So..a couple of weeks back I was talking to a young musician who was wondering what it is to be a young musician in the age of AI.

After an introductory preamble, they paused, presumably looking for some insight or a perspective that would solidify their understandable confusion about how the course of their life might unfold with, you know..‘everything that’s going on these days.’

With that lovely gap of silence the first phrase that crawled around at the back of my tongue was somewhere in the category of useless phrases like, “So..what can I do to help?”, and as much as I knew the offer could be seen as generous, it was also useless in this context insofar as I imagine if they knew what would help, they would’ve asked for that already, which, in a way, they did.

But maybe they were not looking for help.

From nowhere I could discern, I started telling a story. It started as most nonsequitor’s start which is to say I don’t know where precisely this story made sense until I started telling it.

In the hour before that call, I had another call. I had no clear idea who I was talking to except that I had ordered a curious box from them that felt like it had come from 1994. And I wanted to talk to them about this intriguing bit of world design they had engaged in and — I dunno — discuss and admire their work in that regard.

But I still didn’t know what specifically was in the box, except it indexed to a website that was some kind of late twentieth century self-help program or materials or °something° of that sort. Somethign evocative of that moment, and for its clever incongruity with the here-and-now, and for its resonance with a felt era I had lived through — well, I was just, you know..in that reverie of familiarity for something that had been.

Turns out the the box — the container — and the elements surrounding it (the website, the materials in the box like the cassette tape and such) were all part of a design fiction project that riffed on the self-help culture of the late 20th century, but with a twist that made it relevant to contemporary issues.

But this was a very specific kind of design fiction project in that it was primarily the first of a series of what we traditional would call a ‘record album’.

It’s a fair bit of world building, and-also or primarily a collection of music that just happens to not be pressed onto vinyl or whatever as one might expect an album to be (or used to be, depending).

I reckon soon I’ll have more to say about the specific project but this is the story I told. A musician (who just happens to have spent a fair bit of time as such as a sound producer at Radio Lab so, like..‘credible’) imagined a world, imagined a container for that world, and did more than feel inspired by it: they created material artifacts that provided entry points into that world — a curious 80s vibe website and videos, remixes of the ontologies, anxieties, hopes, fears, desires of that era — and related it through a tapestry of visual and audio textures into the present moment.

As the story was decanting from my brain into the Zoom nozzle in real time, I started sensing its purpose which was neither profound nor bursting with insight: there is a kind of creative audacity to call a box of stuff and the world it implies a music album.

This isn’t new. Most of David Byrne‘s oeuvre has been exploring adjacent terrains and containers for ages. The “things in boxes” mode, for example: “Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information” (book + DVD: music + animation) reads as a tongue-in-cheek poke at the PowerPoint universe, and also as genuine worldbuilding through craft. Countless trad type (vinyl, cassette tape, cd) containers of lyrical stories we call ”record albums” reflect deep worldbuilding through sound and music, from Pink Floyd to Radiohead to Bjork to Tyler. The Creator, to The Flaming Lips, etc.

And I suppose this was the point I was rolling around with my chin-wagging: however well we operationalize stacks and services to maintain a presence in the consciousness of the endpoints of the internet, creativity doesn’t happen there.

It happens in finding both the curiosity and confidence (and audacity) to refuse to accept the given forms. It happens in imagining otherwise. It happens in finding one’s shape as distinct from the packaged and preserved, the off-the-rack identities already hanging in the storefront.

So that happened. I told that story. It felt like it made sense to both sides of the chat.

And then at the end of that week I went to see Kahlil Joseph’s film BLKNWS:Terms and Conditions without having anything close to an understanding as to what it was, let alone what it was about. And what I came away with is a reinforcement of this sense that audacity, more than recrimination, is where there is hope for imagining other kinds of habitable worlds.

BLKNWS has an opening title card that implores audience — who is there to watch, remember — to receive what is about to be revealed as a sonic album; allow the textures of sound and images to wash over you as you might sit and listen — perhaps eyes shut — to a trad music album from start to finish.

Whoa.

Kahlil Joseph’s creative genius may be in the audacity to imagine that a “movie” can be other than a three-act structured thing with an inciting incident and all the rest. That we are told from the first moments that this is not what it is, and then are taken by the hand through a multi-layered visual collage that holds together through TikTok clips and an expanse of story that spreads across generations while also allowing for a sci-fi visual bed that challenges what sci-fi can become..

At the end of the week that I told that story to the young musician about a box that contained a video player that claims itself as an album, and saw the film that asked me to watch it like music my sense of things focussed into something felt and simple: creativity doesn’t live in the stacks, the services, the distribution logic, the endpoints.

It lives in the audacity to choose (and teach) a different container. To refuse the default form. To insist the work be received on different terms.

And maybe that’s the only practical kind of hope: not recrimination, not status seeking, not name-calling, not blanket refusals to explore, nor critique-as-a-lifestyle. Rather finding the way to bring the stubborn, specific act of making other forms, other containers for carrying the freight of meaning — places for other ways of being such that other kinds of worlds become possible to sense, see, and try climbing into.

Which makes me think of this: in this kind of season that’s filled with literal containers — all the boxes, wrapping paper, gift bags, objects of worlds we’d like to be a part of..all that stuff — this makes me feel with a particular clearity that the most meaningful work often doesn’t fit in the container with the familiar and default shape.

If you’re building new containers, reframing the brief, or dreaming up ways to make a project feel like a gift: I’d love to be part of it in the year ahead.