Year End: On worldbuilding
The internet is an amazing space when it reminds us how vast and diverse the world is. Early dot-com websites reflected this notion of an “expanding space” in their company names, using words like “earth,” “globe,” “world,” “space,” or “system” to describe their growing networks. Our website contains the word “world” 950 times. In comparison, our galaxy contains 100+ billion planets and scientists believe that around 40 billion of these are earth like.
The word “world” is mentioned 956 out of 755802 total words in the TCI-verse.
On the eve of a new year, it may be important to check some numbers in order to reflect on what binds us together in this world. As musician Madalyn Merkey puts it, “I keep it very theoretical, like I just need to get my numbers right before I indulge in the environment that I’m creating”.
It’s a fact that programs love to count. Just like counting the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on a beach, let’s iterate through our microcosm, one word at a time. We could count how many times green [40] or blue [62] is mentioned across our website. Below is a tally of how many instances a particular worldbuilding word is mentioned throughout our 314 interviews. We will update this list on occasion with a current count and will leave a timestamp at the bottom for reference.
galaxy [1]
universe [34]
world [950]
earth [44]
globe [3]
water [129]
plant [62]
animal [69]
human [210]
system [168]
love [1074]
hate [570]
calm [19]
star [1531]
home [234]
community [226]
blue [62]
green [40]
play [1238]
friend [569]
work [4585]
life [1082]
death [101]
day [1266]
month [238]
year [1422]
Last updated: December 26, 2017
Income inequality in the art world is exactly like the income inequality of the country. The art world is in the world. It can’t be better and it can’t be worse than the world. It’s in the actual world. It reflects it perfectly. It seems more extreme because it’s smaller and we actually know some of the people, but it’s really not dissimilar to the world at large.
I’m pretty set on promoting life-long education as the most important thing. Getting people to be curious, in this time when you can access almost every piece of information in the world, is the best possible thing to do to try to help all humans.
It is difficult when you’re doing everything on your own and you put something out into the world and it’s sort of like, ‘Is anybody hearing me?’
My idea is to get the realtime earthquake data of the world, the whole world, and transform the data to MIDI signals, to play the piano. So the piano, damaged by the tsunami, is now a device to express the vibrations of our planet.
Babe the pig knew he could communicate with sheep and he knew he could be a good herd pig but the world was like, ‘No, pigs don’t herd sheep.’
If you’re putting things into the world, you have a responsibility to think about who they affect. You’ll never fully know the depth and magnitude of whatever you’re making, and the effect it will have on the people who have to interact with it or will see it, but you have a responsibility to do the best you can.
I most enjoy building a small fictional world that is hyper-focused on small details, in which you can access everything important through one interaction, one conversation, one small interpersonal thing that’s gone wrong. It’s usually something very, very subtle. Just a minute of dialogue, a facial expression. Tiny moments of rupture.
I realized that the society is perhaps composed of a group of people who built their own worlds because they couldn’t blend in with the others.
I thought that if I could have some sort of stable center or a truth, then things can branch out from there, and I can create my own world or, perhaps, my own religion. In a way that’s what all artists do. I’m just being completely honest about it.
As opposed to how it’s used in the business world, the spreadsheet is actually a super flexible tool. It’s like an infinite notepad where you can link cells to subsequent sheets and zoom in and out infinitely.
I feel like so much of what’s happening right now for me personally and practically in relation to my work—and everything in the world—is about visibility.
I definitely know a lot of people on Instagram that I’ve never met, that live all over the world. A big part of my community on Instagram are also my ‘offline’ friends.
Independence is another difficult term because we’re in a moment where the entire world around us is so mediated by corporate platforms that nearly every decision we make is one about whether or not to engage with a platform that is at odds with our values.
The world is animated now in a new way through technology: everything is responsive and interactive and algorithmically sorted into types or “species.” You could say the technology boom has renewed a sense of magical properties in the world that harks back to the folkloric, like the possibility of a talking tree or an animal guide.
I work with the paper like it’s cloth. You can say that I’m sort of obsessed with it. I collect different kinds of paper from all over the world to work with. It is the perfect material for me.
Maybe it’s not art, maybe it’s about what’s going on in the world but it’s so important to have a conversation about the things that are going on around you. It’s therapeutic. There’s so much crazy shit going on in the world, it’s kind of relaxing sometimes to look at each other’s art and not think about everything else for a while.
In a grander world perspective, existential pain of an artist is not that big of a deal, but when you’re in it that shit hurts.
It’s a pretty white world, you know? Understanding that history is really so critical.
I have a new mentality, which is that once you put something out in the world it doesn’t belong to you anymore.
I watch a lot of Nintendo 64 games or SNES games, but I quite like ambient games like Shenmue, like a Dreamcast, open world games…
You could be the greatest technician in the world, a computer genius, but at the end of day these things are just tools. It’s just like learning how to use pastels or oil paints. You still need to be an artist controlling those tools.
For anyone in the classical music world, being able to expose other people to these great works is always something you hope to do.
Feeling is hard to find in the publishing world, especially a publishing world that mimics typical American power structures. I mean, even the page is white.
I try and occupy the words that best represent what I think needs to be done in the world—or what I think I should be doing in the world—so composer and choreographer feel the most accurate.
Oh yes. That’s a piece about a sex encounter between a French Poodle and a Mexican Hairless dog. In this piece I dealt with race issues through dogs. It just really amazes me how in the dog world we still talk in terms of “pure breeds” in a hierarchical way. When we describe humans we would never speak in those terms, unless we are white supremacists or something like that, because it is not politically correct.
Art is good; self-expression is great. What it isn’t is a substitute for political action to transform the world and challenge power.
I love the world of books and the experience of reading and the experience of writing and how private both those experiences are.
The world as it is now… I don’t know… I feel like the world has always been the same: disappointment in human beings, an overflow of stupidity, etc. We see it more because of social media and the constant bombardment of banal information reflects how people are stupid and ignorant. It’s precisely because of this that I believe publishing books is so important.
I can’t speak for Temra but for me, I find myself very much drawn to collaboration. I don’t know what it is. It’s really special. I collaborate a lot. I’m always trying to find ways to work in a social way. I think it feels more real for me, or more applicable to the world when it’s social. Maybe there are more lines of sight in play.
I don’t know, curating is a weird sphere. If the art world is already a strange, rare sphere, I feel like curating is even moreso. It’s this weird sphere of power within the sphere of power that already is the art world. It’s hard to penetrate. Definitely, I wouldn’t want to be a superstar curator.
I think all it takes is a little elbow grease and practice and trying to make your poems sound like a conversation, because I think that’s what poems are at the end of the day. They’re trying to speak something. If we think about it as a script, think about yourselves as a character, think about it as something that you are trying to tell a friend, the world, a room, whatever it may be—then you can have a better read.
So you have something that you’re not only trying to say for yourself because you need to say it, but also that you’re saying to the world, even if the world in your schema is this small community… even if your audience is just a basement.
My favorite screening of Oversimplification was in a prison. It was an audience of mostly black men. Seeing them watching the film and trying to process the function of it and the vulnerability involved in that scenario was powerful and interesting. They screened it in sections and then talked about it in groups. It was this profound lesson for me and my understanding of how in making something, my unawareness or willful turning away from engineering it for a specific thing creates a focused characterization and world-making that hints at operating at a very specific frequency for very specific people. I think that having, no pun intended, a literally captive audience of black men who had to process letter writing with partners who they were estranged from in these broken emotional spaces was relatable for that movie in a way I could never have anticipated.
It just shows that if something rings hollow or flat or feels like not of the world that you’ve created, it rings so clear when it comes out of somebody else’s mouth.
Then after the conversation is over, you can check your email and the world will still go on. On tour I don’t have to always be thinking about the show, I can just go for a walk and look at the sights, be in that moment.
So much of our world is not physical these days, which is amazing. The fact that we’re so much more connected and information is so much more available. It’s easy to bitch about the fact that we’re stuck in front of these screens, but it’s also, not to forget, a miracle that information just flies around the world so fast.
Everything else is subject to the whims of the world.
I don’t want to make art. I don’t want to take over the world. I just want to become an adult and do a good job.
I just decided that I wanted to do things on my own terms and hopefully the rest of the world will eventually sync up.
The idea of discovery is really what it’s all about. The idea of having that moment of discovery while making music, while being really deep in it, it’s honestly like honey. It’s just one of the sweetest feelings in the world. It’s otherworldly.
In a world where people are obsessed with popularity and making money and everything being about taking that next step onto something bigger, the idea of walking away is hard.
Absolutely. Though I find that the different worlds I occupy didn’t ever really connect. Now with the internet, they do connect.
I know I’m supposed to care about timelessness, but I don’t. Honestly, the world might not be here tomorrow, so I’m just like, “Let me say whatever I need to say in the language that I need to say it and not sit here scratching my head thinking about how I can best describe a tree that will cross generations.”
