📙 #011 Use Words, Not Too Many, Mostly Short

One out of three isn't bad.

I finally got a bunch of posters, prints, and pictures up in the studio after getting around to painting the wall roughly a year after moving in. In some ways, this sudden burst of making the place look nice is all Laura's fault, on the grounds that she was going to pop over so we could talk about creative spaces and YouTube. A plan scuppered for both of us, if I'm going to be overly dramatic about it, by a proper rockstar, but that's not my story to tell, and I've already blown it out of proportion in the first half of this run on sentence.

It seemed wrong that I was going to say I felt creative in the studio when it was still covered in old-person floral wallpaper, which was only still up because my tolerance for twee-ness was greater than my tolerance for DIY.

Laura was going to visit on the following Wednesday, giving me approximately six days to paint everything and hang pictures. The visit hasn't happened yet, but I'm pleased to say I'm already benefitting from the art being up; my soul has been lifted after a somewhat grueling year.

Above my desk, framed in a way I don't fully comprehend, is a poster that reads:

USE WORDS
NOT TOO MANY
MOSTLY SHORT

Placed in an attempt to shame me into getting better at writing more succinctly. Long term readers of this newsletter will know that so far it’s had no discernible effect.

I bought the poster from FITZROVIA LIGHT INDUSTRIES. As a side note, they are the purveyor of this fine book that I recommend you all go out and buy.

And for those that like to slowly build up “everything is interconnected” mental models of the world, the design was done by Stefanie Posavec, who you have definitely now heard of.

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LIGHT vs HEAVY INDUSTRIES

What I'm about to tell you is absolutely provable to be false on nearly all counts, but I'm going to tell it to you as though it's a fact, because apparently now with ChatGPT being a thing, being confidently incorrect is all the rage.

When a single person or couple wish to act as a single "art entity", the postfix "LIGHT INDUSTRIES" can be used. When a larger group of people wish to act as a single art entity and/or create art installations/experiences, then "HEAVY INDUSTRIES" should be used.

So if I were turning my hand at something different I may go under the moniker CATTUS LIGHT INDUSTRIES LTD, but along with other people it could be WAYFINDING & DISCOVERY HEAVY INDUSTRIES GROUP.

This kind of nonsense comes about when a suitably in-charge person asks you to fill in a form to start a new limited company, open a business account, or something else typically "grown up" and you ask "Can I call this anything? Do you really allow me to write whatever I like in this box and then it becomes a real thing? Do I even need a factory or any diggers?" and they say yes.

When you’re a proper grown up, it turns out no-one is really stopping you from suddenly becoming “CATT’S REMARKABLE PARANORMAL AND INTERNET INVESTIGATION SERVICES”

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ALL THE PRINT THAT’S FIT TO PRINT

Since we last spoke here, two things have happened, well, a LOT of things have happened, but for the moment.

ONE: We have moved to Substack, which is like the old newsletter service but a lot more complicated.

In theory, I should be changing the headers & footers, and adding calls to action. As I have not done any of that yet, it is likely that you will see prompts to sign up for Substack all over the place. I am absolutely not planning on having a paid version, even though the admin dashboard I have to deal with is trying to push me in that direction. How this will look is as much of a mystery to me as it isn’t to you, since you have now seen it.

TWO: I included some pen plots in the last issue, with more versions shown below. Print versions arrived a couple of days later.

I've also been playing with turning Midjourney outputs into Polaroids, and putting digital works-in-progress into the digital frame that hangs on my wall.

There are a few things going on here, which, if you were my therapist, I'm sure you would be able to explain back to me a lot better than I can describe it to you now.

I appear to have this need to HOLD THE ART, and be surrounded by it.

When I'm working on a project, it's normally on the screen; I'm interacting with it, changing things here and there and getting near-instant feedback. When something comes back to me printed, and making that happen is a process in itself; it then sits in the room with me, or I sit in the room with it - I haven't figured that one out yet.

And it tells me things about itself that I don't see on the screen. After a while, some of it will irritate me and I'll realise it was where I was lazy with the code. Other parts I'll fall in love with, and I'll try to understand why.

The other thing I realised is that I can’t PRINT ALL THE THINGS, because as much as I love print, it takes up space, costs money when I don’t have my own printer (something I’m planning on fixing) and printing out every work-in-progress is a little excessive.

My half-solution to this is to use the Samsung “The Frame”. I’ve set up the worlds simplest website that randomly picks a new output from whatever project I’m working on to show & change every ten minutes.

The current project is MONSTRRRR (simplest refreshing website here): https://revdancatt.com/monstrrrr which is in a VERY EARLY stage, so I’ll be switching the pool of images in and out over the next few months.

This isn’t anything that’s coming out any time soon, at least I don’t think so anyway, and it’s still in the exploratory part of the process. But I’m already finding it useful having it sitting up on the wall in just the spot I glance at when I’m thinking and trying to avoid looking at…

USE WORDS
NOT TOO MANY
MOSTLY SHORT

Eeeeep!

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YouTube ROUND UP

There’s been a surprising amount of YouTubing since the last newsletter, I figured it’d be good to mention what’s going on over there.

At the end of each month I try and do a “Profit/Loss Report” for the month. This almost made sense when I was just doing pen plotting, because it was a useful thing for similar artists to be able to see what other people were doing. They could see what type of things I was buying, how many things I was selling and how much money that pulled in. Then they could use that to help with whatever their plans for selling work was.

Now that the answer currently seems to be “Yeah, just get really lucky with your timing and make money from pen plotting by selling NFTs instead”, I’m not 100% sure how useful that is. But you never know, watching monthly videos about how an artist is utterly failing to get any of the things they planned on doing done could be useful to someone, and boy do I have the videos for them in that case.

Another type of video I’ve started making is a weekly “Weeknotes”, they’re best explained here:

A pre-history of weeknotes, plus why I write them and perhaps why you should too (Week 16)

These are very self-serving, acting both as a self accountability tool and also a way to look back and remind myself of what I did and when. I used to do written versions and they were invaluable at the end of the year when I wanted to remind myself of ALL THE THINGS.

Each day I record the odd snippet of what I’m doing and dump them onto my laptop. My coded organisational assistant “Kitty” (named after the terminal app it runs in), then files those away into folders named after the day of the week. On Friday I drag them all onto the timeline in Final Cut Pro and cut them down into something that makes some kind of sense.

Everything that talks about “How to grow on YouTube” tells me the above two types of video are the ones I should ABSOLUTELY NOT BE MAKING, and yet, despite the fact they are very mundane I still have a soft spot for them. Q1 Week 4 & 5 shown below.

Those ones aside, the last two videos have been about getting the pen plotter to make handwritten notes for me, on the grounds that at some distant point I’m going to want to do something like this for a project that again explores the intersection between real/unreal, and automated insincerity wrapped up in the disguise of sincerity. OR SOMETHING, look, it’s still early!!

THE WRAP UP

Normally I’d put calls to action here on all the places you can follow me, but I think we’ve both been through enough already. Assuming I can make this software work, I’ll see you in the next one.

Lots of Love,
Dan
xoxo