Carceral Content Creation
Jul. 16th, 2021 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavaka the post where I finally poke at my longstanding strong feelings on separating 'actual self' from 'artist persona'.
I.
the first time art-as-the-self was ever an issue was towards the end of art college.
influencers as a concept wasn't quite a thing yet, or the word 'content creator' - and yet, the pressure to be the brand when graduating was immense. before college I had always happily separated illustration under the (kradeelav) handle and design work under [real name], and the streams had never-ever crossed. there was no need to - my illustration was pure digital deviantart delight (I hate the word hobby, actually, more on this later), fanart of old-by-that-day games (fire emblem), fanart of niche villains, pretty similar to what it is today actually. that entire handle, even, was borne out of a zelda fanfic. Design work was design work, on the other hand - things you did for clients and college assignments, never for fun.
I don't know if I ever personally had fun doing design projects as assignments. I switched over to the design major the second year, figuring it'd give me more opportunities and/or more money (a choice that was coldly made, but one I don't regret to this day), fucked around on google sketchup a lot in the back of the class attempting to make videogame levels when I didn't respect a particular professor for not getting to the point - who were we making this for, what was the scope of the assignment, how would it help an imaginary corporation's bottom line, not just fucking around making abstract CD covers without even a specific band/genre/aesthetic/label as constraints. It wasn't even realistic !
(funny - I look back, and i thought like a project manager far more than a designer, even back then.)
the third year of college I don't remember much. at all.
the fourth year, though - between crawling out of Hell Year Brains and still camping out in the library for videogames (lol) and animation art books, there was the existential looming pressure of Graduation and Oh Shit Ya Gotta Find A Job. I still think the college should get sued over giving such a piss poor effort of preparing us for a Job at least in a sense of using our design skillsets at the dayjob (with how often they advertised something like a '95% job placement' rate ahahahaaaaaa, fuck, i'd be impressed if 20% ever got a job in the arts industry-), but I do remember one course that attempted to smack into us the concept of a Brand for the self, portfolio, artist's statement, portfolio again, vague sense of using razor-sharp specific trendy aesthetics to cloak the whole self to flirt specific kind of hip agencies into hiring you -
- when i didn't even fucking know whether I wanted "to be" an artist. kinda resented it, actually.
i wanted a job, and i wanted to keep drawing bishie villains. the two, even to young-and-dumb!krad, were obviously mutually exclusive, (and once again mutually exclusive to the rest of my life).
by graduation I remember spending hours, days, weeks going back and forth whether I should shoehorn the slightly more mainstream-y kradeelav illustrations into a pretty soulless portfolio, just to fuckin.... shut them up.
In the end, I did only just to give me slightly better odds in interviews.
(I still kept the handles separate, mostly out of spite and an uneasy sense of self preservation if we're being honest.)
II.
'content creator' as a word gave me the wiles from day one.
it's the kind of thing you expect from a particularly cringey corporate BS mouthpiece (it's my dayjob title), but not seen on the wild west web. not before ~2015 or so, at least. (I can't link google trends on this computer, but it seems to have taken off after 2016).
it was... crude. baldly soulless. surely people would reject the idea of their art being linguistically strip-mined and boxed into a slot of a machine?
(it reminds me of the way the word "hobby" has been slowly poisoned in my brain - a concept that once used to be genuinely harmless as something done in free time now was basically analogous to "side-hustle" - another non-dayjob money-making scheme that simply used interests as a means of personal engagement to the medium.)
right before 'content creator' became hot, eg around 2016-2017, I was again, trying to unknowingly force myself into becoming exactly that thing with the webcomic. I had gotten accepted by a publisher, I had launched a patreon for another income stream (can't have all your eggs in one basket!), i had the ads set up on the website, i had google analytics set up, I had the update twitter for maximum eyeballs -
- and mind, I believed in the story, believed in the characters (that I still do); this was not done with cynical-self-awareness. this was, whole-ass, unironically 'i can use the job to survive and then eventually live off of thehobby hustle passion!'
(ha)
III.
I haven't talked about the rest of the "actual self", that I keep away from the internet in whole or in part: my beliefs, my family, my friends, what other people perceive me as (gender, medical stuff, etc), my home, my haunts, my days, my books, my worries, my guilty pleasures, my dreams, and on. You'll see some of it here, sure, behind locked posts, and selectively so - a tiny, tiny fraction of people compared with who I allow to see my art, and a fraction of people far more resembling my circle of IRL friends, just ones that, er, happen to be in digital space.
That space, is a holy space, in my eyes. I will never forget bristling so intensely to the degree I had to walk away from the computer, once, at an art director at a $sexy_company on twitter baldly saying that every artist/designer should be on the platform under their real name or he wouldn't hire them. (I think the gender here is subtly important to the conversation, actually. something something pseudo-anonymity-as-self-preservation. control. connect the dots.)
I was already pretty set to keeping my artistic spaces separately (I don't mention my Art to IRL people, for instance), but that was probably the day I swore never to compromise "actual persona".
And to the flip side of the coin - if there's one word I don't mind as a stand-in to 'content creator', it's artist persona. The mask that I (and all entertainers to some degree) *voluntarily* take off and on to showcase Art. The winking theatre mask that I can vanish away and switch to Normie Corporate Self when needed. (And removing both of those when I want to be Human, not a Creator with the existential responsibility.)
It's clunky to say it like this, but I think the consent of it, actively choosing the arena as the scene-creator, is a big part of it for me to feel safe in showing Art, these days. Consent was there almost by accident/default back in the deviantart days when I was less directed, less focused on things still within the mainstream; protected by not making an aggressive point with the play-art, and not mixing the streams.
And yet that play, that proto-artist's persona with a budding taste for anything that strayed from Respectable shit was still very different from Brand-as-self. a Brand issellable, as in selling your soul sellable monetizable. I grew up in an environment where Harry Potter books were deemed 'satanic'; my artist persona known for edgy kink art is not a sellable option in terms of actual physical safety. Neither is compromising on what I draw (because you might as well just go right back to corporate design for all of it since the dollar ratio is easier/higher).
Sometimes I wish I could talk to that art director, way back on twitter.
And just mention, maybe, there's a few good reasons for the self/persona separation, not all of them obvious.
I.
the first time art-as-the-self was ever an issue was towards the end of art college.
influencers as a concept wasn't quite a thing yet, or the word 'content creator' - and yet, the pressure to be the brand when graduating was immense. before college I had always happily separated illustration under the (kradeelav) handle and design work under [real name], and the streams had never-ever crossed. there was no need to - my illustration was pure digital deviantart delight (I hate the word hobby, actually, more on this later), fanart of old-by-that-day games (fire emblem), fanart of niche villains, pretty similar to what it is today actually. that entire handle, even, was borne out of a zelda fanfic. Design work was design work, on the other hand - things you did for clients and college assignments, never for fun.
I don't know if I ever personally had fun doing design projects as assignments. I switched over to the design major the second year, figuring it'd give me more opportunities and/or more money (a choice that was coldly made, but one I don't regret to this day), fucked around on google sketchup a lot in the back of the class attempting to make videogame levels when I didn't respect a particular professor for not getting to the point - who were we making this for, what was the scope of the assignment, how would it help an imaginary corporation's bottom line, not just fucking around making abstract CD covers without even a specific band/genre/aesthetic/label as constraints. It wasn't even realistic !
(funny - I look back, and i thought like a project manager far more than a designer, even back then.)
the third year of college I don't remember much. at all.
the fourth year, though - between crawling out of Hell Year Brains and still camping out in the library for videogames (lol) and animation art books, there was the existential looming pressure of Graduation and Oh Shit Ya Gotta Find A Job. I still think the college should get sued over giving such a piss poor effort of preparing us for a Job at least in a sense of using our design skillsets at the dayjob (with how often they advertised something like a '95% job placement' rate ahahahaaaaaa, fuck, i'd be impressed if 20% ever got a job in the arts industry-), but I do remember one course that attempted to smack into us the concept of a Brand for the self, portfolio, artist's statement, portfolio again, vague sense of using razor-sharp specific trendy aesthetics to cloak the whole self to flirt specific kind of hip agencies into hiring you -
- when i didn't even fucking know whether I wanted "to be" an artist. kinda resented it, actually.
i wanted a job, and i wanted to keep drawing bishie villains. the two, even to young-and-dumb!krad, were obviously mutually exclusive, (and once again mutually exclusive to the rest of my life).
by graduation I remember spending hours, days, weeks going back and forth whether I should shoehorn the slightly more mainstream-y kradeelav illustrations into a pretty soulless portfolio, just to fuckin.... shut them up.
In the end, I did only just to give me slightly better odds in interviews.
(I still kept the handles separate, mostly out of spite and an uneasy sense of self preservation if we're being honest.)
II.
'content creator' as a word gave me the wiles from day one.
it's the kind of thing you expect from a particularly cringey corporate BS mouthpiece (it's my dayjob title), but not seen on the wild west web. not before ~2015 or so, at least. (I can't link google trends on this computer, but it seems to have taken off after 2016).
it was... crude. baldly soulless. surely people would reject the idea of their art being linguistically strip-mined and boxed into a slot of a machine?
(it reminds me of the way the word "hobby" has been slowly poisoned in my brain - a concept that once used to be genuinely harmless as something done in free time now was basically analogous to "side-hustle" - another non-dayjob money-making scheme that simply used interests as a means of personal engagement to the medium.)
right before 'content creator' became hot, eg around 2016-2017, I was again, trying to unknowingly force myself into becoming exactly that thing with the webcomic. I had gotten accepted by a publisher, I had launched a patreon for another income stream (can't have all your eggs in one basket!), i had the ads set up on the website, i had google analytics set up, I had the update twitter for maximum eyeballs -
- and mind, I believed in the story, believed in the characters (that I still do); this was not done with cynical-self-awareness. this was, whole-ass, unironically 'i can use the job to survive and then eventually live off of the
(ha)
III.
I haven't talked about the rest of the "actual self", that I keep away from the internet in whole or in part: my beliefs, my family, my friends, what other people perceive me as (gender, medical stuff, etc), my home, my haunts, my days, my books, my worries, my guilty pleasures, my dreams, and on. You'll see some of it here, sure, behind locked posts, and selectively so - a tiny, tiny fraction of people compared with who I allow to see my art, and a fraction of people far more resembling my circle of IRL friends, just ones that, er, happen to be in digital space.
That space, is a holy space, in my eyes. I will never forget bristling so intensely to the degree I had to walk away from the computer, once, at an art director at a $sexy_company on twitter baldly saying that every artist/designer should be on the platform under their real name or he wouldn't hire them. (I think the gender here is subtly important to the conversation, actually. something something pseudo-anonymity-as-self-preservation. control. connect the dots.)
I was already pretty set to keeping my artistic spaces separately (I don't mention my Art to IRL people, for instance), but that was probably the day I swore never to compromise "actual persona".
And to the flip side of the coin - if there's one word I don't mind as a stand-in to 'content creator', it's artist persona. The mask that I (and all entertainers to some degree) *voluntarily* take off and on to showcase Art. The winking theatre mask that I can vanish away and switch to Normie Corporate Self when needed. (And removing both of those when I want to be Human, not a Creator with the existential responsibility.)
It's clunky to say it like this, but I think the consent of it, actively choosing the arena as the scene-creator, is a big part of it for me to feel safe in showing Art, these days. Consent was there almost by accident/default back in the deviantart days when I was less directed, less focused on things still within the mainstream; protected by not making an aggressive point with the play-art, and not mixing the streams.
And yet that play, that proto-artist's persona with a budding taste for anything that strayed from Respectable shit was still very different from Brand-as-self. a Brand is
Sometimes I wish I could talk to that art director, way back on twitter.
And just mention, maybe, there's a few good reasons for the self/persona separation, not all of them obvious.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-17 06:57 am (UTC)He was definitely targeted for that. It also definitely played a part in his art; his art stood out, his portfolio pre-college was extremely impressive. His professors laid into him especially hard about buttoning up, building a professional persona; they interrogated him about his hobbies a lot: Oh, you like horror? You can turn that into a side hustle. Make a lot of horror fanart for everything you watch! Sell prints! Post it on Instagram! Oh, you like entomology? Ehh, that's not monetizable. Actually, that's a serious drain on your time. If you're serious about art, you'll drop all other interests immediately.
But the worst moment, okay, was when he got chosen in a group of top students to meet with a studio exec for a possible internship. The other kids were all very straight-laced Catholic kids. He knew them all very well; super vanilla, straight, devout Christians. Their personal artwork was all very sanitized; they didn't understand why my brother was uneasy about sharing links to his old Deviantart page. They shared theirs just fine!
Anyway, in preparation for this event, my brother conforms. He puts on the Business Professional Mask his professors are always bugging him about. Dresses up a little, doesn't do anything weird to his face or hair. But a weird transformation took over his classmates: they showed up in thrift store hipster clothes or Goth outfits they'd never once worn before. When asked for her religion, one of them (a good friend of my brother's who went to Mass and had just had a Serious Talk with him about his homosexuality) claimed she was a Satanist. The exec loved it. He hated my brother (real hostility, very aggressive every time he addressed him), though, and gave him a very pointed talk about how artists should be Weird and Interesting and Quirky, not dull professional types.
"Loosen up, be yourself," he said. "Like these guys."
That incident just always burnt me up. My brother STILL gets real anger in his voice when he talks about it. For him, stuff like that basically killed his personal art world. He's only just now getting it back by making collages that he doesn't post anywhere, and never tells his friends about. When he loves a TV show, he feels obligated to make fanart of it for his Instagram because that was ground into him in art school, and so he slaves over a soulless piece of PG-rated fanart in a palatable style, and it kills his love for the show. He was near tears trying to come up with something decent for WandaVision. IDK. This post was just really on-point, really resonated with me (and with him). Thank you for writing it.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-26 01:50 am (UTC)(Also... this might be a stretch, but your bro might like KM Claude's work. There's something to the queer religious/horror vibe that makes me think there'd be an appreciation there.)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-26 02:02 am (UTC)Edit to Add: I still have the Unholy Sacraments zines! Fuck yeah.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-26 02:27 am (UTC)(and aw yeaa!)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-18 05:22 am (UTC)it reminds me of the way the word "hobby" has been slowly poisoned in my brain - a concept that once used to be genuinely harmless as something done in free time now was basically analogous to "side-hustle"
i've kind of adopted the word "avocation" for this myself. i like the etymology there, "a calling away [from one's regular business]," something that by definition is not work-in-exchange-for-attention-and-money, but also not necessarily something trifling—can be a valid calling in and of itself. and okay yes maybe i was uh influenced by a really lovely passage about this word in the Terra Ignota books, we all have our beloved media lol
also thinking of it in terms of consent is really interesting and related to vague stuff i've noodled on before; thanks for that framing~
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-25 09:27 pm (UTC)You learn something new every day! :D
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-18 09:11 pm (UTC)Ooooohhhhhhhhh this made me bristle so hard my teeth squeaked from grinding. I do not play in those spaces anymore; when I was young and dumb, I wanted to be a concept artist, and around that time I ate this kind of thing up, thinking that landing An Industry Job would fulfill me. Or something. I think I was in a place where I didn't have my own ID to play with, not yet, so to me, any Art Job™ would be enough. I never did get into The Industry, like I'd thought I would. I ended up doing a lot of furry porn, which was both a blessing and a curse for a long time, lol.
Cut to now: Not Just Any Job Will Do, Not By A Long Shot. Namiin Stone is not my legal name (not yet, anyway), but it is my name. Not really in a brand or persona sense, but in the sense of: this is who I am, this is who does all the nasty romance, and it is a pen-name and a stop-gap of anonymity for now. Mostly from harassment; which I've experienced in blips throughout my online life, but never in a way as to threaten my real life - because I take care to keep my legal name far away from my online handles.
If we're talking Brand™, MoltenGold is my Brand™. And I remember trying to impress upon the Hardcover organizer why allowing pseudonyms and pennames for folks who asked would be a boon. I was afraid of harassment, and someone else was afraid of applying because, in his country, if he was discovered, he could've literally been pulled out of his home and beaten in the street because of the porn he did for the book. A good friend of mine basically had to change his name on the spot to have the one that he wanted in the book; organizer later tried to say that it was about the contract, not about the names in the book. Which was fucking bullshit.
The guy was having none of it, dug his heels in, and talked about how letting people have psuedonyms would lead to people with names like "horsefucker69" in the book, and how, in the industry, if you want to make a name for yourself, it must be your name. To do anything less was, to his mind, censorship. I will spare your comments of me ranting about that irony, when censoring me because my art was Difficult (hm, thought you wanted difficult) was just fine and dandy.
(I think the gender here is subtly important to the conversation, actually. something something pseudo-anonymity-as-self-preservation. control. connect the dots.)
-Points and this and laughs- I was a girl in a gentrified, industry porn book, who wanted this exact thing, who was barred from having it. I could sit and spew an essay of that oddness of experiencing a gender disparity in the way that I did for the first time ever, when I've grown up and worked in - if not inherently queer spaces - fringe spaces where everyone was weird and on about equal footing, in the department of sharing vulnerability while simultaneously grabbing for methods of control in this manner. Before the era of carrds and dumping all of your personal information online, that is.
I'm still reeling, months later, at the starkness of how I experienced my girl-ness in that space, vs. how I experience it literally anywhere else in spaces I have a modicum of control in. It was alien as hell and left an awful taste in my mouth. I admire your ability to be so separate. I've never had to do it, with how the chips have fallen into place in my life, and now I'm not so sure that I could without obliterating my entire online presence from the last fifteen years or so - but I grok this whole damned post in different ways, for sure.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-25 09:05 pm (UTC)It's nuts that the Hardcover organizer didn't realize the very practical reasons of a pen name - hell, romance authors use pen names to separate erotica from other works in different genres, it's a pretty mainstream habit (and not like, quite as niche as hacker handles or whatnot). [faceplams, and slowly shakes head] I could understand 'veto power if a pen name is flagrantly off brand/and or offensive' and compromising on something, but straight up denying them? bah. You know my feelings on that whole clusterfuck but... good god.
your last two paragraphs are also powerfully thought-provoking, because yeah, you're right on how subtle the discrimination can be there. Hacker spaces (i say that since they built the web and were the first adopters) still have issues, but it was almost by accident that some folks could hide under gender-neutral usernames and aesthetics/presentations, or at least have the freedom to shape them - maybe it influenced the kinds of spaces where it was always Less of A Problem to navigate, as you were mentioning.
I don't see a solution to it, unfortunately. But I also admire your sheer ... bravery feels almost insulting, but dedication? dedication in soldering forward with your own creative world, presentation, and aesthetic with an eye for never compromising the spirit of it. goodness knows the world needs more of that fearlessness.