Process: Inspiration

Much of my initial framework to rediscover a value for loss came from reading How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. Subtitled 'Resisting the Attention Economy,'  the book explores how our media and work landscapes ask so much more from us than we appreciate, and how so much of our life, even down time, has been whipped up just to boost productivity. Seeing that kind of culture in a new framework from Odell's exploration got me thinking about what else we might be missing out on. Discovering how better to fit loss into our lives is a reflection of how to reclaim our time and agency as personally valuable in Odell's work. Our loss, our grief, belongs to us, and in a world increasingly seeking to commodify our experiences and sell humanity back to us at a price, it too is something that our systems either aim to squeeze out, or capitalize on. 



Joanne McNeil's Lurking opened up my consideration of virtual space. Similarly to Odell's exploration of how our time and attention have been monopolized, McNeil's exploration of how virtual spaces and the evolution of the early web changed how people interacted—or even could interact with each other—gave me a staging location for where to situate my work. These are considerations I've had interest in for a while, but with the dual pursuits of Odell and McNeil in mind, I could see where they met. We're being capitalized on in opposition to how we function as people, and as our virtual spaces are made with these motivations in mind, even the terrain we enter is geared towards commodifying our experience. Popular websites live and die by their profit model, so the tension between attention and platform are a key part of our world.  



As I considered novel ways to explore these budding ideas, landmark design thinking compendium Speculative Everything by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby offered me numerous escape moments to break open my mind and think about what could be. I feel like I've always landed in really weird places with how to approach a work and execute on ideas, and this book validated that experience. Taking a look into their experimentation and ways of thinking from time to time reset my ability to think when my creative brain was locked up with process execution.  



While getting into what exactly I was concerned with, and how exactly to communicate it, in the beginning it felt at times like I was completely out to lunch. As I explored and talked with more people about what my work concerned, it started to become clear, and I started to noticed threads from what I was exploring and what others were saying. A number of times someone I'd talked with would send me a link to something that seemed to be scratching the same itch I was getting at. One of those itch scratchers was Adam Curtis's documentary HyperNormalisation. I've asked a number of people who might have recommended it and I still can't find where it came to me from, it may have been from a reading, but watching it I felt like I wasn't alone in concern for how the world was fraying as it becomes overwhelmed by new and hard to parse context.  



Another one of those works sent to me was Slavoj Žižek's collection of essays Welcome to the Desert of the Real. A friend recommended it off of a conversation we had, and we're both still not sure if it was just because of the interesting Baudrillard quote, its use in The Matrix, or actually Žižek's book, but I think that confluence of confused referents works pretty well. Even though Žižek's book is a collection of essays regarding the world after the September 11 World Trade Center attacks, the material was surprisingly resonant with what I was concerned with. It gave me even more faith that strange sense of losing our power over grief, or having a more twisted relationship with loss and grief, was an aspect of our age. All of these works, and many more articles, podcasts, and conversations with others came together to make me feel like I wasn't off base, that this work really is situated in this moment and worth consideration.