This morning, I was blessed with plenty of inspiration for my writing, and I have reached a new way of seeing the difference between art and content, as most of what we encounter these days is the latter.
Art is something that is preserved. And its preservation is not forced, as it is being reached by art’s ability to make us return to it, sit with it, or argue with it. Everything accumulates, and the more time you spend with a piece of art, the more it gives you. And it always preserves something which can take the form of a feeling, a question, and many other moments and emotions that belong to each one of us.
Content, though, is the opposite. I would even say that it is designed in a way to disappear. The only reason it exists is to fill a slot, and unfortunately, the algorithms and our attention work in such a way that makes most pieces of content being replaced by the next thing within seconds. They don’t ask anything of us, and they rarely get remembered. It simply erodes. And not just itself but also the platforms it lives on, the attention of people it reaches, and, over time, it even erodes the idea of what it means to create something.
What is more concerning, though, is that we have reached a moment when we are no longer just consuming content, but we are also becoming it. The more we let our lives be shaped by these feeds, the more we start treating ourselves the same way they treat everything else. We allow ourselves to become replaceable, disposable, and reshaped for the next moment, platform, or trend.
But everything is happening without us even realizing it, and we wake up one day realizing how much has already been lost. But I don’t want this to happen to anyone. That’s the reason why I’m presenting you with three pieces of art that will mean something even in a decade from now, to remind you of the things that are actually worth our attention.
It’s 8 am on a Monday now as I put into words the way this piece, which I discovered only last night, made me feel. It brought back so many memories that I knew it must be part of my next curation.
I was born in 1999, so a lot of what we call retro gadgets today were popular in that time or earlier, or when I was just still a child, I fortunately got to experience them too. And part of that is being from Romania. If something were really popular in the States today, in Romania it would receive the same attention in about five years or so. A few people may know about that thing, that’s for sure, but it will get mainstream here only later.
I know it’s an exaggeration, especially now that we have social media and things are traveling so fast (so today the time of adoption may be shorter, but still a lot of time between seeing and acting), but back when the internet wasn’t there, especially social media and the smartphone, things took a lot of time to get popular here. So even if a lot of things felt dated to others, they felt right on time to me.
We had a gadget that looked similar to this one. Inside, there was water with some little poles and small circles, and I had to press the buttons to place the circles on the poles. There was nothing digital in it. None of these gadgets, cause there were more with other games as well, weren’t digital.
I am sad that I don’t have any of them anymore. I was just a kid when I had those, and I was the only one valuing them, and as I am not sure where I left them back then, someone definitely threw them because they had no value to them. But I would love to get some back. Maybe even make some of my own and adapt them to whatever I want them to do today. I have so many ideas!!!
This piece is so simple, yet the memories it brought back are more important and more impactful than anything else it could have offered me.
face control by francoise gamma
How much of myself do I still have left?
How much am I willing to shape myself to please the world I move through, like social media, instead of being the one who molds those environments into who I am???
That’s an essential question that I should keep asking myself constantly. The second part of it is what preserving myself actually looks like, while the first one is letting these places mold me into whatever they want me to be.
I am looking around me, and I am realizing how many of us are willing to change who we actually are for something that doesn’t even matter that much. It matters because we made it to matter, but it doesn’t actually matter. It is something we have no control over, and that will always work the way it wants to work.
And with the constant changes happening in the world that we care about more than our own, we should be changing ourselves to keep up. But this act will make us end up with a fragmented identity. We will never be able to hold onto a single self, and I find that deeply concerning.
I was reminded of the importance of preserving my identity, and of not letting any external factor I have no control over and which doesn’t actually matter, fragment who I am.
The only relationship in which I am not concerned about having to change myself is the one I have with God, because He is the only one for whom I would do it, just to make sure I am making His will. And even then, I am just changing for something that exists within, for that is where He is.
So at the end of the day, there is nothing external we should be changing ourselves for, and we should not let anything control our face.
riding the notifs by catswilleatyou
While I initially had chosen a different piece for this curation, when I ran into this one, and right after I curated the previous piece, I knew this was the third one for this week. It was what stirred within me and the connection with “face control” that made me choose it.
This piece made me aware, again, of how dependent I am on my phone, on social media, and on the notifications of these platforms. I have to always check it. If I am not getting any notifications, why am I not getting any? Why aren’t people liking what I do? Why this, why that, and so on.
And I find myself doing this even when there are things far more important than those notifications going wrong!!! I still care more about what’s happening on the screen than what’s happening around me. And that’s not okay at all, and realizing it once again was sooo awakening.
And I am someone who doesn’t scroll all day. I used to when I was in high school and a little bit after. But now I’ve stepped back from most platforms. (I am still using them for posting to find that distribution.)
The few I still spend time on feel “healthier” than the others, though I know every single one is toxic in its own way. I’ve always said I don’t care about metrics. I usually find myself writing “against” them, because I think they only harm rather than do good.
But I cannot lie, and I cannot say that I am affected by them too. Even when I am not on my phone that much, even when I barely find any will to be on these platforms, I still care, in a way, about the things that are driving our society so much. I am aware of it, and I am actively working on not caring about them anymore, so they stop influencing my life and the things I do.
This piece made me see all of that.🌹