Curate to Create

My friend Gavin is a gifted creator. I first met him (and interviewed him on the P&P Podcast) when he was a creative director at R/GA. He’s since taken his talents to Spotify, and I’ve admired what he’s done there.

When he reached out saying he was ready to share some fresh insights, I jumped at the opportunity to extend the platform. His article below reminded me of what legendary restauranteur Danny Meyer said about innovation: “ABCD so you can ABCD: Always be collecting dots to always be connecting dots.” (see: “Make Connections”)

The collection- and connection-instinct is at the heart of a curator. It’s the beating heart of The Inspiration Discipline.

Over to Gavin 🎙️

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The Future of Creation is Curation

Here’s the Headline: Everyone is focused on content creators, but the future may belong to content curators.

Here's why it matters:

• We’re standing at the end of the social media age, an era which incentivized mass creation and mass sharing that ultimately generated an un-consumable amount of content for audiences. 

• Modern technology is allowing audiences to have more control over what they choose to consume, but with choice comes anxiety.

• Creators add to this anxiety: Creators are focused on making new creations that take an investment from audiences. Though the investment may end up being worthwhile, audiences invariably ask, “Should I invest my time in this creator, this piece of content, this idea or this story?” 

• Curators on the other hand, provide a solution: Curators have done the work of identifying worthwhile creations and are creating connections between them in a way that makes them relevant to audiences. 

• What we need is a new kind of curator-creator that can package and present content in a way that audiences of the future can actually consume and support with their dollars.

The problem is a tale as old as time:

“What has been will be again,

    what has been done will be done again;

    there is nothing new under the sun.”

A saying that is so commonplace in our modern lexicon that most don’t know its ancient origins from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. This reminder that nothing is really new rings so true as we’ve reached what feels like a saturation point as we are now squarely at the end of the social media age before we embark on whatever this new internet is going to be. According to market intelligence company IDC, the ‘Global Datasphere’ in 2018 reached 18 zettabytes (or 18 trillion gigabytes). At the rate our society creates content, it's predicted that the world’s data will grow to 175 zettabytes in 2025. Curious how much data that is? If you were to store 175 zettabytes on Blu Ray discs, your stack of Blu Ray discs would be long enough to circle Earth 222 times. These infinite photos, videos, Instagram Reels, blog articles, microsites, digital art pieces, short films, feature length films, podcasts– add up to more content being made than today’s viewers can conceivably even consume, especially when relying on algorithms to serve content to audiences. For creators, this means the countless hours of inspiration, conceptual thinking, collaborating, production, and sharing is more often than not, going to waste. Author and artist Austin Kleon sums it up perfectly in Steal Like An Artist when he states “If we're free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.”

Control and Fatigue:

In the future, the audience will be in control, not relying on an algorithm to serve them content. At first glance, this should be good for creators. “Finally,” they’ll say. “The ability to go straight to an audience without a pesky gatekeeping algorithm.” But just like channel surfing through thousands of channels in the early days of satellite TV, infinite choice causes anxiety and fatigue. Viewers are going to need filters that can tell them what ideas, creators, and stories are worth their time investment. This is the opportunity for curators: not only to aggregate the best content, but drawing creative and unexpected connections between what’s already been made and packaging them together to present to new audiences in new engaging and relevant experiences.

Take a page from these curator-creators: 

Ephraim Johnson aka 5thletta

Ephraim is a storyteller and curative strategist that uses Are.na and Instagram to curate unique content experiences for his brands Internal Knowledge and Player 99.

Ephraim: “Curating has a way of being able to connect things to what people may already know or be familiar with better than a new tangible object can at times. I always believe that through curation, there is a way to translate a new meaning or idea even though it may not look or feel new to everyone. I’ve always seen curation as a means to help speak a language that words or objects can’t sometimes. 

I use Are.na a lot to help form better understanding and gather information around concepts or ideas I want to bring to life. I use Instagram as a platform to make those ideas palatable to the masses and pop culture through Internal Knowledge, Player 99, and Thug Tears.

I do my best to tell stories that help people understand lived experiences and perspectives. I think that’s a gift I have, and something that will help us get back to intentionally interacting and understanding one another in this ever changing world. 

[For people looking to get started curating] I would say research and more research helps. Once you refine how and what you research it’s about keeping a log or well of things you like to build a perspective of your own. I also recommend being open and optimistic to the idea of refining your curiosity. A lot of things are more connected than we know and live in harmony through juxtapositions. I think it’s up to us to figure out what those things are and how they can connect us all.” 

Bosco on Preserving Nostalgia

Bosco is a multidisciplinary artist and musician behind the creative agency Slug Global, and now a new venture, Palette.xyz.

Multidisciplinary artist Bosco is creating new experiences based on the premise of preserving nostalgia. We spoke with her on our Tools for Time Traveling podcast about how her new creative endeavor Palette.xyz is bringing the past forward by crafting something new through what’s already been created. When talking about her approach to curating new experiences, Bosco said “[I’m] receiving this information as a gift and figuring out the best way to extract it, to share, to make it a more tangible language. I think people are just so fixated on just living in the past instead of bringing the past forward and really reimagining. The stuff that we are making is just a derivative of the past, and it’s your approach on how you want to do it different.” Now, because of this retro-futuristic perspective, we've seen incredible in-person events that explore the importance of innovation, craftsmanship, and functionality of the technology that shapes our culture. The Palette.xyz experience studio and innovation lab is even generating commerce from the curation, repackaging, and reselling of old items, and creation of new items using traditional methods like hand-building ceramics. What we see from Bosco is that the future might not be all about people who are able to create net-new things, but people who are able to curate new things and experiences using creations from the past.

How can we become curators? 

Be a cultivator

This kind of creativity starts with cultivation. A great example of this would be creative director and founder of Eyecandy Jacobi Mehringer. In our podcast episode with him about the future of filmmaking, he explained how his personal library of references that he’s saved over years of researching and being a fan of great filmmakers has turned into a database for creators to learn new visual techniques that receives “1,800 DMs a day of just content creators and young creatives [looking to be featured]”.

Be the connector of dots

Find unexpected connections between ideas that no one else can see besides you and then use your creativity to draw a connection that didn’t exist before. It can be a video essay, a moodboard, an Instagram page, a photobook, or an in-person experience.

Sensemake for your audience

Author David Gurteen defines sensemaking as “the process by which we make sense of the world, especially complex situations for which there are usually no simple, apparent explanations.” So what can you create to help make sense of a complex problem or ambiguous situation for your audience? Basically, present familiar and interesting things that have already been made in a way that’s totally new. Totally you. 

If none of this has convinced you, think of the millions upon millions of unviewed creations as trash floating in the ocean– causing burdens on social media, servers, websites, and in the minds of struggling creators. Preserve your creative energy and our content-driven landscape by taking up less space and rather building upon what’s already been made. 
Let’s not keep reinventing the wheel. It’s going to become increasingly difficult to create anything original as time goes on. Instead, let's find all the most creative and provocative ways to keep the wheel turning.

Related: Make Connections
Related: The Inspiration Discipline
Related: Paint & Pipette Presents: Gavin Guidry