A few days ago I posted a rather long screed on what I consider the four modes of creation and distribution in today’s varied media landscape. Today I am going to follow that up by stating where I wish to fall in such a landscape and why that is the decision that I have made.
The path in life that I have chosen at this point is media, and I therefore spend what would appear to be a rather inordinate amount of time to other people thinking about media’s place in the world and my place in media. My particular niche is the creation and distribution of mathematical stories, a rather specific and tiny niche to be sure. In order to cultivate a bigger audience I am always trying to evolve my products into styles and modes that I think will better suit the content and the audience. After having thought so hard about the four modes I decided that I hope to be a Curatorial Creator.
I love stories so much that I do not want to change the content or message of a story that I am lucky enough to get my hands on, there in lies the part of me that wants to curate. The problem comes from the equally large part of me that wants to tell the stories that I have inside of me, in other words I want to be a creator. For a long time I could not really figure out how to merge these two impulses and have therefore created media that allowed me to do one or the other. I was a creator with Combinations and Permutations and a curator with Strongly Connected Components, but then finally after much thought I finally came up with a project that allows me to integrate both creation and curation in Relatively Prime. The modus operandi of Relatively Prime is specifically molded to satisfy both parts of my media soul, as I will the show will be me using the stories of other people, without changing the messages of their words, to tell the stories in mathematics that I feel are interesting and important today.
I sincerely hope that everyone who reads this takes some time to deeply contemplate where in, I can not say “the” because these modes are just creations of my mind, my modes of creation they fall as there is no way to make a product that is better than one you really want to make. And I really want the world to be full of even more awesome media than it is already.