1 year of visual culture, and a new name !

From the ashes, The (im)posture emerges anew

Dear all,

In April 2022, I was subscribing to my first non-spammy newsletter,Colin Meloy's Machine Shop and was amazed by the intimate tone, the flexibility, and the nostalgia of the format (and obviously Meloy’s way with words). It was one of those moments when the things that shuffled around silently in the back of your head for months suddenly fall into place. I too, would start a newsletter.

I had been tired of Instagram’s ruthless algorithm, and unsatisfied with the word limit on Twitter and had just received a conditional offer to the PhD in social anthropology at Cambridge. That January I had published my first piece of writing ever on Eye on Design about so-called Corporate Memphis and received some really amazing comments on it. I remember writing that essay out of frustration, because I felt that we always heard the same voices, the same tropes about the creative industry, and that these rarely accounted for illustrators’ experiences. To be honest, it was⁠—and still is⁠— nerve wrecking to decide to voice my opinion in public. I’m not a shy person by any mean but I find online space so saturated with people who feel entitled to express themselves without necessarily having anything to say, I was worried to become one of them. But then Substackcame around and I thought, heck, if it’s a newsletter, it’s opt-in (unlike web scrapping) and if people are not interested they just wont subscribe.

To my surprise, one year later, you are now almost 900 to be okay with the little things I’m writing about creativity, capitalism, and visual culture in general, and I couldn’t be more grateful ! The PhD turned out to be more demanding than expected and I had to stop writing for a few months, or rather, my writing energy got sucked into papers about phenomenology and semiotics. But we’re now back in full swing !

In the past year, many things happened around here, here are my highlights :

• My first piece of writing about AI and illustration was first published here and later got picked up up by Eye On Design.

• The first Thread I created was to answer a question we don’t often get to ask, what even is illustration?

• I explained why I don’t draw other people’s ideas, and

• wether we could trust aesthetic to be a fair judge of people’s value

• Finally, my favourite piece this past year was one about why I don’t think illustrators still need advice, and some advice on how to stop.

But enough retrospective.

After thinking a lot about and asking you, I decided that I will broaden the scope of the newsletter to visual culture matters in general. I started this space as an anthropologist doing illustration and it felt natural to focus on the creative industry. These days I feel more like an illustrator doing anthropology and my interest in the visual is far reaching. My PhD project is really about looking, and how who does the looking and in what way changes the value of what is looked at. Here I’d like to talk about illustration and AI but also the photographs of black holes, the relation between language and perception of VFX and reality. I want to keep exploring the creative industry but also talk about cognitive sciences, history or philosophy. I you came here for the creative industry stuff, do stick around, there will be plenty of it still.

We often hear we live in an image-saturated environment, a society of spectacle to use Guy Debord’s expression. Yet, I see very little attempts at developing people’s visual literacy. This is something creatives are painfully aware of every time we work with a client who’s not used to talk about images. So I hope this newsletter is, and will continue to be, a space where we get to think differently and profoundly about what it means to live in a world of images. Both as makers and as lookers.

Sooooooooo, to reflect this new era of the newsletter, I hereby rechristen this space… On Looking !

After a year (1 year !) of doing this together, trying things out, essays, chats, threads, etc. I’m genuinely excited about this new direction, it feels right. I hope you do too.

Write to you soon,

Julien