Untitled, 2025
Rescuing our work from the social media dumpster fire
Fresh strategy for New Year’s resolutions: make them in July.
Let’s say I aspire to “social media sobriety” in 2025. I could wait to wake up January 1 at rock bottom, face down on the floor, surrounded by empty dopamine bottles, then rub my eyes and try to “resolve.” Or maybe I could work up to it — make it a preemptive New Year’s resolution to soft-quit this bizarre job as an unpaid content creator that I don’t even remember applying for.
Maybe New Year’s Day then feels less like the first step of a marathon, and more like crossing back into Manhattan at mile twenty-one with four boroughs already in the bag. I could start early and take my time: walk, run, stop for an egg sandwich in Brooklyn and a dollar slice in the Bronx. If I fall off the wagon, I still have a goal in front of me, not just a promise behind.
🔉👋 Hey, I’m Chris. I write music, and play percussion in contemporary chamber-band Alarm Will Sound. My weekly newsletter Music and Math and Feelings explores a broad range of musical topics: from just intonation to electronic music to drum corps to artist mental health.
I use this space to explore, analyze, and visualize the music of my favorite artists, as well as share my own. Click here for a taste of the most popular posts.
Escaping the content house
Part of the process is clearing out items out piece by piece, like slowly deaccessioning the detritus of an apartment I know I’ll be moving out of. It feels amazing. Some rooms are so easy to empty — goodbye everything I’ve ever posted on Twitter, it’s been nice… But not real nice!
Other spaces are tougher to just empty into the trash. The Meta corporation has some of my favorite creations sitting in their basement… I want to figure out what’s there and then save it all before the building burns down.
For example, this untitled little animation:
I made this while learning a very cool app for drawing pixel art1. The 64 horizontal lines are partials of the harmonic series. Each color represents an “identity” (an odd-numbered partial and all its even-numbered duplicates), and my aim was to show visually how the identies distribute themselves into six octaves, and then what it sounds like.
I love trying to make sense of music with little visualizations like this, but I always wonder if the infinite scroll of social media is a barrier to getting the point across. If I saw this in my feed would I be inspired to try to figure out what’s happening? I’d probably just think “neat-o” and keep swiping.
Either way, this stuff has about a nineteen hour half-life on the socials and then it’s dead, so I might as well just bring it back home. I’d rather hang it on my own wall anyway! Save it competing for attention with starbucks selfies and ads for ketamine therapy.
Self-storage
Did you know: Instagram and Facebook will collect everything you’ve ever done on the platform and just hand it over?
My biggest concern when I started to think I’d like to stop feeding the algorithm was how to save the stuff I’m proud of. How would I find it, and how would I export it?
When I discovered that they’ll do this for you I was shocked. It’s not even hidden within nine layers of menus… it’s right there in “your activity.” Like they don’t mind if you go!
Anti-social, 2024
There are so many reasons to escape.2
One of the biggest ones for me is how hard they make it to display work the way it was intended. I shudder to think of the hours I spent trying to squeeze videos that were positively cinematic in 16:9 widescreen into a “square” or (even worse) “vertical,” aspect ratio. I spent full days remaking videos for Meta as the view through a peep-hole: offering half the screen for half the time, as if it were the whole movie.
Instagram congratulates me on how many “impressions” it gave me, and meanwhile the full work goes basically unnoticed. And I totally understand… as a viewer I rarely click through to exit my zombie-scroll either, despite knowing how lovely it would be to see what my friends are really up to. I’m addicted.
Audio infuriatingly un-syncs from video after posting. Images crop in unexpected ways and portions get obscured by engagement buttons. Stories go up in the wrong order. Links are broken. I need to actually post them to see if they display as intended, and they never, ever do the first time. I post and delete, remake, re-post, delete again.
I think about how little all this work actually does for this project, and about all the time it steals from starting the next one.
I’m a huge fan of YouTuber “Tantacrul,” who made one of the funniest and truest videos on the internet — a cathartic rage-fest about the awful design of Sibelius notation software. He’s recently published three hours on “What Facebook Has Done To Us,” which is the most comprehensive anti-social media manifesto I’m aware of. It’s pretty breathtaking:
I’m kind of hoping he’ll do “What YouTube Has Done To Us” next… but I’m not sure where he would post it!
Untitled, 2020
Enough negativity, all the evils of social media have been discussed ad nauseam everywhere, you get the point — back to the joyful rediscovery and reclaiming of digital items!
I’m a huge fan of the artist Josh Lambert, whos pattern drawings I discovered circa 2018 — they were hanging about ten feet from where I’m sitting at this very moment (the japanese design bookstore and gallery Usagi in Dumbo).
A couple years later when I came across a little sketch he had up on his website Untitled 2020, it spoke to me.
Usually I start with the music and then work out the visualization; this one went the other way. It looked like music to me already — I just came up with a way to animate its unique notation:
Here are some sketches from “unrolling” it: translating the segments into midi data and assigning them to drums and harmonic series-tuned piano:
Remembering where my friends are, 2025
In the months before the new year, another part of the process is getting back to sharing fun things with people directly, rather than dropping it into the algorithm’s maelstrom and hoping they (or anyone) will see it.
In browsing my archive I was delighted to find this gem hidden deep in a pile of self-destructed instagram stories, which I would have otherwise completely forgotten about:
This is Alarm Will Sound pianist John Orfe, who courageously allowed the stage crew of EMPAC to put him in a harness and fly him (and the grand piano) twenty feet over the stage as part of our production of Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Paper Pianos in February of 2023. John is a human jukebox, and uses moments like this to keep us all constantly entertained.
If all goes as planned, in 2025 I guess I’ll have to find some other place for stuff like this. Maybe I’ll think about who the John Orfe fans are in my life and show them I care by just texting it directly. Or I wonder if I could create a little chrisptagram on my own website. Be my own boss. I’ve got two more weeks to do it.
Thanks so much for reading/watching/listening.
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This would be a good time to mention that this new year’s resolution, and this post, were inspired by Seth Werkheiser’s Social Media Escape Club, thank you Seth!
Excellent post Chris. Thanks for putting me onto Josh Lambert's art. I love your conversion of his work into music.