Assuage the Algorithm

Cribbed my own title from a show I curated like...8 years ago

This is a braid of 3 intertwining thoughts about art and content that I swear belong together.

Trina Turturici in Assuage The Algorithm at Monte Vista Projects in 2018

First: It’s interesting to me how I have an instinct to couch my missives under some kind of justification of my perspective. Like, I want to talk about right now - art and self-promotion in the time of the algorithm - like I have a point of view worth reading. Like I haven’t been deeply active on the internet since the AOL dial up days and posting my own shit since MySpace had those little group boards on the bottom left of our screens…what were those called? I’m always remiss to talk about Tumblr b/c I feel like it makes me sound like one of those people who’s heyday was High School, and those days are LONG gone, and it’s easy to pretend that Vine never existed because…it’s almost like Vine never existed!

Tangentially - I saw a video the other day about how Gary V. ruined social media, and of course the feed refreshed and I couldn’t find the video again to finish it or get their take but instinctually this feels right. In a Gary V. internet - everything has to be promotion, everything has to be hustle, every opportunity has to be taken to push something further and if it doesn’t then it failed and no one is biting and you have to keep going but also you’re a failure but also do it 100x a day because if you’re failing it’s because you aren’t pushing hard enough.

People have asked me for decades now (ugh) what kind of art I make, or what kind of artist I am and I always say I’m not one. I know real artists, I’m friends with them and have worked with them and while a curator at the Getty told me “don’t sell yourself short, you take really lovely pictures on your instagram” I have never felt like one because I don’t have that compulsion I see in them to create art. They can’t stop. Even the artists you love to hate on, watching them work and think and consume other arts to feed into their own work? It’s another level IMO. I don’t have that…or do I? The term creator is so specific but if I look back at the probably 5 Infinite Jest’s worth of crap (see? Why do i do that?) I’ve posted on the internet, that seems pretty compulsive to me. Am I a creator? I don’t take umbrage with that word, although I don’t think anyone would accuse me of being one or have me in mind when talking about creators in the way they discuss them today, but I am pretty sure by definition that is what I am outside of my day job. Curator has almost worse pop-culture connotations when it comes to online output, although it is what I am, which is probably why I separate it from what happens on the internet. I’m a creator here and I’m a curator out there.

An artist was talking to me the other day about how they keep posting and no one likes/bites on their posts, that of course I had and continue to encourage them to do which started this particular screed. There is a frustration at shouting into the void as a creative person. To believe you have made something of worth and you want to share it but have it seemingly fall flat. I think that is where my decades (UGH) of online musings has gotten me, a pretty healthy relationship with the algorithms that rule this place. Of course I get jealous when someone does something I have already done and gets more likes, or someone with less followers than me seems to have more cultural relevance, or someone has dumb/bad takes gets opportunities from the internet than I don’t, but these are also professional feelings I have IRL with other people and so the cringe of being envious of an internet personality is mostly faded and the normal internal professional competitions remain. There is no way to know what will hit and there is no point in trying to please the algos for the potential to have a moment of fleeting relevance. There is no sustainability there emotionally or productively. What there is here is the opportunity for a journey. To exorcise our thoughts and feelings and intellects and creative endeavors and tastes and opinions against the crashing rocks of the web and to keep going. In the next few weeks I am 87% sure I will finish the first draft of my first book. It came together pretty easy, all things said, except that it didn’t. On paper I’m 4/5 done and I wrote it in a few weeks last month. Easy. Except what I really did was type and speak at least 5 Infinite Jests worth of information onto the internet via different portals in a wax on wax off way of building a writing muscle that is finally ready to fight. And no one may like this book either!

Maybe only 3 people read it and that will make me sad for a while but I will eventually be fine and I will never regret writing it the same way I don’t regret filling out those pass it along fill out things on MySpace or the weird one liners on Twitter or the 6 second art shows on Vine or the random musings on Tumblr or the bad art photos on Insta or the hundreds of Blink 182 videos on SnapChat or the walking ramblings on Tik Tok or the newsletters I put here.

Perchance I protest too much.