Creativity

Creating Across the Centuries

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Art Connects us, art is part of bigger things.

Digital collage is one of my artistic media, and one that I didn’t expect to become such. I originally picked it up for my work in zines, and then it just became “my thing.” Now I regularly examine public domain art resources, usually museums, for interesting images and such to work into my mashups.

My collage work is, for those aware of it, rather surreal. This originated out of my early zine days, punk, and the Church of the SubGenius. It was honed by an interest in alchemical and spiritual diagrams of yore and the Surrealists themselves. I combine images from across the centuries to create something new – many times something that surprises me as Surrealist work is Rorschach blots in reverse.

Once when poking around for some backgrounds to work with and inspire me, I searched the Welcome Collection, I stumbled across a lot of lovely, colorful prints. These were meant to be part of something called a “Toy Theater,” which I’d never really heard of. So I took a break from my art-searching to learn a little history.

Toy Theaters, to judge by the Wikipedia article I found and the art I had discovered were “a thing” in the 19th century, with interest surviving to this day. You could buy backgrounds and kits at theaters and operas, scripts were available, and there were of course fancier and self-made versions. Imagine going to the theater and then your parents buy you the kit so you can reenact the story you saw!

Toy Theaters, to an extent, were the same as merchandise and action figures we know from our mass media movies, albeit more personal. You’d assemble your own theater, you might customize it or alter it, you may even have cutout actors based on people you had seen the night before. They were also stages of the imagination.

Despite having scripts and the like, we all know people like to create. I’m sure over the decades that there were romances and battles and skulduggery among casts that would never have met. I’m sure people got silly, had fun, or got serious. They could mash things up, do things there way.

Then, across the decades, I realized they were like me.

Here I was, looking at images of Toy Theater backgrounds, finding inspiration just as someone would unpacking their Toy Theater kit. I combined disparate elements in a fury of inspiration, no different than someone playing with the Theater or taking a stab at the equivalent of fanfiction. There, across ages, I was doing the same thing that those people with their Toy Theaters did – creating my own world out of the parts.

Every artist who’d made these backgrounds and printer who’d printed these prints was having their work still used by people like me. Every parent who lovingly saved their child’s toys, toys which eventually were donated to museums, were seeing their effort live on in how that art was seen and used.

I felt both small and large, part of something bigger but also just me, there, a guy behind a computer playing with graphic programs.

Art, art has so many connections that it lets us feel the largeness of it all. A hundred years ago a family happily assembled a Toy Theater. Now I create strange and wonderful surrealist work. And we’re all the same, part of the same thing.

–Xenofact

Art Is Unstoppable

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We’re all used to hearing about how oppressive governments crack down on art. They don’t like free expression. They want to control information. They also like to destroy joy because they are controlling assholes.

But I’d add something else to these control freaks – art is terrifying to them. Art is something that is a threat to dictators and they must control it.

Think about what Art is – not even good art, but sincere art. Art is personal expression, thoughts and feelings turned into another form. It often combines different media forms, like sound and visuals together, or penmanship and words. Art is a bundle of ideas, of feelings, that works it’s way into your head – that’s what art is, and even intentionally obscure art can intrigue people to actively engage.

Art spreads. Art infiltrates. Art infects. Art can be symbiotic with the people who encounter it. This is the kind of thing that unsettled a would-be tyrant.

A play, a stunt, a book, a song can soar across the radio waves and the internet and change people. Art is communication, and communication will go as fast as it can (and sometimes as slow as needed). A piece of art can change people fast and dictators don’t like change and they aren’t happy with fast either.

And you might not know they’ve changed. Someone may have become changed by a book or by a TV show or a bootleg tape and you won’t know! People become different people but you can’ tell. Well, can’t tell until too late, and dictators fear people not being what they seem.

People infected with art might even make more art. They get inspired to do things. Art combines with the appreciator’s own ideas to make something new. That fast-spreading art can produce even more art that risks the control a dictator wants. Von Neuman’s catastrophie with bright brushes and a poison pen.

Finally, dictators are not creative people. They’re not imaginative. Art is creative. Art is imaginative. Dictators can’t understand it, can’t deal with it, so the have to destroy it or control it.

(Some Dictators even posture as artists, but you know, they never really are.)

So of course they feel threatened by art. They can’t control it, can’t stop it, can’t do it and it’s lurking right behind them.

Of course that means if we keep doing art we keep breaking dictators. And as I’ve noted art and spirituality are pretty much the same thing, who knows what you can do to would-be tyrants with just some innocent art with spiritual elements . . .

-Xenofact

The Talent of Delusion

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I’ve been thinking about Conspiracy theories a lot. I mean as my regular readers I know I do that anyway, but as 2025 is the age Conspiracy Theories and reality collide at lightspeed, I’m thinking more. Mostly I’m asking how did we get here – not in the exact causal sense, but how the Conspiracy Theorist mind works.

Lately among my readings, viewings, and podcast-listening I realized that Conspiracy Theory Believing requires skill.

If you’ve ever listened to someone go on about Conspiracy Theories, you realize they are retaining a complex alternate world inside their head. They have a skill to retaining and organizing that information about things that are, let us be honest, not true, sometimes bonkers, and often very bigoted under the skin. Yet these folks can recall it.

More than that, they are constantly resolving conflicts in their theories. Conspiracy Theorists are having the world collide with their beliefs all the time. New facts come in, the apocalypse doesn’t come, the hated (often female and/or PoC) politician resigns, the space lasers don’t fire. Conspiracy Theorists have to re-spin their tales all the time or else they have to question them, and if they questioned them they wouldn’t be Conspiracy Theorists. They’re maintenance experts on believing an illusion.

But Conspiracy Theorists also collide, believers who believe vaguely different things come together – and they display a talent for taking new input and combining them. This is the infamous “yes, and” discussions you can see among True Believers, where a person states one belief, and a slightly different believer agrees, then adds onto it. If you’ve witnessed a Conspiracy Theorist get on a good rant going at an event or in a conversation, you can see this happen at amazing speed as people ask questions.

(The Knowledge Fight podcast focuses on Alex Jones, but has covered other subjects, and in almost all cases you can see their subjects build mythology in real time.)

Conspiracy Theory is a skill, skill is similar to if not exactly the same as the worldbuilding done by writers, gamers, game designers, and artists. They have an ability to create on the fly, to recall vast information, and to adsorb and polish information. The jaw-dropping connections of a Tonspiracy Theorist are all too close to the clever ideas of a good writer to act like they’re not two branches of the same tree.

Conspiracy Theorists are easier to understand if you realize they had a skill at such creations (that they misused) or that they have developed it. It also means the evil grifters are even worse because they have some skill here and use it to screw up the world.

This gives me pause to other ways we might use such an insight to help those lost in these conspiracy worlds to get out.

  • We can recognize this “talent at fabulation” by asking “does this person sound like they’re worldbuilding?” It’s a key to detection. Also if the theorist in question is some evil grifter, we can help people avoid them.
  • If we’re trying to help the Conspiracy Theorist, realizing a skill is being deployed will allow us to help them find their way back with the various oft-discussed techniques.
  • This skill they developed might be channeled elsewhere. As facetious as it sounds, I wonder how many people who have developed this creative skill might find outlets elsewhere. I’m not saying they should write fiction, but who knows?

It’s strange as I think over this insight. I realize some people I’ve seen, some I despise, really do have a skill. It’s just been used or developed in ways making the world worse.

-Xenofact