Hi reader!
Thanks for stopping by.
Before I dive straight in to the blogs, I thought it might be helpful to establish a few principles guiding my approach here.
My main goal with this blog is simple enough: to share things I think are cool or interesting.
It might be music, a photographer, a piece of writing, personal observations, films, scientific articles, YouTube videos - anything really, as long as it feels surprising, moving, confusing, or that it is generally contributing something new to my understanding and appreciation of the world.
I’m mostly inspired to make this because, over the past years, I’ve become more and more convinced that we’ve lost sight of the value of an individual’s curatorial taste. Or at least if I’m just speaking for myself, I have relied increasingly on algorithms to feed me content in my past decade on the internet. I think that this is also true for many others.
More and more of our information, culture, and aesthetics are served up to us via these neural networks that encourage a passive approach to taste-making. Rather than seeking out and finding content, it gets served to us on a platter. Most of us consumers, and in some cases the algorithm’s creators, don’t fully understand how or why algorithms make the decisions they do.
I don’t want to say its all bad. These recommendation algorithms have allowed creativity to flourish and connected consumers to new art at an incredible scale. I know I’ve certainly found interesting photographers and musicians via algorithmic recommendations. But in their scale and personalization, they are lacking something. Algorithms can’t tell us why they are recommending us a given piece of media. They can’t express what a song means to them or why they find a particular photo to be worth looking at. They aren’t built for that.
So I guess that’s my hope for this little blog here, to help fill the gap I feel algorithms have left. To bring some personality back to a recommendation. And to help me better understand my own taste and interests through the process of writing about them. I want to elevate things that I think are fun or cool the same way I did as a college radio DJ sitting in our old studio on the top floor of the student center, or the way I still do when I talk to friends about movies, music, and ideas I want to share.
This blog is meant to be a shared journey in exploration.
As shared as a blog can be at least.
What I really mean by this is that I have no cultural or academic expertise. I’m learning through writing here. I feel like most curators online have a specific niche they have dedicated themselves to and they speak to their audience from a perspective of expertise. That’s not really what this is.
At the time of writing, I am 27 and very much in the continual process of developing my tastes and exploring my interests. This blog serves as a place for me to hone those intuitions through the process of writing. I figured I might as well share the journey with the hope maybe I can help someone else gain something along the way.
Beyond those main pillars, I’m not quite certain exactly what shape this blog will take. I assume some posts will be pretty succinct, with a couple pieces of media that I want to share and some thoughts about what makes them interesting to me. Others might be longer and center more around an idea I want to explore.
I have a background in neuroscience as well as journalism and these will surely present themselves in some form. I’m an American living in Copenhagen, so travel, culture, languages, and the like will find their way on here. I’m certain I will occasionally get overly academic because I can’t help myself, but I’m trying my best to keep things casual enough.
I hope you enjoy reading and find something worthwhile from this work in progress.
Thank you,
Christian