What could it mean to reimagine art not as a value or end in itself, but as a material extension of caring?

What does it mean to say that art is care?

---

You can go back to the previous installations in the adventure here:

Part 1: How Does This Possibly Make Sense?

Part 2: The Work of Art and the Art of Work

Part 3: What If No One’s Listening?

---

I’ve been working on this project for months now, exploring the idea that art can be care. I’ve also had this particular chapter waiting to get finished for months now (summer naturally pushed it to the periphery of important activities). And throughout this process I often find myself worrying that this whole thing might be a dead-end waste of energy. At times I’ve found it hard to imagine what ‘art is care’ even means, and so I wonder… Maybe it’s so hard to think about this for the simplest reason possible?

— Because it doesn’t make sense?

— Because art is simply not care, and I’m trying to get blood from a stone?

Maybe.

But, no, I don’t think so.

I think it’s hard just because it’s hard.

Some things can be hard to think about just because we don’t know how to think about them. Because their truth lies outside the regulated boundaries of our thinking paradigms. Because we are ill-equipped to frame it in a way that sees it for what it really is. Because the question pushes up against ideological barriers of our normal ways-of-knowing.

Which would suggest that it’s so hard to imagine what all this means because in order to sustain the illusions that buttress our social system we cannot be enabled to think clearly about it.

And this means its even more important to think it through.

How can we start to think outside the normal boundaries of that social illusion?

How does our ideology - our ruling social system of belief - make it hard to think about art as care?

How do art and ideology connect?

Ideology Constrains (Yes, And…)

Ideology is a fancy way of naming how a social system guides people to think and act in terms which support its established social order.

The term ‘ideology’ is loaded with the baggage of Marxist critical theory, and all the many threads of sociology, politics, and philosophy which have dealt with that tradition over the years. Marx’s use of the term ideology was politically pointed: in the most straightforward sense, ideology is how the ruling class maintains its dominance by influencing the way people think. Marx develops various formulations of this across his writing, changing emphasis depending on purposes and the eras. But here is a good general idea of what we’re getting ourselves into:

“For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”1

Ideology is when the ruling class in a society institutes a system of ideas which supports its own rule, and supports those ideas as supposedly ‘universally valid and purely rational,’ even when the form and articulation of those ideas does not in reality serve the real interests of anyone but the ruling class. A society has certain modes of belief and patterns of thinking (about property ownership, freedom, work ethic, and so on) which support its structural order (economic mechanisms, class divisions, motivational drives, and so on).

Ideology is about all the complex ways that a social system regulates and reproduces the allegiances and activities which support it. The study of ideology is a critical practice when we want to think outside the normal boundaries of the socially-assumed notion of ‘universally valid truth’ which is created by that specific social system.

Art Transforms (Yes, And…)

Enter the oft-stated ‘purpose’ of art.

Many artists propose the value of art in framework that fits right into this idea of ideology, such that art is supposed to be a special way to break through or crack up ideology.

For example, as I quoted once before in this series, Brian Eno and Bette A. say:

“In art, we try out new possible worlds and other ways of being, by paying attention to our feelings about them. Art allows us to share complicated concepts and feelings with each other. This cultural conversation opens doors to shifts – in ourselves and in society. Art shepherds change.”2

I have also already quoted Ursula K. LeGuin, beautifully articulating this same idea:

“the exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.”3

In this framework, art is something which breaks through the ideology of a specific social order to expose alternative ways of designing human culture. Art can break up a socially sanctioned set of beliefs, and expose new possibilities.

But why is it assumed that art is only for change?

Does art only transform?

Of course not. We can see examples of this everywhere all around us. Art is, as often as not, propaganda, advertising, branding, established iconography, and so. on. Art is all sorts of things to different people in different places for different purposes.

We should not assume that art exists specifically for breaking the mold, changing our assumptions, and dreaming new ideas. Couldn’t it just as well do the opposite, and serve ideology by entrenching the mold, reinvigourating our assumptions, and reinforcing old ideas?

Yes, And… (Burp.)

This notion that art is specifically counter-ideological and socially transformative just happens to be the inspirational vision that most of us (who are in a certain position within the cultures of Western modernity) want to believe. And it tends to be the idea that famous and successful artists like to propose. Probably in large part because it makes us feel good about ourselves. And this should, already, make us wary. Ideology exists precisely in the things we want to believe, the things that feel easy and obvious and clear. Perhaps this notion is a little too easy, a little too pleasing?

So let’s squash these two concepts together - art and ideology - and make something more interesting.

When artists say that ‘art transforms’ its because that’s their ideology. And this presents us with a neat little paradox.

The ideology of modern art is that it transforms the status quo, but at the same time this ideology is itself the status quo of modern art. That is, our society’s ideological belief system treats art as an act which overcomes and transforms ideology. So now we’re just caught in a loop.

To put it another way, art cannot be purely transformative. Because once you treat art as purely transformative, that belief is itself an ideological constraint which maintains the system of belief which posited it in the first place - and so it’s therefore no longer purely transformative. Can you transform the transformative character of art? Does it them become conservative, or is it still transformative when it negates its own transformativity? This is one of those paradoxes that gives you a headache pretty quickly. There’s no way out of this little loop… or is there?

It’s actually fine. Calm down. We’re gonna be okay. This is actually a “yes, and…” kind of scenario.

In this series on art and care, I’ve been saying that art is constitutive of social identity and meaning. No matter whether it’s expressing transformative or conservative passions, art works to articulate social identity. That articulation is complex, and can go in many different directions, or even in many directions at once.

Art can shepherd change, but it can also corral consistency.

It can show us that things are not permanent, not universal, not necessary. But it can also make us believe that things are permanent, universal, necessary.

Art is not just about transformation or constraint.

It is about how we articulate ourselves as beings who exist at the pressure points of transformation and constraint.

Even though we are prone to believe that ‘real art’ must probe deeper, expose ideology, and shepherd change, art just as often does the opposite – it shines the surface, it entrenches ideology, and protects against change. And even more importantly - actually, it’s always doing both. Even if it is provoking critique and shepherding change, it has to shepherd that change into something else.

Whenever we unravel the ideology that we wear, we are also re-knitting those threads into some new coat.

So let’s talk more about ideology.

We must think of art as more than purely transformative, and we must likewise liberate ideology from being purely restrictive. Ideology is not something only ‘the system’ does – it’s something all social systems do. It’s not just The Man. It’s human.

Ideology is not just about what holds us in chains.

It is about what holds us.

In Marx’s work, the concept of ideology was more explicitly about aiming a critical arrow at the ruling system. And the ruling system has a certain privileged position in ideological analysis, because it has a huge established structure to support it. So it’s a big target. It’s easy to hit. But when we abstract and generalize the theoretical concept, we can easily come to see that any system which rules a certain community of humans will present ideas which serve and support its own system with “the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”

Ideology may be most prominent, most obvious, most noticeable in the ruling ideology, but that’s not where it ends. Ideology is in every nook and cranny of human cultural organization, at every level of culture and subculture and subsubculture. We have to turn the critical power of the concept around and see that there is ideology in any social system, including whatever version we wish to institute instead of the ruling system we are currently criticizing and hoping to transform.

Art and ideology share this form: they are not either/or progressive or conservative, liberating or constraining. They are constitutive of that dichotomy itself.

Art and ideology are expressions of the human capacity to live in a dynamic tension between those poles.

Both art and ideology are (at least) two-sided: Janus-faced, folded curtains, whiplash masks, stretched elastic bands. And this is duality of tension is also actually a bad metaphor, because it’s even not really dual-sided, as much as its multifaceted. It doesn’t have to be neatly arranged on one side or the other. Art and ideology are concepts which we can use to explain how human social systems create, define, regulate their cultural identity in a complex dance of liberty and constraint, progress and conservation. An act of art or ideology can be many things at once, or different things at different times, have different flavours and powers depending on who articulates them, when, where, for what purposes, and according to what you’ve had for lunch.

Burp.

Clarity Needs a Clearing

I hope I am spouting all of this philosophical claptrap for a good reason.

I’m trying to make it so that thinking of art and ideology in the same terms shouldn’t seem strange or scary.

Art and ideology sustain the illusions that buttress our social system, disabling us from thinking clearly about certain things. But also, on the flip side, they also drive the illusions which dispel those other illusions, enabling us to think clearly about certain things.

Art and ideology are the lens through which we learn to see the world, make judgments, process emotions, articulate choices, and dream. Art and ideology define what we see as clear.

Now, nothing in reality is actually clear.

That is, ‘clear’ as in clear-cut, obvious, simple, completely defined, distinct, independently and self-sufficiently true.

The ‘real world’ (somewhere beyond our perceptual projections and constrictions) is infinitely complex in every detail. There is no essentially smallest atom, and there is nothing that can ever count as ‘the biggest.’ Nothing has a fundamental identity. It’s all in complex flux. Nothing is at all ‘clear.’

We only think that things are clear when they fit easily with our preconceptions, our expected mental frameworks, the systems of our social ideas. When an experience or idea does fit nicely into the molds that we have prepared to define it, then this is the feeling we get of ‘truth’ - when something is seemingly ‘obvious.’ So the feeling, the experience of truth is not when we ‘match up’ with reality, when we find a way to explain and define something out there in it’s completeness. That is actually impossible. Because ‘out there’ nothing is complete, everything is a flux of connections and forces and bonds and attractions and explosions and so on. When we find something that feels true its because we have managed to expel or restrict some of those inherent real complexities, to bracket them and set them aside from affecting how we perceive and understand the event in question. Truth is an experience of subtraction - we’ve removed enough of the real complexities to render the event knowable according to those limitations.

For example, we know from psychological research that our conscious sensory perception of life - what we think about and recognize that we see, hear, smell, taste, touch - is only a small part of what we actually take in from our sense - that the majority of sense data is automatically and unconsciously filtered based on expectations about salience, reward/danger calculations, and that the experience as we perceive it has had all that stuff filtered out of it. We are simply incapable of processing everything. We don’t have the power for that. And why would we? What’s the point? The point is life. And life has a job to do. Our practical life experience of the world is a matter of utilitarian functions which remove most of the actual complexities from our concern, so that we can understand and act only on the things that ‘matter’ to us.

This is how truth comes to us.

Truth in conscious experience is always less than reality.4 And this likely seems upside down. We normally think of truth as ‘revealing’ something, as seeing more into reality, in a way that ‘penetrates’ or ‘goes deeper’ or ‘expands’ on the clarity of what is really there in the world. I’m saying that life does not process that way. Actually, when we define something as truth, as relevant and important to our living actions, it’s the result of processing which has filtered out most of reality, to the point where what is left is clearly defined because everything else as been removed. Which is why I’m saying that truth is less than reality - specific truths require boundaries to function. They count as true only if you create a specific space in which the actually infinite variables of reality are limited down to a small set of specifically salient action-related concerns.

We cut and filter truth out of reality. Reality is actually the ultimate mess. Clarity not actually out there, it’s an intervention - it’s what we get when we’ve reduced reality down to what we deem important for acting in the present moment.

We have to make space for truth to exist, we have to clear out the complexity and defend it from the grappling jungle of contradictions that surrounds it. When ideas and feelings are clear, it’s because a clearing has been made and maintained for them. Because they have been willfully cut out and defended from all the everything that continues to surround it.

You Can’t See Your Own Eyes

Okay, so all of this is relevant, I hope. I’m trying to say that this is how art and ideology work: they are an act of clearing-away, so that something can become clear.

Ideologies are the clearings in which ideas can grow.

The metaphor of an actual clearing in a forest plays out well in many ways here. For one important point, it makes explicit that the clearing is an ongoing activity. If you stop clearing, the forest around you. will slowly encroach and fill the clearing back in. Ideology must continuously operate to maintain what seems like more of the same. It also helps to express that ideas are extremely specialized to their specific environments. They cannot likely survive outside of the spaces that have been cleared for them. For an idea to survive at all, it requires the space created by the act of clearing.

Art is a means of opening these clearings, and of tending their edges to keep them open.

Art-Ideology is the socio-political dimension of human societies, upon which we base what we deem clear, obvious, truthful. Human cultures are specific ways of carving out clarity in this way - the action of carving away complexity to define the truths that will guide a certain way of acting in the world. Art and ideology accomplish this act of clearing. And, like I’ve been arguing, they can both/either conserve a current system of social truths or transform that system and try to move away from its core coordinating parameters. They can open up new clearings and they can close down old clearings. They can resist new clearings and maintain old clearings.

Previously in this art and care series I developed an idea in which art and work are bonded, such that they both perform human functions of manipulating the world and ourselves. Ideology provides us with a new concept to articulate that bond more elaborately. There is always an ideological language in how a human society uses the technology it has invented to transform the material world into workable form and to transform cultural identity into thinkable form.

We think and act through the ideology we live by. Which is why we cannot see it or know it. It defines what we see and how we know. In this sense, ideology is not a system imposed overtop of ‘natural’ human desires. Ideology is natural to human desires. It is a system of generating human desires. It’s not the regulations that stop us from getting what we want; it’s the regulations that define what we want.

It is the clearing, in which things can be clear.

Ideology is what makes certain ideas feel clear, but which itself cannot be clear.

Ideology is the part of our social-cognitive system that we cannot understand clearly, but which enables us to feel clear about the things we believe.

Slavoj Žižek elaborates extensively on this concept in his classic The Sublime Object of Ideology, where he argues that the “ideological is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence.”5

Ideology is a part of consciousness which enables knowing, but which cannot itself be known. Ideology is the obscure basis of knowledge which makes things clear.

You see everything with your eyes, but you cannot see your eyes.

Ideology is the blindspot in your retina where the optic nerve sits, to send signals to your brain. They supply the ultimate form of the information you receive from your vision, but they also create a gap in the network. You cannot see there, the rest of your field of vision compensates and fills in the gap.

The parts of ourselves we cannot know are the generative components. Like the optic nerve, it’s where the actual information gets assembled and articulated that we lose our sight. Without the optic nerve blindspot, we would receive no visual information. Ideology is those blindspots: the places where we lose our sight, but which are also constitutive of the capacity to see at all.6

Creativity as a ‘Value In Itself’

After elaborating these ideas, I find it easier to critically analyze the common notion that art is anti-ideological - that art is about transformation and change, unravelling the expected, and challenging institutional beliefs. We can now trace how this idea of art can actually be the opposite, and work as a mechanism of ideological defence (and I’m stressing that it can be that, not that it must under all circumstances). Something that tends the current clearing of modernist capitalist art-making, and won’t let our ideas out of it.

It’s easy for us to think of art as a kind of anti-ideological practice, as a way of undoing ideology or breaking free from it - a way that we can set off on. new paths into the surrounding forest. But there’s something to be wary about in the ease, the presumptuousness about its natural truthfulness, the seeming clarity with which we want to believe in this notion of art. This sense of clarity it suggests that, actually, we’re still in the same clearing.

The simplicity and seemingly obvious clarity of it should be a warning sign that it is a deeply ideological concept.

Art may be partly this kind of anti-ideological act, indeed. But it’s critical that we don’t also forget that ideology lives in our wants and desires. So when we start to name these things in ourselves, and in our own wants and desires, that’s when we might find paths leading away from this clearing. The fact that it also tends to be deployed when we want to feel good about ourselves is another sign. It presents us with pleasure, it defines our desires. It’s alluring. Fantasies and delusions must be alluring to work.

We see with our eye, but we cannot see our eye.

We know with our I, but we cannot know our I.

Finding the ideology in art is not seeing what is there in front of us, or clarifying “what the art is actually truly about.” Because, remember, if every truth is a clearing, then there is no ‘what art is actually about,’ it’s all clearings which strip away complexity until the idea fits a specific opening.

Ideological analysis in art is asking:

What things seem so clear to us that they cannot be inspected without ruining the clearing which holds them? — Question those things.

What clearing makes this art clear?

What eye is needed to see in this way?

What I is needed to know in this way?

I’ve gone through so much of this theoretical backdrop because I had to articulate this for myself, before moving forward with my project. I started to ask myself why it could be hard to think about art as care, and why we tend to resist this idea? Especially, why would artists themselves resist the idea? Why do I, myself, resist this idea?

What might it be in our own beliefs, in our own driving ideals and ideas, which holds away the practices which would develop art as care? What is it about what we already believe in, in how we see or hear, that creates barriers?

The answer to that is partly about what we take for granted as meaningful art. And that is to say, the ideology which makes a clearing for our accepted truths about what creativity and art are, what they are for, and what value they bring into our lives.

What is it that we take for a value or end in itself? When we name that, we’ve find an ideological generative core.

Samuel W. Franklin’s study of the “surprisingly recent history of creativity” helps immensely to open up this question. Franklin argues that the idea of creativity which our culture currently holds is a relatively new invention developed in large part for the sake of expanding post-WWII American business.

Franklin summarizes his argument nicely:

“In its many splendors — playful yet profitable, extraordinary yet universally human, the driver of human progress and the thing that will save us from it — creativity is something of a cult object, something we project all of our desires and anxieties onto, imbued with almost mystical powers, and beyond rebuke. In our divided times, one of the most amazing things about creativity is that nobody ever says anything bad about it. Virtually all of us are members of this cult of creativity. Kindergarten teachers, mayors, CEOs, designers, engineers, activists, and starving artists, we all basically agree creativity is a good thing and that we should have more of it.”

This representation really fits with the concepts of ideology I’m developing here - this sense that creativity is a cult object, that holds our desires and anxieties, once nobody ever says anything bad about it. It becomes the container which clears away a space in which we live, in which we are enabled to take certain things as clear, obvious, and true. As Franklin asserts, among the many potential candidates for ideas that may count as truly ideologically essential to Capitalist society, creativity is a frontrunner.

Values that are accepted as an end in themselves are the ideas that do the clearing. They are the eye that we see with, the I that we think with.

When the common notion of creativity tells us that art is a ‘transcending anti-ideological force which is used to break free,’ there is a contradiction in that: because breaking-free onto new paths is also a mechanism of tending the current ideological clearing, rather than offering new paths out from it.

What happens when ‘breaking-free’ is the means of ‘reinforcing the system’?

When transcending and overcoming is the process of conserving and solidifying?

It’s like breaking out onto new paths that only end up circling back to the same clearing.

There’s this sense in which seeing creativity as purely ‘breaking boundaries and inventing newness’ is an idolize form of how Capitalism works - the endless growth cycle which requires only ever looking forward, reinvesting, producing something new to carry capital to the next cycle, and doing it all over again at increasingly breakneck spiral speed. When we conceive of creativity, and the inherent value of art, as solely based on a model of ‘endless overcoming,’ it plays out as an ideological investment in the Capitalist doom machine.

It’s hard to criticize these things because they underpin the very ground we stand on as ‘creatives.’ They represent some of the ways that creativity is treated as a “value and end in itself.” I kind of don’t want to criticize them, I struggle with it, because I realize that I am deeply invested in these values myself. This is why its so hard. This is what makes a lot of it seem ‘wrong.’ But I also want to expand our capacity to tear down this death-machine and build something else. I’ve critiqued the concepts of creativity and art extensively in other recent writing, noting that art which can be produced for sale is a very recent invention and does not naturally capture the large majority of how humans have practiced creative art-making throughout time-immemorial. Tearing the value of art away from the idol of Capitalist creativity requires us to revisit some core beliefs and values we have about ourselves and our worth in this world. Like dealing with climate change before its too late, this is scary because it requires reorganizing our entire way of life. And like dealing with climate change before it’s too late, it’s also entirely and immediately necessary.

What Would Abraham Do?

So in the next sections of this series of essays, I will start to go into more detail about how the ideology of art affects our ability to create art as care (I think I keep saying that every time, it’s bound to be true eventually).

I’m trying to work out how I think about these things, on the go, and it keeps getting me wrapped up in theoretical tailspins. This chapter on the meaning of ideology was necessary, for me, just because I need to this be not only a critique of the ruling ideas, not only a criticism of the cage we’re living in. We have to acknowledge that we live through the cage; that the cage is an engine; that we must equally criticize our own beliefs, the ones that we think we are unleashing as an honest counterattack to the ruling ideology.

Reframing art to include care, community, and connection requires this kind of ideological self-critique. There are blocks and barriers that capitalist modernity has erected, which cripple the economic, social, and psychological capacity to enact art as care. It’s a challenge to identify and extract ourselves from those systems: like criticizing the propensity we share to treat creativity as an essentially good end or value in itself.

I’m tempted to say that I know what to say. I’m tempted to spout off on the most brazen of possible paths, just for the sake of seeing where it goes. What would it mean to say that creativity is actually the main blockage here? Maybe our idea of creativity is itself the bulwark of an ideological system which resists the really necessary move away from the individual, away from the productive logics, away from the application of art as consumer production, away from the cancerous death-spiral of infinite Capitalist growth?

But really, of course, it’s complicated. And I don’t actually know. I think what actually happens, in the midst of the cosmic complexity, is that there are many ways we prune the hedges around our clearings at the same time as we start off on little trailblazing excursions. We tend the edges of what we hold to be clear, and we poke holes in its boundaries at the same time. Living on the borderlands, at the edges, may be the place where creativity is born.

Maybe it’s not a full-on sacrifice. Maybe it just takes loosening that clarity, accepting it’s not totally clear one way or the other, to begin drawing paths out into the bush.

Maybe.

God has never asked me to sacrifice what is most precious.

And it might be too easy to sidestep the challenge by saying ‘it depends’ and ‘it’s complicated.’

I don’t know.

I don’t want to sell a new cure. I don’t want to write the book that everyone should thump on. That’s just acting in the old clearing. I want to, instead, take the potentially more humble move, the more honest move, the more hopeful move - and just ask for help.

I want to do this with others.

I want people to get up and start making paths together.

Through caring about art that is care.

Because (of course, it makes sense)… the only way to do it is to do it.

The means articulate the ends.

You can go back to the two previous installations in the adventure here:

Part 1: How Does This Possibly Make Sense?

Part 2: The Work of Art and the Art of Work

Part 3: What if No One’s Listening?

In Part 2 of this series I set out an idea that technology has a dual nature: technology does work, and at the same time it also always does art. The work is aimed at accomplishing material transformations to serve human needs; the art is aimed at accomplishing social transformations to serve human needs. The work is aimed ‘out,’ the art is aimed ‘in.’

Technology is our capacity to re/design ourselves through art at the same time as we re/design the world through work. The bond between work and art, through technology, means that a particular system of symbolic culture matches with a particular system of productive economy. There is a direct connection between how/why we manipulate the world and how/why we coordinate ourselves. This is an essential dynamic of being human.

Homo Faber = Creare Hominem.

Technology is social and society is technological.

In this frame of reference, ‘care’ is essential to art because art is socially oriented, a form of human communication as interactive self-design. At this stage, I’m not making a value statement about whether or not we should be caring about each other, or if we should be more or less caring in our work and art practices. I do think we should, but that’s a separate part of my argument. Here I’m saying that art has care built into it, in the fundamental sense that it must be oriented as a communication with other people.

Art fundamentally cares about other people - it cares what they think and feel, it cares how they react and respond, and it creates bonds of care between humans by linking them together in these shared feelings and thoughts and reactions and responses.

This is an interesting point in itself, because it suggests some shifts in emphasis for certain ideals we have about art-making.

To elaborate a little, lets consider the commonly held notion that true art is made for the artist’s own satisfaction, and it shouldn’t matter if anyone else cares or approves of it.

“Would you still make music if no one was ever going to listen?”

You likely have heard this one before. It’s usually posed as a way to encourage people to do what they ‘really want,’ rather than worry about how others will receive it. We are very socially conscious, and it can often get in the way of finding our ‘true voice.’ And validation from others can sometimes eclipse the real passion of doing art for its own joy.

I used to think of this question as a clear test of whether someone is really doing it for the art, or whether they’re doing it for some other social reason like status, attention, money, etc...

And that’s how people usually read it, I think.

In a recent Substack post The Great Conversation, Klinger brings this old question into the context of talking about art as a conversation, in terms very aligned with how I’m talking here, saying:

“We create art to get a reaction - to impress, to please, to shock, to inspire, to provoke thought. This is another sense in which creation is inextricably linked to reception. Not only does the audience care about the artist, but also the other way round.

At its core, art is a form of conversation.”1

If we are thinking about what it means to conceive of art as a ‘conversation’, it occurs to me that:

A speaker (who can also listen) without a listener (who can also speak) is not a conversation.

It’s possible that the urge to be heard is more about the need for communication than it is about the need for validation.

When we put so much emphasis on receiving validation from people listening. Or the opposite, on trying not to worry about that validation. Either way we’re riding the same pendulum. This idea relies on a sense of art where value is produced by the artist, and must ‘find its end’ in the consumer. It’s locked into a one-way conception of art as self-expression which creates a consumer product. When you’re applying technology toward instrumental ends, or when you’re producing and selling a product. You act on the world, not with it. You market it at people, not with them. The production of value is a one-way street. The self is expressed, and the other is a passive consumer.

But if it’s art acting towards human relations, then the arrow goes both ways, and the source of it can no longer be situated in a single self. There is a return journey of artistic expression because art is a practice of communication with humans, and essentially involved in establishing human connection and togetherness. The Other is not a passive consumer, but is also part of the expression. The very nature of it is social, connected. Art does not start from a subject, it starts from a relationship, from the conversation in between people.

Klinger and I are in sync with Ursula LeGuin on this:

“Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.”2

If, as I am claiming here, art is essentially communication, and cannot be otherwise, then the reception of the message is just as important as its creation. There is no communication without a two-way engagement. A signal and a receiver who can signal back and be received. There must be a relationship.

From this perspective, the idea that “we shouldn’t care about how our music is being listened to” no longer feels like a good test of whether someone counts as a ‘true artist’… does it?

Making music even if no one listens is cutting away half the equation of art. If art has care built into it - through the essence of its social-political nature as communicative social identity construction - then it’s not art if it’s not a conversation.

Conversation has to be part of it. Music that no one hears is fundamentally not art.

Caring about a listener happens because art has a relationship at its core.

LeGuin again:

“When you speak a word to a listener, the speaking is an act. And it is a mutual act: the listener’s listening enables the speaker’s speaking. It is a shared event, intersubjective: the listener and speaker entrain with each other.”3

Looking at the influence of social media and AI-generated art is illuminating here. It kinda feels like ‘speaking without a listener’ when we post and chat into the void of social media. The sense that our art has to find validation and valuation through other people’s approval is indeed damaging in the context where our society atomizes us, slices us away from embodied community bonding, and assures us that our art is purely about ‘self-expression.’ If art is only about ‘self-expression,’ and those expressions don’t impress anyone, then it certainly feels like a deflating failure.

Sending a signal out into deep space and never expecting anyone to hear it just doesn’t feel like satisfying artistic action. Making a thousand songs and posting them straight into the void of the internet is very unsatisfying. If anything, it has a negative effect on the sense of social connection. It makes people feel even more lonely, even more disempowered. If the function of art is to have an impact on the social world around us, then we need responsible listeners, response-able listeners. People who react not just by absorbing, but by responding in return. Expression that elicits expression. It’s not enough to have the one self-expressed, that expression has to reach something, it has to make an impression for it to even count as expression.

I’ll come back more to a critique of Capitalist society and the idolization of self-expression in future sections of this series. Stay tuned for more on that. For now, I want ot keep on a narrower track. I’m trying to flip the script on this common saying.

My point is that we must care about whether other people care about our art. It’s important and naturally human of us to do so. And it means that we should stop berating ourselves for wanting to find a social home for our artistic activities. It also means we probably need to reframe our economic understanding of art-making to do that well.

It’s really very inhuman to try to speak without caring about being listened to. Only robots can do that. It’s only AI that actually is capable of making music and not caring whether anyone listens. A software program does not care about what people think of its art-product (at least not as far as we know, and likely not in the same way, in any case).

Making music without caring who listens is only something that bots can accomplish. And when you think of it like this, the saying flips instantly from inspirational to cautionary.

It’s worth also noting that even the maker themself is a listener. There’s a communicative relationship between myself and I. We’re more than singular, even when we’re by ourselves. Humans are made of social relationships, inside and out. I speak and listen inside my own head, and this is basically thinking. So there is always a listener, it’s just that the listener might also be only yourself and the conversation that happens within art might be only speaking and listening amongst yourselves. That can be enough.

Even if it’s a distraction to the art, and even when it’s a detriment to the well-being of the artist, caring about what other people think is a specifically human aspect of art-making.

Probably the lesson here is that trying to find personal validation from consumers is not a great plan for your artistic happiness or integrity, but trying to find a community to share your art with, and to engage with in conversation - that’s absolutely essential.

Art needs a human receiver, because it is a conversation. It requires mutual reactivity.

It’s inescapable, and we only do ourselves a disservice when we pretend otherwise.

So I think we’ve got this saying completely backwards.

The answer to the question

‘Would you still make music if no one was ever going to listen?’

should actually be no.

And I’m not even saying that you shouldn’t make music if no one is listening. I’m saying you can’t make music if no one is listening. You would not make the music if no one could listen to it (and ‘no one’ also includes yourself), because if you lost the listener how would you even know it was music?

The question now also, interestingly, makes the same kind of sense when you invert it.

Would you still make music if you yourself could never listen to it?

If I couldn’t gawk at my own productions, and feel self-satisfied about having ‘expressed myself,’ if I couldn’t look into the artistic mirror and feel pride at my own creative powers, then what would it still be worth to me?

Would I make it even if I were not able to identify with it?

Would I do it, even if it wasn’t something that could be made?

What if I completely forgot I had created it?

What’s is it worth if it’s not ever mine?

What if it’s all for the listener?

Moving forward, the definition of art-as-care that I am slowly building up can now apply this particular claim about human nature - that art has to care about its reception, since it is a social communication.

So this is a foundation. An anthropological claim about the nature of humanity. People have to work together on things that they care about, with people they care about.

Art must care what others think and feel about it, since that is its very purpose - to affect how people think and feel as a group. If art has no social influence, then it isn’t doing what art was developed to do. And then it isn’t art.

We’ll see where that takes us next.

Next Chapter — Part 4: Creativity and Ideology “...Not as a Value or End In Itself.."

1

Klinger

The Great Conversation

Dear Reader…

Read more

4 months ago · 7 likes · 9 comments · Klinger

…makes music…

…writes about music and creativity…

…provides professional audio mixing and mastering services…

Subscribe now

On July 25, 2025, at Neys Beach on the north shore of Gitchigami, Lake Superior, the sunset was smokey. I was there, in that place and time.

This music is that place and time.

BANDCAMP - SPOTIFY - YOUTUBE MUSIC - APPLE MUSIC - DEEZER

Do Not Settle for Music as a Commodity

We forget that music is an event, at its root. It’s a happening. People do it together in a moment, a place and time. It’s not an enduring thing. It’s a passing experience. We forget this because we live in an economy that has privileged the recorded music as a consumer product. We forget this because so much of our modern music economy focuses on recorded music as a commodity.

A commodity is a product made for sale in a market, where its value is measured in terms of what it can be exchanged for compared to other things for sale in the market.

So what happens when we start to treat music as a commodity?

When we engage primarily with music in this format of a commodity, we unchain music from specific event in a place and time. The music has become a thing - a vinyl record, a compact disc, a tape cassette, a streaming app. When I press play the same thing happens every time. You can go back to the same thing again and again, scrutinize every detail, extract every iota of interest from it.

The record is eternal. The event is ephemeral.

Commodities tend towards standardization, interchangeability, and universalization. A record, by its very nature, inherently leans into these qualities of commodification. It takes a unique and immediate human musical event and transforms it into a product which is standardized, interchangeable, and universal, and exchangeable on the market to anyone, everywhere, anytime. You can exchange a record for something else of market-equivalent value. But you cannot exchange an event. You can exchange the recording, but not the performance.

A record may be essentially a commodity, but all records are not made and shared the same way. If we lean in to the commodity form, we tend more and more towards those features of standardization, interchangeability, and universalization. We can find this, for example, very clearly on display in a playlist slot which can be filled with any ‘lo-fi study beat’ that meets the genre standard, at the lowest cost. Like Joel Gouveia writes, streaming services tend to make people treat music like tap water, a utility which becomes a devalued background expectation or baseline standard of living. For the purposes of the playlist, one lo-fi study beat that keeps people listening is just as good as another. Once the song is ‘up to standard’, they’re all basically the same universal representation of the format. All that matters is the global brand consistency and retention rate of the playlist itself.

The modern playlist is truly the kind of ‘ambient’ music that works like junk food. One kit-kat candy bar is as good as another. And you’ll find the same candy bar everywhere, in every store across North America. They’re universalized, standardized, accessible, mass producible, repeatable, commodified. At least you know what you’re going to get, we tell ourselves. This is the ultimate economic goal in North American culture in particular, I feel; but it’s also an inherent logical drive of Capitalist economic production in general. Grow and standardize until we have a million choices between essentially the same thing.

All the way on the extreme far end of this spectrum we can find AI-generated music - where there never was an event at all, and the music is pure product. And all the way at the far other end, some kind of event that cannot be captured - a melody arriving from inside a dream, the intimacy of a love song to your newborn baby, an ecstatic trance dance that no one can even remember. That kind of stuff.

So from one end to the other, there are varying intensities of commodified logic at play within any particular record, and within the delivery systems we use, and in how we engage with each other while consuming them, and the cultures surrounding them, and so on. We can lean in… kit-kat lo-fi beats 4-eva. But we can also lean out. Trance dream lullabys 4-neva.

I’m asking: how we can identify and subvert the logics of commodification in music, wherever we can?

Does ambient music offer any special ways to lean out?

Ambient Music is Place and Time

People often think of ambient music as boring clichéd sonic wallpaper, as mood setting kit-kat playlist atmosphere. It can be, when it leans into its standardized, interchangeable, universalized commodified dried-up slop. But there can also be a lot more to it than that.

Ambient music isn’t supposed to just be background. It’s an approach to music that brings the background forward, that augments the setting, that highlights the container of place and time in which events can happen.

Let’s analogize this a bit. Let’s say you are watching a film. There are characters doing things, striving for goals, encountering conflicts, and so on. When you watch that film you probably mostly focus on the characters doing things. The characters and their actions happen in places and across time, but you don’t really pay close attention to those places and the passage of time. The same can be said of music. Most music has characters up front - melodies, lyrics, structural progressions, and so on. You pay attention to these things as they go by, through the place and time that they exist within. You’re not paying specific attention to the places and times.

Now imagine watching a film with no characters. Just panning shots of a room, a beach, a road. A close-up dialogue of a wall, where a talking head is not. Rapid fire action cuts, with no fighters. Ambient music is music without the characters - no demanding stars, no structural progressions, no melodies and lyrics (more or less… it depends, of course). Now you have no choice but to pay attention to the time and place that is still there, once all the characters and their actions have been removed from the scene.

Ambient music is not just happening in a space and time, it is the space and time where it happens. It’s like getting rid of the characters and then having to watch an empty stage. What do you notice then?

It doesn’t ‘have a container,’ like it happens ‘in a place and time.’

It is a container, it is a feature of the place and time.

This framework is one way to shift the emphases of commodification (or, at least it can be). It inspires the music to be un-standardizable, non-interchangeable, and non-universalizable. Wild, worthless, and specific. It is trying to not be a ‘thing.’ This is not to say that it is not a record, not a commodity like any other music. It’s just to emphasize that there is a certain value in the philosophy which actively resists the logic and sense of commodified artistry. That’s important to me, anyways. Lean out.

Ambient Music is Eventfulness

We can think of an event as a lived experience happening in a time and place. A record is not a real event. It can only represent an event. But by offering a representation, the record can catalyze a new event - when a listener experiences listening to the representation. Any record can catalyze new events, and all records hope to do this. But ambient music has a specific approach.

Ambient music emphasizes the eventfulness in a record in a special way. It’s not presenting an event, to observe and consume, it’s emphasizing eventfulness as an opportunity. You, the listener, are invited to fill the place and time presented to you with your experience of it. You are the ingredient that fulfills the eventfulness of the place and time.

Again, to develop the analogy, we can think of it like a stage, set for a play, but there are no actors. The empty stage invites. What if we get up and explore the stage, poke around, discover the space for ourselves, in our own time? By clearing out the main musical characters and plot structures from its format, ambient music does something like this. When ambient music presents a time and place ‘without characters’ it’s like setting the stage, clearing the space, for an experience to fill it and make it an event. When there are no characters in the music, we cannot sit back and observe the story. Instead, the music invites the listener into the song, like entering its space.

Ambient music recognizes music as an event that has a time and place to it, and makes that condition into both 1) an artistic principle when creating the music; and 2) an audible feature of the music.

This is a special way that the ideals and approaches of ambient music work to emphasize (even within the confines of the recorded musical product) a fidelity to eventfulness, a way of bringing forward time and place as essential to the music itself, offering an ephemeral experience even within the confines of recorded music as a commodity.

Field Recording as a Conversation with Time and Place

The sound of squeaking sneakers. The hideous scrape a trolley wheels. The hiss and bustle of a commute. The crackling unintelligibility of echoing loudspeaker voices. The chirp of trees. The drip drip of a light spring rain. The burble and fizzle of a lazy brook. The distant hum of the earth.

One of the time-honoured tropes in ambient music is building songs with field recording: taking a microphone out into the world, and bringing back a document of time and a place which will serve as an integral part of the composition.

What are we actually doing, artistically, when we do that?

Do I ‘use’ the field recording? Do I adorn with it? Do I overlay it? Do I chop it up and repurpose it? Do I follow along with it?

I’m sure people have many different idiosyncratic techniques, reasons, and approaches to this. I personally like to engage with field recording as a way to make sure that place and time becoe specific in the music. It anchors that element of amibent music which we’ve already discussed.

I also do it to make sure that it’s not just me in my music. I want outside influences, I want dialogue. I try to treat the sound as a collaborator. I’m playing with it, playing along with it. I try to treat the sounds of the recording, the place and the space captured over a specific period of time, as a live partner. I want the field recording to bring me into a place where I cannot simply use it, or apply it, but where I have to take the posture of an improvisor playing in real-time conversation with others.

I find this stance alluring because it is one way to treat the act of making solo recorded music as more social, as involving care. It forces me to listen to something other than myself. I’m listening to it, and responding - which makes it impossible to retreat into pure self-expression. It grounds things in a reality which is entirely unique, but also very multiple, open, relatable, and inviting. All of these moves enable a certain resistance to the standardizing, interchangeable, universalizing forces of commodification in recorded music.

Three Theses on Ambient Music

1. By removing the ‘characters’ from the scene, ambient music foregrounds what is usually the background, transforming the set design and the passage of time from supporting structures into leading roles. When this happens, a listener can no longer sit back and ‘watch the show.’ If there’s nothing in the show then the listener has to put themselves into it, enter the space, follow along with the flow of time, and take a more active role within the musical environment.

2. Ambient music focuses on place and time as a way to present music as an event. Technically, once the music is no longer and event once it becomes a is a recording. It’s a representation, a product, a thing, a commodity. But ambient music has a certain self-awareness about this, and still refuses to give in, so to speak. The presentation of place and time in ambient music invites listeners into a clearing, onto a stage. This powers up the possibility of rebirthing a new musical event from the frozen representation of an older one. (Perhaps this is the magic of all music, and this is just a specific way to accomplish it.)

3. Ambient music’s prominent use of field recordings is a technique that aims to accomplish these goals: by emphasizing that the music is representing a specific place and time; and by engaging with that place and time as a prominent feature in the creative process and audible expression of the music. There is also a sense in which the filed recording can be considered a collaborator, a way of de-centring the individual human composer from the process, and treating the music less as self-expression and more as an articulation of dialogic and ecological connection with the entire scene of the place and time which it represents.

You can go back to Part 1 here, if you want, to get the whole picture, or read on - I’ve tried to offer a sufficiently brief re-introduction below.

This investigation began for me from a quote by David Graeber (1961-2020), American anthropologist, activist, and anarchist writer.

Graeber wrote:

This idea evoked a thought-mutation, sparking a new question…

I’m curious about how I can infuse my musical creations with political values. How to draw out practices of compassion, care, and communism in the music I make. Even when the two things might not seem to fit together on the surface, they might bond behind the scenes – they might share a productive system, a tangle of affects and effects, a common drive, a network of interactive coding. We may be able to engage with a practice of art that emphasizes caring, that does art in politically and socially intentional ways, to empower care as a collective value. We may also come to articulate a foundational understanding of art that is essentially part of human bonding, relationships, and connections, and is therefore actually anthropologically rooted in care (aside from any political orientations we might wish to emphasize).

Either way (or both), seeing art in terms of care shifts the landscape. Art can no longer be a simply individual act of self-expression; it has to be an inherently social articulation, an elaboration of something collective. This supports critical and practical transformations. We can use this lens to rethink a lot of the taken-for-granted formulas about what-art-is that we have inherited in our society. It forces some thought about what it means to be rich and poor, individual and collective, self and other, in this society. How can we remedy the sickly imbalances that this society produces, diseases that we all feel creeping under our skins and institutions, within the practice of art?

Part 2: The Work of Art and the Art of Work

Brian Eno and Bette A. recently published the lovely little book called What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, wherein they argue that art can exist in all the things we do for no functional reason.

Whenever we make a tool to use for some functional purpose, we are creating technology. Everything applied for the purpose of empowering a human is a technology. When we make a tool, art exists in whatever we do to the tool which does not strictly have to be there for it to functionally work. That is, if the ‘art part’ was altered in anyway, or removed entirely, the thing would not be functionally impacted. It would still do its work.

According to Brian and Bette, technology always has a split within it between the parts which are there to accomplish the functional work of the technology and the parts which are there to articulate the emotional art of the technology.

For example, Brian and Bette talk about a screwdriver (and I’ve seen Brian use this same example in at least a few lectures):

A screwdriver has two parts: the blade and the handle. The blade can really only be made in one form: it has a specific purpose and it has to be a specific shape and size and strength. You couldn’t make it out of marble or glass or chocolate. It wouldn’t be able to turn a screw. If you go to the hardware store and look at a selection of flat screwdrivers you’ll see that all the blades are virtually identical.

This is not true for the handles. There is no space for ‘art’ in the blades – but there is in the handles, which might be striped or speckled or multicoloured or opaque. These variation in the handles make no difference to the usability of the tools. They are stylistic variations that don’t relate to function.

The less functional a thing is – the less it has to do something in particular – the more space for art there is in it; the more freedom there is in it. The art engagement begins where the functional engagement ends.1

You can’t do much art with the part of the screwdriver that is required to drive screws, because it already has a function which is too specific. But art is possible in the other part, the handle where there is ‘more freedom,’ where nothing has to be a certain way. There’s ‘non-functional space’ to play around with and stick the artistry into.

What Brian and Bette call ‘non-functional’ is not equivalent to ‘useless.’ It does have a goal, it’s just not a physical functional goal. Art is emotionally motivating. The end-goal of art is to have an impact on people’s feelings.

Brian and Bette suggest that art is how humans collectively articulate our own feelings, ideas, choices, and interests, and to convey these to each other so that we can have a conversation about the feelings, ideas, choices, and interests that unite and divide us into cultural groups. Art has literally no precise mechanical function. Its impact, the reason for its existence, the goal towards which it is oriented, doesn’t work upon the world directly. It only has an impact on anything in the world by first going through the feelings of humans.

Music, for instance, can cause people to keep step when marching or paddling or rowing; it can rouse grief, sensuality, aggression, indignation, revelry; it fires people up, or stirs longing, or ignites contemplation. And those emotions then motivate humans to act upon the world. Emotions are motivations. Emotions don’t drive screws, they drive actions.

Music has an impact when it drives people to act in certain ways.

For examples…

To be effective, a screwdriver must drive screws.

To be effective, a national anthem must drive passionate feelings of belonging.

One drives physical matter, the other drives social motivations.

Art drives living humans, not material objects. Art is, in this way, essentially social communication - oriented to connecting emotions, to synchronizing emotions, to sharing emotions. The social world is articulated through art because, as Brian and Bette say, “being together in art is an agreement to share some feelings with each other.”2 Being together in art is doing the work to design who we are as a group.

Art is the quintessential example of how humans have freedom to design their cultures differently. Variation in culture is expressed and developed largely through art. But let’s be careful – this artistic articulation of culture also shows how culture is tied to the functional work that is present in specific technologies. The technology also delimits and aims the cultural artistic expressions that are possible through it. Any tool, technology, or human activity has two sides to it: work as a technical act and art as a social act. Both sides combine in getting certain things done, making certain arrangements of work and feelings seem natural and inevitable, while making other arrangements of work and feelings seem unnatural and impossible.

In technological activity, art and work are thus folded into each other. I like the word folded here, since it emphasizes that these are not two separate things that just incidentally occur in the same place. It’s not divisible: you don’t get one without the other. They fold from one source; a hinge that mirrors and imprints the two sides on each other.

Another example Brian and Bette consider is fashion style. There is a certain material functionality to an article of clothing. A hat might be functional in the way it shades your head from the sun, keeps you warm, protects your brains, etc. It has to have certain structural features to do that - a brim to create shade, and a functional way to stay secure on your head. Everything else beyond the functional which gets included in the hat’s design is the realm of art. It’s ‘style.’ It is also important, but in a different way. It provides social-emotional functions: it is fun to make, it represents aesthetic identities, it explores feelings and ideas about beauty, it articulates cultural belonging and status, it signals social codes to others in our society about what we like and who we are.

So every tool has both work and art in it, both physical and social orientations: 1) an instrumental function to work on transforming the material world to accomplish human goals, and 2) an artistic function to articulate the social world which will motivate those goals.

This all helps refine the question I started with: what could it mean to say that art is care? What if we transformed Graeber’s assertion that “work can be the material extension of care” to reference art instead?

Here’s my suggestion, built from this analysis of technology…

First, this is a claim about human nature. Humans make technology, and through that technology we enable two very specifically human powers: work and art. Our technological actions simultaneously impact the material world and the social world, such that the human capacity to build and use technology defines both our capacity to manipulate the world and ourselves.

What is work?

Transforming the material world, nature, objective resources, in ways that meet human needs.

The work of technology is aimed out, at the material world, to have an external instrumental function, an impact on controlling, manipulating, and transforming material resources to serve human needs.

What is art?

Transforming the human world, social bonds, subjective characters, in ways that meet human needs.

The art of technology is aimed in, at the cultural world, to have an internal socializing function on controlling, manipulating, and transforming emotional resources to serve human needs.

Same action, different orientations.

Brian and Bette say it this way:

Science makes models of things so we can understand how they work.

Art makes models of things so we can understand how we work.3

Second, this theoretical platform about human nature also supports a political stance. My own political belief is that there is a deep problem in our society regarding the way we generally conceive of both work and art - work and art in the capitalist economy are alienated. Capitalist systems cleave us from ourselves, distance us from each other, and posit individualized atomic actors who cannot conceive of work or art as ‘care.’ This alienated conception of work/art reflects and reinforces a deeply exploitative social system. I will dive into these critiques more in the next section of this investigation, but it is necessary to state explicitly that I do have a political programme.

To conceive of work as a material extension of care and of art as a social extension of care is, on the one hand, a claim about human nature, but on the other hand it is also a claim about what we can and should do with that human nature. I am also staking a political challenge to the current social structures of work and art. This political challenge needs one more point about human nature, though, for it to become more intelligible. It requires that we also recognize that the goal of work and of art is not found in the technology or the product itself.

The goal of technology is not for its own sake. As Graeber urged, technology is not a “value or an end in itself.” The point is not to build a tower. Not to split an atom. Not to make a painting. Not to make a poem. This is a very common mistake we make in art. We think that the object is itself the art. That a song I make is the value and end and purpose of the art. But the art object is only a medium, a tool of communication. Same as I do not drive screws for no further reason or purpose, but rather to build things that serve me and the people around me, the goal of art does not find its end in the produced art product.

We forget that the objects of our labour hold social power; that these objects connect humans in specific ways. Economics either emphasize or abstract from this foundation of care. When we are convinced that work’s value ends when it is finished, that it only goes into objects and stays there, we are losing the sense of care at the heart of work. We don’t build bridges to live suspended on their arches. We build bridges to get from one side to the other. And back again. To allow for human traffic. To make connections.

The value or end of work and art is to meet human needs, not to build things. The things we use, the tools we build and the technology we employ, are bridges of care. The song I make is not the art; the effect it has on people’s affect (myself included) is the actual art.

And in this sense I assert once more that care is not only a political aim, but a fundamental component of social human artistic action. We care for each other. We have to. It’s part of being human. Work is ultimately aimed through this care, when we feed and clothe and shelter and support one another. Art is also aimed through care, when it elicits cultural conversations and connected feelings.

We work to live, to survive, to serve our families and our communities and ourselves and each other. The goal of work is to serve material human life. Likewise, the goal of art is to serve social human life. To articulate who we are and how we think and why we do thing the way we do.

The goal of work and art is human activity. It ends back where it came from. It’s a circuit. The goal is in what it does to people.

Which is why '‘care’ is such a critical idea here. The goals of work and art are about how we care for people (ourselves and others).

So how do we care?

Do we treat work as a material extension of care?

Do we treat art as a social extension of care?

And if the answer is “not really,” then what can we do about it?

This is going to be a series of articles that build over time, exploring a question that struck me when I read these lines from David Graeber.

What if we replace the word “work” with “art?”

Does that make sense? How does that possibly make sense?

What does it mean to conceive of art as the material extension of caring? It feels weird at first. Like it doesn’t fit. Like maybe the answer is just “no, that doesn’t make sense.” But the more I’ve explored it the more I’ve found that the idea elicits some profound and exciting shifts of perspective. I have become more and more enamoured with this idea. And I’ve written too much to fit into one single argument, so I’m going to split things up and post it is smaller pieces, so that I don’t get bogged down in writing a whole book that no one wants to read (just smaller chunks that who-knows-who wants to read). This is part 1, just an introduction, trying to lay out the project so that it feels ready enough to start its journey.

For anyone who has read some of my recent writing on Substack, you’ll know that I have been exploring related questions centred around a similar provocative shift in perspective. I’ve been asking things like: what if we stop thinking that we’re creating our art, and instead think of it as a relationship where the art itself is also a living being? What changes when you take that perspective of relationship instead of the normal notion where the art is a product, a goal, and end-point? What if we think of the art as a process of communication, rather than as an object of production? What if we think of art as a matter of making connections, rather than making things? Of other-conversing, rather than self-expressing? And how does all this possibly change the ways we engage economically, politically, socially, and creatively?

I’m generally interested in criticizing the taken-for-granted motivations of our capitalist society, and uncovering alternative ideas that can help us reframe ourselves. So when I read bits of political critique, like this passage from Graeber, I’m always thinking about how it could translate into a critical theory of art.

Graeber is trying to get us to think differently about work. What is work? Is work a way of achieving money that we can then spend on our own basic individual needs, with some leftovers (hopefully) to purchase personal pleasures? Is this the essential meaning of work, or is it actually a rather specific type of work that we just take for granted? What are we normally taught is sacred in it? What do we think work does? And for whose benefit?

The worldview of the rich (which is the worldview we ingest daily from the powerful institutions of our society) understands work as an instrumental means for individuals to achieve economic value (making profit or getting paid, it depends on where you stand in the system). They are leaving out an essential component of what humans have always worked for: care and safety for each other.

The people who rule this society want us to worship work and forget labour. They want us to forget that labour is toil for life, not for pay. They want us to deny that labour can serve collective care, rather than individual greed. They want us to devalue the labour of birthing mothers, and the labour of all caregivers. They want us to beleive that labouring for each other instead of fighting against each other to work for their profit is impossible, childish, unworkable, or plain evil.

How we think about our world affects what we are able to do in it. We cannot find out how to abandon work and organize labour, to treat our labour as a “material extension of care,” unless we can imagine ourselves doing it, feeling it, passing through it, being in it. We have to be able to imagine labour as care, in order to love the work/work the love.

Lucky for us, we can totally do that!

Brian Eno and Bette A. have recently argued that this is exactly what art does (the title of their 2025 book). Art is about trying on feelings. It’s a way that people can safely engage with a variety of feelings, in practice mode. We can enjoy a horror movie, without actually being in mortal danger (personally, I’d rather not). We can enjoy a Grateful Dead concert without actually being on acid (debatable). We can experience the splendour of a starry night without actually going out into the cold dark (not quite the same, of course, but there’s something there). But art is not only about how it makes you feel when you perceive it; it’s even more about how it makes you feel when you’re performing it.

Art also allows artists themselves to process these feelings in an active way, working through the feelings that are involved in the art that they are making. And in this sense it also becomes clear why it’s worthwhile that everyone si an artist, in some way and another.

Brain Eno and Bette A. say: “art changes how we feel about our feelings. How we notice them, how we respond to them, how we compare them, how we make use of them.”1 Art helps us to work on understanding feelings, exploring feelings, deepening, modelling, sculpting, and creating feelings. It helps us to learn how complex emotions fit together.

Brian and Bette also emphasize that this means art’s not just about isolated individuals exploring their own feelings and expressions. It allows us to imagine alternative realities that connect with other people; it allows us to feel outside of ourselves, which is the core skill of empathy. Artistic expressions are a conversation and a connection; art is a form of human bonding. And in this sense art also has a socio-political function to it. It can either support existing social structures or question and challenge them. It can reinforce certain models of shared feeling and ideas which sustain the existing social relations, or it can expose the contours of those systems, and fray the edges of those feelings and ideas so as to reach for something different.

Ursula K. LeGuin has said this beautifully (concerning literature specifically, but it applies across all the arts):

“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.”2

Brian and Bette agree:

“In art, we try out new possible worlds and other ways of being, by paying attention to our feelings about them. Art allows us to share complicated concepts and feelings with each other. This cultural conversation opens doors to shifts – in ourselves and in society. Art shepherds change.”3

Art is oriented to cultural creation – it is one of the essential ways that humans create ourselves through cultural conversation. So the method and style and practice of how we perform that conversation matters a lot.

The medium is the message.

We are how we art.

It’s a good start.

Let’s start.

Kids - a Wild Reworking by Circul & Eas

Kids - the Original

Kids, by synthpop weirdos MGMT, is nostalgic and fuzzy, and at first listen it seems like it evokes the endless summers, the glory days, the timeless wonder of childhood. But when you listen again, it only half feels that way. The other half evokes the lost summers, the numbered days, the time-bound tragedy of growing up.

It’s about golden days, yes, but it’s about growing up out of those golden days. The image of childhood as golden is a nostalgic reconstruction. It’s like recognizing how beautiful the day was, only when you stop to watch the glorious sunset. It’s like the Owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk. You only notice the glory when it starts to fade.

Childhood. The endless summers were only endless because we didn’t know about endings yet. We hadn’t emerged into the stream of time yet. Sunny fields of insects buzzing, stuttered playgrounds in the distance, floating shimmers and pouncing stabs. When you’re there, it’s all just there. But when you’re looking back, it becomes something entirely different. An unsteady, flickering, alluring phantom – a mirage of everything you ever wanted, but presented as something that is always already lost.

You were a child crawling on your knees toward it
Making momma so proud but your voice was too loud
We liked to watch you laughing
You picked the insects off plants, no time to think of consequences

Control yourself, take only what you need from it
A family of trees wanting to be haunted
Control yourself, take only what you need from it
A family of trees wanting to be haunted

The water is warm but it’s sending me shivers
A baby is born crying out for attention
The memories fade like looking through a fogged mirror
Decision to decisions are made and not bought
But I thought this wouldn’t hurt a lot, I guess not

Control yourself, take only what you need from it
A family of trees wanting to be haunted
Control yourself, take only what you need from it
A family of trees wanting to be haunted

Childhood. The garden of Eden. Either you’re living in it and you can’t know, or you’ve eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and then you’ve learned to know what the garden meant but you’ve already been cast out. The nostalgia for childhood is a way of coping with this alienation. A way to buttress the loss. Nostalgia allows adults to keep the actual lived experience of childhood at a ‘safe’ distance.

This is what nostalgia is, at its core: childhood fantasized. From the outside looking in. Nostalgia doesn’t long for something that actually was. Nostalgia invents a fantasy projection of what supposedly was, through a fogged mirror, and then uses that mirage to block us from any further engagement with the real present.

Seeing childhood as the hazy ghosts of endless summers is a nostalgic projection that bars us from being fully immersed in the present. Melting away into the ideal of what being-like-a-child-was is just a way of diverting the task of really-being-like-a-child-now. Nostalgia is an eddy of time. A little swirling corner of the river, where we try to escape the flow of time. Nostalgia is being haunted by ghosts you created for yourself, to protect yourself from going on down the river.

And all this is what MGMT’s Kids evokes for me. In my cover of the song I’ve channeled these complex feelings, trying to tease the melodies into twisting knitting patterns, tangling the threads up to articulate the haze, twirling and bubbling in the eddies.

Grow up. Control yourself. Take only what you need from it. A family of trees wanting to be haunted.

The only way to get back there is to stop trying, and get lost on the way to somewhere else.

Though it will always be lost, you can always lose yourself in it.

Shrink down. Let go of yourself. Take it all in. Release the ghosts.

Lose the way. Be here now.

White Noise

Rick Rubin Is the Future of Work

If I don’t go into that office every day, who am I…

Read more

6 months ago · 1706 likes · 162 comments · Tom White

White asks us:

“If you could do anything—if the how were handled, if the cost were zero, if the only constraint were your own imagination and will—what would you do?”

The hubris is intense. He’s basically saying – ‘You’re God now, so what’s the plan?’

Well, apparently the best mortal model of God is Rick Rubin, superstar American music producer and leading guru for the ‘cult of creativity.’ White continues, explaining that Rubin is the perfect avatar for this prophesy because he presents himself as someone who has made a career out of knowing what he wants in spite of not knowing how to do it himself.

White says:

“He can’t do the how. He is the undisputed master of the what.
Unironically, Rick Rubin is the future of work.
Taste and touch—knowing what’s good, knowing what’s right, knowing what you want—evolve into essential, tactical skills that remain solely the privilege of the embodied once AI abstracts away everything else.”

There’s some bits to this article that are truly thought-provoking. I want to pleasantly absorb all of its inspirational morsels. But I also have a sense of unease about the whole premise. Like, it’s like a ‘cigarette argument:’ immediately pleasurable and motivating, but really bad for your health on every other level.

I wrote this essay to figure out if I’m being overly critical or if there really is something toxic going on.

I think the answer is both.

Dream or Nightmare?

In a sense, this is just how technology works: a new machine comes along that does the how way better than any human ever could, and then people have to move on to coordinate the what that defines that technology. Technological advances make a certain skillset obsolete, and then you get to shift attention towards different skills – notably, the skills requires to operate the machine that may have taken over your initial skillset. Weavers become Factory Workers. Steel Drivers become Drill Operators. Ploughers become Ox Drivers.

In any area of work where we’ve built machines to improve efficiency and capacity on a job, the labourers have to adapt and become managers, operators, information-organizers, technicians. This is the fate of any skilled labourer under the plodding progress of technology.

White is telling us that with the advent of AI all our busy-work is obsolete and the things we know how to do no longer really matter. All that matters now are the decisions about what we should do. Enter Rick Rubin, the guru of knowing what is in good taste while leaving the how up to the lesser operators.

I think it’s likely that Rubin is actually doing more than this, and that the guru persona he’s presented to the world is mainly a promotional strategy. Let’s remember, in a traditional album-making context there’s lots of jobs – recording engineers, mixing engineers, and mastering engineers who take on all the technical ‘know-how,’ along with the composers, songwriters, performers, orchestrators, electricians, and everyone else who is doing their jobs. If he’s not doing any of those jobs, someone else is. Rubin’s job is to understand people as much as understand music. He is likely really good at paying attention to what’s going on, helping people be at their best, understanding what they’re aiming for, and tending to the environments and supports which will help them make great art.

These are the roles of a manager. It’s not mysterious. It’s organizational and people-focused. It’s about making sure that things are working in the big picture and that people are being set up for success.

But Rubin presents himself with another job title too – he is an arbiter of taste. White notes that, in interview with Anderson Cooper, Rubin says his main speciality is just:

“I know what I like and what I don’t like, and I’m decisive about what I like and what I don’t like.”

This is why White sees Rubin as the ‘future of work,’ since, quoting Alberto Romero,

“in this brave new world, the how becomes incidental to the what.”1

Knowing what you like is one part of the puzzle. But the real trick is that what you like has to align with what everyone else should like. Being able to taste, and knowing what you like is one thing, but having ‘good’ taste means that your preferences have to align with some kind of social audience. Someone who has ‘good taste’ is treated like they are in-the-know, able to discern whether what’s happening is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and worth consulting on it.

Is this a slippery slope into a world where everyone’s a critic and no one wants to cook? Where everyone’s a manager and no one is capable of doing the work?

This isn’t prophesy. This is already what we’ve got. It’s worth briefly complicating the story about technological progress here.

This idea that technology moves people over from the how of a job into coordinating the what is standard fare when discussing the economic consequences of technology. But it’s only half the story. The other half more commonly gets left aside. It leaves out the actual structure of work under a capitalist economic system. There’s two sides to the technological development - the side of capital ownership and the side of dispossessed labour. It’s not only that weavers turn into factory workers. The shift also includes factory owners. Someone’s capital owns and profits from the factory, and then some of weavers turn into factory workers. Some of them lose their profession and their skillset all together. So AI might help advance the nameless possibilities for some people, but it puts much more than that out of a job entirely or crams them into shittier and shittier jobs.

This future of work might be a dream for a select few people, but it’s also a nightmare for most of us.

White’s argument feels like it relies on the core techno-optimist delusion that it is a good thing to be ‘freed’ from all constraints, even the constraint of the how, free from doing anything. Maybe we’re supposed to be insulated by some kind of vague ideological promise that still itches under the bandages of the invalid American dream? Maybe holding on to a delusional dream staves off the real nightmare?

The American dream hands one class of people freedom and opportunity, while it enslaves and oppresses another class of people. There is no separating the two sides of that coin.

In his argument White likens the advent of AI technology to a genie, noting how well this metaphor plays out with his how / what divide. For example, as he quotes from Alberto Romero:

“The idea of thinking about ‘single-use’ magical objects is that they invert the effort allocation 100%: the ‘how’ is fully outsourced. How does the genie get you a billion dollars? How does it make you extremely handsome? You don’t care, you don’t want to know. So, you automatically realize that your mental effort must now be fully devoted to the complementary question: what do you want?

This is, of course, an exaggeration of what AI does, but—and this is the fundamental insight—only in degree, not in kind. AI is the closest thing in the world to a genie lamp.”

This is an interesting thought experiment. Indeed, we don’t tend to think about where the genie gets its power, where the genie comes from, or how the genie works its magic. I really think this metaphor is even more powerful than White/Romero acknowledge, because they don’t name the other side of the coin.

We send a handful of people to the moon and send millions to the curb.

It reveals how we we will take the wish and run with it, apply it entirely to our own needs, desires, and dreams, and willfully avoid thinking about what price the genie is paying, or what price anyone anywhere else is paying, for our wishes. It’s an experience we all know intimately. You’re offered something great, fantastic, best-ever, just for you. But you only get it when you don’t ask where it comes from, who builds it and under what kind of labour conditions, how much subsidized energy it’s taking to prop up your opportunity, whose land is being blown up and what ecosystems ravaged, and so on. Just as long as you don’t worry about the whole economy of it, then - wow, it’s so amazing! Aren’t we blessed.

A billion dollars.

Devilish good looks.

Don’t ask where it comes from.

Don’t imagine a wish that might benefit more than just yourself.

The moment when the genie offers its wishes is like the moment we are offered the American dream. When we say yes we forget all about what the costs are for the genie and beyond, and we sign up to strive for our own benefit at the expense of any other life.

I think this is main reason why the ‘Rick Rubin model of the Future of Work’ feels so amorphously icky and secretly unhealthy: it’s built entirely on a trash-heap of privilege.

Dream or nightmare? Both. Depends on which side of the coin you’re on.

Taste Versus Flavour

I think we have to get more clear on what this thing called ‘taste’ actually is. What does that mean?

Taste is the sense of liking or disliking something. Like Rubin said, he knows what he likes and he knows what he dislikes. That’s his ‘taste.’ But it’s not simply individual, it’s also social. There’s a sense in which taste represents what’s good or bad to other people, and that some people have good taste and some have bad taste. Taste is a social distinction, as well as an aesthetic judgment. It is founded on the premise is that there is some definable objective real difference between good and bad art.

If we just stick to the analogy of ‘taste,’ as if this is about the yumminess of food, then we can carve some helpful distinctions out of it.

Let’s say, ‘taste’ dictates that an expensive fancy five-star meal is ‘better’ than a hot dog. The fancy food might be more refined, more textured, more dynamic, more healthy, and so on. Sure. But tell that to a five-year-old who just loooovvves hotdogs. If you start that argument, then you’re the asshole.

The five-year old doesn’t care whether they’re ‘supposed’ to like the fancy food more; they don’t care about the class-status that the fancy food implies. They don’t care about taste, they only care about flavour.

Flavour is a personal experience. Flavour is not something you have to convince yourself of. When you taste a flavour, it’s not an argument, it’s not a judgment, and it doesn’t carry social status codes. It’s an experience, a sensation. Your taste buds send information to your brain, which is then associated with your experiences and expectations, to determine whether something feels good or bad, whether you should consume it or not. I might very well prefer a hot dog to a fancy highbrow dish because it brings a whole host of positive associations with it, because it represents a familiar pleasure, because it reminds me of someone or somewhere, because it feels safe or dangerous, familiar or novel, and so on. It all depends on me, not the meal.

Flavour is a private internal affair – it is unshared, in a basic way. Words can trace it, and art can express it, but no one can actually experientially know the flavour of my personal taste experience. Perception, sensation, experience – these are subjective phenomena which occur for a living being, and cannot be passed across the boundaries of that being. I can imagine that other people feel and perceive the same way that I do, but I cannot actually know that. I can’t be inside their experience.

Taste, on the other hand, is not a perceptual sensation. It is the negative of flavour in this sense - it cannot be internal, it is social and shared to begin with. Taste is inherently a social communication, it is made to be shared because it signals something about cultural value, it tells someone “this is good and this is bad.” Taste happens when people rank and order expressions of flavour according to their own social hierarchies, statuses, conditions, discernment, and so on. It defines a social division of cool/uncool, in/out, recommended/discouraged, accepted/banned.

Malkovich? Malkovich.

When we understand that the ‘taste’ we’re talking about is primarily a social signal, then we start to get closer to why it might be relevant to the ‘future of work.’ Taste is what people express to prove they are socially valuable. Taste is what people try to cultivate so they can hold status. Taste is what someone shows off when they need to sell something to someone else.

When someone is trying to make taste into something that matters in a social situation, it’s because people are trying to signal that they are worth something, or that some other thing is worth something and they themselves are valuable because they know it. This is literally Rick Rubin’s own definition for why he is valuable: his taste matches the taste of a consuming public, so listening to him is a path towards selling records.

Granted, there is a kind of taste where people aren’t necessarily trying to one-up each other. For example, I do want to hear about great music - but not from everyone indiscriminately, I want to hear from people whose taste I trust. I’m looking for people I resonate with. I want to learn from them, and if I find someone who I resonate with, then I can say, “that person has good taste in music, I want to know what they think is good.” But this is actually about what I like - I’ve identified that I like a lot of the same types of things that they like. So here is a crucial difference, I think: when someone starts telling me that they have good taste, I’m being sold something (for money, status, clout, or various other currency). If, on the other hand, it’s me telling them that they have good taste, it’s me making a connection.

The first emphasizes transaction, the second emphasizes connection. It can be one or the other, or both, and it starts to be a problem mainly when it leans into the former. When it’s operating as a competitive transactional social-status function, taste is always a hierarchical comparison. It says: this is good because that is bad, and this is bad because that is good. It’s about saying it to someone else, to assert: “this taste is good and that taste is bad; this taste is ‘better’ than that taste.” This is part of what tends to infect taste with icky flavours, why it is so often that aesthetic taste pumps someone up at someone else’s expense, why it’s so often mean.

When we’re talking about production, the question is not that of flavour (“does this feel good to me?”), it’s that of taste (“does this rank as something that will feel good to someone?”). In this scenario, the sensation experience of “does this feel good?” gets replaced with the social question of “should I show that I think this is good?’

This is almost inevitably what is going to happen when you bring taste to work.

And there’s certainly value in that. I’ll admit that one Rick Rubin is something potentially valuable. A person who has a good sense of how to communicate with the artists and engineers involved, someone who can do the tricky job of people engineering, and also provide a solid sense of taste that is grounded in the public market – this is all super valuable. He’s got his powers, and he can help certain people achieve great things.

But imagine a whole world of Rick Rubins all lying around on couches waiting for each other to do something that they can then judge as tasteful or not. No one is doing any work, and everyone is trying to assert their own version of ‘good taste.’ Everyone is competing for the same manager position, all trying to be the one who decides the what, and no one even has an inkling of what it takes to do the how of the process.

Shudder. The true horror of a world full of managerial tastemakers starts to sink in.

It reminds me of the scene in the film Being John Malkovich, where we witness what happens when John Malkovich enters the portal into his own head, instigating a dreadful feedback loop of Malkovich. Every character is John Malkovich, and all anyone ever says is “Malkovich.”

“Malkovich…” “Malkovich? Malkovich.” “Malkovich!”

This is the dream we’re talking about.

“Rubin…” “Rubin? Rubin.” “Rubin!”

Tasteless Flavour

When everything is about optimizing market-value, then idolizing taste does make sense. Taste is a competition. It’s a skill derived from knowing what’s good and what’s bad given a certain social context. It’s a skill about convincing others you’re cool enough to deserve being listened to.

Taste is already a marketing move.

But within the actual activity of making art, inside the process of being creative, taste actually functions as a barrier to finding out what we do actually like and dislike. Taste is what tells us that it’s cool or uncool to make a certain kind of art. Taste is the little voice that pops up to question whether what we’re doing is really cool enough, unique enough, revolutionary enough, popular enough. It’s the little nagging voice that tells us to switch away from what is actually fun towards some category, some genre. It’s what happens when artistic discovery is replaced with calculations for maximum cool. It’s what switches the judgment from “what do I enjoy?” to “what do I want?”

Taste bars us from finding ourselves within our artistic activity. It’s what kills the artistic spirit in every child. It’s what happens when the light dies – and someone stops creating something because it feels good, and instead creates something that counts as the ‘right’ thing to make.

Taste makes it seem like there’s something that defines art as ‘good enough’ to count as ‘real art.’

Excuse my language for a moment, but I feel this very deeply.

Fuck that.

Fuck right off, taste!

Get out of my art.

Taste dulls the capacity to savour the flavour. I’ve felt this too. I’ve been caught up in trying to create something I think is cool, something ‘good,’ when I should have just been following what felt delicious.

If you stop to consider if what you’re doing is tasteful, if that idea ever comes into your head, then you’re already lost the fun of playing with the muses.

Taste is the enemy of honesty in art.

Taste is the enemy of joyful creativity.

There’s a world of difference between a thing that I represent as ‘good taste’ and an activity that I engage in because it tastes good.

The devil offers you a deal: you can have good taste, but it will cost you your tongue.

Flavourless Taste

Do we not live in bodies that move and act? Do we not exist in time? Is there no power in learning and practicing a skill, to the point of developing an embodied style?

It feels like White is treating the creation process itself as a black box which simply makes an output. The logic of production strikes again – asserting that it’s only the output that matter, as a consumable product that can turn a profit, and the process is only a matter of cost-expense balances.

White introduced his argument about the future ‘rule of the Rubins’ based on “taste and touch,” which makes it seem like something based in sensation, physicality, action – something that only embodied beings can accomplish. But now we can see how that premise is entirely upside-down. Making decisions about whats, while remaining completely divested from the action of the how is about as disembodied as you can get.

Being able to abstractly decide on outcomes without any action at all, to simply magic-speak the what into existence - this is a magical fantasy, a logic of disembodied productivity. It’s the fantasy of a brain trying to exorcise its own body. It’s a weird dream of being something without doing anything. Come to think of it, it’s what happens to everyone who gets addicted to being John Malkovich - they get to be what Malkovich is, without having to know how to actually be John Malkovich. It’s the virtual-reality life goal of a compulsive voyeur. It’s a scroll-mirage. And that’s exactly what this techno-feudal-zombie-capitalism-on-life-support system wants it to be.

All this also makes me pause, to admit that I might be reading White out of context. Nowhere does he say he’s talking about art, creativity, or anything like that specifically. He’s talking about work, after all. It’s a tech-entrepreneurial perspective, I guess. Which is a perspective that I don’t quite understand. It’s basically a whole different orientation, a different cultural perspective, where it may be perfectly acceptable to want to be a disembodied managerial tastemaker who dictates things into existence. Maybe my whole gut reaction is just that I cannot possibly imagine making this kind of choice, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense for someone else.

The Price of Wisdom

“The price of knowledge and wisdom is dropping to zero.”

No. The price of knowledge may be dropping to zero, but the price of wisdom is and always will be the same. It costs doing. It costs life experience. It costs mistakes. It costs living.

We should recall the famous line from Mikey Shulman, CEO of the AI music software system Suno, who claimed that everyone wants what he’s selling because:

“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now... I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music.”

Why, Mikey? Because it’s hard? Because it forces you to make mistakes? Because it’s not constantly ‘enjoyable?’ Because you’ll find out that you suck at something, and have to live with that for as long as it takes to get better at it?

Shulman and White both desperately want the what without the how. (Or they just want us to want it, because that’s the what they happen to be selling.)

How do you even develop taste in a vacuum of practice? In a cell where you never go out and try to do anything? That is the image of an internet hell, where millions of people compete to prove they have the best taste, that they know precisely what should be done, in realms where no one has any idea how anything actually get done.

It’s all deciding and no doing. It’s all being and no becoming.

All managing and no working. All taste and no flavour.

But in reality, what and how are not separable. If you forsake the skills needed to develop the craft, then you don’t get the chance to figure it out on the way. You don’t get the quest. That’s not a real-life journey; that’s a destination vacation in a gated resort villa.

If I let AI mix my song, I might get a cool output. But I’ve given away the process of discovering what happens when I do it. I like the process of building skill because it allows me to find out. It allows me to discover something. I don’t just make it whatever I ‘want’ it to be. I have to discover what is being created along the way.

White’s concept of ‘taste’ is something prepared and unveiled already-whole. But I am not Zeus – lounging around all-knowing on a cloud-couch, cracking children out of my head fully-formed. And let’s also remember, Zeus only ended up birthing Athena fully-formed because, in his terror at losing power, he thought he could devour Wisdom herself.

In art there actually is no what before and/or apart from the how.

I don’t ‘decide’ on the art, and then go and ‘do’ it. There is no linear progression from what to how. Again, it’s not a production line.

I have a particular style of playing guitar, or playing piano, or making beats, or orchestrating a song. I did not decide on these styles simply based on a ‘good taste’ preset pack. I had to develop them myself. I would never have been able to just decide on the style of my guitar playing in advance, without having gone through the years and years of practice and play. And it keeps going, style is not ever done.

In embodied creativity, you have to learn what you want through the doing, not in advance of it. Art is discovered, not produced. I believe that the best parts of my own music come from the places where I’ve worked so hard on the how that it taught me about new whats.

For us mortals, we have to work. We have to develop our talents. We have to live in bodies that act, in order to find out who we are always becoming.

Art in Action

Art is like sport. You can change the technology, and players have to adapt. But you do still have to actually play. You can’t just decide to play a sport. You don’t just choose what moves you’re good at. You have to actually go play.

Rick Rubin is a coach, not a player. Which is also fine, and we need coaches. Let’s just not confuse the two.

You have to do the how, not just the what, or else you are categorically not actually playing.

We can also see this distinction in the idea I espouse in many of my other writing: that art is fundamentally a communicative relationship. I’ve been really invested in thinking about seeing art as a living being. This rewires a lot of common ways we think about doing art.

If I know what I want, I could just ‘make’ it – but that’s so lonely. It’s a production-focused concept of art, to create an object, a content, a product. But if art is a communication with the muses, with some spirit, inspiration, some being who must be communicated with, then all of that goes out the window. If I treat the music I’m working on as a co-creator, I start to treat it with the respect due to a living collaborator, and I have to give up some of my control, I have to work with what is happening, I have to listen and respond, not just direct and command. It shifts the way we often settle into thinking about art as a ‘production’ or ‘expression’ - like it simply comes out of me, expresses my feelings, represents me, and is something that I can totally design and control. I can know what I want, but I have to have the how skills to communicate and express myself in a relationship which is categorically not a product, which I cannot simply control or will into being according to my taste. It’s less a matter of ‘judgment’ and more a matter of ‘relationship skills.’

Like in sport, like in loving relationships, in art you can’t just toss aside the how.

Hustle That Hobby

In a wrap-up concluding moment, White lays it down:

“All this just to arrive back where I started: get a hobby.”

Wait, what?!

A hobby is specifically about enjoying the how of it. A hobby is something people do exactly because they don’t want to worry about a production end-goal. A hobby is an activity where the pleasure of the how is the reward without any concern for the what. Work, on the other hand, is done for a purpose. Even if it is also pleasurable, work rewards with ends, it recompenses. Work is specifically done for the sake of a what.

How do you claim that people should do it for the love of it and also claim that there’s no use in learning the how of it? What actually is ‘doing it,’ then?

I’m totally confused by this point. White somehow turns everything he’s said into advice to ‘follow your dreams’ and ‘do it for its own sake.’ Lord knows how he has convinced himself that this is actually the logical conclusion of his argument. How did we get through all that stuff about tossing out the how and focusing only on the what, only to come back to this as the supposed conclusion?

And, sigh, again: this was already blandly solid advice anyway without dragging the advent of AI into it. No one needed robots to take their jobs, and to degrade the idea that actually doing things and learning things is inherently worthwhile, to be told that having a passionate hobby is a really nice way to have fun in life.

“The last competitive edge is doing things for their own sake.”

Barf. I hate this sentence so much.

Is it about enjoying a hobby or about building a competitive edge?

Are these two separate cakes?

I’ll order two cakes, please. Can I have one and eat the other?

The logic of productivity, that thought-form that treats art as if it actually simply is the product, infects this entire perspective, turning taste into the what of art, when actually art should be all about flavour.

Especially if you’re just in this for the joy of it, as a hobby, doing it “for it’s own sake,” then worrying about taste is a trap. It’s going to focus you on the very things that ruin the joy of art. It’s going to keep you up at night scrolling around looking for useless anonymous validation and trying to consume more and more so that you can fine-tune the calibration of your good taste – instead of actually doing the work, and having fun doing it.

You start to create because it’s fun, there’s joy in the how. It’s what White is calling a ‘hobby.’ But if you’re trying to gain a competitive edge, then you start worrying that what you’re doing isn’t good enough, isn’t professional enough, isn’t tasteful enough, and you start distorting your actual muse in an attempt to make it cool, competitive, profitable. Taste and cool and profitable are the same thing here – competitive edge is geared at gathering social power (in the form of clout, cool, money, etc.). It cares about the presentation, the product, what can be shown and valued as socially desirable. And I’m not saying that these two things can’t coexist – that you can’t engage in the joy of making art and also engage in the practice of marketing and selling it. But when you let the competition aspect enter into the art-making process, it degrades the experience. And if you’re only pressing a button to input your ‘taste’ into a machine that will spit back a cool song, then you’re not making art at all, you’re making a product for social value.

Do your thing and forget about whether it’s cool, or good, or has any taste. Do you like it? Did it taste good while you were eating it?

Would you do the thing even if you couldn’t show it to anyone? Even if no one would know? Even if there was zero social status attached to it? Even if it subtracted from your social status? Even if it’s not at all cool. Even if what you’re making is crap and no one really should like it? Of even if it’s genius awesome and no one ever cares.

The art is the how – so if you’ve relegated yourself to only the what, if you’re a Rick Rubin now, then you’ve turned yourself into a manager and a taste-tester for a production process. Which is also fine and dandy if that’s your thing. Just don’t pretend it’s all one cake.

On November 13, 2021, I had a dream where I discovered an invincible warhammer named Scrolnir.

These are the actual notes I wrote in the morning, to record that dream…

I found four pieces of a large warhammer (like Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir). This hammer is called ‘Scrolnir.’ The pieces are look like they’re made of glass or ice - clear, transparent, jigsaw pieces that fit together. They have little colourful bobbles inside them, floating blobs of colour (kind of like frozen fruit, different sized coloured, beads, or bubbles) and threads (like liquid swirling strings). It looks kind of like actual blown glass art, but not exactly – this is like there are actual things inside the glass pieces.

I put the pieces together and they magically fuse. This hammer is invincible. It has unlimited power. But as I pick it up, the handle breaks off in my hand. It’s broken, the moment I pick it up.

I then have to go and find the pieces again to make a new one, or recreate it.

This is a quest, but there are no details of the actual quest in my dream. I blur through finding the pieces, and then I’m back at the point of putting them together. I put the pieces together again and when I pick it up the handle breaks off again. This is frustrating, and depressing, but in the dream it occurs to me what’s going on. I realize within the dream that the idea here is that I have an invincible tool, but I can’t wield it.

A drawing I made of Scrolnir, assembled and ready to rock.

This was close to five years ago, and it was near the beginning of a musical journey I was embarking upon. Making music has always been a big part of my life and identity, but in my 20s and 30s I fell away from it, for various reasons. I was trying to do other things, things I imagined were more sensible, responsible, ‘necessary.’ I was trying to find my identity, happiness, and power in other pursuits. It was a mistake. I was not finding my power in those other things. Those other things sucked the power out of me. And when I came back to music, it was a spark. I found a renewed passion which I felt I had lost entirely from my life. But it was also struggle to shift my understanding of myself, my priorities, and start identifying as a musician. That is, it was hard to come back to wielding my power. I had to break through barriers I had put up around myself to avoid myself.

All that other stuff was really just a way to avoid wielding my real power. The dream about scrolnir was a representation of this - a message from myself to myself. I find it especially interesting that scrolnir appears so fragile. A warhammer made of icy glass is a ridiculous thing. It’s the fragility that feels like a central point in the symbolism. When I approach it like its fragile, then it is. But with the confidence, it becomes invincible. It’s not actually about the hammer. The magic is in the attitude.

Dreams are little letters to ourselves.

As I started up the Circul & Eas music project, I dove into getting good at the technical aspects of music production, and started on a cycle of EPs based on the four seasons. Summer 1 is the completion of that cycle - from Winter, through Autumn, to Spring, and now Summer. And each Season has one piece of Scrolnir in it. I’ve got all four now. Can I wield it?

These Scrolnir songs are supposed to be little letters to myself. And here they are, finally fully delivered:

“You can wield your power now. Hold it. When you have the confidence that this is really your power, then it won’t break. You’re here.”

Komorebi is a Japanese word that names the joyful and serene experience of watching sunlight and shadows sway in a canopy of leaves. The shifts in tone and colour and shape. The glimmers and sparkles. The varying shades of shadow, swaying, brushing, squinting, as leaves overlap leaves, over light over leaves.

I wrote this music to sound like the dance of komorebi.

My mom tells me that as a baby I loved komorebi. I was born in March, in the early spring, so this puts me at 3 to 6 months old during the summer of that year. Apparently, she would put me out in the grass, and I’d lie back, roll around and giggle, looking up transfixed as the leaves swayed and rustled and glinted in the summer breeze.

I like to believe this story. There’s a romantic appeal to it: that this awe and beauty would have been imprinted in me so early.

As an adult, I still love komorebi. (But also, maybe that’s easy… who doesn’t?) I still like to lie back and roll around and giggle in the grass, looking up as the tree branches sway.

It is one of those deeply wondrous simplicities in life. A perceptual, environmental beauty that exists simply because of life on Earth. A universal human experience of natural beauty. The sort of experience that, maybe, we have all enjoyed. If such a thing exists. It exists in such a thing as this.

Resolution Activated: this summer I will do komorebi.

I love taking long walks to nowhere.

When I was younger I would often make sure I had a whole afternoon free, leave my front door and walk as far as I could. I’d think, write notes, bring a sketchbook and some markers, daydream, plan, find snacks, visit trees, play on a little pocket mbira I’d always have along. My best creative thinking happens on a long walk to nowhere. It’s how I did most of my deep explorations and discoveries, back when I was thinking all the time.

These days I don’t do this nearly as much as I should. I also don’t think much anymore.

Resolution Activated: this summer, I will take long walks to nowhere.

This song will help push you out the door.

This walk will help you think more.

Put the pep in your step.

Aim you at the aimless.

Pick up a pencil and a notebook, make sure you‘ve got some water, take a deep breath and hold some gratitude for existing in this physical beauty. Let’s go!

August 25, 2024.

Sunny afternoon. Summer. Waves in the cold. Ankles, calves, knees. Great lake.
Children playing. Windy rushes. A spot to stop. Sway, listen.
A place to stay.
A place for a moment to be in.

Pukaskwa Waves is music that has a place and time to it. Based on a recording taken standing in the waves of Lake Superior, at Pukaskwa National Park, the music holds reverence for that place and time. Shifting waves and children playing set a tone for the pulsing warmth of buzzing synths and bubbling gongs. It feels like closing your eyes, absorbing the sunshine, and breathing in time with the lake.

Lately I’ve been making music that is designed to honour a specific time and place. Taking sounds from a place, and trying to weave music around that as a foundation. I feel like I’m grounding the music in relationships that already exist, rather than merely ‘creating’ from my own whims. Like it causes me to listen first.

I’m planting a lot of time into this endeavour. Excited to see what grows. I think it develops an essential tenet of ambient music, as Brian Eno original conceived of it: as music for a space.

‘Ambiance’ means the feeling of a space. “The character and atmosphere of a place,” says Google’s dictionary. Ambient music is built on the idea that music is actually part of the space that it exists within. Perhaps even that music does not happen ‘within’ spaces, but that music is a part of what makes a space.

Maybe we can start to call this practice ‘Ambiance Music,’ to differentiate from the vast ocean of Ambient Music?

This is music that is, for me, most profoundly experienced as a conversation with living spaces. Like Richard Skelton’s work, where he creates his own stringed instruments and records them outside, in moors and fields around where he lives, to gather the sense of a unique reality, a real place, which the space conveys. That excites me the most. I want to weave my sound into the sounds that are already erupting from life, in the places where I exist, where I breathe, swim, walk, dance, laugh, love, listen.

I have a few more projects based on this idea that will be coming into the world this year. I don’t know why this is what is drawing me in. Do we ever really know why we’re inspired? Does it matter? It’s an inspiration. So there’s no need to explain it. But I also like explaining things, and I’m curious. So I wonder….

One reason I’m interested in this (I think) is because it’s a meditation on listening. It’s a way of hearing first. It has to be receptive. I can’t just ‘express myself’ or ‘speak my truth.’ I’m interested in finding other forms of expression than that. I don’t want it to be about ‘me.’ I want it to be about connections.

Musicians might be the most primed to listen, you’d think. And yet we’re often making noises, as opposed to listening for them. But the best music happens when it’s both at once, of course. I cherish the skills I’ve developed from playing in live bands - a very specific way of being present and adaptive, tuned in and responsive, able to speak and listen at the same time, trying to balance voices rather than shout over others or be drowned out by their insistences. These are valuable skills, which we can also turn on when we’re living in all sorts of other ways. I’m not sure where else I would have learned these skills so clearly, except in playing group improvised music.

Living and listening within the world gives us a space to respond. There are moments all around us. Surrounding us, enveloping us. We can listen to them. But even deeper, we can listen inside them. Being inside a space. Being part of an ambiance.

It’s a common saying. Austin Kleon wrote a rather wonderful book in 2012 with this as its main theme and title. I like that book. It’s grounded and inspirational. I agree with its vibes and aims, and it seems everyone loves it. I just think the actual phrase “steal like an artist” is nonsense (at best) and harmful (at worst).

Kleon opens his book with a few quotes. Let’s hear them.

“Art is theft.”

- Pablo Picasso.

“Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal. Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling, utterly different from that from which it was torn.”

- T. S. Eliot.

The consensus on these quotes is that an artist shouldn’t worry about taking bits and pieces from other artists, as long as they ‘do it the right way.’ Inspiration can be nabbed from anywhere, but you have to do the work to transform what you take into something artistically personal and new. You should not just copy other great work, which means what you take is still ‘theirs.’ You should ‘take’ it and make it ‘yours.’

Sure. Great. Okay. I can get behind this idea. It encourages us to be original, but also acknowledges that there is no way to be totally original - that we have to take from ideas that already exist, but not ‘just borrow’ them.

But here’s my axe to grind: using the language of ‘stealing’ doesn’t really make that point very well. If you think about it, the language of imitating and stealing actually muddles and confuses that point.

Art is theft, and theft is bad but it’s okay when great artists do it because they do it so well.

Stealing is bad - unless you steal like an artist.

Are we really saying this?

“Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal”

As is surprisingly often the case, the quote “good artists borrow, great artists steal” is very popular, but it’s hard to pin down where it comes from. It’s another quote that people often say is from Picasso, but maybe not.1 It’s kinda ironic that it seems to have been stolen and repurposed so many times that no one remembers who ‘owned’ it in the first place. Serves it right, I guess.

The basic point is the same as the first few quotes we’ve seen. If you transform an artistic idea enough, if you take something from someone else and you put your own artistic flair into it, then it will come out as unique and original and ‘great.’ Whereas if you ‘only borrow,’ then you’re not putting in enough energy to transform and reinvigourate the idea, so the work can only be ‘good’, not ‘great.’

Right? That’s what people think it means… right?

So why does it make no sense?

How do you ‘borrow’ artistic inspiration? Are you going to give it back?

Why does it make you great to steal rather than borrow? What, actually, is being borrowed or stolen?

Is ‘stealing’ great? A thief sneaks in through your window, rifles your jewelry box, and makes off with your stuff - but hey, if he transforms it and puts his own artistic spin on how he wears it, then it’s okay - that what ‘great’ thieves do!

Umm.

And ‘borrowing’ isn’t great? When your friend borrows a book from you, but does not transform it, does not recreate it, and honestly gets it back to you promptly when you need it again - well - sigh - I guess that’s just lazy and derivative artistry. Good enough, I suppose.

Umm.

Seriously. Neither of these references makes any sense whatsoever.

The idea is that great artistry transforms its influences. But the concepts that are being used to say that feel rather out of touch with the message. The whole thing would be much clearer if we replaced them with something else. Like, for instance: good artists copy, great artists transform. That’s what it is actually supposed to mean. Why not say that?

I will be bold about this. My first feeling is that there is nothing about ‘good artists borrow / great artists steal’ that holds any reasonable narrative value… Unless I happen to be taking it out of context? So… what context am I missing here?

The ‘Greats’

It’s said that Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, commonly brought up the “good artists borrow, great artists steal” quote. Maybe we can take this as a clue to the kind of worldview in which the quote does gain some sensibility. Maybe it makes more sense as an entrepreneurial idea than it does as an artistic idea? Maybe we’re just inheriting a way of understanding art which actually comes from business?

In that case, here’s the missing context: treating something as ‘able to be stolen’ means first treating it as property. Maybe the notion of ‘stealing artistry’ is so powerful (despite its incongruities) because we tend to automatically associate art with property, because we’ve (sadly) accepted that a logic of property is natural and essential for everything.

If we’re talking about how an artist makes money and jostles for prestige within an ecosystem of property rights - then, actually, this all starts to make more sense. It makes complete sense that borrowing is a bad idea. You can’t make good money off something you’ve borrowed, since you have to give it back and you don’t own the rights. So stealing is, in this sense, the clearly ‘greater’ option. Stealing something involves stripping the other party of their ownership. Transforming it enough to escape any copyright challenges means you don’t have to deal with sharing the wealth. This would be a ‘great’ move only in the sense of becoming a richer, more popular, and more successful artist.

In this context, we’re calling it stealing because it is stealing. But we’re also saying, “oh no, but not that kind of stealing!”

This smells like an elitist narrative meant to help people feel like they deserve to be above the law. It stinks like a desperate defence. It reeks like someone trying to validate themselves with shaky moral rationalizations.

It now seems more oriented towards making artists great, not towards making great art.

‘Great’ in the sense of popular, iconic, rich, famous. Like Picasso? Like Eliot? Like Jobs? Mmmhmm. The pieces are starting to fit together.

Like Bob Dylan. who ‘stole’ several songs from the folk traditions, copyrighting material which had previously been used and transmitted as part of a musical commons. Dylan invented an aura around himself, and transformed a culture which openly shared songs it into the fodder for his individual stardom. The essay series This Machine Kills Copyright2 and This Machine Kills Moon Men3 from Maceagon Voyce is a worthwhile read on this point, addressing the way Dylan straight-up copyrighted several songs from the folk canon, claiming for himself what was previous treated as a common good. Bob Dylan is ‘great,’ I agree. But the point is not about his artistic merit, it’s about how much he was able to transform what was common cultural material into property belonging to himself.

There’s lots of other examples of this kind of thing. We can also look to the vast history of cultural and racial appropriation in modern American popular music, and think about more of the ‘greats.’

Like Elvis Presley. Elvis was undeniably ‘great.’ No doubt, he didn’t just ‘borrow’ ideas, he took from his influences and ‘transformed’ it with his own artistic style. But that doesn’t change the fact that he essentially stole economic and culture value away from Black American rock n’ roll artists, whose greats were marginalized and pushed down in direct inverse proportion to how Elvis was idolized and raised up as the great artist.

It’s also notable that it’s not just Elvis. It’s not like he was being super malicious or evil about it all. It’s an industry, an economy, a larger cultural issue. The public can’t see any of that extra stuff. They have to believe that it’s all Elvis. They have to believe in genius. They can’t see Elvis and say “oh he’s so good, and I can see how he borrowed this and that from these other musicians.” For the idolization machine to work, he has to have stolen those influences, and not got caught. It has to seem like he invented himself out of nothing.

In the end, who’s ‘the king?’ Elvis is the king. Enough said.

Which Side Are You On?

When we apply the concept of stealing to art we are participating in a discourse that treats art as a competition over property, and we treat this framework as natural and essential: “Everyone can, should, and must act as if everything they create is property.” If ‘art is theft’ for Picasso, it’s because the context of his success and fame impels him to see his artistic persona as property, and the process of taking from his influences as theft. But ‘taking from your influences’ could just as well be explained by all sorts of ways that do not evoke ‘theft’, and yet still acknowledge those transmissions and influences.

The idea that art is theft shouldn’t be taken for granted as natural or essential. There’s a cultural battle here.

Do we treat art as a shared cultural activity?

Or do we treat art as an intellectual property created by an individual for their own sole profit?

And perhaps even more to the point: which one do we WANT?

Because it’s up to us.

These sayings about ‘stealing’ have an impact on the way we choose to understand ourselves. When we talk about art in terms of stealing, we are (often unwittingly, of course) reinforcing cultural acceptance of a system that treats art as intellectual property (among other things, certainly).

This is an ideological battleground.

Of course, when we start talking about ideological battlegrounds, we also cannot avoid thinking about who ‘us’ is… Which side are you on?

Ideology means the ideas that people accept and apply in our own lives, but which actually work against us; ideas we believe in but which also support, validate, and encourage a social system that exploits us. It’s the ideas and concepts we use to understand ourselves and the world that do not empower and benefit us, even when they seem like they do. And, actually, especially when they seem like they do. Ideology is even more effective when people mistake what controls and disempowers them as the source of their own control and power.

The ‘stealing’ we’re talking about here does just this. It seems like it supports what we want to believe about our own artistic values, but it actually undercuts those very values at the same time. There’s ideology hidden in it. All this talk of stealing artistic value reinforces treating art as property, even though that doesn’t necessarily benefit us. We could use other terms, which would carry other significance. But we persisting with this misapplied talk about ‘stealing’ serves the ideology of our social system.

Only within an economy of intellectual property is it even possible to say there’s anything wrong at all with honestly and unabashedly using other artistic ideas and influences. This is not the standard or dominant practice for most of human history and human cultures. It may certainly exist, in different forms and in different proportions, in all sorts of ways. But humans do not regularly treat their cultural artistic activity as a matter of individual property. That’s weird. We do art and music and dance and all the stuff as a way of creating common meaning and shared creative experiences, often in smaller groups, or through guilds, associations, apprenticeships, ritual lineages. There are all sorts of variations and complications. But in most cases people are co-creating their cultures through art, not vying for power and prestige.

Western Capitalist society has created a weird outlier situation, where artistic activities have been stripped of their capacity to provide people with something participatory, stripped of ritual significance as a community activity, and turned into products that should be consumed.

Perhaps good artists borrow, and great artists steal. But that’s only within an economy that defines ‘artist’ as someone who sells an entertainment product. It cuts out the primal and collective sense of art entirely from its purview. ‘Greatness’ in this system means a star that stands alone and above the rest of us. An idol, a genius, an king.

So if good artists borrow, and great artists steal, let’s remember that there’s a very specific context for that kind of ‘greatness’ and ‘stealing’ and ‘artist.’ And let’s also ask:

What kind of artist shares?

What kind of artist co-creates in an economy where there’s nothing to steal?

What kind of artist doesn’t create property?

Property is Theft

There’s an old anarchist slogan, popularized by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1840.

“Property is theft.”4

This idea feels like it can help us shift even more perspective on ‘steal like an artist.’

I’ve been saying that when we’re talking about stealing, we have to consider the systemic framework in which it is possible to ‘steal.’ You can’t steal something that isn’t property. If it doesn’t first ‘belong’ to someone, then it isn’t stealing to take it.

Let’s name a looming historical connection here: this is also the essence of how colonization was (and still is) justified, and how the rape of the Earth was (and still is) justified.

The age of European colonization was very explicit about this belief system. “Look, it doesn’t ‘belong’ to anyone; these people don’t understand property, so we aren’t even stealing it from them if they don’t own it! Or, the Earth and all other creatures have no agency and therefore cannot be stolen from, which means it’s all ours for the taking!”

Good colonizers borrow, great colonizers steal.

The social constructs, laws, and morals around property underpin any talk about the social constructs, laws, and morals of stealing. By stating that “property is theft” Proudhon was trying to shift some blame away from the poor who might have to steal a piece of bread to survive, onto the rich whose entire fortunes could be said to have been based on a more systematic and legitimized form of stealing. The point rang true because it turned the critique around in a way that poor people could really appreciate. Poverty is created by the rich. It is not an individual’s problem where someone does not have enough money; it is a systemic problem where society enables some people to exploit others. Poverty is generated by property.

This probably isn’t the place to go into it extensively, but noting the basics of Marx’s argument about the labour theory of value can help frame this nicely for us. For Marx, Capitalism is fundamentally split between 1) capitalists who own the property necessary to produce goods, and 2) labourers who own nothing, and must therefore sell their labour power to the capitalists for wages. Owning the means of production allows capitalists to pay labourers to provide work into the production process, and and the way they make value from this process is by paying the labourers less than the value which they provide with their inputted worktime. If in a day’s work a labourer provides $10 of value to the final product, the capitalist must pay the labourer less than $10 for that day of work in order to increase value for themselves in the final product. For example, if the capitalist gets $10 of value from the day’s labour and pays the labourer $6 for the day, then they’ve created $4 of value for themselves that has basically been plucked away from the labourer.

So, in this process, the capitalist essentially ‘steals’ value from the labourer by an unequal exchange - they get more value into their production process than they give back to the labourer in wages. This is what Marx calls surplus value. People who work are paid less than the value which they put into the process, and that extra value is ‘surplus,’ it gets skimmed off the working day and becomes profit margins for the final product once it all gets through the marketplace.

Surplus value is a really powerful way of framing the thesis that property is theft. Owning productive property is what enables capitalist industry to steal from labourers. Property enables the theft of labour power.

That may have felt like a plodding diversion from the point. I apologize if I have tricked you into reading about economic theory. But I do think it sets up an interesting insight that can help us explain why ‘steal like an artist’ is such a contradictory concept.

In our society, capitalist value production is a legitimized systemic form of theft. Since this kind of theft is so indispensable to the capitalist economy, it has to be protected. Proudhon emphasizes an interesting sociological point in all this: that it is illegal to steal property, because it is property which enables legal theft. The rights of property are so sacred in a liberal capitalist social systems that it creates a binary opposition of two thefts: one that is the subject of the law, which is essential to the machinations of the system; and the other which is the object of the law, which is exposed by the law and cannot be allowed to threaten the machinations of the system.

Stealing property is illegitimate because property is the only legitimate way to steal.

The owning class uses their property for stealing. The dispossessed class is only able to steal property.

One is the law. The other is the outlawed.5

Okay. Neat. And what does this have to do with art?

Enclosure of the Artistic Commons

It only makes sense to ‘steal like an artist’ when you’ve accepted the premise that art is property. But if property itself is the original theft, then there’s something even more essential that has already been stolen from all of us.

Treating art as property is only possible when art has been enclosed, shrunk down and and packaged for individual ownership. During the middle ages in England it was accepted traditional practice for certain lands to be ‘held in common,’ such that poor peasants could cultivate wood and other natural resources freely, and in some case tend to common gardens and livestock. There was a traditional sense in which these lands provided for villages. For several centuries, these common lands were gradually stripped away - ‘enclosed’ as private property by a system of legal, economic, political, and military maneuvers which heralded the advance of Capitalist economic transformations in England. Marx makes an extended analysis arguing that the enclosure of the commons contributed to the growing capitalist industry in England. It dispossessed many people of their traditional means of survival, creating patterns of demographic dislocation, forcing peasants to travel and seek new forms of sustenance. These dispossessed peasants became the workforce pool for the industrial revolution, providing the cheap abundant labour which was needed to make the factories work.6

Sylvia Federici has analyzed the enclosure of the commons as a strategy of colonization more broadly, specifically looking at the treatment of women through the Witch hunts of the middle ages. In Caliban and the Witch7, Federici offers a lot of detail about how enclosure is a tactic which gets applied in all sorts of ways - not limited to the specific history of England, nor necessarily limited to the matter of land. Enclosure can be seen as a strategic tool that has been applied to break up solidarity that people have around land, bodies, and social relations of all kinds. The enclosure of the commons can be a strategy, applied variously, to attack anything held in common.8

Capitalism requires that commonly-tended resources and relations are transformed into individual property relations. It’s part of the game plan to turn everything into a commodity relationship. It is also essential to the advance of Capitalist social systems that only individuals (and the prime individual has categorical traits as rational, male, White, self-controlled, self-interested, …) should be able to hold power. Enclosure tactics have provided capitalist expansion with the tools to dispossess and dislocate many traditional systems, all over the world, destroying the cultural grounding and ancestral traditions that kept older economies and social systems running (in their own varied ways).

It’s intriguing to consider how this has also happened to art in our society.

The enclosure of an artistic commons is a colonizing event: when a culture’s capacity to produce artistic activity in common is outlawed, it’s capacity to control its own artistic activities disbanded, and individual practices based on property ownership are offered in their place. For example, we can look to innumerable examples of colonial governments banning and repressing Indigenous cultural activities. In Canada, where I live, a clear example of this is the ban on Potlatch, which outlawed Northwest Coastal Indigenous People’s traditional ceremonies and social gatherings. The Canadian Encyclopedia says it straight up: “The government justified their decision to ban the Potlatch because they believed it was preventing the assimilation of Indigenous Peoples.”9

So much of the way colonizing systems try to discredit, devalue, and disempower Indigenous people is based on different strategies to enclose commons. In art, it involves eliminating art as a collective and participatory activity, and turning art only into objects for sale. Settler Canadian society loves Indigenous art, when we can buy it. When it is a component of Indigenous autonomy and cultural empowerment, then we’re not so keen.

I emphasize the term artistic activity, because we need to make sure it has sufficient contrast to the way we think about art in our social system, as property, as an object. Culturally common art is an activity, not an object; a mutually created ritual, not an individually owned production. When art gets individualized and treated as an object which has market value, instead of as a cultural activity by which people create themselves together. Since the whole of the cultural activity has been stolen, the commons enclosed, we are left only with the petty individualized scenario of stealing art-as-property from each other.

Again, to draw comparisons with the Marxian analysis, we can say it’s like common cultural creativity is the means of cultural production, and therefore, in order to maintain control over that field of social reproduction, it has to be treated as individual property. The people cannot have the means of production to ourselves, in common. Instead we are set against each other vying for the opportunity to copyright ourselves, and then sell our creative powers to the production machinery.

Share like an Artist

So… wooah… that was a lot. I started this essay thinking I was dealing with a fairly simple idea, but apparently not (or, maybe it is simple, it’s just that I haven’t been able to be simple about it).

My proposal is simple, at least: let’s stop saying that we should ‘steal like an artist.’

For anyone who wants something different, for those of us who crave and need more of the cultural commons in our artistic activities: let’s change the way we talk about it so that we can better articulate our values, goals, and systems.

The best way to really do the thing that people actually mean when they say ‘steal like an artist’ is to stop making a culture in which anything even can be stolen.

There’s nothing to steal if the creative material is held in common.

Share like an artist. That’s a different kind of artist.

Share like our liveliness depends on it.

In order to do this, we have to change how we create and enjoy art.

Create, not produce. Enjoy, not consume.

Art of this sort inverts a lot of the identities and systems that we take for granted in our consumerist society. It is not consumable, it cannot be casually bought and sold as entertainment. It is absolutely non-exchangeable, non-interchangeable. It is completely unique to the people and place and relationships who create it. You can’t trade in one form of it for a value-equal amount of a different form. It is an anti-commodity. It’s the kind of thing that has to be naturally developed by a community and a culture. It’s the collective expression of a people’s way of life, an expression of liveliness. Liveliness cannot be sold and consumed. It happens in communion, connection, ceremony, celebration, mourning, worship. It happens with life events and community activities. It happens among people, through mutual engagement, where there is no necessarily sharp separation between artist and audience.

That vision of a radically reoriented artistic culture is a big package. It won’t happen overnight, or in our lifetimes, or possibly at all. But by thinking about what it could be, we can orient ourselves towards the possible. It can help us to recognize the shifts we can make right now, in tiny moves and giant leaps, depending on our opportunities.10

So how can we put more energy into making our creativity collective?

Where are our commons, and how should we be fighting for them?

3

Guided by Voyces

This Machine Kills Moon Men

I’m back in London, riding the cozy vestiges of a Thanksgiving spent at home, in Minnesota, with my family…

Read more

9 months ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · MacEagon Voyce

As I walk with her, I am ruminating on the meaning of creativity. I root around in every idea, thinking here and there, chasing little concepts when I find them. And so I think: here is an interesting contrast, my dog is expressing her ‘dogness’ and I am expressing my ‘humanness.’ She is sniffing around, and I am thinking around.

Let’s say, for the sake of this discussion, that creativity is a specifically natural activity for humans to do. Creativity is an act of natural humanness. I’m not necessarily saying other animals do or don’t do it at all. That’s another question for another time. I’m just starting from a place that posits creativity as an especially powerful natural capacity of humans.

It’s natural for me to think up creative ideas, just as it is for my dog to sniff and poke in the bushes. Creativity is how humans have come to design our special ways of living. We are not good at sniffing. We are not fast. We are not big. We do not have strong claws and jaws. But we are able to come up with plans and schemes. We are able to analyze, foresee, organize, and build. Creativity is a special power that we possess. We assemble ideas, draw connections, build useful tools, and design ways of understanding the world that will keep us living. It’s a joy, for the same reason that my dog finds joy in sniffing around and tracking little creatures. Because it motivates an essential aspect of our survival capacities.

Use Your Illusion

The adaptability of intelligent creativity is humanity’s superpower. It has made us gloriously amazing, fantastically adaptable, and seriously dangerous.

We are creativity creatures.

We are creatures who are especially endowed to create.

We’ve been created to be creators.

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.1

• The Bible, Book of Genesis 1:27

If we are a creature who is especially endowed to create, Genesis says it’s because “we have been made in God’s image.”

God is a creator.

God created us in God’s own image.

Therefore we are creators too.

Christians, in particular, make a lot of the idea that God created humans in his own image. But the notion is not restricted to the Bible. It shows up in all sorts of religions all around the world. I am of the mind that there is great wisdom to be gleaned from the religious traditions of the world, especially when we look at them together, comparatively, to see the patterns on common threads that they share. So I take a sociological and anthropological perspective on issues like this. With a socio/anthropo-logical lens, we can accept that there are things worth believing in the religions (in texts like Genesis, for example). But believing them in a somewhat different way, which also requires reframing them. The religions themselves usually see these stories as matters of fact. The sociological perspective sees these claims as a representation of the human cultures which invented them, possibly having some bearing on the natural world, sure, but also inextricably bound up in a socio-economic worldview and way of life. Religious stories and rules tell just as much (or more) about the people who are telling them as they do about whatever it is they’re explicitly saying.

So, from this perspective, we’d say it’s not that God created humans in his own image, it’s rather that humans created God in our own image.

A simplistic sociological perspective often stops at this kind of inversion. At its most crass it simply flips religion on its head and says: “No, you’re wrong. God didn’t create humans. Humans created God. To think of God and religion as factually true is an illusion, a fallacy, a crutch, a false belief system that should be seen as useless antique machinery.” But at a more careful level, it should never be this stark.

The reflections of religion - the way that religions mirror the human cultures which create them - are a function of survival. It’s no trivial matter. It’s actually a matter of life and death. And because it’s a matter of survival, the way we deploy our creativity in response to the world, to develop stories and ideas that guide us through our actions in the world, cannot be based on pure ‘illusion.’ Any culture that engaged with a purely illusory cultural and religious practice, something that was totally untethered to reality and to human survival in the world, would quickly dissolve and die.

Insofar as their religious models might be an ‘illusion,’ a culture still has to use their illusion (thanks, Guns n’ Roses, for the academic reference). And, actually, this is what a sociological/anthropological perspective is saying: religious systems are a representation of a culture and its ways of life, so understanding them in a sociological way is not about deciding whether they’re factually right or wrong, but about assessing their functional implications in action. The question is not ‘is it true or false?’ The question is, rather, ‘what does it do to that culture?’

For a sociological analysis of religion, saying that religious ideas are simply a ‘falsehood’ or ‘illusion’ actually pulls the rug out from underneath its own feet. It can’t stand on the premise that there’s something worth investigating here and also dismiss that very thing as false.

It’s just a functional question about how religion and cultures can help us understand how people work. And when we look at it like this it doesn’t matter which way you put it. Whether it’s God created us in his image or we created God in our image. There is no separation between Gods and their humans, between humans and their Gods. It’s actually a mirrored relationship that doesn’t have a start or end. It’s a chicken-and-the-egg situation. Just gotta roll with it.

What does the mirror show us?

The Bowl and the Water

We can learn a lot about a culture from the way it represents its God(s).

A people’s Gods show what they worship.

What a people worships shows where their values are.

Creativity is so powerful to us, and so open-ended - so that you can often see right into the treasured core of a culture’s or a person’s own values based on whatever they say is the purpose of their creativity.

For example, there is a very common sentiment in our society that creativity is {self-expression}. I don’t think art has to be about self-expression. It could be, sure, but it’s very narrow to stay locked in that lane. To the extent that art is about self-expression, and especially to the extent that this idea masquerades as self-evident, it exposes a presumption within our culture rather than a fact about creative activity generally. It reveals that we worship self-expression, because that’s how we’ve decided to apply our greatest capacity. It shows the shape we have placed creativity into. It focuses on the bowl, not the water. The bowl is a cultural artifact. Water is just what keeps humans alive. A particular bowl is a particular culture. It gives the water a particular shape. But the water is shapeless. Water is all of us.

Perhaps there’s something that happens when a culture focuses in on a ‘Creator God,’ something where it helps a society put some focus on the formless, rather than the formed? To see creativity itself, not just the various forms it takes?

Wherever people start worshipping a ‘God of gods’ (as it is actually often put), they are recognizing the creativity of creativity. It sparks a certain level of self-reflexivity and universalized awareness about what is human, beyond the peculiarities of a specific cultural domain.

I should be clear: I don’t think we should say this is any better or worse than any other more specific god(s). The Creator God, with whatever universalizations and abstractions it relies on, will bring its own set of problems and perils. The culture who exalts the Creator God is not necessarily escaping to another meta-layer of ‘greater creative freedom.’ But it does mark a critical act, a unique turn in how we can understand ourselves and our own special powers in more abstract and universal terms.

It Could Always Be Otherwise

Our particular modern capitalist-consumerist-individualist society has granted special place to ‘self-expression’ as the wellspring of creativity, that fountain of our human capacity. There are also other ways it’s been framed, explained, designed, and pursued. And there always will be.

It could always be otherwise.

Creativity is the power that makes it so that it could always be otherwise. So that we could always be otherwise. Creativity is what allows humans such an amazing capacity to adapt, to learn, to change, to be capable of facing challenges. At heart, we are the water, not the bowl. We are radically un-predetermined, able to shed our shapes and create new ones on the fly. For example, we can live in any climate on Earth (basically). We can adapt to any ecosystem (mostly). We can learn new ways of surviving when we displace ourselves, on purpose, and travel to some fully different place with different life challenges. Most animals on Earth do nothing of this sort. They adapt to their situation and they stick with it as far as it will take them. They change when they have to. They don’t go looking for places in which they are distinctly maladapted, and try to figure out a new hair-brained scheme for surviving there in spite of it all. That’s madness. But that’s human.

Humans can fill-in-the-blank of their creative capacity to fit into all sorts of new situations, and adapt our lives and beliefs to match those new ways of life. We can change just because we want to. We can change for good reasons. We can change for bad reasons. We can change for no reason at all.2 Our concepts of religion reflect this practice, and we get the myriad forms and patterns of human religious systems worldwide.

Creativity itself: the capacity of human creation into which ‘blank’ gets inserted, the space that remains open to all these potential adaptations.

Creativity is not any one specific adaption. It is the fact that there is an endless possible number of those adaptations. It’s the space in which any of those specific adaptations can exist. It’s not, for instance, the adaptations of the Inuit for living in an Arctic ecosystem. And it’s not, for another instance, the adaptations of the Apache for living in a desert ecosystem. Each of those ways of living will give the Inuit and the Apache a certain set of worldviews and religious frameworks within which they build their mythologies and conceptions of gods. But to the extent that their systems might also invoke a Creator God, that does not represent a specific creative adaptation. That represents an invocation of human creative adaptability itself. It’s an awareness of the formlessness of creativity which allows each adaptive form to arise. It’s worshipping the water inside the bowl.

Where we see Creator Gods at the centre of a religious system, we can think of that culture as placing a high value on the power of creativity itself. Not creativity as self-expression. Not creativity as functional inventive power. Not creativity as artistic skill. Just creativity. The Creator God theme is one place where the ‘essence of creativity’ gets held open. It forces us to not fill-in-the-blank. Instead of worshipping the endless amazing ways we can answer the fill-in-the-blank question, the Creator God reminds that we invented the question too.

The Creator God may be one method of making sure there’s a gap in the system of human representations, somewhere. Making sure there’s an un-fillable spot in the network of ideas that we weave around ourselves. A hole in the tapestry, so the picture’s not complete, so that things can still be unravelled when they need to be. A wellspring from which new creativity can still flow. We spend so much energy building up the creative bulwarks of culture all around ourselves. But it wouldn’t be true creativity unless we could tear it all down again. So there needs to be a cornerstone that we can yank out when we need to demolish and re-build, adapt again, move on. A blank that cannot be filled. So the Creator God is a mythological method of avoiding foreclosure on the nature of our own most powerful capacity - a way of making sure that creativity itself remains creative.

Creativity’s power is to make sure that nothing can be only as it is. There has to be an openness in the system.

Having a Creator God in a religious system, no matter how else a religion might be set up (monotheistic, polytheistic, etc…) accomplishes this one vital task: it makes sure to emphasize that things could always be otherwise.

Creator Chats is a series where I ask musicians about their own creative process, and about the works that they’ve created. I’ll be talking to artists who I’ve worked with as a mixing and mastering engineer, to share their insights and inspiration.

Try Catch 23 is the music project of Grant Lucas Muller. For this album Tidal Progression, Grant worked on a live coding platform called Tidalcycles, as a late-night/early-morning way to bounce his newborn baby and get the creative juices flowing at the same time.

I will admit: it’s mind-boggling to me how this works as a coding system. So let’s hear it from Grant!

Using Tidalcycles is kind of like working in Session view in Ableton, only you’re working with text to describe how you want to hear instead of pressing play on different scenes or loops. You type your code into a REPL (Read-Eval-Print loop), and Tidalcycles reads it in real time, evaluates it as an operation to execute over samples of audio, then “prints” it in the form of sound immediately. The process is “live” in the sense that the loop is always running. When you type in something new it operates immediately to change the output (sound). The result is that you can build up very complex patterns of instruments and operations over samples. What you hear in a live coded song is more like a text performance; each change in the sound you hear is the result of sending a new command to Tidalcycles to evaluate.

Woah. That sound cool, although I’m still not totally sure what it means. But I do know that it’s a wild and unique way of doing things, and the results are also very fun. Let’s learn more about it…

What does creativity mean to you?

To me it’s the act of identifying meaning in what appears to be meaningless. Finding signal in the noise, extracting and it, and showing it to others. Take a painting. Observed from too close and i t’s just a bunch of random dots or scratches. Too far away and it doesn’t look like anything, but when looked at just right, it becomes something the means something. Creativity is figuring out how to see or hear something just right, and then showing others (and hoping they see it too).

Where do you think your creativity comes from?

I think everyone is creating all of the time whether they know it or not. The idea that your brain has to create a map of the world you’re surrounded by, to make sense of a chaotic world, that is an act of creation. I think it’s an inherently human trait. I try to make that process unconscious when I can so that it doesn’t feel like work, but rather listening into the world around me and trying to figure out what signals the universe is trying to send me.

Do you have a story or an image or an idea of what happens when you’re creating?

I have this image in mind of an explorer, like someone cutting their way through a jungle with a machete. When I’m playing the drums or the piano I’m trying out dozens of ideas to see if any of them feel right. That’s like searching for something, not authoring it. When I find what I’m looking for I have this Indiana Jones image in my head, like I just found some long lost temple, and the real work of extracting that artifact and bringing it home is at hand.

Subscribe now

Is there a specific version of that story or image that occurred while making this specific project?

This project was a learning project for me at first, it was only halfway through that I felt like I was stumbling on patterns that I liked and that I wanted to extract and work with. One of the first “songs” that appeared happened by accident because of a bug in the software I was using, and that was the “Eureka!” moment for me, that these patterns were signals from the void that I needed to play with and continue to extract.

When you’re creating, what is the most fun or enchanting thing about it?

It’s that feeling of discovery, the enchantment of feeling like you found some kind of treasure and you have to show the world what you’ve found.

When you’re creating, what is the most difficult or frustrating thing about it?

The work of finishing is difficult to me, because the discovery part is over. Once that part is past I have to work hard to keep the feeling of discovering something new going, which is why I always try to mix the creation part with learning something new. In this case I learned Tidalcycles, a livecoding language, to search for interesting patterns, slice samples, stretch them, all kinds of stuff that I wouldn’t be able to do with a traditional DAW.

Is there any specific experience that you want to tell us about the making of this project?

This was a special time for me. We had our first child and this whole sleeplessness thing was really new to us, so I spent a lot of time figuring out how to make learning and creating a part of the schedule, and that meant doing the work early in the morning with a sleeping baby strapped to my chest. I have fond memories of it because my daughter was there with me.

Was your creative process especially different from other projects you’ve done?

Yes very, because of the circumstances above, and because the music was all written using a livecoding language called Haskell. I’d experimented with it before and just didn’t have the patience, but because I had some constraints on me (a sleeping baby and the need to spend a lot of time in front of a laptop) I made it work. It turned out to be really fun!

Why are we drawn to it? Why does it feel so good? So enthralling?

One common answer is: because it’s divine. It’s God the creator. When we create we are partaking of what ‘God’ is. We are being godly.

This is an answer. It’s compelling, and common, and it’s hiding in all sorts of explanations even when they aren’t explicitly spiritual. It’s also huge. It might be so compelling because it’s so expansive. Whenever we start talking about divinity we kinda blow the roof off the conversation. It’s a wide open sky. Nothing to run up against, no boundaries, no echoes, no edges. Shout anything at the sky and nothing comes back. The wide open sky will take it all.

So this is difficult territory when it comes to critical thinking. It’s easy to float away, a thought balloon disappearing into the clouds, when everything always comes back to a concept like God. It will, like the open sky, absorb any thought you speak to it.

Proceed with caution.

Now, talking about creativity in terms of ‘God’ tends to split the idea of creative power in two - into those who see creativity as composing from divine spirit, and those who see creativity as channeling through divine spirit.

On the one hand, there’s the idea that I have creativity within me, as a divine life force, such that I have control to enact it, conduct it, compose it. My expression, my vibe, my truth, my story, etc… In whatever form it takes, we find this version in the idea that creativity comes out of me. ‘Soul’ is maybe one of the most distilled versions of this, like when people conceive of art as ‘letting their soul speak.’ The power comes out of me.

On the other hand, there’s the idea that creativity comes from a natural force outside of myself (God, inspiration, the Universe, the World, the muse, life, insert-preferred-name-for-spirit, etc.). And then it’s not mine, and creative action has to be considered as a different kind of process. Here, it’s less of an ‘excavation of essence,’ and there is no control. It’s more like a practice of ushering, helping, and channeling a mysterious force beyond ourselves. Less like speaking and more like listening. In this case God is the creator, and I am a conduit. This is a mode of creativity that is like channeling. The power flows through me.

Is it me who animates the art, or is the art animating me?

Do I compose music, or do I channel it?

(Or? …)

Channeling

What I like best about music is when time goes away.
- Bob Weir

I’ve played music shows that I fully do not remember. I remember the beginning, the first few minutes while we got warmed up, then I remember ‘waking up’ at the end. I spent the whole thing (apparently) in a trance. My memory was completely shut off for the show. I suppose it was good? It feels like it was good. I hope it was good!

For those who engage in performative arts requiring improvisation and bodily flow states, this is a common experience, I think. This kind of thing happens in sports too. In battle, I bet. It’s happened to me with sex.

This kind of experience seems more like channeling than composing. It does not feel like I’m controlling and organizing the output. Rather, I have become a tuning device, a radio receiver, and I’m just letting the creativity flow through me.

During that show, I wasn’t conscious or analytic in any normal sense. I was allowing myself to be a part of the creation, I was going along with it, not controlling it. But there is a more deeply seated control, a competency built up from years of practice and study, upon which this experience of ‘going with the flow’ has to be founded. The thing is, being able to channel effectively requires extensive training. Without my practiced musicianship and familiarity with my instrument it wouldn’t likely have gone very well. Put a non-practiced musician up there and put him in a trance, and he’ll likely not play at all.

So it’s a tension. You have to have control to surrender, you have to hold a clear form to let it go and still flow. Only someone who is so well trained can allow their body to do the work without letting their mind interfere. The same goes for top athletes, who must allow their training to shine when engaged in sport that moves too quickly for the conscious mind to be responsible for making every decision.

Letting go without discipline is just going to degrade into fluff and noise. Letting go into your training is where the fine-tuned machinery can be animated with creative breath, and there turn into beauty.

Composing

People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I.

- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

For this version, I think it’s appropriate to imagine the ideal of a Western orchestral composer in the classical tradition. This is an architect. Someone who has trained, studied, and prepared to coordinate a piece of music, arrange the parts, write them out, control them from a bird’s eye perspective.

The conductor of an orchestra also conjures this value of control and coordination. The conductor is the one who is in charge, who guides and orders the music, who makes all the decisions. The way contemporary electronic music culture refers to a ‘producer’ as the all-knowing all-controlling architect of a musical creation really emphasizes the point, too.

The brain has different functions for being alert and present in moments of heightened environmental awareness versus being critical and analytic about planned and organized decision-making. This Substack post by Yana Yuhai on how to slow down time (the neuroscience of time perception) offers a good summary of how humans process time, addressing how it can stand still or fly by. Either we’re ‘in the moment,’ immersed in the flow, or we’re out of the moment, able to analyze and objectively observe.

This is another way to frame the distinction we’re addressing here, where being in the moment usually feels like channelling something bigger, some outside power, while creating from the inside often feels more like a composing process of putting the right pieces together in the right structures. Yet, I know that I can also lose track of time doing that job. There’s a blessed wonder in getting lost in the work of composing too, and no matter how structured we think we want to be, there’s no beauty in perfectionism. There’s got to be some room for grace.

As someone who has musical experience both with improvising live music and with being the overseer of DAW-based production, I’ve had my share of both these types of creativity. And I’ve also lost my time in both of them. Even though composing is more ordered and organized, you can still trance into it. There’s no sharp dividing line between these two shapes of creation, even though their distinction is presented as a clear cut.

In my own study of how creativity is understood and represented by artists, I do find there’s some value in seeing where people land on this spectrum. And I also think there’s some value in looking deeper, to see that essentially it’s not one or the other, that the question about which one is the ‘true source’ of creativity likely cannot, and should not, be settled on this axis.

Communing

Once
In a while
God cuts loose his purse strings,
Gives a big wink to my orchestra.
Hafiz
Does not require
Any more prompting than that
To let
Every instrument inside
Go
Berserk.

- Hafiz

Does creating occur when I act out a divine spirit? Or does creating occur when I am a servant to divine spirits?

Well…. there’s a third option, of course. Both.

Dualities like composer/channeller or conduct/conduit are very appealing because they offer us a defined choice. We can feel drawn to one or the other, and it encourages self-reflection to ponder which tendency might be more prevalent in our own personal creative lives. That can be fun, or useful, or paralyzing, or destabilizing.

There might indeed be a prevalent tendency for someone, somewhere, at some time, but it’s not ever a pure cut. It’ s not ever fully one or the other.

This division is a duality, and a duality is a balance of synthetic opposites. A synthesis is the split of something whole, but it’s something that is whole because of the division. This is not about ‘proportions.’ It’s not that someone would be, say, 23% composer and 77% channeller. You could go there, into personality test territory. But that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that maybe creativity itself, the source of creativity, is not inside me in a divine core, and it’s also not outside me in a divine Other. It’s in the relationship between those two divinities.

Duality is not where I cut a banana in half, and now the banana goes back together and becomes whole. It’s in a way of thinking that sees the world according to balance and tension, relationality, where there is a separation that creates a coordination. Like the way animals and plants respire in a cycle - we take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide, while the trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. The whole can only be understood according to how the separate parts interact, and the parts have been designed according to how the whole acts. A synthesis is a whole that can be split, and a split that is whole.

My belief is that creativity, like humans ourselves, is a synthesis of communication. Neither fundamentally about the individuality of composing nor about the immersion of channeling. Neither fully the I nor fully the Other, not me and not you, not I and not God, but the synthetic communion of those elements.

There’s a space of connectivity that binds these opposites. It’s the connectivity, the threads of their interaction, glue, the in-between that actually represents what we are better than either side looked at in analytic isolation.

Synthesis is in the way we find parts of one half seeded inside the other half - like in the yin/yang symbol, there is a spot of dark in the light and a spot of light in the dark. Composing and conducting can transport me to a place of trance, and it can feel like channeling some other source of creation, working with the muse. And channeling also requires co-ordination, conduct, and composure. If I didn’t have all my practice, knowledge, and preparation to work with, then I would channel mush rather than art.

When I speak, Other responds.

While the Earth moves me, I move on the Earth.

When I sing, the muses sing.

Let’s remember… Spirit is breath.

Literally. It comes from Latin meaning breath.

Inspire = breathe in. Take in creative life.
Expire = breathe out. Give away creative life.
Conspire = breathe together. Exchange creative life back and forth.

When I create I expire, I breathe out, I exhale into other lives, to inspire them.
When I create I inspire, I breathe in, I inhale all that gives me life, to expire again.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Life is not life when there’s only one source. Life is a relational transaction.

Live. Die. Live. Die.
I take in to live. I give out when I die.

I cannot only breathe in. I cannot only breathe out. I have to keep breathing. Conspiring.

There is no such thing as a solo performance.

Mixing and Mastering Services

Musical Creations

Creator Chats is a series where I ask musicians about their own creative process, and about the works that they’ve created. As a mixing and mastering engineer, I get to work with some amazing creative people, and this is a chance to hear more about what makes them tick.

For years, Aaron Gilbride has been building a whole world of songs as Psychotronic Squirt Gun, each one a link in a chain of interlocking storylines. Together they populate up a world where aliens, magic, and inter-dimensional tomfoolery hide behind every turn.

In 2025 I started mastering these songs for him, to help put this amazing body of work out into the world, for everyone to enjoy. I’ve met Daisy, Eddie, Callie, Polly, Clarissa, Chase, Isabella… I’m so excited to learn what happens to them, and meet more friends along the way. I truly can’t wait for Aaron to send me more songs!

There’s something really unique and special happening here, and the perspectives that Aaron shares in this interview expose some glimmer of why. There’s a certain kind of commitment that Aaron brings. He’s serving the stories. As he says here, “when I’m creating, I’m listening.”

This is where an artist treats their job like being a midwife - where the artist helps things be born.

This artist does not create. This artist serves creation.

This artist does not make a product. This artist presides over a birth.

This artist helps a mother and child get through a labour, an ordeal, so that the child can come into this world.

So… thanks to Aaron, for listening, and helping the incredible world of Psychotronic Squirt Gun come to life!

What does creativity mean to you?

Creativity, to me, is the act of connecting things that already exist or potentially exist in a way that feels honest. It’s not necessarily about inventing something out of nothing. Although ultimate creation in nature seems to be that way... Anyway, it’s about noticing patterns, meanings, emotions, and ideas that are already around us — and arranging them so they resonate. When it works, there's this positive glow I feel afterwards.

Where do you think your creativity comes from?

Honestly, it comes from being inspired by artists I genuinely love. Their work takes me to an internal place of buoyant escapism — a kind of inner happiness where things feel meaningful and connected.

I also believe that the people and art around us act as reflections. When an artist truly inspires me, it’s usually because they’re resonating with something that already exists inside me — not because I invented it, but because I recognized it.

I don’t think that’s unique to me. Ideally, it applies to everyone. Art works when it reminds us of something we already carry, even if we didn’t yet have language for it.

Do you have a story, image, or idea of what happens when you’re creating?

I tend to think of it as tuning a receiver rather than building something from scratch. That requires me to be present — not overthinking what I’m doing, but actually doing it. When I’m creating, I’m listening: to lyrics, to images, to emotional tone, and following where they lead.

If I push too hard, things flatten. If I stay receptive, the work starts suggesting its own direction.

That said, I usually begin with a story or conceptual framework that gives me an initial orientation. It doesn’t dictate the outcome, but it provides a starting signal and a clear sense of intent. From there, the process becomes less about control and more about paying attention.

Is there a specific version of that story or image that occurred while making this specific project?

Yes. This project feels less like making isolated works and more like assembling a signal over time. Each song, character, and chapter functions as a kind of transmission — complete on its own, but even more meaningful when experienced in sequence.

Rather than aiming for immediate clarity, I became more interested in cumulative resonance. Meaning — or the moral of the story — doesn’t arrive all at once; it builds over time, the way a story naturally should. Once I realized I could apply this approach, the project stopped feeling fragmented or random and started feeling genuinely exciting to me.

When you’re creating, what is the most fun or enchanting thing about it?

The most fun part is simply producing sound around an original melody. When lyrics are involved, they help explain a character, but it’s the music — the sound itself — that gives emotional weight to a scene or a concept. It’s magical, honestly.

Those moments feel less like invention and more like discovery. It’s when the project starts giving something back — when it feels alive and arrives at emotional places I didn’t expect. That’s the part that keeps me going.

When you’re creating, what is the most difficult or frustrating thing about it?

Rewriting or redoing parts I’ve already made that no longer work, often because I didn’t yet know certain things when I started years ago. That can be frustrating.

My standard is pretty simple: I have to be able to listen to it later without cringing — ideally even enjoy it. If I can’t do that, I know I need to go back and fix it, even if that means undoing work I’ve already spent time on. Most music producers would probably advise against that, but because all the songs interconnect into a single storyline, each one needs to be listenable on its own.

Is there any specific experience that you want to tell us about the making of this project?

Yes — I had an epiphany about what often happens when artists become commercially successful. At a certain point, they’re approached by powerful interests and offered a choice: comfort and visibility in exchange for alignment, or exclusion if they refuse.

Realizing that helped clarify my intent. This project only works if its meaning stays visible and honest, so I decided early on that I wouldn’t trade that clarity for anyone else’s version of success.

Was your creative process especially different from other projects you’ve done?

Yes. This project demanded more patience and long-term thinking, since every piece had to connect meaningfully to the others.

What is it about the storytelling and world-building that attracts you to this format?

Storytelling and world-building allow ideas and emotions to exist without being reduced to explanations or arguments. Characters can hold contradictions, and meaning can emerge over time rather than being stated outright. That feels closer to how people actually experience life.

Do you have a big-picture storyboard arc idea, or are you developing things piece by piece as you move along?

It’s mostly a fixed map, but new ideas naturally emerge along the way. Having an overall structure keeps the project coherent, while allowing flexibility keeps it healthy for me.

What gave you the idea to do a musical comic book series in the first place?

I’ve always been drawn to long-form, seemingly never-ending stories, and comics felt naturally suited to that. They let ideas evolve over time and make complex science-fiction concepts more accessible through character and imagery. Musically, I was influenced by Bob Pollard, who showed that songs could start with words or loose conceptual ideas rather than formal musical structure. I took a similar approach, but with more narrative intent. David Lynch’s suggestion to create your own world was what ultimately pushed me in that direction. This project grew out of combining those ideas: using songs as building blocks, comics as a long-form container, and letting meaning emerge through sequence and repetition rather than abstraction alone.

And who is it that needs fans, just as much as the fans need them? The star.
That’s just the other end of the same circuit.

A star is someone who needs to show others what to desire.
Who needs self-worth handed to them by a fanatic.
Who needs to be idolized by fans.
Who needs a fanatic to set their own compass.
A star is too bright and hot to get close with - a star cannot be a friend.

The Need for Social Connection

Let’s say I’m sad about the fact that no one seems to care about my music, and I feel demotivated to make my art.

Why?

Maybe I created music I thought was ‘good,’ but perhaps nobody listened. There’s a need for social connection, validation, and recognition that’s not getting met there.

I want someone to like my art. That’s a real emotional need. It feels good when people care, when we connect. And it shows that art is social. That it matters how it is received.

There is a desire to know someone else, and know that others know me too. The desire to love someone, and love that they love me. That’s a social need. It’s separate from the economics of getting paid and surviving. When someone knows me, and I know that they know me; when someone loves me, and I love that they love me… that’s called a friend, not a fan.

I also want someone to support me for it, so that I can support my life and continue doing it. But that is a somewhat different need - it’s not the need for social recognition or validation, it’s an economic need within a certain system of social production. And even the idea that I have to ‘be paid’ for it is an assumption that comes from that system. It could be very differently organized. It‘s just hard to envision what that means from inside our own world.

Being a star and having fans can serve economic needs, for some people (often at the expense of other people). But it does not support emotional validation needs of humans seeking communication, collaboration, and collectivity through art. We get ourselves into serious trouble when we think that it does.

The Star-Fanatic Circuit

Star transmits signal to fanatics. Fanatics consume signal. Product-consumption.

This is what I’m calling the star-fanatic circuit. It’s a a way of producing energy, like an electronic circuit, or an economic circuit.

We are taught to think about the value of art based on its sheer objective impact - records sold, dollars made, people impacted, cultural zeitgeists notched. In the process of marketing our art we reach for anyone and everyone. And then we also expect that this should feel satisfying, in the emotional validation sense.

But the star-fanatic circuit does not satisfy those needs. Completely the opposite, it alienates people from each other. It abstracts a social relationship into a coded formula, a commodity circuitry. This is bloatware that comes automatically installed with our cultural operating system. It’s clogging things up behind the screen, and we don’t even notice unless we intentionally go digging to clean out the junk applications.

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.

Terrible.

Terrible advice.

The moon is a barren rock. What the #@*^ are you gonna do when you get there? And the stars are just wallpaper for the void. Hey! If you miss, at least you can float forever in the frozen abyss!

This kind of motivational slop models the star-fanatic circuitry. It launches you into space: because you’re so special - you aimed high and followed your dreams, good for you! You deserve it! You’re one of a kind! Brilliant, exposed, cold, alone. And it puts your fans down below, the middling masses, the ‘rest of the kind,’ regular Joes who stayed put, always looking up because they need you for their puny earthling navigations.

But trying to get real human warmth from a star is like trying to get blood from a stone.

When we’re stuck in this belief that social validation can come from fans or stars, the actual relationship of art gets wrenched away from real human interactions. It gets abstracted and broadcast across the universe, the nameless anyone, the nameless everyone. The warmth of human validation cannot survive hurtling through the vast vacuum of outer-space.

The link here is mythical and cold. It’s a loveless marriage taped together by a mutually upheld illusion of what each other ‘should’ be offering. Both sides are just shadow boxing with a projection of their own fantasies. No one is happy, and no one dares admit it for fear of facing the truth that something’s not working right.

Unless we find ways to validate art in closer communion, within real human ecosystems, among friends, then the need for artistic activity to be emotionally validated will go unfulfilled. And even worse, people will not understand why it feels so empty even when they do have fans who are supposed to offer that validation. It will feel like you should feel validated. And feeling unfulfilled, yet also knowing that you’re supposed to feel fulfilled - this is the secret ingredient in your Grandma’s famous recipe for depression.

Scenius

I, as an individual, am a single neuron. What creative capacity does a single neuron possess?

Humans are a social brain. A network. An Us. Creative capacity comes from collections, links. From the amazingly exponential expansion of options that emerge when you combine neuronal connections. Constellations.

Brian Eno has shared a useful word to help elaborate on this idea: scenius. It is the social version of genius. Instead of fixating creative power in an individual, and looking for the roots of creativity and inspiration on that personal level, we can turn to see how creative power comes from groups, who together form the social bonds that collectively articulate creativity and inspiration from a scene.

Like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution. As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture. What really happened was that there were sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work. So I came up with this word ‘scenius’ – the intelligence of a whole operation or group of people. I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture. Let’s forget the idea of ‘genius’ for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.

Scenius is about the creative sparks that come from interaction. At the value of art that is created in a community, at the value of art in creating community. Scenius is a group that creates a culture together, and enjoys doing it together. This is where great movements in art come from. And this is also another way of emphasizing the non-commodified value of art. It is cultural communication, generating social identity.

What does this mean for valuing art? What happens when scenius is truly the focal point of our attention and energies?

Us-Expression, Not Self-Expression

Art is communication - ways of sharing ideas and feelings, ways of creating meaning together among humans.

I want to emphasize the value of calling it communication by highlighting that I’m intentionally not saying expression. There’s a common sense in our society that art is about self-expression. But I don’t believe that. I think that idea arises from the star-fanatic circuit, the notion that art is something produced as expression and consumed as impression, in a one-way line. Self to other. Seller to buyer. It’s a solipsistic delivery system. A lopsided emphasis on an abstract subject who can simply express what comes out of himself.

This abstract subject is the genius who supposedly should ‘shoot for the moon and land in the stars.’ He’s the star we’ve been chasing.

But if art is not engaged as a production-consumption system, and rather as a communication-communication system, then it’s definitely not enough to call it self-expression. It’s not enough to expect that it ‘comes out of’ a subject, a star, and gets transmitted to others for consumption. Art is never delivered from one place to another, that’s a package, a product, a way to sell art. Active art, where it really comes from when it’s made, is created in communication, in a place, together.

Maybe we can call it a matter of us-expression instead.

And this gets even more provocative when you apply it to the inside of a single person. What happens when we think about art as an us-expression from inside one person?

Saying that I ‘express myself’ feels so monolithically narcissistic to me. Who is this self that does all the expressing anyway? Am I truly only the one in me, this self? Who said so? … This self said so? Am I that boring and predetermined, that I can be summed up in my expressions? Do I have a script? Am I selling a product that has already been produced, and it’s just a matter of promoting it? Do I know myself so clearly, that I can simply deliver my self’s true expressions?

No. Again, I really don’t think so. I think it’s far more fecund to think of artistic creation as a way of allowing the us-within to arise in various formations. Art is a way of making the individual into a dividual. It’s about how the multitudes within me twine and twist, finding different expressive harmonies at different moments, places, emotions, and challenges. It’s a way of allowing for the groups within me to create, together. It’s that special ‘us,’ the social communication that creates in between, in the gaps. It’s a special capacity for letting go of the control that a self would demand from me. It’s a way of short circuiting the expression that would seem to come clear and simple from ‘a single self.’ It’s a call to arms to cut off the king’s head, and allowing the people within to share in their expressions. It’s allowing the scenius within me to come out.

And How?

What could change if we shifted towards making art for a scene of friends, rather than acting like a star for fans?

Whose scene? Who is ‘us?’ And how are we dealing with our fundamental resource needs, enough to continue doing the art if we abandon the orientation to the star-fanatic circuit and invest in our scenius instead?

There’s layers to this. I think I’m saying that the solo artist ideal, the genius, the star, is not a healthy or truly human choice. We need a scene, and we thrive with scenius. So the value and the validation have to come from friends, not fans.

There’s a famous anthropology study by Robin Dunbar that concluded humans have the social brain capacity to truly engage with only about 150 other people, maximum. Beyond that we lose the social emotional power to coordinate ourselves.

This is a contested idea, but the concept is captivating. If we’re trying to think about how things would change if we engaged with art as acted among friends rather than as aimed at fans, then an idea like this take on a new value. What if 150 is a real, practical maximum limit to the amount of meaningful artistic relationships one person can coordinate at once. How does this influence the way we understand spheres of influence, overlapping connections between different scenes?

There’s a sense where we need to prioritize that smaller set of friends (maybe that’s 150 max, maybe not exactly), with whom we are passionately engaged in creating and communicating - creating communication and communicating creativity.

Even seeing fans as friends, and shifting the orientation of how we expect validation from those fans can be a revolutionary move. We might be encouraged to rethink how we reach out and engage, leaning more into the strategy that privileges quality of connections over quantity, making art for a select group rather than for everyone, taking care how we offer and receive inspiration from a scene rather than from the mass media. Like For The Interested has expressed, there are so many worthwhile questions that start growing from this shift…

We all want a big audience – except for the people who have one.

They want a bigger one.

That desire – whether we acknowledge it or not – colors what we create, how we create it, and how we promote it.

It influences our decisions and combines with a mistaken belief that social media makes it “easy” to attract a huge following to drive us to chase one.

But chasing a huge audience often keeps us from attracting one.

Because a meaningful following is the result of connecting with individuals – not the result of broadcasting to the distracted masses.

That’s why it’s helpful to ask yourself this when plotting your content and promotion strategy:

“What would do differently if you only needed 10 true fans to succeed?”

Probably a lot.

The spectre of GenAI art forces us to double down on this kind of question - both in terms of economics and artistry. When art-products can be made with nearly zero effort and time expenditure, then the market for art-products gets pretty messed up. There’s a lot of talk about shifting towards more connection with fans, more engagement with a scene, more participant involvement in the art that does get promoted. A lot of these points I’ve been elaborating are circulating as common ideas these days, as I can see it anyway.

For example, I appreciate the way Music X has recently discussed practical economic and legal issues along with the bigger artistic and theoretical questions:

If we allow for the philosophical for a moment: Is music primarily about the artifact, as in the recording that can be played back identically each time? Or, is it about the experience, as in the moment of listening, which is always unique and contextual? GenAI might actually be pushing us to reconsider music as a more collective experience again is an optimistic take we can have here.

…

The key is ensuring that human creators can still build sustainable careers creating music that has cultural value beyond functionality. That means new revenue streams, new ways of connecting with audiences, and new frameworks for recognizing and rewarding creativity that goes beyond generating content.

There are ways that the development of AI technology can create even more options to centre communication and collective creativity in music. It can serve a move towards scenius as the source of music, enable different forms of collaboration, participation, and support generative interaction in music projects. But it’s up to artists to make those things happen. The corporate overlords are not interested in that path. There is a real danger that these tools will be used to move us even further on the alienated path of fetishized art, “where art ceases to be seen as a means of human communication, and the human viewer needs only themselves to create meaning.” (as pixiewithpens has recently put it.)

Capitalist economics will exploit these tools to cut us even deeper into the star-fanatic circuit, to the point where there aren’t even any stars left, just fans wrapped in their own personalized individual void.

It’s our work to provide the exact opposite as an alternative.

It’s our work to engage the scene-friend ecosystem, to the point where there aren’t even any artists left, just friends in their own collective scenes of creative communication.

My Music

I love Christmas music. I hate Christmas music.

I love Christmas music.

I love the cozy wrap of winter warmth that it evokes. And I love the tradition of having specific music for a specific festivity. That’s something our culture doesn’t have enough of, in my opinion. I love the sense of attaching a song to activities, food, family, decorations, weather. I really love the way this can awaken deeply-seeded feelings. It’s a hypnotism. A ritualization. Speaking about human culture generally, this is in large part what music is for - a way to mark an event, to evoke specific feelings that are meant to be felt with that event - a wedding, a harvest ritual, a birth, a death, a coming-of-age, an offering. Our culture has smudged out this close association between music and events. Modern Western culture only kinda/sorta haphazardly maintains this tradition. The ‘Here Comes the Bride’ song. The ‘Graduation’ music. ‘Thriller.’ The Christmas music tradition is the most alive as an active way that we still do this.

I hate Christmas music.

It’s soooo sappy. There’s a finite charge on my Mariah Carey buffer battery. It’s tiresome the way it gets attached to selling everything. And when it switches on to constant rotation at 12:01 am, November 1st, it’s hard to still enjoy it by the time the actual holiday rolls around.

So anyway… here’s some Christmas music, without all the Christmas musiciness. I took the modern classic Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow! and tried to evoke the special coziness of being warm in the chill, the unique presence of being not-totally-here. I slowed and stretched it into an abstract palette of sounds that are meant for actually lying in the snow, dozing in the cold, going nowhere for a while (eleven and a half minutes, if you need to be exact about it), inhaling the humid crisp in the air, and letting the flakes collect on your eyelashes.

Enjoy with grog, or grogginess, or both.

Merry Yuletide.

We get to learn about diverse artists, and continue expanding our collective inspiration.

Spooqs - BIOMES

Spooqs is a genre-fluid exploration of imaginary spaces in electronic music. Spooqs’ latest release BIOMES is an immersive world-building project focused on a thematic journey to the depths of the ocean. And it feels like it. With sparkling synth washes and wobbly waves at the surface, it darkens and deepens as we descend.

Through wondrous attention to texture and mood, there’s a tangible sense that each song is a scene, a place, a feeling that is also heightened when you’ve read the accompanying text for each song and behind-the-process insights.

Spooqs sets it up for us nicely, with this introduction:

BIOMES is a collection of cinematic, electroacoustic soundscapes inspired by role playing games and nature documentaries. These tracks are melodic studies of landscapes and exploration. Together these six pieces constitute a short story about a pilgrimage across the dunes, and deep into the ocean. There is an imprint we leave on the places we visit, and an imprint those places leave in turn on us. We never forget the beautiful and intimate spaces we’ve passed through. The farther we travel from home, the deeper we dive, the more we come to know. There is a kind of explorer’s resolve and a sense of adventure when we come to new places we’ve never seen.

What does creativity mean to you?

I do a lot of the creative things that I do out of compulsion honestly. I’ve always been interested in art and digital media for as long as I can remember. I remember playing video games as a little kid and thinking about how each ‘layer’ to the experience needed a talented person or two to create this cumulative whole out of music and images and code. I guess I always just wanted to explore each of those things, because I thought they were interesting individually.

Where do you think your creativity comes from?

Something I really do believe is that there is a creative side to each and every one of us. We all have passions and dreams and a story to tell. I think that some of us are lucky to be around groups of people, things that inspire us, and even a place and time that fosters and nurtures this side of our Selves. Great art and great teachers are like a bird warming that egg of your creativity and helping it hatch into something. I’m really lucky to be around a group of people that inspire me to develop my skills and make me want to share the things that I make.

Do you have a story or an image or an idea when you’re creating?

Always. But most of the time it is a very vague image, that is free of most details. I like to imagine that I’m composing music for a video game, and it’s my job to describe an imaginary space. When I start a new project, by the time it has a sonic identity I’m usually thinking about the ‘setting’. If I was playing a video game, what kind of environment would this track be taking place in? A quiet fishing village? A haunted forest? A creepy subterranean tunnel? A bizarre general store with a kooky guy working the counter? Once I figure out ‘where’ the track takes place, it feels a lot easier to make decisions about the track and where it wants to go and what it wants to sound like.

Is there a specific version of that story or image that occurred while making this specific project?

I started all 6 of the tracks on BIOMES during Jamuary - a yearly idea-a-day songwriting challenge. The only real thing that connected them at first was the common trait that they were ideas that I wanted to avoid writing drums for. That decision was originally made because I was starting to feel the burn of writing every day after a couple weeks into the challenge. Not writing drums made the idea a lot less time consuming to jot down and it felt like I was ‘giving myself a break’ in a certain sense - since my daily jams often start with a combo of drum and bass groove and the first set of chords. But like I said previously each of the tracks felt like an idea worth pursuing once I could hear where they took place - a vast desert, the rolling waves of the ocean, a coral reef, a trench at the bottom of the ocean.

The specifics of the story and imagery didn’t really emerge until I decided to put all 6 together and try and arrange them into an ‘arc’ of energy that sounded compelling. The oceanic theme became more apparent when they were all together. And from there it felt most natural to follow a progression of going deeper into the ocean. It all feels very abstract to put into words, but a lot of those kind of decisions feel rational in the context of the imagined whole.

When you’re creating, what is the most fun or enchanting thing about it?

That’s a difficult question because there is a lot I love about a lot of ways of working. And I feel like I’m trying to look for some new way of working with each release. The tools I’m using and the music that I find interesting each year changes, and so adapting and exploring really might be my favorite part of the whole thing. Just getting into a flow state where you’re moving forward and not really thinking too hard about the specifics because the music and the ‘setting’ sort of tells you what it wants. There is this window of time near the beginning of writing where you’re past the blank canvas syndrome, but haven’t quite gotten to the finnicky technical stuff where it just feels like immersive play. And that’s definitely my favorite stage of the process.

When you’re creating, what is the most difficult or frustrating thing about it?

This one is easy. Time. There will never be enough of it. At least not for the fun, creative parts. For me, the writing part usually comes easily. The next stage is often a lot of pragmatic decision making. Mixing, cleanup and the technical parts of making the whole track work cohesively. That prescriptive part can still be creative and engaging for me. But after awhile, I get the itch to get back into that state of immersive play - the part I described before where you’re finding the identity of the thing that’s being created.

Is there any specific experience that you want to tell us about the making of this project?

I guess this would be a good place to say that I think that testing your creativity in an endurance run is one of the best and most helpful things a developing your skills. You’re also giving more of your ideas a chance to exist in the first place. There are a lot of people out there who think that musicians or artists get struck with a bolt of inspiration and go create while their muse is whispering in their ear. And to me that’s just not how it’s ever worked. The tracks on BIOMES started as daily demos in Jamuary - ones that I started writing three weeks into the event. Listening to the mix tape, you can actually tell that these more ambient, drum-free tracks would happen on days after I had written something more intricate or detailed the day before. These tracks often started as me ‘taking a break’ but still pushing myself to make something that day and not break the streak of making one every single day. Very likely, some of them started on days that I was feeling low energy and might have been hesitant to open Ableton and get started. And so I’m really glad that I pushed myself those times instead of waiting for my muse.

Was your creative process here especially different from other projects you’ve done?

I’m still in the process of discovering the magic workflow that works the best for me. At this stage I know that it involves these create endurance runs like Jamuary. Since 2022, I’ve tried to do these ‘two week challenges’ as a way to start new ideas and explore new sounds and ways of working. And so that first ‘stage’ of production where I’m farming ideas hasn’t changed that much. The past few releases, I’ve used Arturia Pigments as one of my main software synthesizers, but for Jamuary 2025 it was the ONLY synth that I used for the month, and I feel like this made the project easier to work on as a whole and package into a resource pack for other musicians to use. Committing to the creative limitation made the tracks a lot easier to come back to and wrap my head around as they all shared a similar anatomy and template structure.

Spooqs // BIOMES