Novelty and Authenticity
Six months away from the vlog. There is a lot going on behind the scenes - personal/professional/national/global - but really I have been thinking, reading and absorbing. Where to go with one’s extra energy? Being a contemporary “media worker” is all about stops, starts and about-faces.
Mark Deuze’s Media Work lays out the opportunities and insecurities of media production in today’s “informational hypercapitalism.” The conclusions are neither optimistic nor pessimistic. They are, to me, simply hopeful. Disruptive technologies are exactly that - disruptive. Obama is a case in point.
Deuze reminds us that it is the novel and authentic that will always attract attention, and therefore have value. The difference now is that what is novel and authentic depends on networked communities made up of individual creators and consumers. It can no longer be controlled by top-down corporations,governments or boards. At the same time, commerce and power need attention flows and must be engaged with or following culture production. What does this look like in practice? Nobody knows the answer, which is why it is such an exciting and precarious time to be a media creator.
I recently finished a draft of a feature script that is one part novelty, three parts formula. It seems to me that Capital will only feed cultural production in healthy ways once it follows (rather than lead)s the directions of individual and niche creators. So instead of the 100 million dollar mega-hit, why not seed communities by funding 1000 artists with 100,000 dollars? Or 10,000 artists with 10,000 dollars? The artists have to keep working no matter what, continue creating novel and authentic forms without the attachment to money. If the artist helps to cultivate a niche community, then their work has value and money, in theory, should follow.
Much of my reading lately has been around the cultural implications of recent brain research. It could be said that the experience of novelty is the firing of new neuronal pathways in the brain. The brain feeds on new experiences.
- Neuroplasticity - experience changes the brain’s organization.
- Mirror neurons - the same neurons are fired by an animal performing an action as an animal observing that action.
Voice, style, technical innovation, the weird, the hybrid, the disruptive are what some of us hunt for - the fuel for these unstable times. But novelty in media is also the recording of the novel or contingent in daily life. A reminder of the strangeness of what is always nearby. Novelty is everywhere. It is our brains that become lazy and dull. One of the roles of art, and one that is essential for health, is the exercising of new (and refreshing of old) pathways in thought. The art vlog is the brain’s gym.
But the trick with novelty is that there needs to be a dose of the familiar, a cultural context, or else the brain has no way of dealing with it. It ignores novelty, rejects it or labels it silly or pretentious. The familiar is essential for novelty to actually register as novel. David Lynch is able to create such deeply strange experiences because he uses so much that is familiar - the well-lit suburban house, the diner, the cup of joe. The familiar is the invitation into the brain, where the art work can then start firing neurons in unexpected ways.
Authenticity is even trickier. Questions of authenticity were hotly debated when vloggers first shook hands with advertisers. An artist can be stuck repeating a certain kind of effect because it is easy or profitable to do so. Here is where networks and the feedback of consumer/creators help in authentic cultural production. We want to sing the praises of novelty and authenticity when we see it. The comment and the link are just as much acts of cultural production as the post.
These thoughts are not new. Just reminders to myself of why to keep making things.
In his poetically inspiring Keynote at the recent ELO Conference (entitled Visionary Landscapes), Mark Amerika reminds us that the work is never just about ourselves:
Perhaps playing to play
while staying ahead of ones time
requires a recalibration of ones inner time
catching the flow of their unconscious poetic rhythm
so that their intersubjective jam sessions
with the fluid personas within and without
take place in what I call asynchronous realtime.By asynchronous realtime I am referring to
what at times feels like a timeless time,a simultaneous and continuous fusion of horizons
that embeds itself in an ongoing formal investigation of
complex event processing where the visionary artist,
always gyrating at pivotal locations throughout the narrative,
becomes a multitude of flux identities
nomadically circulating within the networked space of flows.
