Be Creative

I recommend being creative because it is much easier than being excellent. Keep in mind that it is still hard to be excellent and creative.

I suspect like other industries, the way art is consummed these days has changed rapidly with the advent of the internet. Most people's impressions of fine art are no longer predominantly from visiting gallaries and curated exhibitions but in public spaces, and more often inter-office chainmails, to be flicked over while bored and trapped or blinked at and maybe instagramed on your way to something else.

These are what I have deduced are the 'creative' solutions to this new interaction:


1. Scale


Increase the scale. You can use one of two methods, literally increase the scale take any object and make it really large. Or mutliple copies, like make something really large by stacking heaps of identical objects.

2. Media

Change your media to something unconventional. Instead of ink on paper, jam on toast, match sticks, sand and a rake, crushed cans, recyclables, garbage, frisbees...

3. Tedium

Replicate something a machine does with similar precision by hand. Imitate a dot-matrix printer.

4. Space

Change the way an audience interacts with a space by putting something in it.

5. Obfuscation

Take the message of your piece and d l t  pa t  f  t. Or obscure it.

6. Dimension

If you have a 2D piece add a 3rd dimension.

7. Recursion.

Take a picture, then take a picture of that picture.

8. Documentation.

Document your process, or document anything.

9. Iteration.

Do something multiple times.

10. Combine.

Combine any of the above 9.

Pretty Bad

My mental state is the worst it's been since the breakup with Claire. Except there's no clear catalyst, like then. Nothing. I have just rapidly descended into a similar grieving process and in the past two to three days it's become crippling.

It's scary, it's terrifying actually because I don't know what to DO to make myself feel better.

Diagnosis

I don't understand depression, the normal chemical functioning of the brain is so intrinsic to my conscious experience, empathising is impossible. Depression is harder to understand or even imagine than other unfamiliar experiences such as being blind, deaf or an amputee.

In all those cases speculation as to what one would do is quite possible, to imagine more importantly the quality of life obtainable.

I have experienced similar but ultimately temporary - environmental states comparible with depression - such as grief or loneliness. But to imagine those states of mind devoid of their context, and lasting, enduring is hard, particularly given that imagining, speculating are temporary in their own nature.

But the idea, the idea that on any particular morning, on an otherwise nondescript da you could wake up lacking the motivation the desire to do anything in particular, to not feel any prospect the day could yeild any enjoyment.

And that the condition persist in those that flourish despite of it, find meaningful careers, people to share their lives with and things to look forward to, borders on the obscne to me. A cruel affliction, that leaves me unable to comprehend the extent of the strength of people who live with it.

And of course it must be compounded by the fact that it is so hard to understand by the 80% of the population who never suffer it in any form. I spend little time attempting to comprehend just what depression means for people, but any time I do I find it beyond my ability.

Yokohama

The pace of drawing a comic has a drawback in the time it leaves you in a certain headspace. I got stuck on one page for a whole day that took me back to Yokohama.

One of those days when I knew I'd said goodbye to something special, and it just rained and rained all night. I was all alone and camped out in a claustrophobic dorm room.

May I live few days like that in the rest of my life. But I'll take them to go on living.

Learning

unconscious incompetence > conscious incompetence > conscious competence > unconscious competence >

you don't know what you don't know > you do know what you don't know > you know what you know > you don't know what you know >

it's an exquisite cycle. Teacher has to go from the fourth step to the third in order to get student from first to second and then onwards through.

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Obama is in, Bush is out.

My theory is that this is what is driving the sudden social acceptability, indeed trendiness of something almost universally accepted to be bad - pretentiousness, in exactly the same way that Bush and the Neocons drove a worldwide trend of being proud of excess - also previously regarded as bad.

People employ the reading of books in this decade in the same manner that people used to employ spray on tans a decade ago.

Pretentious - Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.

the pity is that while Bush drove a 'be an idiot, loud and proud.' vibe, it wasn't replaced with being quiet and maybe standing back to respect expertise and considered approach, it was 'attempt to conceal your idiocy, loudly and proudly.'

While I did feel relief for the world that the Neocons were eventually ousted, and there was a shift back leftwards, while the democrats may be less wantonly damaging as the republicans, they are at least equally annoying. Particularly in their effect on social trends.