home sweet home

lately when i dj, i tend to think: am i spinning for me, or for them? according to the greats (aka old hag rick rubin), artistic self-expression should be about producing something that singularly represents yourself, without any regard for other people's tastes. but when you dj, you have to consider the crowd, the culture, the zeitgeist (a term recently coined) by singer-songwriter camilla cabello. if you can accurately read the room and spin for the people, it's considered a huge talent. but when you read the room, you have to step outside of your body and into the body of the crowd; you have to create for their tastes. maybe its a perpetual balance between me and them - but perhaps it doesn't have to feel like a balance when you become one of them. maybe spinning for me and spinning for them just become the same thing eventually, when (if?) i feel like just another person in the crowd? is that the goal?

i think im interested in plunderphonics because it engages critically with the idea of intellectual property in music and seems to embody principles of open access in the public domain. digital humanities as a scholarly field is the same; everything should be archived and totally free to view online for everyone. it recognizes that anything we create is not just heavily influenced by everything that came before it, but inextricable from past creation [x]. there is no me without them.

there is no personal self-expression without the interactions and interventions of others. if there was, self-expression would be pointless. who would you be expressing if not a person living in a highly interconnected world of traditions and norms and cultures and counter-cultures and political experiments and social structures? an isolated human living in a vacuum? has that person ever existed? are they happy?

when i feel guilty at the thought that my self-expression is informed by all the people i have had the pleasure of bouncing against in my life, i should remember that my position in social culture is precisely what makes my expression worth expressing. ive been finding solace in the idea that my body is just a tool for an idea to become actualized when it's time for that idea to be actualized. if it doesn't happen, that's okay. no thought or failed project is wasted because now an idea is in the ether. someone else on the other side of the world may have caught the idea and is currently working on actualizing it. there's no need to be envious of people who seem to be expressing their 'true' selves (whatever that means). any genuine creative energy should be celebrated as a breakaway from the forces that keep us working on purely productive, efficient activities. that energy is a reflection of my own creativity, just in someone else. my time to send out my energy will come if i'm patient and curious.

[x] but what happens when AI companies train their models on the bevy of accessible content posted online by well-meaning creators and turn it into a tool that disadvantages visual artists and graphic designers? according to lev manovich, artificial intelligence operates on the opposite logic of modernism; instead of doing away with tradition, AI art (at least now) is mostly just really good at taking the corpus of an artist's work and translating it into a reproduction. ethical technologists have argued for stronger copyright laws when it comes to AI-generated art, but that seems like a huge compromise, going against the ethos of open artistic freedom. i think thats why NFTs always seemed icky to me. call me a traditionalist but i think the economic and the artistic should be kept separate just like my parents... although i guess they're also inextricable. fuck. hopefully a revelation about the nature of creation will come to me via esoteric symbolism in a dream one day. until then we are soo cooked.

home sweet home