The time has come my dear friends, followers, and fellow design proletariat. I will no longer be posting or reblogging to this Tumblr any longer. I will leave it up as an archive to rummage through dying trends but as much as I may believe in the benevolent act of sharing, I cannot ignore that the wholesale cheap selling off of your creative industry, our creative industry, is getting worse and worse. We're taking lower pay. We're giving our labor-time away. For almost nothing. The bottom dollar. Barely surviving. Which is a shame because I have seen how overpaid creative directors keen on the image aggregator world lurk these feeds; scrolling, right-click-saving images that typically younger, underpaid (or not paid at all) interns then assemble into dazzling pitch decks for brands to pick and choose their next flavor combination. Many of these "directors" have convinced people that their mood board is a substitute for vision, for an idea; the mirror reflecting back a little manga dystopia mixed with a dash of swiss typography mixed with motorcycle gangs from the 1970s Los Angeles. Alakazam! Hit the runways. Fast cash.
I've had whole conversations that feel more like footnotes than any discussion of any particular person or work of art nor their philosophical background or context. Did you see? Yeah. And did you see? Yeah. Well, did you go to? Yeah. Cool. Yeah, everyone's cool. Nobody's boring. Cool is cheap. Duh. Everyone's a king or queen of their own curated life now. Therefore, it's only natural that everyone's ascension to the throne should soon follow with the irrelevance of the individual "tastemaker" founders of image blogs. Kanye West might not know it yet, but any Tumblr kid that's going to be the next-gen pop icon already has more knowledge of what he/she wants to look like, act like, sound like than any seasoned brand strategist with a talent for tasteful arrangement.
When I went to the L.A. Art Book Fair a couple weeks ago I was struck by how precisely aggregated everything from the book jackets to the people browsing them were. I couldn't identify very much amongst them because few if any stood out. Not necessarily one grey mass but the idea of many grey pulpy masses moving around each other. It was like watching an elaborate ritualistic opening ceremony. Cult of the book. Fetish of the image. Pastel Goth acquiesces to the Health Goth at zine table 58-D. Etc.
I am paraphrasing a bit. It's Ryan Nelson's DDDDoomed book again. Images need to be given the respect they individually deserve; which is not to become part of an assembled spectacle slop in the visual trough of the Internet's transient pigpen. We've become such ravenous image consumers. Addicts, really. Barely halting long enough to understand an image as we whiz down down down the feed for our fix. What else in this world moves through information at such a dizzying pace without pause, without reflection? Search engines? Viruses? The NSA?
One's justification for continuing to consume like this is, to no surprise, also an addicts'. Like any other addict, history is irrelevant. On to the next one. Pull down to refresh. 5 unread posts. 16 unread posts. 25 unread posts. The jaded addict will tell you everything's already been done. Nothing's original. The image pulled from oblivion is forgotten at exactly the point of reblog. Not once have I ever looked back at my posts from 3 years ago let alone 3 months ago for "inspiration." What was I building? For whom? The addict's memory. All this time I had convinced myself I was sharing knowledge.
Lastly, because we are all also producers of the image of ourselves (an image instantly loaded with surplus value) equipped with basic editing tools and camera in hand, we accept an uncritical view of the produced image. We are dangerously close to believing everything we see. It's not some conspiratorial paranoia to think that such a lack of critical awareness has grave implications for humans as the Age of Information slips into the Age of Simulation. I can no longer aid such ignorance at such a crucial point of transition.
Thank you for following and godspeed!
- Travis
