iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

It’s not being preachy, it’s being pastoral. I’m working on cultivating this in myself, and I hope I can help other people do so, because I’m really tired of yearning for all my talented friends to finally get to do what they want to do.

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But reclamation has to happen in ourselves, in each other, and in remaining unafraid to be (in ten layers of scare quotes) “selfish” about our own personal visions, day by day. That might be one way we cultivate the kind of nuance almost everyone is complaining has disappeared from the world.

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A urinal in an art gallery and a reality star in the White House participate, in different ways, in the same symbolic drift of mediation, spectacle, authority, value, and the worldwide collapse of distinctions. I don’t think that resemblance is an accident.

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There’s a reason so many of our collective practices feel stalled and struggling, beyond defunding alone. Arts literacy and critical artistic thinking have been consciously and unconsciously dismantled by many different forces since the middle of the last century.

maybe not by making everything *about* them, but by finding the motifs and choreography of historical continuity, connective resonance and a healthy awareness of Everything That’s Going On inside our own authorial expressions, rather than critical ones.

We’re a good few decades into the “new internet“ now, and if you care about tending to culture in a way that is substantive without becoming preachy, I think we have to find ways of expressing our own personal visions towards those substantive ends,

We’ve been so overwhelmed, many of our most talented systems-minded artists have ended up mistaking representation of systems for the practice of systems.

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Modernism prized narratives of alienation within conditions of increasing chaos. Postmodernism prized polyvalency, instability and identity-shifting, sometimes towards nihilistic ends. I don’t think we need to keep naming the next thing. We don’t need post-post-post-whatevers.

Because we need, IMO, art that has the architecture and structural mechanisms of systems thinking, connective thought and pluralistic resonance without necessarily having to be *about* those things.

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I hated learning this, to be honest, but I’ve found your heart and your attention will find their feet again, and you’ll discover all of that deep systems stuff inside the New Thing. Life finds a way, etc. But ultimately, it can’t be our job to teach or preach anymore.

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And the good part (and the bad part, if you’re a systems-thinker) is reorienting yourself around tiny acts of process. Starting again from something like a hobbyist mindset, and trusting your brain to come in later and start making connections.

Recently I’ve been working on myself in this regard, and Que’s stream solidified the answer for me. You have to begin again. Beginning again, after decades of artistic longing, can feel like murdering parts of yourself. It isn’t comfortable, but it’s vital.

and a lot of artists end up not only siphoning away their own creative energy (albeit towards a worthy cause) but slowly lose their grip on their own artistic agency. And then one day you look up and you have a tired, yearning heart.

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Meld that with an increasingly hostile online environment, and with the workload of trying to take people through the process of critical thinking and “systemic literacy” (thanks @flantz.bsky.social),

I have complex feelings about this word, but ultimately it‘s a noble impulse. It’s also a mammoth task, which is perhaps why we so rarely see figures in media anymore who can exert themselves across the whole fucking history of the post-Enlightenment world and make it plain.

You end up trying to trace “the artistic mindset” through other people’s work, but also trying to show how certain deep relations exist within the media we admire, through criticism, didactic work, teaching, scattered Discord conversations that never seem to resolve, etc.

When you’re someone who knows that art can save people, and you have a connective, systems-forward brain (or ADHD), you can end up with this sense of duty and ownership towards helping others.

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