Notes from the Hatch: The Huge Beating Genius Machine

Sunday, October 20, 2024

Unidentified Man with Horse (1880) from Smithsonian Archives

Hello friends,

A couple of weeks ago, I had NPR Tiny Desk concerts playing in the background while I worked–if you don’t know, NPR is National Public Radio and they invite musicians into their office space to play a handful of songs among cluttered desks and onlooking office workers. It’s great. The first concert I chose was Feist who said the following between her third and fourth songs:

“I consider [this song] to be the grandmother of the first song. There’s a DNA throughline through records you make, where there’s a little thumbprint that ends up fifteen years later on a different song.” 

I stopped what I was doing and reached for my journal. I thought about how every piece of art sits within infinite webs of context, both for the creator and for the viewer. When you’re studying literature or writing in school, there’s a lot of talk about this—it can, at times, seem like a sort of contest to be the one who is best able to list all the things a piece of work is “in conversation” with. But what would this idea look like if freed from academia? What would it look like, I wondered, if I diagrammed my own relationship to a piece of art? And then, what if, I turned that into an essay?