Image: StrangePainting1.png by Matt Schell 2015, created in Joy Exhibition by Strangethink

For a few months I’ve been feeling a bit stuck creatively. Mainly because I’ve been feeling crushed by the weight of finishing Monarch Black, which I’m still not doing. That created a kind of creative block and I felt guilty about working on other stuff, and then I didn’t. Creative energy is something that grows the more it’s used, like physical energy. I don’t think it’s possible to rest and save creative energy long term, it has to be excercised or it withers and shrinks. So I created Strata as a kind of path back to making stuff, and I’ve been making YouTube videos and releasing updates on it as a way to get back into the saddle. So far Strata is not earning a lot of money, but it is ticking along steadily. It’s currently making about 100 dollars a month between Itch and the Asset Store. Not anything that’s going to change my life, but I’m going to stick with it and see what happens. It’s been slowly picking up reviews and attention so maybe that will accelerate at some point.

The fact that Strata is a paid product sort of allowed to feel ‘virtuous’ to myself to work on it while ignoring Monarch Black, and was a kind of a loophole to get myself working again. It’s worked. I recently went on a binge of watching videos by Seth Godin, someone who I admire very much. His background and perspective is primarily in writing about marketing, which I understand is not for everyone. But as is often the case, when you get good enough at something, and think deeply about it, the insights from long practice begin to become more universal. I do marketing work for my day job (what a surprise to find that I, who think of myself as an artist turned into a professional marketer) and so his stuff is relevant to me on a lot of levels. If you are interested in a radical and transformative perspective on education, I strongly recommend you read his free book “Stop Stealing Dreams”. I think I’m actually going to re-read it again soon as I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Seth Godin is the person who recommended writing a blog every day (as he does) and I decided to accept the challenge and do this. The fact that his posts are short and daily was something which also gave me a kind of ‘permission’ to write this the way I do. Short, personal, discursive and filled with digressions. It’s important for me not to think of this as ‘useful content’ for people, although probably some thoughts of use will arise anyway. This helps me to avoid the temptation to write the kind of ’10 great tips to finish your stupid videogame’ articles that a lot of blogs degenerate into.

One thing that has helped me to get this blog going and so far be pretty consistent with writing it is a morning routine. Over the past few weeks I’ve been practicing the following routine pretty consistently. I wake up, take the kids to school if it’s a school day, have breakfast and coffee, then immediately after go straight into the following sequence, which I do in the same order: Meditate for 10-20 minutes, Write 3 pages longhand in a journal (just garbage free form stream of consciousness type writing) and then write one of these posts. The fact of doing it in the same order and doing it every single day has made it easier, and somehow the fact that there are multiple parts weirdly seems to make it easier. I think the reason for this is that once the routine is started I’ve sort of conditioned myself to move unthinkingly to the next step when I complete the previous, so it becomes sort of automatic. I’ve tried at various moments to form different habits but somehow launching this kind of sequence of good habits every day has helped this latest attempt to be more successful. It’s still only a short time but I find myself looking forward to doing it tomorrow as I go to bed, which is a good sign. I also enjoy it and don’t see it as a chore. It takes roughly an hour every day. It’s pretty purely pleasurable at this point. You all can be my public accountability partners to see if I continue and for how long. If I slack off and you notice send me a message and ask what happened at support@mirrorfishmedia.com 🙂

I often wonder why it is that I like minimalist music so much. Many people find it incredibly boring, or too simple or too repetitive. There’s not enough there for them, but somehow for me the simplicity of the form is a major part of the appeal. I of course enjoy plenty of non-minimal music that has a lot going on and a lot of lively emotions in it, but I enjoy minimal music in a different way. I’ve been trying to understand those different modes of enjoyment and articulate them to myself. I’ve been listening to a lot of minimal ambient music lately. Particularly William Basinski who I wrote about earlier, but also a lot of work by Japanese 80s ambient composer Hiroshi Yoshimura. My friends Stefanie and Lamin mentioned to me that they were playing his music at bedtime with their son and since they have excellent musical taste I decided to check it out. Yoshimura’s music is wonderful, it’s simple, beautiful and refined. The aesthetics feel very ‘traditional japanese’ with a palette of sounds drawn from field recordings and 80s new age synthesizer vocabulary. There’s a deliberateness, sense of negative space and calm, peaceful mood that I find fitting into my life at many moments. Particularly in the morning, like now as I’m writing this, or as I’m winding down at the end of the day. I am reminded of skillful visual design or art when I think about Yoshimura’s music, clean, balanced and impactful. For me minimal music and minimal art or graphic design sit in similar modes of appreciation for me. I want to be able to appreciate each element distinctly in it’s own negative space, either in terms of timbre, arrangement or time and hear it’s relationship to the structure of the whole. This is something that the earlier music of experimental artists like Autechre did extremely well for me also, the sense of structure, deliberateness and detail. It’s something I’ve never been good at in my own music at all, which is an interesting thought, although my work has always been minimal and deliberately so.

I started reading a great book last night “Mastery” by George Leonard. He examines the process of learning through his practice of the martial art Aikido, as a teacher and student. The core message is bold and uncompromising, that the only path to excellence in a subject (or for that matter in life) is through the embrace of methodical and deliberate practice. He writes at length about the need to embrace the plateaus in learning which occur in between quick occasional accelerations in skill. This is probably just the book I needed to read right now. It’s bitter medicine in a sense for me, I feel like he’s shining a hard bright light on some of my dilettante tendencies. I have a strong pattern of learning something insofar as it’s easy, while progress is quick, and then coasting on a plateau for a long time, without taking the disciplined steps needed to deconstruct my skills and advance. I’ve also been bad at seeking out teachers who are better than me to help me go to the next stage. The result is a lot of mediocrity in my opinion, with moments in which I accidentally hit on something good, through sheer volume of attempts. I think this is true of a lot of people, so I don’t mean to be too harshly self-critical, but it’s probably something that’s holding me back. An example of this is that I made music for years using keyboards and sequencers but I never really learned keyboard well enough to play live on stage. It’s an embarassing detail for me, even after having moved on from actively creating music daily. I thought often about taking piano lessons, but the humbling experience of being a beginner after having released records and been seen as a non-beginner held me back. The willingness to humble oneself and break down the illusion of earned competency to move forward seems important, and is something I’m still bad at. Listening to Yoshimura’s music there is a refinement and surety that I think I appreciate very much for the knowledge that it’s something I lack.

Image: Still from Monarch Black, Matt Schell 2018

I have no idea what I’m doing and it’s super uncomfortable. I go through phases of my life where I’m extremely goal directed. I pick something, like say making a video game on my own, or short films, or some project and push hard toward it. This is when I’m my most comfortable, I know what I should do with my time and I have a plan. And then there are moments that arrive where those goals shift or disappear and I don’t know what I want to be doing. I’m in one of those right now to an extent. I think it’s part of the reason why I’m writing so much. Trying to figure it out. Turning ideas over. I have my game project Monarch Black which I am committed to finishing, though to be honest not actively working on now. I’ve told myself I won’t start large new projects until I finish, but it’s been a year since I stopped actively working on it. A bad place to be. I will finish but when is a big question mark. I know better than to give up, though maybe that is unwise. It will not be as good as I wanted it to be (surprise) and I guess that’s the major source of resistance.

Finishing work is the process of collapsing the possibility space. When work is unfinished it’s still open and might surprise us by turning into (gasp) THE BEST THING EVER. But as we get closer to the end the passage narrows and what the final thing will be starts to become visible. The possibility of it being the best thing ever diminishes. We can see that it will be a thing, yes, and good if we’re lucky, but not our masterpiece. The ego does not like this at all. As long as I have not finished my first game there is always the possibility that I am a secret genius. Finishing something removes that possibility. Letting go of that, it turns out, is hard. I’ve always had a hard time finishing things. I know this doesn’t make me special, but it’s a problem I wrestle with. I think after a year’s pause with Monarch Black I’m getting to the place where I have some distance to just say “It will be a thing that will be OK and done and that’s good enough.” But it hasn’t been easier getting here. And until I’m back in the harness actively pulling towards the finish then I can’t really claim that I’ve accepted that. I think I’m getting closer.

The problem with Monarch Black for me lies in the game design. Game design is a discipline I care about a lot. It’s unique to games and in my mind probably the hardest to do well. I think many of us who get involved in making games, because we like to play them, secretly think we will naturally be good designers. Facing the fact that this is not the case is super humbling. The problem, as I see it currently is that I decided to be a genius and do a flying, six degrees of freedom, procedural shooter which doesn’t directly copy any games I’m personally aware of. How original! How brilliant! The problem is this means I am completely out to sea design wise and have nothing to draw on directly. I can’t compare my game to say, all the Mario games and ask, are my controls as good? I’ve had to cobble together a set of design tropes to steal from and none of them directly fit or work well together. The result feels mushy, unclear and unfocused design wise. This is such a hard thing to accept and move past for me. I’ve flirted with just completely throwing out the core game play and making it a pretty procedural exploration game without combat, for example. This would solve one problem but create others. I still don’t have answers to these questions.

I tell myself a lot that I should love the process not the product. I really believe it, but also find it hard to apply. I’ve learned so much during the making of MB and during that time. It’s huge. But that also is painful in it’s own way because it leads to temptation to start again. It’s also humbling that I know better than this. I know, very strongly, that attempting big long projects for your first project is a bad idea. Yet here I am four years in. As a teacher I am great at giving advice and terrible at listening to it. It’s super embarrassing. I’m circling around though and getting closer. Talking about this stuff publicly is a good way to get it out of my head, maybe. I hope so. At this point in my life I at least have a strong enough stomach to sit with these feelings, recognize them and not give up or be totally derailed. I think this is maybe the start of maturity or wisdom when it comes to creative work, and it only comes from having been here again and again. It still doesn’t get much easier.

Static in a technological context is probably becoming less and less a part of our lives as analog media are superceded by digital. But since I grew up in the 80s and 90s, static is a part of my mental vocabulary. The radio breaking up into crackling bursts of sound as you drive farther away from the transmitter, the background radiation of the universe flickering on channel 3 of your TV, the rolling scan lines of corrupted analog video tapes. Now we probably encounter static more often as an aestheticized retro signaler, a post processing effect applied to crisp and beautiful digital images in order to lend them a certain feeling. But I remember static, hiss and noise as problems to be overcome, the battle to achieve a favorable signal to noise ratio.

This morning as I write this I’m experiencing what I think of as mental static. The signal is not clear. I feel anxious without a clear reason why. I feel irritable. Achieving the basics is a struggle. The signal is breaking up. It’s funny how much lately I’m referencing Doctorow’s novel Walkaway but in it is a neurodivergent, brilliant character called Dis. There’s a wonderful passage where she discusses her mood swings as a kind of emotional weather. This resonated a lot with me:

“Bit by bit, she learned to surf the moods. She recognized the furies as phenomena separate from objective reality. They were real. She really felt them. They weren’t triggered by any real thing in the world where everyone else lived. They were private weather, hers to experience alone or share with others as she chose. She treasured her weather and harnessed her storms, turning into a dervish of productivity when the waves crested; using the troughs to retreat and work through troubling concepts.”

The character’s emotional weather is wild and severe, but I think that for those of us with milder internal gusts and showers there’s some valuable perspective here as well. Like everyone, I go through ups and downs. Sometimes they’re triggered by stress due to real, objectively existing factors, but sometimes they’re not. Or sometimes something that should be mildly upsetting happens and really throws me for a spin, more powerfully than I feel it should have. Having a perspective that allows some degree of distance, however small, from these storms is something I find very valuable. Thinking about your own emotions is hard, because emotions affect the mind and the mind is the tool we use to think about our emotions. It’s a complex, self modifying system. It’s easy to set off feedback loops of being stressed out about being stressed out and spiraling downwards. Stepping back and noticing the emotional weather, the flickering static and observing it at a remove allows me to modify and sometimes arrest those patterns.

The two main tools I have for doing this are meditation and journal writing. I’ve been writing a journal since I was a kid, for about 25 years. I have giant plastic boxes filled with black and white composition books in my Mom’s basement in Brooklyn. I keep them out of sentimentality because the writing is much more about process than product. It’s rare that I re-read them, but I find writing in them to be valuable. Recording thoughts in a linear and sequential fashion allows me to put them down and stop carrying them to a degree, particularly when done repeatedly day after day. Or if I find myself coming back to a theme again and again then it bubble to the surface and I realize that it’s something I probably need to examine more deeply.

Image: Still from Alea City One, by Matt Schell 2018

Something that I remember observing about my parents as a kid was how little time they spent with their friends, as compared to how much time I spent with mine. Now as a parent, I understand. Being an adult with kids is pretty challenging in terms of time. I find I spend a lot more time not seeing my friends than seeing them, and making new friends is much harder due to time constraints. I also find myself more cut off from my professional communities, excepting the work context. Almost all the new people I meet and get to know nowadays are work colleagues. I’m not particularly happy about this turn of events and have been thinking about what the possibilities are for change. I’m a single parent so time away from the kids always requires careful management and resources. I’m also an introvert so getting out and mingling is not a fully natural thing for me to do under the best circumstances.

Every morning after I meditate I sit and write three pages long-hand in my journal, a practice called ‘Morning Pages’ which I got from Julia Cameron’s book “The Artist’s Way”. In these pages lately the theme of some kind of space keeps popping up. A store, or a gallery or a cafe or a co-working space or a school. I think this comes from my desire to be around more people in an interesting context, with shared interests. There is no real sensible way that I can currently think about to make this a reality in my current life but it keeps bobbing to the surface during my freeform writing sessions. I would love to start or be part of some kind of public space that revolves around art and technology, in which diverse groups of people can come together, meet and interact. I realize that I miss a lot my time at Dubspot, the electronic music school in Manhattan (now defunct) that I used to teach at. There was a wonderful community there of musicians, DJs and students from around the world and I met many wonderful people there. Teaching there was a great balancer of my otherwise introverted tendencies, tying me into a lively community with a sense of purpose. My work has some of that but not to the same degree and it’s much less heterogeneous, and also less artistic. So this ‘space’ idea has been bubbling to the surface.

I’ll lay out the fantasy here for fun. The fantasy is a reasonably large, well lit space with two rooms. One is a public space with a cafe, some long tables for people to sit and talk and work. There’s good coffee and simple cold food and snacks. The walls hold screens which are used to display a rotating collection of interesting screen based art. Generative works, moving images, real time art and so on. Speakers quietly play interesting music. The cafe doubles as a store and sells a small collection of books, tools, toys and art works. The second room is a room in which classes, lectures and workshops can be held. The curriculum is varied and focuses on the intersections of art and technology. Classes are taught in a ‘flipped classroom’ methodology with lectures delivered online via video and then class time spent in a hands on workshop, solving problems, answering questions, collaborating and applying what was learned in the lectures with the support of an instructor and fellow students. The physical location would stick roots out of the physical world down into the internet and connect to the digital world in interesting ways, but the primary focus would be on the place itself. I think in our current exploration of the discovery of the possibilities of the internet, internet communities and global communication we are maybe missing some opportunities for things which blend the two, but privilege the physical. It’s something I’d be interested to explore at some point if I ever got any (at this point imaginary) time and money to put into it.

Image: Portrait of Edmond Belamy (detail) created by GAN (Generative Adversarial Network)

Much debate has been made about whether video games are art. Mostly, the calling of video games art is an attempt to defend their cultural validity by associating them with more respected cultural forms like cinema, art galleries and so on. But mostly video games are not art, as their primary purpose is to entertain and engage the player. Art is not made to be useful in this way, it’s goals are self-contained. Games hold your hand, teach you to understand through play and offer up gently sloping curves of difficulty, hoping not to alienate the paying customers. Mostly, video games are entertainment. They do not seek to challenge us, but instead pull us into the beloved flow state, that floating effortless/effortful balance and gently hold us there. Some games break this and introduce flavors of bitterness, struggle, loss but always in a framework of ‘fairness’.

In this sense, in their tail wagging eagerness to delight and entertain their players, I would say very clearly, video games are not art. They’re games, entertainments, engaging cultural works. Importantly, they should not be seen as less culturally valid or important for this. Video games do not need a Citizen Kane moment, do not need to become respected. They’re loved, and important to many of us and that should be enough. This striving desire for respectability is a neutering force that seeks approval from the dominant arbiters of culture. Fuck them and their patronizing pat on the head.

A similar process of attempted cooptation is going on in another globally beloved artistic culture, hiphop. The awarding of the Pullitzer Prize to Kendrick Lamar is an attempt to pull hiphop into the realm of respectable artistic expression, and to some degree no doubt it will be successful. Already we see a second middle aged generation of hiphop fans seeking to erect a respectable and artistic boom bap purism, in contrast to the raunchy, decadent materialism of the current 808 and autotune generation. Lamar deserves the Pullitzer for his brilliance, and the recognition of hiphop as one of the most culturally relevant  forms of our generation has real value, economically and otherwise. But we as partisans of previously maligned subcultures should reject this infusion of seriousness and respectability. In both forms we should seek to continue to exist on our own terms, to be great and notable for the reasons that we have chosen not those that others would seek to impose from outside. In both forms the public votes with their dollars and attention massively in our favor. Both are culturally important forms, worthy of study, serious engagement and thought. But hiphop should never be respectable and neither should video games.

View from the train outside Berlin, 2018

I’ve done a lot of different things in my 39 years (so far) and whereas I used to think of them as scattered, I now start to see them as a kind of spiraling web of connections. This perspective is useful to me because it helps me to understand and trust my weird compulsive desire to go and intensely learn and do new, and often disparate things.

Things I’ve done, semi-in order:

Edited video art for money (and lots of boring stuff too)
Taught adults technical skills
Made my own short weird films and music videos
Worked on someone else’s feature films
Made experimental electronic music
Started an independent record label
Performed music live
Worked in sports broadcasting (did not like this)
Worked for a crazy lady at a video transfer house who used to take pills, cry at work, fight with the customers and let her dog poop in the office (this was 2008 after the financial crisis, absolutely awful)
Taught people how to produce electronic music
Learned how to make YouTube tutorials
Taught myself online marketing
Learned game development and computer programming

And now I work at Unity and do something which is a weird salad of many of those things and skills from over the past 25 years. The point of the list is that I’ve sort of zigged and zagged through a unique career path. At no point could I have predicted the next step, even a year in advance. The pattern is: I do something for a while, get super interested, try to learn everything about it, some period of months or years go by and then I get interested in something new and often unconnected, and repeat the process.

Historically I used to get a bit stressed about this. “I just spent all this time learning this stuff! What a waste to go do something new?” But then I go do the new thing anyway. As the process repeats though, I realize that each time I change I still have all the old learnings in my head and it becomes a useful lens to look at the new thing through, and sometimes is directly helpful.

I learned to edit video when I was 15 as an intern, and the vast majority of my jobs since then have somehow involved that skill. I got excited to learn music when I realized it was something you could do by editing things on a timeline on the computer.

This week I’ve been working on a small art video game project called Alea City One as part of the Procjam event. The feeling of being able to create something that involves sound, image, time and interactivity is really good. It feels like I’m getting closer to the things I always wanted to make. The feeling of being able to express myself across multiple disciplines and having them inform each other is super gratifying.

I think if i had tried to be more “serious” and single mindedly pursued any single one of the various things I’ve passed through, I would have missed this moment. The advice then is: just do the thing you’re interested in now. Do it with intensity and learn all about it. Life is strange and you absolutely do not know what will happen next or what you will need to know. Learning things is fun.

Untitled by Matt Schell and his computer, 2018

One of the things I enjoy about creating art with software is the potential for indirect creation, where software tools add a layer of distance between your hand and the brush placing the strokes. Computers allow for the creation of wonderfully complex and playful art making tools, particularly if you learn how to create rules and systems with code or code-like visual programming tools. In art we talk a great deal about authorship, authorial intent and mastery. But the work I’m interested in elides some of those things. It places the artist in a kind of improvised dance with flickering randomness, or with their audience as co-creator. Something arises from these interactions which is usually a bit softened in it’s emotional impact, perhaps a mood is evoked but it’s not entirely clear what mood. I find this refreshing after sitting through years of extremely didactic artworks including most mainstream narrative output and music. The hero dies, the strings swell up, his wife collapses in tears and we might as well have a giant flashing sign saying “FEEL SAD NOW”. I find myself interested in more diffuse impressions which are slightly harder to grasp and touch. By not hammering the audience with canned emotional cues we give people some emotional negative space to fill with their own feelings.

In a sense the work becomes more like the Rorschach blot images used in psychology. What do you see? Is it two dogs biting or a beautiful tree? The audience brings their own interiority to the piece and the feelings experienced are more unique to them. Of course that feeling may be “meh” as the emotional broth is too thin and they are not interested in coming up with a response from their side. That’s a risk I’m willing to live with.

Consider the paintings of Jackson Pollock, made possible with gracious funding of the American government via that notable arts institutition the Central Intelligence Agency. I remember my father taking me to the Guggenheim in New York City as a young child and seeing them and getting an absolute charge, particularly after walking up a long ramp filled with paintings that were mostly boring to me at the time. The energy, chaos and complexity of the works really crackled off the walls for me. As a child I could respond directly and my young anarchic heart sung out in sympathy with the splatters and arcs of paint. In Zen Buddhism we talk about ‘beginners mind’, the mind that is simple and unencumbered by cynicism and knowing. My life-beginners-mind recognized a kindred spirit in Pollock and his paintings. Of course various adults look at the work and petulantly say “Bah. My kid could do that.” And they’re probably right, but could you?

Procedural, software mediated generative works help me to reach some of that naive beginners mind place by inserting shaped randomness into the work. Noise, juxtaposition, surprise all arise through the use of random number generation. It’s a wonderful feeling when something you’ve made makes something that surprises or delights you, like magic.

Image: Ronin by @neauoire

I’ve been a fan of the work of Devine Lu Linvega and Rekka Bell from before they decided to move onto a boat and sail the world. Their work occupies an amazing space of very digital, very contemporary and often cold and dark aesthetics while simultaneously feeling humane, intimate and personal. They’re some of my favorite digital creators.

When they sold their possessions and moved onto a boat to sail the world as a ‘floating studio’ called 100 Rabbits I was absolutely fascinated. I’ve followed their journey through their series of wonderful monthly patreon funded short documentaries. If you are someone interested in both experimental aesthetics AND experimental ways of living, I strongly recommend you check them out.

I think we all need to figure out better ways of living, both on the planet, in relationship to capitalism and consumption and with ourselves and one another. It’s very possible that the next era to come will not be characterized by the cheap energy, disposable raw materials and general churning excessive consumption of our current era. Learning to live and be content with less, on less, and consuming less seem like valuable skills. Living on a boat is an example of minimalism in terms of space and resources. It also represents a kind of untethered flexibility that I think we may do well to embrace in the next era of less, or in the current moment. One of the reasons we consume so much is the feeling that whatever it is needs to be done now, and quickly. We need to jet across the world for three days and then back. What if we were not so tightly coupled to schedules, external dependencies and urgent but not important complexities. What if we could take time to get where we wanted or needed to be, and allow the wind to blow us there slowly and indirectly?

I recently re-read the wonderful Walkaway by Cory Doctorow in which he portrays a kind of post-scarcity post-capitalist, utopian anarchist future. It’s beautiful and harrowing, I can’t do it full justice here but  I think you’ll love it. In it he depicts groups of people who live in zeppelins that bumble along slowly, going where the wind takes them. Untethered and free.

One of my greatest desires in my current life is for time. I think of myself as living in a time famine, a time desert. These conditions give rise often to an obsession with life hacks, productivity improvements and effectiveness fidgeting, but another solution to time famine is elimination, decoupling and drifting away. Doing less with less.