Jared White

On occasion, truth be told, I’m not so swift on the uptake. You see, it finally came to me as I sat musing on the nature of the work I’ve been focusing on a great deal this year across several unrelated disciplines. When I list out these efforts all together, you’ll immediately spot the pattern—hence my sudden smack-that-forehead moment of epiphany:

• The Internet Review, my rebooted & coalesced blog combining over 25 years of writing on tech topics
• Subterranean, my album release of newly-freshened electronic music compositions spanning 20 years
• Essential Life Photography (currently in the works!), my curated portfolio of photographs taken over the past seven years I’ve lived in Oregon.

Obvious, isn’t it? And yet these were all separate efforts which I didn’t give much thought to in terms of their conceptual interconnectedness…until now!

If I might put a theme on it, I could call it Rebel Without a Timeline. In all of these cases (perhaps least obvious for The Internet Review which is still primarily a blog format), the primordial desire is to break out of the confines of the “reverse-chronological timeline” and showcase work which encompasses months, years, and even decades of effort in a curated fashion. Fact is the Internet isn’t so good at that—not any more at least. The validity of the “death of the homepage” narrative has been hotly contested for a long time, and I don’t wish to litigate that here, but it’s hard to deny that the primary format by which people consume content online is—as Netscape once established—What’s New.

No matter which social media platform you use, no matter which email newsletters you subscribe to, no matter how you choose to bookmark and follow creators—it’s all about What’s New. Even algorithmic timelines which are somewhat non-linear nearly always favor recency. You might see a post from a day or two ago, but you certainly won’t see something from months or years ago—unless that’s been intentionally shared by an individual. Maybe something older will surface in a “related” section (most notably on YouTube), but it’s an exception to the rule.

Streams Makes Sense, But They’re Also Missing Something

Content streams, feeds, whatever you want to call them—they make sense. They really do. There’s a reason that’s what publishing on the Internet is built around, by and large.

But streams miss out on a vital aspect of creativity. Streams are lacking in context. Streams are lacking in legacy. And streams are lacking in relationships between disparate pieces of content.

When you visit an art gallery, you’re participating in multiple layers of experience. The most basic and obvious layer is when you’re looking at one piece of art at a time, which I might call singular attention. This painting. That sculpture. This photograph. That projection.

But beyond that, you’re experiencing the layer of comparison. This painting as compared to that sculpture as compared to this photography as compared to that projection.

But at a higher level still is the layer of compilation. All of the art in the gallery has been compiled together into an exhibit. And the exhibit itself could be considered a form of art. Why did the curator choose these pieces, and not other pieces? Why are they placed where they are placed? What is the larger story being told through this collection of created artifacts?

The unfortunately reality of online streams is that the layer of comparison is completely random, and the layer of compilation is missing entirely. When you open Mastodon, or Threads, or YouTube, or whatever: sure, you’re seeing a bunch of different works compiled together, but nobody is doing the compiling. It’s either the almighty algorithm, or mere recency based on who you follow. That’s it. Thus there’s no meaning to the compilation. There’s no “reason” I’m seeing this post next to that post. Sometimes there is humor to be found in the accidental contrast—people may post screenshots of how two posts next to each other afforded a moment of happenstantial comedy. But it was never designed to be that way.

What’s Worth Curating?

It could be argued that few posts on social media would even ever rise to the level of warranting curation in a particular gallery-style collection in the first place. And that’s fair. But some of what we post on social media is art, straight up. We post our paintings, our songs, our sculptures, our knitted sweaters, our poems, our prose essays, our dance moves, and on and on and on. Yet who is compiling any of this art? How can we compare things in a way which brings a higher sense of meaning?

This loss of meaning, loss of fidelity in the experience of “art in digital spaces” has been weighing on me. A lot. I think it may be subconsciously contributing to my growing unease that simply “being very online” is rather bad for my mental health. Even while I’m compelled to post, post, post my creative works online, I often lack the satisfaction I think I will get out of it.

On social media, we’re all just shouting in the wind.

And so I crave a more curated experience, and in many cases a more “meatspace” experience. I find myself going out to listen to live music more often. I find myself wanting to visit art galleries and museums IRL. I find myself wanting to attend meetups in which I can converse with just a few people about real ideas which make sense in the real world.

But what can we do, beyond all that, to make our online experiences of art better?

As a starting point, I think we can attempt to reorient ourselves around the concept of the portfolio.

A Portfolio is a Gallery of One

Some forms of art lend themselves to portfolio-making better than others. For example, an album is essentially a portfolio of music from a particular epoch. A non-fiction book could be considered a portfolio of related essays.

But no matter what kind of art you create, you need a portfolio. (And probably several at least!) This is what I’m beginning to realize more and more as I evaluate all of the different projects I’m involved in. The “reverse-chron” format of blogs and social media is beginning to crush my spirit, and I desperately want to start focusing on how I can surface various collections of thematically-similar creations.

First of all, you’ll almost certainly need a professional website. Your Instagram profile is not a photography portfolio. Your “top posts” category on your blog is not a writing portfolio. And your Bandcamp homepage is not a musical portfolio.

Secondly, you’ll need to start diving into the different themes of your work over the years. You might need to set aside some time to review past work and jot down ideas of what you like or don’t like about different pieces (as well as what stand out in terms of “keywords”). Sure, maybe you’ve taken lots of photos of flowers over the years, but what kinds of flowers? Are there certain colors you gravitate to? Are there certain angles? Certain photographic styles? Certain species? Expand your thought processes beyond the rote work which goes into each piece, and start to approach your work as if you were the curator of a gallery. How might you put an exhibit together? What would it say? What would it mean? Which conscious decisions would you make as you separate the wheat from the chaff? How might you be showcased as an artist?

One aspect of this I sometimes think about is how the “stream” often prompts us to want to put out only “pretty” art. Because if you were to post a single artwork which is “ugly” in some confrontational or countercultural or aesthetic way, it might just get “rejected” in the constant flow of online content which tends to promote conformity to norms. Case in point: if I simply mentioned “the Instagram look” in photography, you’d know exactly what I’m talking about…

But in a curated collection, you could put a pretty piece and an ugly piece side-by-side—the contrast between the two being of primary importance. Some of Phil Collins’ solo albums come to mind here: I noticed the tracklist often ping-pongs between a “hit single” which is palatable to the masses, and a “weird song” which nobody would ever suggest is Top 10 Radio material. In a world where a Phil Collins is just posting clips of singles on TikTok or whatever, I’m not sure the “weird songs” would land all that often. When I listen to some modern albums where every song sort of just sounds the same and nothing stands out in any particular way, I wonder if this sort of dynamic is at play.

So I’d recommend being a bit bold in your portfolio selection process. I’m just starting this process with my photography, so I’m excited to see what kind of contrast I can bring out, which sorts of non-sequiturs I can put on display. I fear my own work has trended “pretty” over the years because I’m always thinking of what might land on social media, rather than what I could say that’s provocative or even distasteful. It’ll be a challenge certainly, and quite probably inform how I approach my craft going forward.

Outatime

One of the enduring tropes of sci-fi stories is the fish-out-of-water sensation of time travel. I think we love time travel scenarios because it wreaks havoc on our sense of linear progression. We typically live our lives with a this, then this, then this, then this, then this mindset. Once you time travel, you have to completely reorient yourself around a new narrative of what was true, what is true now, and what might be true tomorrow.

A portfolio is in essence a demonstration of artistic time travel. On my new album Subterranean, that is doubly true, as the origin point for the compositions stem from 2004, 2008, and 2015—with new elements and arrangements mixed in across the last several years. I can’t think of any other music project I’ve ever worked on which “spanned decades” quite like this, and it was enormously fun. I almost lament having to start on my next album project composing in a typical linear fashion. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by my past life performing in folk and classical music settings where you’re always re-interpreting compositions and styles from quite literally hundreds of years ago. There’s a sublime humanist joy to that I can’t quite capture anywhere else.

But I digress. My takeaway here is for you to enjoy some time travel of your own. Get familiar once more with your older work, with additional styles and ideas you might have once pursued. Look for points of contrast between styles, eras, and moods. See what sorts of stories you might tell with your work when these contrasting elements come together in a new and unique fashion. Publish an artistic experience online that’s more than simply fuel for the social media streams. And then repeat this process from time to time, forging new compilations as your career progresses.

The art of curation has in many ways been lost to those of us who are Extremely Online™. We need to reclaim our artistic truths, and thereby reclaim our creative power.

Photo credit: Antenna on Unsplash