What I am Attempting to Do With This Section of My Web Site
Web sites, while I have loved them steadily since the 1990s, tend to focus on output. They are content. Nothing wrong with that. This is content, what you’re reading right now. My short films are content. All I really NEED from you is to watch my content and tell others to watch my content. You can do that in the Video section of this site.
The thing is, the winds of creative output are shifting these days, blown in wild directions by the enormous cooling fans of data centers. Yeah yeah yeah, this is about AI, but that’s only because, much like climate change, EVERYTHING is about AI.
Our hyper-focus on consuming content has led to a certain cheapening, an increasingly fleeting need to just have something, anything, to look at. Something to occupy the noise in our heads, at any cost, for a few seconds. In the old days when we consumed content a little more deliberately, we understood, consciously or not, that any piece of content is the end of an interesting story. That the thing you watch or read was the product of some level of effort done by someone else. This didn’t used to really matter, not to me, at least, in a childhood of occupying movie theaters like they were daycare centers.
But it matters now, and more each day. Myself, I’ve spent my entire life making stuff for other people. There’s a story behind everything I’ve ever written or made, and that story is why any of it means anything. And as I age, the things I make come at turning points of an ever-longer and more complex story, aka LIFE, maaaaan.
All this is to say that this segment of my web site is a supplement to the bio page, which tells you all the wonderful things I have done and why you should hire me to do more, and the video page, which shows you some of those wonderful things. This section is about why anything I have made matters. It’s about the experiences that led to and resulted from my lifelong creative endeavor. Accompanied, of course and when relevant, by the content itself.
Can the story behind content BE content? I say, in the age of AI, content cannot BE content without that story. Without the story, it’s slop. And though slop may look increasingly like content these days, it’s not, and it’s just so fucking important we all remember that. Am I saying that slop is inherently bad? Well— yes, but that’s really just my weird opinion. You can use AI if you want. But! Is slop the same as content? No. I can say that with authority, and I think it really, really matters.
Be better than slop, is all I ask. One way to do that is to experience content through a lens of where it came from and why it matters. Such as on this very web site. If you simply experience what you read, watch, and play through your own lens, acknowledging the creator’s lens as well, you will always come away a little bit different, a little bit new. Even if it sucks! And isn’t becoming a little bit new just the point of everything? Don’t answer that, just… just read this shit and go click on my videos and go on about your day, a little bit different than you were before.