Clarity and moulds
Something about ushering in a new year always makes me crave organization and metrics. I imagine it has to do with the obligatory rituals: changing copyright metadata, launching a new Capture One library (I use one per year), filing what needs to be filed etc. And there’s something oddly soothing about it, comforting even. A sense of security.
But there’s also a ripple effect, a reverberation that draws me in, year after year, and transforms my life into some neatly controlled parody of itself. For a time I build automations, I schedule every minute of every day, I basically go to do crazy. And I re-assess EVERYTHING about my daily grind. That’s what makes this whole temporary insanity beneficial: this need to change forces clarity. The minutiae obsession always fade, eventually, but the re-organization usually sticks. This year, for instance, I realized I had three sets of speakers in the studio: a good set for mixing, another for recording (a second reference due to a weird USB setup thing) and finally, a Sonos One. Plus headphones. But those headphones are what I used 99% of the time in 2019, for both recording AND mixing. So it suddenly occurred to me that all those speakers were just eating up valuable space. So...they’re all gone—except for the Sonos to which I can stream from any device. This change could only happen with a shift in perspective, a reassessment of the very mundane status quo; and it allowed my entire workspace to be reconfigured into something much more streamlined and peaceful.
Clarity.
...
Physical spaces are meaningful; but mental spaces are fundamental. And while the two are intertwined, it’s much easier to overlook our mental space, to forge ahead without ever examining how we’re processing this world around us. I felt overwhelmed for much of the last months of 2019—for several reasons—and I’ve made a conscious decision to find solutions. Part of it has to do with being as deliberate as I possibly can with the content I consume on a daily basis—everything from books, to news to music. Books are fairly easy: I’ve discovered a service called Scribd—a Netflix for books essentially (plus audiobooks, magazines, PDFs)—and I’ve already lined up months of reading material, spanning fiction as well as non-fiction. News is harder and requires discipline, especially in our current less-than-enlightened age and with a planet on the brink of collapsing or all out war. Fire, water, hatred…lovely mix. It’s all too easy to drown in the onslaught and I still haven't figured how to navigate that one out yet. I’ve made inroads but I’m not there. Some things take time.
But music...now that’s an interesting case. For awhile now I’ve been trying to combat the reflex to shuffle what amounts to a literally endless sea of content. To go back to a more precise and active form of listening. Because ultimately, shuffling transforms music from a focused experience into the auditory equivalent of wallpaper. I love the access provided by streaming...but I can’t seem to truly take advantage of it, not without conscious decisions on my part. I saw a TED X talk from Canadian broadcaster Alan Cross over the holidays, and I think it’s well worth the 20 minutes if you’re interested in the subject. He looks at how “containers” have shaped music in the modern era: from Edison’s wax cylinder, to vinyl, CDs and now streaming. I found myself nodding through all of it but it’s the concept of egocasting that struck a chord: how we always orbit to material that already matches our tastes—the psychological basis for the all-powerful echo chamber. There’s quite a bit packed in his talk but it essentially all goes back to gaming the system, to algorithms and their hellbent will to define us, individually as well as collectively. And how ultimately, society itself has been shaped by these “containers”. Because the human psyche is imperfect and all too easy to manipulate.
Tying this back to photography, 2020 and (gasp) resolutions: I‘m not interested in being shaped against my will. We all gravitate to what we know but we also hold the power to expand. This is who we are, historically, at our core—but we must want it. We must be willing to break our own moulds. This year, I’m pledging to at least try.
Here’s to moving beyond the safety zone.
Happy New Year.
