Residency is a four-part weekly journal entry brought to you by one of our favorite artists every month.
This week, Dom Rabalais aka Little Ruckus explains why modern culture is “fucking beautiful.”
Inspiration and the internet: There’s so much fucking amazing shit out there.
I’m a huge fucking fan of making drastic not-entirely-true-statements, so without further ado I would like to say: I’m a huge fucking fan of everything. I fucking love most stuff, if it’s part of existing, if it’s something about being alive, something we as living beings get to experience, it’s fucking awesome and beautiful to me.
I don’t know how common you guys might see one person or another complaining about how {read in a old man voice} “When I was a kid, we had to call each other on the phone! We didn’t have our twittersface or our tumblrbooks!” And these are probably the same people that would say something about how {once again, old man voice} “Music these days is so watered down and empty!”
To these people I say fie on you! Open your eyes! MODERN CULTURE IS FUCKING BEAUTIFUL! Human communication is faster than ever. Art can be created, distributed, consumed, turned into inspiration and then turned into more FASTER THAN EVER! Any person anywhere can create brilliance and show it to the world, how is that not fucking beautiful!? The endless scroll of tumblr, the poetic limitations of twitter, all these are new and fascinating platforms for humans to express themselves, and they create entire new cultures unto themselves. To me, it means two things:
1) Because of the ease with which any person anywhere can create something amazing and post it online in ten minutes, we have a limitless universe of content at our fingertips, this means that one can’t physically spend much time with any particular piece of art or music, because there’s hundreds of other posts that are equally inspiring. Therefore the culture that gets created that is inspired by this endless river of content is a massive amalgamation of hundreds of thousands of pieces of creativity. Instead of getting one world ending blast of inspiration from one particular piece of culture—when I consume information on the internet—I usually get hundreds upon hundreds of tiny inspirations and concepts that all flow together for one new concept. Which, in turn, is put back in that river of content to add inspiration.
2) Because of the sheer amount of amazing shit that a person can view at any given time, if someone creating art wants their audience to truly stop and appreciate their work, to truly become wholly overwhelmed with passion for this one body of work/album/film, that work needs to be absolutely fucking amazing. With so much constantly at our fingertips, we can’t afford to spend time with art/culture/creativity that ISN’T absolutely fucking amazing. Which in a way, just kind of ups the ante for everyone. While technology allows anyone to create anything and show it to everyone at any time, it means that now, you have to be the most fucking amazing to shine above the rest, you can’t not be world-endingly inspiring to have people spend their precious time to be passionate about you.
As someone who makes things nearly all the time, I think about things like this quite a bit, my apologies if these thoughts feel half-formed, in all truth, they are. I would love to continue this discussion to the maxxx. Email me @ [email protected].
THANKS
LOVE,
Dom
Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4
