Carceral Content Creation

aka 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 the hobby 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 is sellable, 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.