The Tyranny of Niches
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- Опубликовано: 5 ноя 2024
- Across social media platforms including RUclips, creators are told to fit their content into niches. If you don't have a clear niche, you will struggle to find an audience. But people are more complicated than that - we all have multiple interests and sides to our personalities. Having to fit everything into one niche can feel quite restrictive. I say no to this tyranny of niches! And yes to a dose of random.
People-watch in New York City while I talk about niches and show you random things I enjoy that don't fit into a simple niche.
EDLUNDART is a boutique design and animation studio in New York City, and now also a RUclips channel for artists and creative people featuring me, a random guy in a hat but also variously a graphic designer, animator, artist, Art Director and Creative Director entertainingly talking my way through videos on art, design, animation, culture, creativity, and business from the perspective of an artist entrepreneur and small business owner.
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I love the random images in particular love the visuals and colors fèls very personal looks to me like you put a ton of work in to this I like just getting lost in the video also did see the previous video about the graphic gig
its beautiful, i love it
Thank you for reminding that its not important to fit into a specific mould just for popularity.
Its better to be your authentic self and make your own space
That's well put, thanks for watching and commenting!
I love this video! I have felt the same way often. However I have come to realize that RUclips is a great place for all this random interest stuff. It’s a great place if you’re enjoying just expressing yourself. That in and of itself is its own reward. You’re right that it probably won’t garner tons of views or subscribers but that doesn’t mean it holds no value and it won’t garner some interested viewers. Whether it’s RUclips or any other platform if your goals are business oriented then random human expression won’t generally progress your marketing. I do think there are some potential ways to do both but they will have at least a small amount of limitation. One way is if your known as The Weird Interests guy you could possibly make it work. My channel is about making comics. Comics happens to be a medium where I could literally explore and utilize almost any random interests as part of the subject matter of the comic. This is possible with other forms as well. I think it’s valid to express your interests with 100% freedom and still enjoy a small following. And also it’s valid to try and find a vehicle to package the random interests in if you’re interested in more of a business goal. And Maybe even a hybrid mix of both could work. My favorite of your random interests was the looped video! I also have played around with similar things and enjoyed it!
Hey, thanks for watching and commenting! I plan to do videos about comics here and there. Anyway, I agree with everything you said, although for me videos take too much time to create for it to purely be about expression. My aim is to somehow do both - express myself, making videos on my own terms, but also have them find an audience so that doing this has a future business value for me. But as with a lot of my creative experiments, I’m prepared for this to not work out. I’m always looking for those rare pockets in the space-time continuum where one can have some fun while also generating a few bucks to live on. We’ll see if this can ever become that for me. For now, I’m enjoying the journey, bumpy as it is!
as long as you talk, I'll listen...
Dangerous words 😂 But seriously, thanks! 🙏
Remove the need to sell, remove the need to want to be accepted in social. That is freeing, but nature and the mechanics of things wont let us. I made an artfilm but I became angry at myself, because most of the audience dont enjoy it and Im tell them indirectly, its good for you and why wont you open your mind. Then I made an advertisement full of logic, so full of purpose and great meaning and thats when I decided to stop making anything else because its no fun.
Very interesting comment, thanks. For me the fun lies in trying to find the tiny intersections where art and commerce can meet, despite the odds. It's like a cruel game the world is enacting upon us, so playing the game is an excruciating version of fun... but it can be fun, nevertheless. Especially once you've found one or two places to operate as an artist while making a bit of money. Then any further finds become icing on the cake.
So I've never had much success on social media, and now I'm trying this RUclips thing, and so far it's not going particularly well, but we'll see. These are games, different versions of the big game. I'm already a winner in a couple of the games (I'll talk about at least one of them in a future video, I'm sure), so I can afford to play and see if I can eke out another win somewhere. But you have to find fun in the game itself, not just winning, because the wins are few and far between.
@@edlundart I have been thinking the role of art and design, because I have a background in that also. Dabbled with Motiongraphics a decade ago after doing graphic design and documentary directing. So if anything, I can actually "feel" your video and process. A thought experiment that Im constantly thinking about is, if I am going to spend the remaining life alone in a place with no people, would I care for art? Would my art style change? Would I care for art if I have no one to show it to? Is art more about the pleasure of other people liking it? Im not sure. But Im leaning on the idea that I might not really care about art if no one is watching, and maybe art is for when I want to escape people and express myself or find aesthetic enjoyment, which then questions my subconscious desire for good art.
@@wangelite5279 I've never quite resolved these questions for myself, regarding whether I make art for me or for other people. Because making things is my default behavior, and I like doing it alone, in the middle of the night, and it's a very insular process, and an escape from people. So that suggests it's just for me. But then, I do think ironically I'm spending all that time in isolation to make art because somewhere deep inside me I have a desire to connect with others, and art is my vessel for that potential connection. But I only want to connect through art if it can be done without pandering or altering myself too much. I have to be true to who I am, and in the end I seem to choose that truth over connection... all while hoping for those rare moments where something I made connects. And hoping, perhaps, that those moments can become less rare.
@@edlundart Nice! This reply can be a good script for your next video it seems. lol. For me I always want to go with the truth, but the longer I live and the more perspective and situation change, the truth from last time become a drag. If life and taxes didnt get in the way, I would love to get more art done. My current middle ground is explore like a mad man, from code art to making tech products. Those avenues have some space for exploration of art to breathe and money to be a shield. Ad work is the most logical and the most lousy creative endeavour, but amazing to fit into the crowd. I also enjoyed my time in nyc for a short few years, until 2010. Lots of creative energy.
@@wangelite5279 Hahah, "explore like a mad man" is what I want to be doing, and I use a very expansive definition of "art" for my activities. A lot of what I do to make money is technically "ad work," but I often more or less forget that's what it is, lol. I just lose myself in the art of it. Thanks for a good conversation! Maybe you're right this topic could be turned into a video somehow.
Keep going up ! a lot of information in this video
I actually really really enjoyed this, I almost cut off 15 seconds in but then I took a great interest in your words. I’d love to see more of this almost free form RUclips. It feels like all of social media has devolved into making the platform equivalent of TikTok trends. Just chasing views with little care to substance or meaning. That said I think I took up line becuaee it’s what I’m good at more than anything. I’ve seen many artists such as Miura utilize line to communicate emotion. Likewise I’ve attempted to do similar
Thanks very much! I’ll have to look into Miura, sounds interesting, and I definitely welcome the challenging of my little line/fields of color thing! As far as my videos go, I think one of my biggest struggles is to get people to stick around past those first 15-30 seconds! Once they’re past that, they like my meandering ramblings. Any tips on what I did wrong to almost lose you there? Maybe readily admitting the video is random and meaningless and then repeating the same footage twice didn’t help, lol 😂
@@edlundartwell if I’m honest the whole point of your video was to essentially to take a shot in the dark doing the complete opposite of what “works” so initially the randomness annoyed me or at the very least turned me off. Until you explained that was the point. As a former creator that resonated with me so I stuck around even if just to spite the algorithm. In any case I ended up enjoying your rambling very relaxing reminds me of public television broadcasting documentary. Think something that’d play on pbs. Keep doing what you’re doing it works for me
@@erikv9366 That makes a lot of sense, thanks for sharing. I'm really trying to thread a needle - I too want to rebel against the algorithm, and get away with things that require more of a "PBS-ish" level of patience, but I also want to somehow find and retain an audience that actually does want this sort of thing. So in order to do that, I can't lose folks in the first 15 seconds. I need to use some kind of trick to capture attention, but I don't really want to use a cheap, tacky trick. I'd rather make videos I like that get few views, than videos I hate that get lots of views. So... my channel is an ongoing experiment and a quest for some sort of sustainable balance. Thanks again for watching and commenting!
I hope more people follow suit
Not in a niche? Now this is a quote of a quote from Wikipedia: "What is absolutely crucial - and global - in defining a hipster is the claim to authenticity, uniqueness and individuality. Being a true hipster is about 'being real', and not 'trying too hard'. 'Being real', however, demands identity work, and being a hipster comes with very strong and reoccurring identity discourses that all focus on authenticity, yet paradoxically form the basis of a very collective style." You find it in the article "Hipster".
I agree that most attempts to rebel against conformity end up being a new kind of conformity. But I think that quote is a bit strange, because my understanding of hipster culture is not that it's a particularly earnest attempt to be real at all - it's quite obviously an affectation, and something that I think includes some ironic distance, which I have difficulty merging with the idea of "being real." But this is an interesting topic. Maybe I could try making a video about hipster culture one of these days. I think it's actually a pretty confusing and opaque term.
Maybe you commented about this because I wear a hat on this channel? I decided to wear this hat in my videos in part so that I can feel like this is a separate character from myself somehow, almost like a cartoon. It makes it a little easier to appear on camera (it's like a disguise, you might say), and I also have this idea that it makes me slightly more memorable to the viewer - it allows someone's brain to go "oh right, he's that hat guy, I've seen him before." Based on the same logic behind cartoon characters always wearing the same outfit.
Anyway, thanks for watching and commenting!
@@edlundart Thanks a lot for your nice reply to my comment. And no, it is not about the hat, more about the fake cross processing filter in your videos that mimicks a Lomography look. BTW: Lots of YT people (Red35, Nick Carver, Naoki Saito to name a few) wear hats. And I don't believe you think a hat makes you a Joseph Beuys. Anyway, good luck and keep on going!
@@buyaport Ah, gotcha - and thanks, I'll keep on keeping on!
Tell us more about how you hate cars
Hah, maybe I will!