehow I did not realize that this was the Pomplamoose guy. (IIRC, I found Pomplamoose through Ali Spagnola). It was both affirming in that I have been seeing people really struggle to connect even with their own following in the last few years, and yet remained hopeful that we won’t let the creative internet die at the hands of what’s good for the big tech algorithms.
After all of that, I felt inspired again. I felt validated in the work I’m setting out to do. It feels real and important because it is and it isn’t.
Until next time.
-Kait