EVERYTHING ELSE IS INFRASTRUCTURE

I think I’ve finally admitted something to myself that I’ve probably known for a very long time.

Art is the most important thing to me.

Not design.
Not business.
Not technology.
Not productivity.
Not even a particular medium.

Art.

Everything else is here to enable it.

For years, I approached life almost in reverse.

I became useful.

I learned how to design things, build websites, solve technical problems, create brands, photograph people, develop systems, make things work. Being capable became its own strange career path. There was always another problem I could solve for somebody.

And somewhere underneath all that usefulness was the person who wanted to make records, films, photographs, stories, strange objects, performances and worlds.

He never really disappeared.

He just kept getting scheduled for later.

Later is an interesting place.

A tremendous amount of human potential lives there.

I’ll make the record later.
I’ll write the film later.
I’ll act again later.
I’ll make the book later.
I’ll take my own work seriously when there is enough money, enough time, enough confidence, enough certainty.

Eventually you notice that later isn’t really a date.

It is a storage facility.

And I have stored enough things there.

So I am changing the hierarchy.

Money matters because it buys freedom, tools, time and experience.

Technology matters because it lets me build things that would otherwise require institutions.

Business matters because independence requires resources.

Design matters because ideas need form.

Systems matter because creativity disappears surprisingly quickly when surrounded by chaos.

But none of these are the centre.

They are infrastructure.

The centre is making things.

Things that didn’t exist before.

Things that sound like something I couldn’t explain in ordinary conversation.

Things that capture what the world looked like to me for one hundredth of a second.

Things that make somebody laugh and then, annoyingly, think about the joke three days later.

Things that fail.

Things that embarrass me.

Things that become better things.

Things that make me wonder, years later, how the hell I made them.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life becoming increasingly qualified to create while creating less.

I would rather leave evidence.

Songs.
Photographs.
Films.
Words.
Objects.
Experiments.
Bad drafts.
Great mistakes.
Finished work.

Evidence that I was here and paying attention.

There is another change inside this.

I used to think every creative interest needed to justify itself as a separate career.

Music had to become a music career.
Photography needed a photography career.
Acting needed an acting career.
Technology needed a technology career.
Writing needed a writing career.

That creates an exhausting little parliament inside your head.

I’m less interested in separating them now.

They are simply different instruments.

Sometimes the idea needs a camera.

Sometimes it needs a microphone.

Sometimes it needs code.

Sometimes it needs typography.

Sometimes it needs me standing in front of people making an idiot of myself.

The medium can negotiate later.

The idea comes first.

And perhaps that is what this website will become.

Not a portfolio in the traditional sense.

More like a record of an ongoing experiment:

What happens when I stop treating the artist as the thing I will eventually become and start arranging my life around the fact that I already am one?

I don’t know exactly where that leads.

Good.

Knowing everything beforehand would ruin half the reason to go.

For now, the assignment is much simpler.

Make things.
Finish more of them.
Show them.
Document the process.
Follow curiosity.
Build enough infrastructure that the work has somewhere to live.
And keep going.

Everything else can report to that.

DAVIEY
Make something of being alive.