Local culture focus can:— make abundant and diverse creative arts with less energy and lower marketing, travel, and similar costs than national/global entertainment and media— establish a field of growing cultural economic activity that is not prone to disruption by automation, corporate consolidation, or AI— build more culture at “fractal scale” in similarly-unique local scenes vs. less culture via monolithic and pyramidic global-scale industry.
Journal
Local-Culture Power (3)
By adopting local culture as the natural environment for creativity, we can— lessen the child-prodigy requirement for fine arts that can make a 17-year-old believe it’s “too late”— dismantle the teen-sensation (or its just-post-teen equivalent) fetish of pop arts and the corollary expiration dates for relevant work (in music, acting, etc.) – generally dispense with ageism in creative work, celebrating creative trajectories that can begin or resume at any age.
Essay - Journal
AIdolatry
I sometimes say that my religion is art, but this may do an injustice to art. Because I believe that art emerges first, before religion, in the conscious cosmos. When a being finds oneself alone with an inner life, with imagination, with the waking residue of dreams, with speculation, with euphoria, as well as with traumas, anxieties, awareness of death and of mysteries, what is the attempt to share this initially inexpressible awareness somehow with another, if not art? It is not simply communication in the mundane sense, not an attempt to coordinate or negotiate, but an attempt to commune: […]
Journal
If nothing is new, suddenly nothing is obsolete
Experimental forms, surreal constructs, aleatory processes — these are now traditional as well. Whether I write a paragraph in the format of Embeirikos or a sonnet in the format of Shakespeare, I write in an established form. This is a liberation. There is no longer any prohibition based on the arrogance and prejudices of Western modernism – if nothing is new, suddenly nothing is obsolete. What matters is human utterance in community, not novelty engineering in history.
Journal
Local-Culture Power (2)
By fostering local creative culture, we can: — enable individual creative journeys to unfold without the alienation created by global cultural juggernauts — provide fertile fields for fresh artistic movements to emerge among personally connected creators and supporters — deconstruct social barricades between establishment/outsider culture, credentialed/folk artists, and other mechanisms of exclusion and de-legitimization.
Journal
What AI can’t replace
AI can’t replace people in a room together reading poetry. AI can’t replace people gathered in a café making music. AI can’t replace the artist’s open studio where you see the mess as well as the work. AI can’t replace the show a local producer puts together with local aerialists and dancers. AI can’t replace the conversation at the pub. AI can’t replace the hours of solitude or the hours of social observation that led to your exquisite short story. AI can’t replace the meal improvised from what’s coming up in the garden. AI can’t replace the flirtation, the encouragement, […]