Photo by Susanna Majuri – Underwater Stories

In the past year or so there’s a single piece of music that I have probably listened to for more hours then any single piece of music ever. It’s called Water Music II, by William Basinski. Partly, this is due to it’s length. It’s 66 minutes long, although that’s sort of an irrelevant detail. Actually it’s endless, circular, timeless. It doesn’t ‘develop’ or go through variations and crescendos like we often demand music does. It doesn’t build up and drop. It’s flat and rippling. The feeling I get from it is similar to the feeling I get staring at the ocean or a flickering fire. It has complexity, and it varies, there are swells and moments of recession but fundamentally, it doesn’t go anywhere. For me, this has turned out to be super valuable in my daily life. It fits perfectly into certain moments and puts me in a certain contemplative, focused mood. I listen to it a lot when I’m writing code, or just writing. I’m listening to it now.

It’s creator, William Basinski is famous for his achingly beautiful work ‘The Disintegration Loops’ in which he records tapes loops as they physically fall apart and the sound slowly transforms and erodes. These pieces are also long but much more teleological, they do go somewhere. There is a process happening of disintegration, growing entropy, darkness falling. There is some connection to 9/11, Basinski is a fellow New Yorker who, like me, experienced the attack on the towers. It makes it more resonant for me. I think I still have PTSD, undiagnosed from witnessing the destruction of the towers first hand. I still get a sharp, shocky reaction to sudden loud noises that I don’t expect, a jittery flood of adrenaline in my system. Meditating for a few years now has made me more aware of it, more able to experience it at a remove. Low flying airplanes still make me nervous, though a bit less so now 17 years later.

Basinski’s work frequently deals with sadness and this kind of aching beauty, though Water Music II is not that. It’s more serene. It’s presence in my life has made me think a lot about this type of music or sound. Music that you inhabit and that stretches out. Music against time. Most music is in a rush to show you how good it is every eight bars and is constantly setting off fireworks to capture our jaded attention span. Basinski’s music has none of that and I’m grateful for it.

I’ve found the word ‘content’ pervading my vocabulary more and more and I dislike it. Content, in my contemporary usage just means ‘thought stuff’. It turns thinking, criticism, art, emotions and general human expression into a kind of intellectual slurry. Turn on the faucet and content flows out for us to passively consume. What does this content contain? Not much a lot of the time. It’s the thought equivalent of junk food, empty mental calories. It’s also a way to be ambiguous about what it even is. Is it a critique? Are we teaching something? Are we expressing ourselves? It’s unclear. Human thought should not be a commodity. It’s anti-individual and demeaning. When we package our work as content it is the mental equivalent of elevator muzak. If we tune in and out in the middle of it, it doesn’t matter at all. We didn’t miss anything. It filled a silence in our day and then disappeared into the void.

Because so much content is delivered through algorithmically mediated platforms, content is shaped by the needs of robots. Robots devour clicks and human-attention-minutes and are never full. When we create our work as part of a content pipeline, the sole motivation is not that it makes our soul sing or we had a burning desire to shout this from the rooftops. Instead, we needed a packet of content to feed to the robots and in turn they will package, deliver and distribute it to our increasingly robot like audiences. What does it mean to have an audience who’s attention span and appetite for content is so shaped by click seeking attention maximizing algorithms? Will we ever see a Mona Lisa of content? Content in it’s purest form is a baroque dance between human creators, distribution robots and the audiences they control. We can see the results when it is divorced from shame or any sense of animating sanity when we explore the dark parts of the purely, atavistically algorithmic and randomly generated hells of kids YouTube. Don’t read this article before bedtime if you’re a parent.

As people who make things, I think we need a more critical perspective toward content and the role being thrust upon as ‘content creators’. We also need to consider the fact that the number one job among all the 8 year olds I know is to be a ‘YouTuber’. Not to be a ‘streamer’ or ‘documentary video creator’ or ‘video comedian’ but to be a job named after an algorithmic platform, to be a person most directly at the mercy of the algorithms, to eat or not eat at their whims. I am not wholly pessimistic about this. The internet is big and weird and new things will happen, and the fact that a new generation sees video making as a two way conversation, rather than slavishly watching cartoons between commercials like my generation is a good thing. Kids want to be creators, and I love that. Hopefully we can give them some choices of what to create though besides ‘content’.

Hi, I’m Matt Schell. I’ve been making things for a number of years but they are sort of scattered across the internet and under different psuedonyms. Some of them should remain that way, but I think it would be nice to have a place to gather everything together under one name. I’ve decided to make this site for that purpose.

Names are funny. For me, using different names was a way to compartmentalize parts of my life in the era of the omniscient google robots. I wanted to be able to share certain things with certain audiences, and so doing it under a different name made sense. Now as I get older, I am starting to see all the different stuff I’ve done through the years as more of a single, spiraling path through art-work-space. I still don’t know where it’s going but as I move restless between mediums, technologies and modes of expression I realize that a lot of what I’m interested in carries with me, and a lot of the skills do as well. I feel like I need to do a better job of documenting that, and I also think that making the process more public is maybe a good thing. I value process as a key part of artistic practice but almost never document it. So I’m going to try and start doing that more, and doing it under my ‘real’ name or as folks in NY sometimes say ‘government’ name.

I’m re-reading the Earthsea books by Ursula LeGuin, who is one of my most favorite authors. I’m reading them to my sons as bed time books, working our way through a huge fat 1000 page compilation of them over many nights. It’s great. In them, knowing the true name of something is a form of power, which enables magic.

The names recorded by governments give governments a form of power over people, and so sometimes people chojose to conceal them, calling themselves nicknames, handles or artist names. The internet is a whole new genre of naming in which numbers, punctuation and symbols have all entered the world of names, giving us people like 21 Savage (21,21), who named himself after his semi-random Instagram user name and then carried that on to be his artist name for his chart topping rap career.

I made music under the name Matt Shadetek and before that Sozer.Sht when I was part of Team Shadetek with my childhood friend Zack Tucker. Soze was a name that I used in tagging graffiti growing up in Manhattan. Graffiti is a world built around names and beautiful or menacing or abstract depictions of them. Growing up with graffiti means that I still reflexively read and catalog tags everywhere I go on the walls, for example noticing that NY graffiti artist Nov took a trip to Berlin within the past few years and tagged the city here. His piece ‘World screaming Nov’ was a memorable one, on the side of the bridge at Smith and 9th St in Brooklyn. His autobiographical book Nov York is also memorable and disturbing, a desperate, stream of conscious, chaotic look at someone in the grips of chemical and artistic compulsion, violence and jail. I’m a fan of Nov as a writer and writer and enjoy seeing his name pop up in cities far away from our mutual home of NYC.

Lately (4 years or so) I’ve been working in the video game business. For this I formed a fresh psuedonym, Matt Mirrorfish. I also formed a company, Mirrorfish Media for that purpose which lives over at mirrorfishmedia.com, and I post stuff there sometimes.

I have an intermittent habit of writing daily in my journal after I meditate. It’s a good thing to do for me. I try to write three pages longhand. I got this from Julia Cameron, who wrote the Artist’s Way. The Artist’s Way is great and has many valuable ideas for creative people who struggle with creating, even if Cameron herself is a bit flouncy and dramatic. I recommend it, even if I find my recommendation to be a bit embarrassing. But the struggle to create stuff is so painful that any help we can get, or share is worth it, even if it’s a bit wincey at times. I am not too proud to accept whatever help I can get.

I enjoy the work of writer and marketing guru Seth Godin and he writes every day, short little posts. They are more oriented towards being helpful to people. Not sure if this will be like that. Currently I’m thinking of this as more of a livejournal sort of thing that maybe people will find value from, and that will be good for me for writing. I will try to not be too self-indulgent, but also no promises.

I may or may not stick to this, I’ve learned with maturity, so no promises in that department either. As I say to my kids when they ask for something I’m reluctant to give: “We’ll see.”