What exactly are we doing here?
Sometimes there is more to be found closer to home than expected. THE RED TELEPHONE MAGAZINE: APRIL 2026.
What is it that we do?
Even if you consider yourself purely a writer, trying to describe that in the online hemisphere is not easy. “Who’s your publisher?” becomes a loaded, snarky question that comes across as a passive aggressive way of saying “You’re not a real writer.”
Being niche can help. I’m a political writer. I’m an arts writer. It describes the work in a way that moves beyond the platforms. For all the benefits of this, it’s still feels like an artificial construct designed for the commercial marketplace that for many of us goes against what we want to do.
Yet many of us would be called nicheless. Defining things in the negative is rarely that helpful.
Since ditching the day job I’ve been the unscripted explorer, doing whatever, in search of direction. I didn’t need to go far to find what I was looking for.
There was nothing to do, nothing to change. Everything was right there in front of me. Well, almost everything.
In April, that “almost everything” managed to transform into everything, itself.
For the past few years, the elephant in the room of my creative practice has been my music. Not my music writing, that has never suffered from any restraint, but the music I make myself. I finally bit the bullet, and put something out there. I’m not exactly sure what I was hoping for, but I do know that hope is often the fiercest combatant when it comes to fear.
Most of all, nothing bad happened. In fact, I was greatly encouraged by the positive feedback. If you haven’t had a listen yet, here it is:
At the time, I kept the commentary to a minimum. Probably a wise move given how much I wanted to say, many things that were likely unnecessary. One of the challenges I’d created in my own mind related to the fact that over the years, I’ve written hundreds of songs to various states of completeness. Choosing which song to start with seemed insurmountable. In the end, the only way I managed to bypass this conundrum was to write a new song, which is what I did.
To those who asked will there be more? I expect there will be much more as I start to delve into my past creations.
Over the past few years many of us have experimented with a range of online services. Social media, such as Instagram, allow us to post a single photo. It’s rarely a work of art in its own right, but what if it was simply a component in a larger work?
For the contemporary artist, the online surface has become one to be addressed, even if that means to reject it. Yet I don’t believe it should be rejected entirely, just as I believe we shouldn’t forget that the other surfaces remain. The landscape. Our building. Our flesh and our souls.
History is concerned with the facts of human activity while the arts is more concerned with what humanity feels. Thus the history of art is a history of feelings. What are we feeling about the world we find ourselves in now?
This is why we must at least come to an understanding of the technology that has infiltrated our world.
In some ways the Industrial Revolution ushered in the age of the expert. From structural engineering to digital circuit design, no one person could any longer do it all. Yet the technology has now advanced way beyond our collective capabilities. The potential of the computer program, of which AI is merely one arm, has only had its surface scratched. Most new technologies look for a lowest common denominator in order to find commercial success. When it doesn’t arrive, technologies are often discarded before they are fully explored.
What AI is going to do is decimate the information asymmetry that many experts rely on the differentiate themselves. The same thing applies to Wikipedia, of course, it’s just that AI does it with more alacrity. This changes the creative landscape in a way that I believe will lead to a new form of generalism. As a result, artists, like nicheless writers, will have the opportunity and ability to begin combining different media into wholly unexpected combinations.
To this end, describing what I do as “unscripted exploring” is a category error. It’s not what I do, it’s how I do it.
So what do I do? I’m calling it Hybrid Arts.
When does AI Art that isn’t art start becoming art? The simplest example is Cucumber Man. Any one Cucumber Man image on its own is not art. Yet, in combination with my episodic micro fictions, something unexpected has began to emerge. Hybrid Arts. The whole requires both elements. With the images dependent on the stories and the story (and the character) elevated by the images, the next step will be to turn these into short video episodes, with spoken word, not unlike the spoken word poems I’ve been working on:
I know more of the same isn’t the most inspiring pitch and Hybrid Arts feels kinda unsexy, but it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be durable. A solid platform on which to mount my next hair brained idea.
Also, as this is the feature essay for my April newsletter, the calendar-centric amongst us will be aware that I’m running late. Again. As a result, for the PDF this month, I’m simply going to run this essay with a catalogue of recent (and not so recent) works.
Thanks again for reading.
This is the feature essay for April’s The Red Telephone. You can download the full PDF here, which also features the usual columns:
Hey, Robert. I finally got a chance to read your PDF last night. I'm ready for more music!
I'm here, waiting for more music with balloons, cake, and confetti.