Welcome to the Creativity Machine

Recently, there was a study that showed that if musicians released more music they would become more recognized. There were two categories: musicians that had a signature style and musicians that were more eclectic. The increase in releases in both categories showed (at least in this study) that they would have become more recognized.

This again redounds to the idea of proper intentions, even if you're generating more work.

I like to approach my work at the deepest levels. When I go back and look at the music that I wrote pre-internet, I like the feeling of them, even if recorded on a cheap cassette 4-track. Back then, people just created music for the sake of itself. The idea of it being public was contingent upon getting a record deal, but it wasn't the primary motivation. For me, it was being involved in a creative process, where over a period of time, you'd have a body of work. But I never felt I was being creative with ulterior motives.

Back in 2010, when Arcade Fire released The Suburbs album: Butler said, “I’m not going to stop making albums because of some fad of digital distribution. The idea that you just have to make bad cheap stuff and sell it cheaply because the format changes, to me, is crazy. It’s more important than ever to me to have the artwork and the recording be as great as they can be.”

There are very few individuals whose entire body of work was good quality. We always look to Picasso, who created art every day in different media, but there are lots of artists who were as productive, and still are. But we're in a different time now. It wasn't that Picasso created the art because someone told him to do it. But he naturally got a lot of recognition and he must have liked it, and perhaps there is some degree of making art just because of the attention. Loving being loved is a human universal. If we start to get more attention we want to make more stuff and that's what shows up on social media. People that have a lot of followers can post anything and get a lot of Likes, and so more posts start coming. Personally, it just wears me down because I know that's happening and people are on the hamster wheel. Both artists and viewers and listeners have to step back, go slower and absorb the material, or at least separate the wheat from the chaff. Take film for example: you could watch films all day long and there will be some films that you would just have to flip through. As regards books, I have a lot of books that I take out of the library but that doesn't mean that I'm always reading them cover to cover. Part of the process of interacting with content is sorting it first and deciding what's interesting, even if it's you making the content.

If we start to think about our intentions as simply being a "manufacturer" of content, and making it like a machine, I think we can lose our soul in the process. I think it goes against the idea of making an artistic product. For an audience, it's deciding where there can be an "inflection point", that is, how something can affect or enhance something in our lives. As wit film, some films require more focused attention and can be more absorbing--you can't just zoom through them, but the new normal is to flip through things so as to get a better idea of what the "nectar" or ''umami'' might be.

Sometimes it might not matter what the content is--you're looking at the numbers first. Beeple already had a big social media following on Instagram before he sold a piece for $65 million. In that context, it doesn't matter what the content is. People accept it anyway, as it was the free giveaway, which ultimately happened to be the extreme opposite.

But nonetheless, creativity can be a "manufacturing" process, albeit a "cottage industry". Not everything an artist creates can be a viable entity, so we keep working on the ideas that interest us in the flow of life. The way we understand creativity now as a society is about we talk about it as a manifestation of #creativity, as opposed to plain old "creativity" before social media. I post as #creativity on social media as well. (It's the sharing the #quote thing...)

We're bombarded with all kinds of information and advice about how to lead our lives in the attention economy. But I want to know what's the core or seed of this? I'm not ready to jump on every little piece of wisdom or advice about what to do for recognition.

The cooking metaphor as a way to clarify intentions:

While I was writing this I had been watching a lecture and the speaker had used an interesting metaphor: cooking for a dinner party, as opposed to cooking for herself and her immediate family, which becomes a different "arena":

"I'm in low gear but when I feel myself losing balance, my agenda is becoming contaminated. I'm now thinking I want to make a dinner because I want something from someone. I'm cooking because I want to change their mind...now it's not in my plans to say ''come on over for a casual dinner.''..I have every intention of manipulating them. I'm always upfront: I will say to people, "I'm going to manipulate you tonight but I'm serving dinner. [It won't be the usual "come over for dinner, dress casually."]

Creating Inventory

If you're working at your own pace and with the right intentions, and not working for the #creativity machine, you can accumulate lots of objects.

I had a change of heart a couple of years ago, right around the beginning of COVID where I started to rethink objects. I didn't want to make any more objects, which was one of the reasons that I went back to making music because it doesn't create objects and you can make more of them. It creates data but it doesn't take up physical space. I think we can make too much stuff (including data). If you make a painting every week over years and years, you'll have hundreds of paintings. You might sell some of them but you can't move them all. There has to be a tamping down of the making of objects. As regards releasing more digital music, it doesn't take up a lot of space, but is taking up different kinds of psychological spaces that have to do with the focus of attention. There is also all the energy it takes to store it all on servers. (That's a long way from saving things on cassettes and floppies).

Serialization as a way to control the creation of objects

There are various techniques that I have used over the years, one of them serialization. If I'm not sure what I want to make I'll just make the next one in the series. If I was ever to restart my art-making I don't have to reinvent the wheel. I just need to create a connection point or thread between things--even in other domains--which is the central idea of the "In Sum" project--where things are connected at calendrical points, and is a way to serialize as well. This blog post was the result of a Riff in August 2021, and has a connection to the present, for example.

We have to spend some time thinking about what we really want and what our creative objectives are. For me, serialization fills the blank page or canvas with something that is structurally connected to the "parent" idea or concept, so my motivations are not to treat creativity like routine manufacturing or an attempt to game the system to pump up the numbers.

There was a video I saw the other day where Bill Gates was singing the praises of one of the books he had read that was all about numbers, metrics, and ratings. Numbers are only part of the story. Just because one number is larger than another doesn't mean we have to do those things that created the larger number. You have to simply make a system and stay within the system that you created for yourself and make some tweaks as you go along. The numbers you eventually might be concerned with is how many works you have in your entire body of work, but again, you could get into machine mode with that MO.

8/12/2021 (Edited)