from the DeepMind of Josh Plough

Bring me back to the Collective DeepMind

20.

Intent is the dipstick of designed intervention, we can measure how dirty it actually gets. The further away from from action and the closer to the exhibition space, the cleaner and more aseptic it is.

Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects…..The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance.

Envy is an emotion that isn’t much discussed in the creative industries. But it’s an ever-present one whether we care to admit it or not. It is a state of being that is shared by all while also dividing, invisibly. I would argue that our current structures of platform reliance and funding are primed to intensify this emotion.

When we have a system that conflates personality and projects and academies that actively force students to interrogate their identities, cementing them into their practices. Then it’s little wonder that the collective mental health degrades when it’s stuck between affirmation via glamour, image via envy, solidarity via friendship and income via precarious funding bodies.