TOOLS

--FILED: 2025.04.22 / REF.ID: 0004-RA--

As I get older, I find myself becoming less emotional about the little things. For instance, I no longer live and die with the sports teams that I follow, which means I no longer "hate" the Maple Leafs (for a variety of reasons), but I still remember hating the music of Jive Bunny and the Master Mixers and continue to dislike "the medley." Somehow, I hear medleys everywhere: timeouts of NBA playoff games, radio jingles in taxis, that ubiquitous Dua Lipa/Elton John song. And yes, I know that they are now called mashups, and that I too can download Fadr, which is just a tool, and yes, I am about be a hypocrite, but is this an attention problem? I don't feel the same way about pictures, and I am trying to learn why. I just think medleys kind of suck.

This is not anti-tech - far from it - we embrace technology, but like a little analog with our digital, like human input in our LLM, and agree with Hiyao Miyazaki that replication is not creation. One of Rebel's goals is to ensure authorship and ownership, to fight against the culture of the copy. Here, we care about authenticity and honesty. We also like tools and believe that while AI can be a tool to help redefine some of the language of art, it is not AI that supplies the creativity, human experience, suffering, and soul that art requires. If one of the goals of art is transcendence, that still requires beauty, originality, and skill, whether with brush, camera, or code.

Tools don't define the artist but can expose them. There is often a right tool for the job, perhaps tangible, but also possibly cultural, philosophical, or even material. Tadao Ando is inseparable from concrete, which for him is a tool, the ideal way for him to create a synergy of positive and negative space. This fostering of resistance is a cornerstone of curation, evidence of method and care. It is an invitation to the observer to add their engagement to the creation.

Have we found a potential path to success for the medley? Two olds don't always make a new, but perhaps they might. If so, the problem may well be one of consumption. Marx was almost right: content is the opiate of the people, and it hurts to say it, but there is simply too much art. This is not an AI problem. There is too much TV, there are too many podcasts. When it comes to content, convenience is eating quality, and the future eats the present: always the next thing, overwhelming supply leads demand. Cultural intake limited to scrolling, where once passed, the content disappears, is not conducive to quality and permanence.

This "how" matters, so some of this rant needs to be directed at the phone, which used to be a tool, but became a smartphone, and then became something else: a cultural delivery medium with elements of a portal, but at once demanding and addictive. (A Portavue maybe, or Vortavax - see what I did there?) Now, I don't hate the phone, but I sure wonder why so many people cross the street, go up and down escalators, or stand in dangerous and busy places staring into it, with no semblance of situational awareness. I grew up on Choose Your Own Adventure books where the reader was a part of the plot: figuratively immersive, and a precursor to video games. (Trust me: "Inside UFO 54-40" has some genius in it.) Today, the screen is pulling instead of pushing, and the reader is barely a participant. The algo will choose the next page for you, but I would bet against it finding Ultima, and that is a shame.

If this all feels a little too fin de siècle for you, we get it: we are also wrestling with ideas of sameness, originality, fear, and authenticity. We hope to add something useful to the cultural landscape: to find an immutable way for artists to sign their work. We don't hate the hammer, the paintbrush, the chisel, or the laptop, we just think that selection and presentation matter. We are not afraid of AI. Are you?