[ recap ]

Last week we looked at John Cage's 4'33", Ursula K. Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory, and Graham Wallas' creative process.

[ thoughts ]

Keith Haring had just turned twenty when he arrived in New York in 1978. He bussed tables at Danceteria at night and studied semiotics by day at the School of Visual Arts, a year or two from the subway drawings. And he kept journals from his teens until he died.

Semiotics is the study of how signs come to mean things and who gets to decide what. It was Haring's whole preoccupation, the thing his art is made of.

William S. Burroughs, the writer he loved most, treated language as the most powerful control system there is, a virus that runs you as much as you run it.

When Haring looked at the computer, he saw another machine for making and moving meaning, and in his 1978 journal, he asked a question: Are we controlling computers, or are we merely helping them to control us?

Six years later, in his 1984 journal, he wrote of technology: "its misuse by those in power who only wish to control," and how the machine fit their purpose. "The mentality of people motivated by profit at the expense of human needs is perfect for the computer. Computers are completely rational."

A perfectly rational machine has no needs of its own. So it takes on the needs of whoever owns it, and pursues them more rationally, and more tirelessly, than any person would.

The machine is now in everyone's pocket, and it is far more obedient than he could have imagined.

It will do your thinking now, if you let it. It has no stake in what you make, and it works, in the end, for whoever is paying. That is exactly what Haring saw coming.

If the finished, presentable output is cheap now, and it is, then the thing worth guarding is what was always yours: the record of what you noticed and how you thought your way through it, before any of it was cleaned up for someone else to read.

[ creativity ]

The radiant baby, the barking dog, and his signature thick black line: none of it came to Haring fully formed. He drew it into being, cutting up and recombining signs until the marks began to carry his meaning.

The notebook was where ideas came alive.

You notice something and write it down. Later, you place it next to something else. A sentence from last week, an image from yesterday, a thought you didn't understand at the time. Connections begin to happen, and what looked like fragments, becomes a way of seeing.

Most of it looks like nothing while it is happening. That’s the whole point.

There's no shortcuts in the creative process.

A private record is not an archive of completed work. It's where the work starts: it turns what you noticed into something only you could have made.

[ making ]

I built a tool for keeping that record. It is called Milieu, and it is free.

Milieu is an Obsidian vault for noticing, writing, and connecting your thoughts.

It is a place to keep what catches your attention, and see how they connect.

Obsidian is a free note taking app that keeps everything you write as plain text (markdown) files on your own computer.

They open in any editor.

Obsidian on its own is an empty app. You have to build your own setup, decide how to file things, work out which features you need, and that is where most people stop.

Milieu is that setup, already done.

Inside are three practices:

• Morning Pages (for stream of thought)
• Four-Square (add texture to a day)
• Notes (quickly capture things that catch your attention)

Most people quit this kind of practice on the first day they have nothing, when missing it once feels like failing. Here, missing a day breaks nothing. On an empty day, the note is enough to keep you in.

Every entry tags and links itself as you write. After a few weeks, you can open one view and see what keeps returning, how your entries connect, and when a thread began.

Milieu currently only runs on a computer. Getting it onto a phone is possible but fiddly: Obsidian's own sync is paid, and the free route, through iCloud, takes time to setup. I'm working on a proper mobile version too.

For now, use it on a laptop or desktop.

You download it, unzip the folder somewhere easy to find, open Obsidian, select "open folder as vault," and choose the Milieu folder. I’ve included instructions inside the zipped folder if anything is unclear.

You can find it here, with everything you need to start.

Thank you for sticking around.

If you have any issues, feel free to email me.

[ sign off ]

Haring thought it fell to artists to lead the fight against a machine aesthetic, or prepare people for it. I am not sure the fight can be won, but preparing people I can do. Keep your own record, in your own words, somewhere that answers to you.

Stay the one doing the noticing.

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.