Discovery is Most of the Fun for Me, When it Comes to Art… and Life in General. (Part I)

When it comes to consuming art, I have sort of an obsession with discovery. I don’t like having my “hand held” or being told the meanings of things, or what to look/listen for — especially before I dive in for the first time, as it strips the art of discovery away from me. This is true for television, film and video games, but especially music.

I’m so obsessed with discovery in fact, that I don’t even read user manuals/guides for new software, or hardware. I click around, press buttons, turn knobs… basically, I explore and play around with things until I have some level of understanding of what those things do. Not the fastest method of learning, of course, but it’s the way I learn best and how I learn to truly appreciate the intricacies of… stuff.

According to my mother and her heavily documented baby books of me, I was pretty much born this way. Before I could reliably walk, or talk, I was taking things apart and putting them back together. Not always correctly, but it was and still is a fascination of mine. To deconstruct. To reconstruct. To learn. To appreciate. But most of all, to understand on some level. This has been a driving factor in me doing most things in my life. My curiosity, mixed with my desire to create — whether visual, physical, or audible — has been my main driver.

Over my lifetime, I’ve been a freehand illustrator, graphic and web designer, coder/developer, dabbled in woodworking, played around with electrical engineering, almost decided to go to school for architecture, wrote, produced, performed, mixed and mastered music, and I’m sure a good number of other things that I’m forgetting. With all of that, the main thing that pushed me forward, was my curiosity and desire to explore, learn, break rules (and things), and develop my own path to how things can be done in a way that makes sense for others — not just myself.

And I say all of this to say what, exactly?

I guess a part of the reason I’m writing this, is due to some things I’ve been perplexed by since coming back to making music. It’s something that I started noticing when I was a graphic/web designer and developer and also in discussing music, television and film with others — A lot of people seem to be uninterested in exploration and discovery. At least when it comes to the arts. I find that especially fascinating, considering that as a society, we’ve been pretty much built on exploration, discovery and conquest.

It seems that now that we’re overexposed to information and having it constantly fed to us in various forms (via social media, predominantly), that we prefer to either have everything spelled out, or have something else — such as A.I. — do all of the heavy lifting for us (something, something, obsession with servants, something, something: another conversation). If not that, then we have expectations, based on “standards” set by others, rather than what actually resonates with us personally in a meaningful way. We no longer seem to be able to consume things free from judgment, or expectations of what we want them to be and in a lot of cases, if it’s not simply “a vibe,” it’s making us think, which is somehow now a bad thing.

Or perhaps that’s always been the case and I was just so engrossed in exploration, discovery, and taking in the moment(s), that I failed to notice.

To be continued…