#34: The Gifts of Sound and Vision

"...you can be an artist, but you also have to be a curator."

For those in the H.A.T.T.E.R-verse¹, you are likely familiar with discussions around the content we choose to carefully welcome into our lives, i.e., our collections.

Curious Realizer - Collecting Things

I’ve percolated on this post and a related concept for a while, now; specifically, the idea of personal curation as a necessary part of a creative life.

In the twenty-first century, creative life also includes some management of other people’s creativity and the overlap between yours and theirs. To put it a different way: you can be an artist, but you also have to be a curator.²

I need to be surrounded by beauty and creativity in other to ignite my own spark plug of content creation, be it word or picture, but I think it’s a behaviour that benefits any creative sort. We can always learn from others. I can be pushed to do better, keep creating, and lose any ego that might have survived grad school. It’s an approach that then lends itself well to an openness needed to engage others in science, especially those not previously able to access privileged spaces (in my world, that means research and the knowledge).

A sampling of what I collect can be grouped in two buckets: the real world, and the online one.

Analog

Being an elder millennial who came of age in a time when hard copies and IRL ephemera reigned, I still hold value in holding a book or looking at a piece of art in front of me. I have a few things from which I drawn inspiration.

Local Art

I like the connection to a work that comes from being close in proximity to an artist. Plus, it supports a local creative! With that as the only real rule in what goes on our walls, we’ve curated an eclectic mix of paintaing, sketch and pottery around the house. (And, although not analog, I have a running list of artists on the local scene whose work I want to add.)

Probably my favourite piece of art, by Enchan Endo. (Fun fact: Enchan and his wife were the ones who rescued Flower the Cat, i.e., Bitchy Cat’s© mom!)

Coffee Mugs

If one is clean, I’ll reach for a pottery mug first for my morning cup. It invokes a warmth, both in the comfort of its grounding weight, and in the memory it stirs: early undergraduate days when, waiting for my mom to finish up the work day at a specialist shoe clinic, I’d sit in the upstairs kitchen and help myself to a mug of dark roast in a giant salt-glazed pottery mug provided by a wife of one of the workers. The whole space smelled of scraps of leather and coffee and was awash in late afternoon sun, and was a beautiful space to be immersed after a day of lectures and labs.

Harbour Lights is a regional food bank drive around Christmas, culminating in a live radio show at our City Market and a sale of the season’s pottery mug. We never got one until last year, so we were pretty happy to snag both versions. This is the one created by Elizabeth Harrison of Crimmins Pottery.

Scraps of Art and Jumbles of Words in Journals

I started keeping journals over the last few years, and enjoy returning to them for inspiration. Sometimes, they’ve been more structured, with themes for the month in recording my health habits and thoughts. Others are a smash of art doodles and scrawled words for this newsletter. I’ll start a new one up for 2022, and am thinking I’ll go more with an art journal that allows more freeform additions than the constraints of a bullet journal (pretty as they are). I think this will be more responsive to mood and material of the day, and more enjoyable to look at later on.

A sampling of my ridiculousness.

Digital

But because I am an elder millennial, in which my second decade of life saw the emergence of a digital life, I’m also not shy about collecting art, music and words online. In writing this, though, I realize that I am far less mindful of what I collect in these spaces. I only recently started pruning the stacks of digital bookmarks, which is both practical and a useful meditative exercise in its own right.

What we collect online, though, should merit the same thought and care as our real world collections, as it’s through this act of mindful selection and presentation that we truly engage with the content.³

The internet has made available vast stores of information, analysis and feedback to enable choosing smartly, every time — or so one would expect in a perfect world. And yet, the value of all open-source information is fast approaching zero. The sheer volume, scale and speed of new content creation and delivery keeps growing every year.⁴

While some of my online “museum” is in need of pruning, there are a few creative spaces I can happily share right now, and which provide me with inspiration.

Spotify Playlists

In my mind, everything has a soundtrack, so I’ve had a lot of fun with curating playlists of songs (spoiler: it’s a lot of 80s/90s rock, pop and new wave). To further add to the vibe I try to create on these playlists, I’ll scour the internet for quirky vintage comic panels to create covers for the playlists. I have to make a sweet cassette or CD cover for my mixtapes somehow.

Some of my playlists on Spotify.

Substacks!

A burgeoning collection, I look for blogs that are well written, interesting, and are genuine reflections of others’ worlds and thoughts. They need to lack pretense. I don’t want people to sell me things, or pad an article with a lot of cheap filler words to boost SEO.

Seeking Out the Gifts

The key is mindful collecting, sorting, and, yes, removing when necessary. (Alison has thoughts about this in her library space, and it’s not what you may think.) It’s an important process to tackle information overload in an age when content creation is cheap, easy, plentiful, but of dubious quality if we really give it a second thought; as such, mindful curation is essential for building new knowledge, and developing a discerning taste for quality versus quantity.⁵⁶ I would add, too, that there’s a meta-benefit from the reflection on your collections, helping you to identify where you currently stand on a style or technique, and what you are feeling now versus five years ago when you pinned that particular quote.

Ultimately, it’s about how the things with which you choose to surround yourself need to be the best for your personal needs and likes. We only have so much time to spend, so it should be spent with people and on things that bring happiness and inspiration.

---

1. Credit to Joe Mendiola of Hello Simple Video for the term H.A.T.T.E.R-verse. (My superhero skill is drinking coffee.)

2. Questlove. Creative Quest. New York (US): HarperCollins; 2019.

3. Xu J. Introduction to Personal Content Curation. Enzircle. 2022 Apr 8.

4. Kruman Y. The Millennial Curation Wave Pushing Back Against Automation. Forbes. 2017 Sep 14.

5. Xu (2022).

6. I also like that Xu asks to take notes on why we’ve collected it. I feel like a special notebook would be good for this work. I’ve never done it in the past, leaning into intuition and feeling rather than explicitly documenting what I like or connect to in the content.