Thumbnail from A Cathedral of 7th Chords.Index:
1) Intrusive Thinking and Creativity
2) The Role of Missing Information in Creativity
3) Art and Algorithms
4) Art, A.I., and Culture
5) Autism and The World
6) YouTube Channel and Miscellaneous
A Club that would have Me as a Member (Revisited): In advance of remarks concerning my YouTube channel, let me state clearly that I have created the channel under duress.
Social media has practically killed off unique creators such as myself. My channel, in so far as I cultivate subscribers, will be more about the community that forms around those who self-identify as having autism than me. I have no problem with this occurring, should it occur, but I am trying to build a brand around my creative efforts first and foremost, not autism.
If I lived in an urban setting where I could thrive by the fruits of my labor, I would do so, but autism has made me fearful of unstructured environments, so I have built a clubhouse instead, albeit a clubhouse flying under a false flag.
YouTube and Mixed Feelings: My goal in starting my YouTube channel in 2023 was to cannibalize my twenty year-old website for content, since I have been incapable of driving traffic to my site (and Google has not seen fit to help me).
In the early 2010s, I created a Vimeo channel to handle animation work. I did not see YouTube as being suited for this esoteric content. However, it was doubtful Vimeo understood the low-tech analog nature of what I was doing. They catered to high production value short films. Hence, I abandoned my Vimeo site, and no longer possess a password that will let me back in.
Initially, short horror animations had more traction on my YouTube channel, although there is little to pick through from my website on this score, even with the recycled Vimeo content. I began making new animation to feed what little demand there was, but this is not what I want to be doing at sixty-four years of age with failing eyesight. As of May 2023, my longer form videos began to build the aforementioned audience around topics of autism, so I abandoned short-form animation.
Even should I push through current difficulties and reach enough subscribers to monetize my channel, it may come too late to do me much good. I already fill the strain of this endeavor as I approached the one year anniversary in August 2022, which is when I began shooting my first raw footage for the channel.
Thumbnail from A Cathedral of 7th Chords.
Eyesight versus Camera: Time lapse photography of my art process is a large part of the YouTube equation. And though this form of documentation is easier to pull off than hand-drawn animation, there is still my eyesight and corneal disease: The camera must be given preference of position, which means I sit further from the easel or drawing than is to be desired. I can, of course, swoop in at the end of a painting session, after the camera shuts off, and fine-tune my brushwork.
Frankly, it is a pain in the posterior to set up the camera and carry out these joyless operations. However, improving how I package my asset (and myself) continues to evolve.
Painting in progress (5/31/23).
Collectors versus Spectators: YouTube, in theory, might help with my branding, but it is unlikely to produce serious collectors any time soon.
The artist content providers one sees on YouTube are not selling their creativity or art. They are either pitching a “you too can succeed” art business model (like any other useless SEO), or they are selling their personality and/or opinions. This is the para-social dimension of social media, and it is the primary mode by which creators gain subscribers.
Unfortunately, this social media dimension of YouTube forces content providers into negative feedback loops where videos about specific topics get more views than those about their art. Regardless, my personality must be a part of my channel’s strategy going forward, but only in service of creating collectors. I plan to draw on my twenty-plus year history of being an effective art instructor for this task.
YouTube and The Unique Creator: On the front end, social media is grease for the wheels; but it is yet to be determined if any media will replace the flawed art gallery system. YouTube has been described as daycare for adults, but I hope it has a second act by doing what Google has never been interested in doing: that is, promoting creators.
The blight of SEOs grew out of Google’s change of focus from personal websites to businesses, but YouTube needs unique creators. Regardless, their algorithm can be cruel. Many channels just go away after a while, especially if they are one-man operations, or their niche topic does not have a refresh button.
When I subscribe to a channel, I often burn through all its available videos in a short time. I seldom reflect on publication dates, but many times the most recent video will be two years old. New content from a channel may infrequent at best, so many of my favorite creators are destined to disappear from my feed unless I rewatch their videos.
Low Barrier of Entry (Or Why I am not Famous): I came of age before the invention of digital media and the Internet. If one accepts the premise that artistic success relies on exploiting one’s childhood to create nostalgia bait for others of the same age, then my time to profit came and went. My generation, in their peak earning years, had money to spend on nostalgia, for sure, but those set to exploit it were few. More to the point, I have rarely stylized my art to cater to a nostalgic impulse, apart from the odd appropriation of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character. By the time I turned twelve in 1970, I had stopped watching Saturday morning cartoons; and perhaps this snobbish-ness sealed my fate.
A website in 2002 allowed me to create a museum for my entire output as a creative. The two decades I spent building my website means I did not have a community ready-made to receive it. My creative life has skirted other types of subculture communities, such as pop surrealism and alternative comics, which were, in their heyday, geographically based opportunities of which I could not avail myself.
The Interent, by comparison, is no respecter of geography.
Nostalgia that has grown around the subcultures of video gaming, skateboarding, and alternative music has been a rich vein for its participants to exploit. The barrier of entry into these communities is low, and there are many overlapping interests.
I have used the same tools as YouTuber RedPilotSun to create media, but my outcome has been different because I am trying to shoe-horn artworks into a digital domain where much of the original work (dating back to the 1980s) is analog.
Moreover, more recent art movement subcultures have developed around niche curatorship of lost-and-found media, or media made to look lost-and-found. There are fewer creators in the classic artistic sense, where an artist develops a body of work and cultivates an audience. These current-year Internet movements are more like group endeavors with many contributors adding one-offs to an evolving forum. Community forums were never on my radar, and it is only because of YouTubers like Captain KRB that I know of their existence.
Near-Death Experiences: Being an avid walker means I spend more time as a pedestrian than I do driving behind the wheel of a car. Statistic bear out, regrettably, that pedestrians are more likely than drivers to be injured or killed in the wild. I have had four near-death experiences: three while taking my daily exercise on the streets of Bloomington, IN. These incidences have occurred, on average, about once every ten years.
1) The first occasion happened one late evening in April (around 1996) while I was walking home from the coffeehouse. A car was driving the wrong way down a one-way street. It pulled into an alley ahead of me and cut me off on the sidewalk. A teenager pulled a gun on me from the passenger window. He robbed me of my wallet before speeding away.
2) The second occasion happened at a dangerous intersection near Indiana University’s Campus in the early 2000s. A car was caught in cross traffic in late afternoon. A second car struck it and sent it whirling around onto the sidewalk. Its fender clipped my shin, and perhaps would have killed me had I not jumped out of the way. This occurred during the writing of my first novel, in which I had already included a near fatal traffic accident for the protagonist.
3) The third incident did not occur in Bloomington but at The Grand Canyon in 2014. Calling it a ‘a near death experience’ is a subjective interpretation, but here is my best memory of it. My then-girlfriend and I had already gone through the park, and were driving east and southbound back toward Flagstaff and Phoenix. This portion of the road hugged The Colorado Gorge. I was so impressed with this unheralded attraction that we pulled off the road next to a Native American kiosk so I could take a picture of it. I dashed down this dirt path toward the imposing view, even given my profound fear of heights. As I neared the vicinity, I heard footsteps rapidly approaching from my rear. I slowed with foreboding, took one quick picture before running back the way I came. I passed a hooded individual who was gaining on me. Had it been his intention to hurl me down the gorge while I stood inattentively snapping pictures, I foiled his plans. Had he tried to wrestle me back toward the ledge at that point, we would have been in sight of the Native Americans at the kiosk.
In my present novel, I write about a character who takes a roadtrip with Death through Arizona.
I took a second picture, which I did not remember at the time. The hooded man who had me in fear for my life can be seen on the left. Where was he going in hurry in so desolate a location? I guess he had to keep up the pretense that he was going somewhere. (As I later discovered, this was a time during which a rash of disappearances occurred in The Grand Canyon.)
4) The last near death occasion I have to relate was the most frightening. It occurred in June of 2020. I was walking near Rosehill Cemetery when a tall freight truck slowly passed me; the driver appeared lost. He turned into a lot behind me along the narrow street. The top of his truck caught on low hanging power lines. With lightning speed, the vehicle, without realizing it, pulled down a row of power poles (at least six of them!). I heard loud popping behind me, and by the time I turned and realized what was happening, the poles were coming down like trees in a tornado. An explosion of plasmic electricity erupted over my head—and gushed like water from a garden hose! I fled in the opposite direction of the falling poles, and sheltered against the brick retaining wall that bordered the south side of the cemetery.
This landscape painting, titled Felled, commemorates this traumatic event. (The full image may be viewed on my Current Landscape gallery page.
This last incident recalls the death of a character, also from my first novel. He is morbidly afraid of electricity and dies from an encounter with ball lightning. There are plenty examples like this in my writing: In the prologue of my current novel, a character suffers from an unspecified eye affliction. Meanwhile, I develop Fuchs Corneal Dystropy a few years later. I incorporated Fuchs into later chapters of the story.
The Power of Coincidence: Many of the coincidences that occurred between plot elements of my first novel and my personal life were never set down in writing, except what I have mentioned in this blog. This pattern of fiction predicting real life has continued, as far as I have communicated, into my new book. And I have one more to add.
Many strange events happened around the time of my mother’s passing in 2013, and since the new book indirectly deals with this chapter in my life, I have tried to accommodate the most striking coincidences in its pages. The most recent event cannot be explored fictionally, so I set it down here:
During the Christmas of 2022, on Christmas morning, my sister shared a video with me, which was a five second snippet from our mother’s last Christmas on Earth. Hearing my mother’s long-removed voice filled me with profound sadness, and it was not until later, when I had returned home to Bloomington, that what she said in those five second pierced me. She was looking over a book of murder mystery fiction, which she received as a present. (My mother loved reading.) Though weak of voice, she says to my sister filming her, words to the effect, that “he has started (or introduced) a new character…”
This was all she said. She was referring to the author of her book, of course, in what must have been the latest installment in a series of books by him.
The strangeness in this utterance is this: The mysterious events surrounding my mother’s passing were so compelling that I, as I have explained, needed to include them in my novel. This required creating a new character to which these events could be assigned, and then creating a special section in the middle of my book where this character could relate these details. This character appears in no other part of my book. This interlude was conceived and written after my mother passed in early September, ten months after she spoke in that video. Although I had been present at that last Christmas, I did not know of this video’s existence, or my mother saying these words.
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