It’s Time to Breakup With the Grid – Saving Creative Incubation with SOOT
Within the creative industry, it sometimes feels like we’re bled dry when it comes to our digital escapades. Ideas once bursting with life are shepherded into rotting folders, pages, and feeds. Between platforms like Are.na, Tumblr, and Instagram, references that once miraculously got our attention get sucked in black holes, buried by images of the same fate. The process is soul sucking, awkward, and transient. But in an increasingly cluttered digiverse, we can’t afford to keep letting these moments of inspiration die out. Rather, to produce our best work, we must preserve the integrity of research as the guts of the creative process. Although, in a climate where Pinterest became a shopping platform overnight and algorithms suffocate us with our own taste, it’s hard to imagine where to go from here. Right now, digital feels expansive in all the wrong ways — relentless and disposable all at once. Is tech antithetical to the sanctity of creativity?
When I first spoke to Jake Harper, Co-Founder of SOOT, the interface known as ‘a new species of filesystem,’ I quickly got the sense that he wasn’t intimidated by this type of question. Harper’s background is a rich tapestry of seemingly mismatched, yet co-existing worlds. From his training as a composer, to his time as a Zen Buddhist monk in Japan, to studying ecosystems, to pioneering self-driving car technologies — he’s informed by his skillset in all of its interdisciplinary glory. It’s clear that SOOT is informed by this as well. He says himself,
“The functionality of a tool emerges from its deeper hidden purpose which is deeply intertwined with the psyche of its inventor… [and other external factors].”
When I first encountered SOOT, I knew exactly what I was looking at. It would be more interesting to say it was some uncharted mystery that I traversed, but as I toggled my way through this platform, it felt eerily natural. Although, describing the experience with words feels less so. The best way I can explain it would be, if Lucy (2014), played by Scarlett Johnson, designed today’s digital experience. It’s visceral, colourful, forming many different shapes, across many different planes. But most of all, as an artist, as a human, I don’t know which — it makes sense. Harper knows that it makes sense because, at a very high level, SOOT serves as ’a resistance to linearity.’
In his research for software and beyond, Harper learned this idea that in natural ecosystems, almost all information by law of nature is self-organising. Meaning, order arises from local interactions. At the heart of SOOT is the fact that self-organisation is powered by curvature. Jake tells us to think of curvature, in an abstract sense, as, “an optimisation function that allows different species to self-organise into niches [such as] acoustic niches for communication, or geographical niches for where they live and hunt”. As someone who is keenly aware that I’m just an ape, thanks to an overactive nervous system and need to touch grass, I’m comforted by any homogeneity between the internet and nature. SOOT introduces curvature to how we interact with information, so that we can benefit from a more natural, yet advanced way of seeing data. It’s time to break up with the grid.
But what does this new natural way to receive information mean for our incredibly unnatural attention economy? The internet is being flooded at the speed of light. If digital information as we know it has a lifespan characterised by refreshing, swiping, and burying, how will things go down in the SOOT World? Harper notes, with information currently defined by the line segment, we’re just seeing things sit at the top of a list and make a linear cascade to the bottom. Therefore, “information is constantly evaporating, and you have to stay hooked to the platforms to continue extracting value.” Alternatively, he describes what he’s building with SOOT as a well that fills up over time. Information doesn’t disappear, it increases its connection to other things and adds value. The language Jake uses around SOOT’s capabilities strikes me as being intentional, respectful, whole, and personal — rare within creative research dialogue as we know it.
It’s this emphasis on personhood, weaved through the entirety of this project, that says the most about what SOOT can do not just for tech, but for the individual. Harper is interested in the way that curved spaces allow us to not only see our information in a clearer way, but ourselves by proxy. He says,
“When you’re able to see your interests play out in a broader view, you’re bestowed a further degree of awareness, and in turn, self-empowerment.
You can imagine mapping a hard drive, that for the last ten years, the only way to interact with it was in folders. You’ve forgotten a lot of what’s there, and the kind of valuable interconnections between your ideas have been severed by the linearity.”
This renewed sense of agency for the artist comes at a charged time. Right now, through mainstream ways of learning and digesting information, many of us have experienced a suppressed sense of identity. On social media platforms, our brains are oversaturated with trendy echo chambers and catchy sound bites, and it’s easy to lose ourselves in perspectives that don’t feel like our own. When we act with a sense of preservation, not only are we granted a more comprehensive perspective about who we are, but we’re better positioned to shield that POV from the cultural crossfire that surrounds.
Our feeds, observed by Harper as using a word architecturally and ideologically similar to the ‘feed’ we give cattle, exhaust us with their rapid regeneration of content. ‘Saved’ folders over the years have become yet another place where information gets lost, their formats only mirroring the spaces we scoured the information in the first place. We’ve become accustomed to acts of savage consumption that strip us of our creative ingenuity. So why have we put up with it for so long? As much as this process reeks of desperation, to some extent, we crave the digital hunt. Amidst, as Harper puts it, “technology [that] has putrefied from a utopian point of view to one of capitalistic exploitation,” I believe we’re eager to still play a role, be it a frenzied one, in what we consume at the end of the day. But the IKEA effect that we felt when surfing Web 1.0 back in the day doesn’t manifest in the same way today. Rather than feeling that satisfaction that comes from participating in creative processes, we’re collectively overrun with fatigue from monotonous patterns and fruitless expeditions. In a multidimensional context, however, we can forsake endless page-scrolling for an instinctual navigation that was built to be, “a map that you can bring alongside you in your creative journey.” With its ecological backbone, SOOT offers a primal alternative to a primal demand.
Today, ‘moodboard’ can be somewhat of a dirty word to creatives. It’s embarrassing to spend too much time on building one, probably since following their conception, they live a flat, superficial, and short life. It’s a dirty word because we’ve been working in a dirty system. Extractive and limiting, Harper says, “We can do better.” We can resist commercial pressure to have a transactional, output-based relationship with our work. How can we expect others to uphold the sanctity of our creative experiences if we don’t defend it ourselves? Delicately aerating our collections of visual artefacts, SOOT allows intentionality to flow through our practice from the onset. As creatives in the digiverse, it’s time to experiment with new ways of working to set us up for new ways of thinking. If we can make space for new systems, we can even reinvigorate approaches that have gone stale. Think back to the creative incubation that brought us to this industry in the first place — the sacred moodboards of our youth that spoke to not just what we would make, but who we were. I want to go back there.
