Dear reader,

First of all, thank you all ! The (Im)posture has now more than 500 subscribers and the newsletter has triggered some very exciting conversations. These past 5 months have been so exciting for me, and I hope for you too.

My personal life is about to change dramatically and I wanted to take a moment to give you a heads up on how this might impact the newsletter. I started this letter as a side project to my illustration career, a way for me to connect with our community in a meaningful way and articulate some of our experiences with the vocabulary of social sciences. In September, I’ll be doing this even more by moving from Canada to the UK to start a PhD in anthropology at the University of Cambridge. My research project will deal with the concept of personal style in the creative industry, and the processes through which specific visual forms become imbued with economic, aesthetic, political and ethical values (for example, how does a flat colourful shape becomes associated with neoliberalism ?). This means a few things for the newsletter :

You’re not done having an annoying anthropologist around asking everyone tons of questions about what they do, why and how. And the newsletter will be also a sort of journal, to take you along with me during my research.
I’m improving the offer for the paying subscribers, who will now have access to the monthly threads to have chats about the industry, as well as more experimental posts, such as interviews, picture analysis, ideas for educators, and other stuff with a more conversational tone. This added value will, I hope, encourage some of you to switch to the paid version of the newsletter (if you can afford it obviously), which will be crucial to making this project sustainable (cause if you thought editorial illustration didn’t pay, boy does academia put it in perspective !).
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The essays, which are the core of the newsletter, and I think the most relevant to most people, will remain free forever. I just might sometimes end up writing just one a month instead of two, depending on my workload with the PhD.
The newsletter will be on hiatus from mid-September to mid-October in order to deal with the moving and start of the semester and the creeping anxiety of putting my life in boxes and becoming an immigrant in yet another country. I’ll obviously pause all paying subscriptions during this time.

This is also a good opportunity to ask you all, what would you like to discuss in the future of this newsletter ? Things I’d like to write about in the future include the semiotics of plagiarism, the role of professional assocations, or artists who look like their work. What are some of the topics and concerns YOU have about creativity, visual culture, and/or capitalism ? Please, do let me know.

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Ok, I think that’s all for now. Thanks a million for being here reading, sharing, commenting this newsletter, you’re making this space a truly special one, like nothing else I’ve seen on the creativity-related internet.

All the best,

Julien

The (Im)posture

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