Week 78-79
Better communication, body-reactive typography, slow-ness, intrinsic vs extrinsic pursuits, the 'zone' and AI tools for visuals, moodboards & writing papers.
Tough, long week.
[Learnings & Thoughts] Saying more, writing less; wondering what is too less?
For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been working with Shobhan to design a ‘creative-coding’ course. We’ve been working in tandem – I produce work, he helps me refine it; usually with a brutally redacting lens.
While reviewing a paragraph, he reduced it to a single sentence and asked me whether that was what I was trying to say. Hesitantly, I disagreed. While re-working on it a day later, I realised that my disagreement wasn’t because I wanted to add a paragraph back in, which was the argument I stuck to during my conversation with him, but simply because the wording of the formed sentence resulted in the dilution of its meaning.
There are three learnings for me from this month-long exercise with him –
Say more, write less
All the people around me who get work done are extremely articulate and spit out a combination of words that almost seem profound. This, I believe, might come with repeated exercises of saying / writing and re-saying / re-writing.Pick a side
Are you going to be pin-pointedly concrete or thought-provokingly abstract? Don’t be in the middle.Who do you want to be / who do you want to work with?
Yes, most human beings in the world have the attention span of a goldfish (and other popular notions). But that’s not all of them. People who read long paragraphs still exist, albeit our numbers are diminishingly low. So the question then is – who do you want to appeal to? If you can bend, bend; else stay fixated for your niche audience. I flutter between the two, depending on the context.
[Experiments] Body-reactive work
Wondered about how typography on the screen could respond to the body.
The above is a piece of text that responds to a person’s hand (me in the top left). The idea was simple – show a piece of text, break it into a grid of tiles, let the size of each tile be relative to the position of the palm (closer means smaller, further means bigger).
Interesting technical premise for future work, especially for performative visuals.
[Life] Acquiring ‘slow-ness’
Ever since my MIT Media Lab application, life has acquired a certain sense of ‘slowness’. There is no short-term deadline that I’m chasing anymore. Although the pressure to find meaningful work still looms over my shoulder, there’s nothing I can pull off in a few nights that will speed up that process.
This results in an unfamiliarly new way to live life. Days are slower, sleep comes earlier, balance is seeping in and I have some level of newly discovered patience to work slowly on more elaborate ideas.
Will I reach where I want to be? Probably. Probably not. Definitely not anytime soon.
And that’s okay.
[Thoughts] Intrinsic vs extrinsic pursuits
An excerpt from my micro-blog that forms the context for this expansion:
[Someone] once told me that my journey is about making peace with mediocrity, a notion that I passionately argued against. I'm beginning to wonder that maybe [that person] was right – for the last 14 years, I've been stuck in the "you-have-potential" trap. I think I'm chasing the wrong things, some of the older people in my life were probably right. Can I chase intrinsic things? My journey then is to uphold the value of intrinsic things, more so than that of extrinsic things. Crap, how do I do that now?
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a couple of conversations with older people who suggested me to shift my focus towards more intrinsic pursuits. Such as, for art – let it revel in the joy of making, without thinking about how many people will ‘like it’ or if I’ll get famous with it.
Funnily enough, I understand these notions. I’ve understood them for a while now. I can also imagine how peaceful that might be. But even with the knowledge, I am unable to let go of my extrinsic desires.
Will it come with age? Will it come with consistently failing to get extrinsic validation and, therefore, resorting to intrinsic pursuits to survive?
No clue yet.
[Self-Realisations] Elements for me to reach the ‘zone’
Found myself in a nice working zone recently, while leading a re-branding exercise for TinkerLabs. Understood that space and silence is of utmost important to me, both of which are very hard to find in Mumbai.
[Tools] AI-generated visuals with consistent style
Found an interesting AI tool that allows you to make visuals with a consistent visual style. Will probably use this for a graphic design poster. Takes a few tries to result in something interesting.
[Tools] AI-generated moodboards
Found an AI tool that generates moodboards. Useful for lazy iterations / getting a second opinion.
[Tools] Writing papers with AI
Found an AI tool that writes academic papers for you. The paper is locked by a pay-to-get wall, but you can see everything else before it; making it a decent tool to have a second opinion on your paper.
Such as: