Austin Kleon - One page diary
Hey y’all, One of the big questions of my book Show Your Work! is: How can you take bits and pieces of your process and serve them up to your audience in a way that’s interesting and/or useful? Your process is always evolving, as are methods of sharing it, so it can be a challenge to get them to line up just right. Worse yet, the social media platforms keep changing their algorithms, which usually amounts to a tiny fraction of the people who are following you actually seeing your posts. This weekend I experimented with a bunch of Instagram Reels. I despise the idea of creating “content” (blech!) for the algorithm, but I’m interested in the algorithm as a kind of creative constraint. (Note: I’m embedding video from TikTok because, well, Instagram are dopes about letting you embed stuff. To watch a video, click on the image.) How do you make short form video content that the algorithm rewards without too much effort or without changing your process too much? Honestly, you probably don’t. When we know we’re being watched, it changes the way we operate. For me, there’s a little compromise: shoot time-lapse video while I’m working and try to forget the camera is running. After the footage is shot, add some music, and annotate it with captions explaining what I’m doing. (I find it impossible to talk about making art while I’m making art. It was a revelation to me when I learned that Bob Ross always had a finished painting offscreen that he copied while he was filming.) These are videos of an exercise I call “One Page Diary.” It’s a mix of Lynda Barry’s brush diaries (see: Syllabus and her other books) and Nicholson Baker’s idea of “cheerful retrospection”:
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Older messages
Embrace bewilderment
Friday, June 10, 2022
10 things worth sharing: Rumi, bicycles, brains, an Instagram tip, the paintings of Rego, and more...
The simplest cut
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
An easy form of collage: 1 + 1 = 3
Let me eat and not be eaten
Saturday, June 4, 2022
10 things worth sharing: bicycles and creativity, Kate Bush, a message for graduates, and more...
A ticket to the freak show
Friday, May 27, 2022
10 things worth sharing: a dozen books worth reading, two great Georges, ear candy, advice from a poet, and more...
The map is not the territory
Friday, May 20, 2022
10 things worth sharing: more maps, drawing without visualizing, books I'm reading, ear and eye candy, and more...
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