Thumbnail from A Cathedral of 7th Chords.Index:
1) Introduction
2) Art Criticism
3) Intrusive Thinking and Creativity
4) The Role of Missing Information in Creativity
5) Art and Algorithms
6) Art, A.I., and Culture
7) Autism and The World
8) 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 because YouTube was not judged to be well suited for this esoteric content. However, it was doubtful Vimeo understood the low-tech analog nature of my work. They catered to high production value short films. Hence, my Vimeo site was abandoned, and I 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 one should should be doing at sixty-four years of age with failing eyesight. As of May 2023, my longer form videos began to build an audience around topics of autism, so my short-form animations were discontinued.
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. Of course, I can swoop in at the end of a painting session, after the camera shuts off, and fine-tune my brushwork.
Frankly, it is a pain to set up the camera and carry out these joyless operations. And to be even more frank, it is possible that my underperforming channel is contributing to my disenchantment around my art projects.
Painting in progress (5/31/23).
YouTube and The Unique Creator: 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 through which creators gain subscribers and become famous.
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. They must keep making the same video over and over again to feed the algorithm, otherwise they will perish. Many creators simply go away after a while, especially if they are one-man operations, or their niche topic does not have a refresh button.
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-Barbara cartoon character. By the time I turned twelve in 1970, I had stopped watching Saturday morning cartoons out of boredom; and perhaps this snobbish-ness sealed my fate.
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 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 evolving forums.
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. Four near-death experiences mark my history as a pedestrian: 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, which 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 an 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. Nearing 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, his plans were foiled. 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 at the gorge, 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 a hurry in so desolate a location? I guess he had to keep up the pretense that he was going somewhere.
4) My last near death occasion 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 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 Dystrophy 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.
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, after returning 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 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 her last Christmas, I did not know of this video’s existence, or my mother saying these words.
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