michael-dean-k/

I like the word experimental because it fuses two halves of a process we don't usually link. What we typically mean is divergence, deviance, tinkering, norm-breaking. Weird stuff. Think avant-garde John Cage soundscapes where he makes music with only kitchen appliances. But also, the word points directly to the scientific process: to run an experiment means to set boundaries, gather insights, and test a hypothesis. Either mode alone falls short. Endless mutations burn you out, and rigid systems can't take you anywhere interesting.

Many of the original experimental artists were scientific. Kandinsky didn't just make abstract shapes, he developed a systematic theory on how colors/geometry provoked specific feelings, and then at the Bauhaus he used questionnaires to test which of his theories were true. I don't know exactly when this happened, but as weird works became mainstream, the word shifted from a process to a genre; the way it was made mattered less than the fact that it was unusual.

Experimental drifted into a contronym, a single word that contains opposite meanings. The power in the word comes when you re-unite both halves, entering strange territory with an analytical eye.

Pretentious > pre-tense > context (I realize this is a stretch, but...). Artists are pretentious when they’re frustrated that others don’t have the context to understand what they’ve made. They’re upstream of culture, and so others don’t have the framing to pick up on it yet. There are two reactions, 1) not caring if they get it, and 2) making work for mass contexts (meeting the culture where the OS currently is)—and maybe both are wrong.

Instead, progressive ideas come with the responsibility to make sure anyone is equipped to download the context to get it. The trick is doing this implicitly without being too on the nose. The bootloader has to be secretly encoded. Deconstructing your own lyrics feels too desperate. Maybe it’s something about building an on-ramp for those who care to try to pierce into something.

Have we misdefined the word "transgression"? If progress is walking forward and regression is walking backward, then transgression means something like “beyond walking.” A transgression is not a sin, but it’s to walk in a direction that is not aligned with our shared notions of progress. It escapes the spectrum. Maybe that’s a meander, maybe that brings us to hell, or maybe that brings us to our destiny. And isn’t so much high-level success about breaking out of local maxim to find a better current to follow? Isn’t genius about hitting the mark that’s out of view? A transgression is something that escapes black and white morality.

In Latin, "materia" means the usable wood of a tree. This maps to the idea that a writer’s Material is not the Experience/Source itself (the full, standing tree), but the lumber that’s produced from it.