Starmirror, Charli XCX, and What We Are Really Creating

Sunday Edition #27: A shorter edition.

Welcome to the Sunday Edition where I share interesting articles and links alongside what I’ve been up to!

Charli XCX on Being a Popstar

I enjoyed seeing this small glimpse from Charli XCX into what it’s like being a popstar.

It’s a unique life, but I was most fascinated by what the actual lived experience must be like. This passage was really interesting.

You will also end up spending a lot of time inhabiting strange and soulless liminal spaces. Whether its the holding area of the event you’re about to enter, the airport lounge, the visa office, the claustrophobic tour bus, the greenroom with no windows, the underneath of a stage or the set build of a photoshoot or music video you’re on, you are often caught in the in-between. You’re in transit, you’re going somewhere but the journey itself takes up the majority of the experience. When Rachel Sennott came to shoot her scene in our upcoming film The Moment she was overnighted in a van straight from the front row of the Balenciaga show in Paris to the back doors of a warehouse in London’s Docklands. She was bundled up with blankets and pillows and shipped directly to us like a package. The journey took all night but she was only on set for around an hour.

In small ways, non-celebs might be able to extrapolate to what things like mass adoration might feel like, but we can’t imagine what spaces look like that are rarely shown or seen. Backstage is less familiar. I would love to read more of what this part of the experience is like. The liminal part of an extraordinary life.

She also has an interesting sentence at the start:

Unfortunately this probably means I’d describe myself more as a ‘creative’ (gross) or plain and simply put: an artist.

This is reminiscent of Yancey Strickler’s recent attempt to 2x2 the “artist” vs the “creator”.

His distinction delineates a creator as someone who also focuses their work on the market.

In recent decades a similar but distinct creative role has emerged: the creator. People who make a living from subscriptions, crowdfunding, selling merch, and other forms of direct exchange unlocked by the web.

Like artists, creators have a lot of freedom in what they do. They’re even more free in some ways, as they aren’t confined to the canon of what they’re “supposed to do.” All tools of the market are at their disposal: from products to livestreams to memecoins to ghost kitchens to limited edition drops. Unlike artists, they don’t have to navigate the academy system or art world politics to do it.

I’m not entirely a fan of this distinction, because there are artists that explicitly use the market as a medium (I once wrote a small bit on this). But, it *is* niche, sure. Charli uses “creative”, but to which Yancey sees “creative” as a Commercial Artist, which isn’t also what Charli thinks it is.

Which brings me to this interview with Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon talking to Peter Bauman about Starmirror, a space where the public can come and sing with an agent and contribute their voice to a collective model.

Compared to the feeling of tech companies leeching data off of us, it’s a far more empowering mode of engagement when generative models are treated as consensual collective archives. And them doing it in a way that resembles one of the more primal forms of communication, collective singing, feels divine.

Our interpretation would posit AI models as cultural technologies that actually work quite similarly to how culture works, which is far less precise. It’s far more recombinative and generative in that way.

It’s a great project. But, to the point, they touch upon the debate around “creator” later in the interview:

This is a tension right now. There are a lot of contemporaries of ours that also struggle with if you have an idea for something, it can be like, “Is this an art project or is this a company?” You have to figure out where it fits and is best suited and then the longevity of it.

…and more specifically:

I’ve actually come to embrace this term “creator,” which I pushed back against for a really long time because it had the stink of not being artistically serious or something. “Creator” presents art and science and engineering all on a level playing field.

What we’re seeing is maybe the wind-down of that Liberal Enlightenment distinction between art, science and engineering towards something a bit more eternal that is really a matter of people creating things. The best artists are engineers, the best engineers are artists, et cetera.

The term “creator” probably wasn’t intended this way but I’m starting to embrace it for that reason. I think in one hundred years, we’ll look back and be like, “Wow, that was a really big shift.” Communication totally shifted around the time of the ubiquitous internet and will mutate into something very, very different from twentieth-century conceptions of art and science. These clean, industrial divisions I just don’t think will continue to persist.

It’s getting harder because the lines are getting blurrier, but I’m also not currently convinced that one term should be an answer. I’m saying that while also admitting that I don’t know what the answer is. But, what I do know is, that in today’s world, for good and bad, the conversation about ‘the thing’ is nearly as important as ‘the thing’. It’s been context turtles all the way down for quite a while now and the conversation itself being a conversation is a part of that. The fact that there is this conversation about what an artist, creator, or creative is, feels in itself a unique act of creation to pay attention to. Why are we exactly struggling to pen down or redefine these terms right now? When this usually happens (like genres being redefined), it’s because there’s generative change afoot. What exactly does it mean to create, to make art, or to invent today? So, maybe we eventually land on better terms and a better collective understanding of what we’re doing here, but for now, I think, continuing to kick up the dust is the point.

What I’m Up To

Honestly, I’ve been offline and touching grass for the entire week. My iPad was open for a record of 1hr a day, and most of that was spent watching chateau restoration videos. 😅

So, here’s a song that I had on repeat again this week. A great encapsulation of Cape Town in the summer.

🎶 Listening - Goldfish - Moonwalk Away

Enjoy! And I’ll see you all next week. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset.

Simon