I am back home after a week away with friends in Melbourne where we visited art galleries, ate amazing food and caught some movies at the international film festival. All-in-all a very generative experience. Consuming all this great art content, has been in the context of the production of a short-film I am a part of, thinking about what type of technology career I wish to pivot to.

After getting into reading and academia in the past year, I saw art in a different light. I started thinking about it like an academic paper. Thinking about it in context with a discourse of other art. What drives me in an intellectual sense is the creation or discovery of something new. What drew me to academia is that it is essentially the most mechanically explicit of such a pursuit. That the systems and institutions are supposedly built for that exact purpose. I'm drawn to environments and people that inspire that.

At the galleries I visited, I was looking at art within a canon of aesthetic discourse. As objects as they related to other objects and the world. What those relations said between them and between others. How different artists saw and felt the world they inhabited. The stories that were important to them. The messages they needed to project.

In academia (or posting) you have the opportunity to make yourself a part of a very interesting conversation. The opportunity to add something new to the discourse. In art, you do the same, in an aesthetic sense.

I look at all the art I've created (if you can call it art). I now see all of it as putting myself into an aesthetic conversation. Of course, all my work is not anything new. However the fact that this conversation or aesthetic discourse is now explicit in my mind, the prospect of creating something new in relation to it is triggering the same feeling of discoveries in academia or technology.

And even if I never end up creating anything truly original, I have the privilege of engaging in this aesthetic conversation that began as soon as humans could communicate. That when I leave this world, I leave behind how I saw it. I leave behind how it felt to me. I leave behind the stories that were important to me.

I used to hate galleries. In 2017 I visited the the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. As an unsophisticated proletarian, I considered all of it to be pretentious bs. I went with two friends, Chris a hardcore musician and Dave a filmmaker. Dave felt the need to absorb the works sincerely alone. While Chris and I walked around laughing at the hallway of vaginas. I saw 'high' art and art institutions to be a space in which rich people could validate their class position without talking about their class position. And resented them for it. While I still hold that position, i now see importance of the works themselves. And the privilege to be able to view them.

At the National Gallery of Victoria, I saw a Mesopotamian stone statue. It must of been 500 BC. I stood face to face with it. Inches away. Staring straight into its eyes. Its features had been worn down. Missing bits of its nose and ears.

In it i saw the 2500 years that eroded it. I felt the civilisations that rose and fell around it. I saw a primitive primal humanity of eons past, crossing time and space to speak directly to my soul. I saw my own small narrative arc as an individual, in the context of billions that came and went, while this statue remains standing. That in my insignificance, I felt salvation and beauty. The creator of this statue may or may not intended it to be their god. But looking at it- I saw mine.

I was grateful for whoever created it millenia ago.

On the internet, everything is now stone. You create with the attention economies of people present and future. An audience with the humanity that is yet to come. What will they know of how you saw the world around you? How it felt to you? The stories you needed to tell? The problems that needed to be solved?

Whether creating art, writing a paper, or building an application. You are able to engage in an aesthetic and material discourse that spans the existence of humanity. Despite it's originality, its success, or its failure. You have the privilege to join in. To join the creator of the statue, or the creator of the telephone, or the writer of the manifesto. To join their successes. To join their failures.

Creation, as such, doesn't need to be a narcissistic pursuit in canonising your identity. It can be a much more transcendental pursuit. It can be about contributing to a conversation that is larger than yourself. Contributing to something that will span millenia. As sentient-beings we have this privilege. That we can choose to do something with the thoughts and feelings that charactrise our human condition. We can choose to create.