The Analogue Dream

I want a cluttered desk piled with papers of unfinished poems and messy drawings and scribbles and handwritten notes and letters and essays and grocery lists and books and CDs and DVDs and vinyls and everything else.

The feeling of a physical artwork in my hands. Something that someone poured effort and time into creating and didn’t press enter into an AI chatbox for.

The rise of AI brings the subsequent death of creativity, and we lose our ability to think for ourselves. People use it to pick their outfit and write a novel for them or make a song and produce something devoid of feeling or passion. Art is what keeps us alive, what takes our breath away and can move someone to tears. Art makes us feel and believe in things bigger than ourselves. It teaches us how to be compassionate and kind and generous and empathetic and to think critically and question the things that aren’t right.

Art is illuminating and sweeping, a profound way of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, across time and place.

Through music, literature, poetry, painting, drawing, film, tv, dance, photography, print, journalism, theatre, sculpture, architecture, design and everything else, we bring to life the concepts that form our very beings.

Love, fear, hope, regret, anger, pride, envy, life, death, existence, relationships, anything and everything. Let’s revert back to an analogue time of physical media and art you can hold in your hands. Refuse the suffocating manufactured AI generated rubbish for real, purposeful creativity and artistry, no matter how messy or chaotic or unassuming. 

This is a love letter to the work of people, the art that shapes thoughts and ideas and culture, and remains unfractured and untainted by technology and social media. A love letter to art not permanently stuck in an online void, but something to be seen or heard or felt in person. A love letter to art itself, art for art’s sake.

Life imitates art, and who are we if not artists? 

All photos by Isabel Ellis