This question relates in a sideways fashion to the insecurity discussion,
which I feel is veering towards the question of what makes an artist an
artist. 

[I should say at the start that I have profound reservations about the very
notion of 'artist' as opposed to 'everyone who is not an artist' but I have
set them aside at this time. However, I think we should more rigorously
problematize the concepts of 'artist' and 'art', which seem to be used
increasingly loosely these days.]

Occasionally, and very much in recent times, I have found myself feeling
trapped by some kind of sense of artistic responsibility, although who to is
not clear to me,  and this manifests itself in a growing inability to simply
experience the world without at the same time feeling driven to mediate it
for the purposes of 'art' (in my case, 'art' usually means writing).

I am curious to know whether others here feel the pressure to use themselves
as a lens at times when other people are just relaxing and enjoying
themselves? 

Example 1
I stare down from the balcony of my apartment and see the slow river sliding
by. Every day it looks different, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep,
sometimes busy with waterfowl, sometimes littered with burger boxes and
plastic bottles that were chucked in further upstream. I've lived here for
nine months now and increasingly feel an obligation to write something about
this river, to record my thoughts and observations about it, to photograph
it (see attached, couldn't resist), measure it, make notes. But why? Must
one use everything around one as material? Is it really a waste, as it feels
to be, if I just sit and stare at it? I'm reading Annie Dillard's 'Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek' at the moment and this has further intensified the drive to
'make something' out of my own river world.

Example 2
I swish around inside my computer, installing items of software, configuring
others, doing a bit of housekeeping. As I work, I'm conscious of the huge
pleasure it gives me simply to be working with my computer. I will find any
excuse to spend an extra half-hour interacting with it. This isn't a
standing and staring issue, but a bustling and fiddling and tweaking issue.
I'm busy! And as I work, I'm always conscious that I am engaging with huge
complexity that I don't understand at all, that the thinking behind this
machine has a provenance going back to Babbage and Lovelace and way before
them, that it functions in a way that I partly understand but which also
feels a little shamanistic even though I don't allow myself to express such
a notion very often, that it embodies probably the most profound
philosophical questions of our time, that it is an economic entity which
impacts around the globe, that somebody fitted it together at the factory,
that through it I connect with the minds of all of you and many others...
All of this is part of the enormous enjoyment I have whenever I interact
with a computer anywhere. Annie Dillard writes of staring at the water so
intensely that she almost passes out. Sometimes I write about my computer
like that, but 99% of the time I just enjoy it without making any kind of
product from my enjoyment. (I'm sure Dillard would give a similar % in
relation to her own work). For me, the very act of using a computer is a
deeply immersive experience, which at times is simply impossible to
articulate.

I used to think that sitting and staring was ok, because some of the data
would emerge as writing at some time in the future, but these days I worry
that I am wasting an experience if I don't immediately process it into some
kind of saveable format. (This is another kind of insecurity, I guess).

So my question is: if I never again turned any of my experiences into some
kind of 'art' format, if I ceased to become a maker, if I just experienced
it for myself and moved on --- would I still be an artist?

Is being an artist all about 'data in / data out' ? Or is 'data in'
sufficient on its own?

I guess I know the answer, that you will all say that unless there is 'data
out' the person cannot be called an artist, but then my next question would
have to be about the optimum ratio. Or, to put it another way, is '100% data
in / 1% data out' a waste?

I am not making any assumptions here about quality or craft. Simply about
the artist's obligation, or not, to process input.


Sue


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