(No, that’s not a typo – My reserved Japanese blood coupled with my infiltration of an upbringing in Middle-Class London can’t handle declaring that I have any sort of ‘Philosophy’ with a Big P. But here it is anyway.)
It’s 2023 and everyone’s talking about the scary advancement of AI technology, wondering whether they’ll lose their jobs any time before their retirement, while fashion and pop culture seems to see a comeback of the shiny and whimsical, pastel to neon plastic aesthetic that cased the now-obsolete technologies we grew up with. Pictures of stars from back then with their flip phones feels nostalgic enough to be endeared about, and it’s been coming for a while. I’d also been fascinated by similar textures for most of my art school years, the transparent, to be precise. I don’t feel that I’ve been able to express exactly what it is that I feel for these things in my work, and it seems to be this oncoming nostalgia that is coming in the way between what I want to say, and the viewer’s perception of these materials and textures.
So I blurted out the ‘Truly Y2K’ manifesto as above. I tried to promote this post on instagram, and for the first time I got a rejection from Meta. I guess that’s only natural when the post could easily be taken as a call to get off of their own platform. (Not exactly my point, but lesson learnt.)
It felt quite nice to get a big “NO” for once, when it seems like nothing you do can really be punk anymore in this age.
In practice, what I am doing to try and be ‘Truly Y2K’ doesn’t feel that drastic.
It can pretty much be summarised in the one sentence seen in my post: “Be anti-smartphone, it’s not smart to do everything with two thumbs and a finger.”
- I have shut away my smartphone, and after some experiments with a bunch of secondhand ‘dumb’ phones, have settled for using a flip phone made for seniors (Doro DFC-0270).
- In my day-to-day bag I usually carry – the flip phone, my MP3 player, my wallet, my keys, my diary/notebook, my sketchbook + pen, my digital camera and my emergency makeup. If my brain feels awake enough I might carry a book around.
- Unfortunately, for my day job I need to use a laptop, but other than this, I only access the internet through a desktop at my dedicated computer-desk and made sure the machine is too heavy for me to carry around the house.
However I suppose that this is important to me in quite a personal way and I thought I’d share the background of it – it’s probably a very relatable story for the average nerdy creative kid growing up in the same generation as me.
I was born in the year 2000, so I am basically emulating what I saw my parents doing when I was a little kid. I wanted to find a balance between sounding like a rich completely-detached-from-reality ‘zen’ yogi who can afford to go “completely off of the grid” and forever being stuck in this goo between the real and the digital. Saying that, I am aware that there is somewhat of a time lag between my childhood and the childhood of the average kid around the block in terms of ‘digital’. I guess also that I naturally jumped into the role of ‘creator’ with a very small ‘friendly-audience’ outside of my physical reality showcasing what I made without really realising it early on, as this was before the trends of tumblr and instagram.
Coming from a Japanese family with a few of its members being involved as a cog in the wheel in the making of the first very digital home-gadgets, it made it so much easier even in 2006 for my family to have access to the internet as well as a range of other surrounding creative gear, despite being pretty skint after the big move to London. To some members of my family, this was something to be proud of and I was very much encouraged to explore this new world; to get ahead of everyone else… (welcome to the contemporary twisted-americanised-nationalism rooted in the carcasses of 80’s Japan.) So, here was little me at maybe 6-7 years old discovering the internet and computer-generated works.
It might sound deadly but it wasn’t all that bad. Thankfully my parents had enough brain cells to 1. not allow me to have personal accounts until I was about 9, and most importantly 2. teach me what information was deemed as private-private-private. I quickly found a bunch of friends on there.
The first thing I did was make a blog on this Japanese website called ‘ameblog’ where I shared my early artistic explorations of MS paint and Paint Tool SAI. This carried on for many years until I changed my main focus to the up-and-coming YouTube, where I recorded ‘speedpaints’, videos that were made by fast-forwarding a digital screen recording of your digital art making and slapping on a pirated MP3 of your favourite songs. I’ve been getting stuck drawing away on paper ever since I can remember, but much of my first experiences of ‘creative experiment’ came from this activity, of being an anonymous member of the web medium.
Though we were all kids, we were quick to try and emulate what was most available to us as reference – what we saw as pop and ‘official’; and a lot of us were getting really close to professional techniques in a very short time, at very young ages. (Foreshadowing.) With my spongey brain I could research how to do what I wanted pretty much straight away. I also sent private messages of adoration and got replies from my living favourite artists! Pirated versions of software were flying around and I loved experimenting with different mediums for practically free. The fantasy of The World Wide Web was still there, and I loved talking to random people from all over the world, fully utilising what I gained from school – my newly learnt language of English.
But suddenly it was time to start getting serious with my academics. I was known as the one who could use the computer in class, and I wasn’t very shy about showing people my creations, so I naturally got pushed into the “Graphic Design” route. If ambitious, why not a programmer? If not, maybe an editor working in TV?
Biggest turn-off in the world. At the ripe age of 13 my creativity was burnt out entirely from the core.
Yeah, maybe I’d have been a genius on Adobe Illustrator by now, coding all the websites if I was left alone, but alas. It was also around this time that all of my classmates were starting to actively use the internet as well, and that was the line being crossed for me. I loved being an anonymous blob in the sphere, but I couldn’t stand the people around me knowing what I’d put out there. And it was quite literally right at their fingertips…
The rest of my school life was me trying to run away from ‘marketability’ as much as possible. I focused on painting, and then I tried to make my art as incomprehensible as possible, but didn’t feel any of the true ecstasies of creativity in such a tight box of abstractions. I then tried to merge painting and my precious digital, to find a mid-point between ‘digital illustration’ and ‘fine art painting’, but to most of my teachers, everything done on a computer was dirty.
This is pretty much how I found myself at Goldsmiths College, where I saw that the digital was not vehemently scorn at, but was also not seen as some sort of easy-money-making advancement. I believe I saw quite a lot of peers creating visual manifestations of similar nostlagias around me during my time there, where they were trying to poke at the machine that had once opened up such a world to ‘do it again’ despite it is gone. But like I explained, I am not at all satisfied with the body of work I came up with, and I think that the fault lies in the fact that this act only becomes possible after deciding that “it is gone”.
Things can be a lot simpler.
By ‘aestheticizing’ my nostalgia for this era of the internet I’m just stupidly contributing to the same energy as the big brands. Afterall, what I want is to feel is that connection between likeminded individuals only made possible through this technology, to feel inspired by the things I see again, without feeling the threat of commodification. It is also about having access to a free plotting space on the big land of the internet and that is made quite impossible by design on most of the biggest websites. These things aren’t made possible by recreating images. This is what I wanted to perhaps discuss with a lot of the artists around me who handled similar themes, but I was too afraid to go there when I hadn’t come up with an alternative solution myself. But this is perhaps my first step in this direction.
As described before, ‘abstraction’ feels to point to something completely different in this post-meme world, and I don’t really like it. It doesn’t have the same whack-in-your-face effect as it might have in eras and contexts past.
I also want to point out that, while nostalgia for specific eras of the internet is not something that can only be felt by people my age, I think that it hits me and certain generations or groups harder because the it is the foundations of our creativity. This is as fundamental to me as pen and paper, and it sometimes went so far as to feel like I had been robbed the freedom of speaking the language I developed with because it automatically ‘comes off a certain way’.
I’m making this website in this way, going back to my roots; not in a polished painterly artist portfolio kind of way, and not in a get-rich-quick blog-scheme kind of way, because I don’t think the potential of having a very creative and thoughtful internet experience alongside healthy physical lives is gone. I am forcing myself to allow myself to be unconcise yet direct and honest, to be unpolished yet specific. I am quite aware that this will probably not reach a lot of people and most won’t bother to read, but I would very much like to keep focus without looking for ‘engagement’ that isn’t engaged at all and only bet on the very few who might resonate with me.
The problem is that we only surround ourselves with ‘content’, only taking a chance on what looks familiar.
The problem is that we give up because “it’s all the algorithm”.
The problem is that we believe the world’s value = number of views, not that the institutions are trying to enforce it.
The problem is that artists are at the end of the day still making instagram shorts, and still buying the new iPhone “because we can’t do without it”.
The problem is that it’s an ‘all or nothing’ attitude, where artists feel like they’re only free if they’re quite literally touching earth (though no hate on clay for that matter!)
Institutions are always going to be institutions. It doesn’t matter whether it was before web 0.0 or after.
Think of me subscribing to big old WordPress and writing these things as the equivalent of buying secondhand fast fashion items. It’s trying to navigate ways to be better despite being a very insignificant individual within the big dooms of the world. If you’re going to give that clickbaity article on how we’re entering the world of Asimov some time off of your day, maybe give my blogposts a try?
Even better, if you are a creative living in 2023, maybe pause to think about how you currently showcase your own! If you end up trying something different to the way it is now, let me know – and I’ll be sure to do more than just a single click of a heart icon.
This website is still very much messy and under construction because I’m doing it very DIY (will alert when it’s all done!), but please enjoy seeing it build.
Alongside just my silly little website, I have been having (a much needed) creative crisis as I have thought my main medium of illustration out to run dry of hope, for now. I suppose this website is sort of like the very first step in letting myself start a bigger experiment. After this I plan to write retrospective thoughts on my past shows to say a small fond goodbye to the very rigid format of them that I had pushed myself into. As you can tell I actually have quite a jumbled and combobulated thought process for everything. It feels quite good to be able to just release them into the void like this again.