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026 - SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CANVAS

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026 - SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CANVAS

Elijah tell us how to create art online without losing your message

MORNING
Aug 10, 2023
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026 - SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CANVAS

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MØRNING! It’s a strange time for creativity. While the internet offers infinite new ways to make art, capitalist digital structures have us in a chokehold. Rather than being free to express and connect, our online lives are stifled by algorithms and engagement metrics. 

So how do we navigate this chaotic digital and creative doomscape? How can we use technology to create and share our art, without compromising our message? This week, Elijah - artist manager, DJ, and the brilliant mind behind those iconic Yellow Squares - shares wisdom that we all need to hear. Dare you not to feel inspired.


@eli1ah’s yellow squares

Introducing the Yellow Squares

I started Yellow Squares to bring new ideas into the post lockdown atmosphere. We all wondered what the music and creative scenes would look like about months of closure. There was a yearning for equality post the Black Lives Matter June 2020 pledges. Marginalised voices were being put front and centre of the reopening of everything.

There was a distinct appetite for change. But the live music industry was on its knees. I believed that the shift the next generation wanted to see wasn’t going to happen by liaising with the previous era. It was about starting new things from scratch. Lots of collectives had emerged online, new artists were breaking through, and people were figuring out ways to make this work. 

I wrote short notes about creative sustainability, scene building and the creative industry, from the perspective of a London based artist manager working in the electronic music scene. 

Prioritising ideas vs instruction meant things could have many different interpretations and apply across artforms, scenes and nations.

Art, online 

This gradually turned into a project that made me question how artists use social media itself. 

The reality? 90% of it is advertising. Tour posters, Teasers, #ads. Not a lot of what you would follow an artist for. 

How often do you click the link in bio? How often is there genuinely great art on the platforms that takes up so much of our mindshare day to day? I thought about how to intertwine practice ideas for scene building and a public art practice.

I picked black and yellow as these were the colours for the first record label I ran, Butterz. It was much later that I realised this looked like a post it note.

Elijah
Elijah on Instagram: “Social Media is a canvas [v3] We can all make this space a lot more creative, inspiring and informative if we move away from treating this purely as an advertising board. Most people will not click the link in bio to your work elsewhere, so finding ways you can make what you do fit within these squares is a good way to make sure people can actually see what you are trying to get across. It’s crazy to me when musicians promoting their new songs don’t have it in the posts or stories. When DJs are telling you to come to their shows but aren’t really sharing what they are listening to or buying or what you can expect etc. Go as low effort or as high effort as you like… it’s about approach and thinking about this as your main vessel of communication of what you do. Included two excellent examples of people doing this in this post @yaw_on_insta who shares videos of him making beats regularly with lots of cool gear.
&
@niallashley who is a painter and 3D artist who has probably the best reel I’ve ever seen. Incredible work! Last slide is a bit of process to how I landed on this 🟨 Check them out!”
September 14, 2022

Why are we on social media in the first place?

Most importantly, what would make it a better place to be? Social Media Is A Canvas: I think it’s having information that will help you in your life, to be inspired to create, and to be entertained. As artists of any discipline what we share on there should satisfy one of these 3 boxes or it’s going to bypass most people. Don’t think about likes and shallow comments like a fire emoji. Think about what would motivate someone to share your post, and or leave some deep feedback. 

What is deep feedback?

Leave behind all the vanity metrics people want you to chase after. Followers, likes and to a certain extent streams, especially if they are coming from passive playlists. What we want is connection over engagement. Some of my posts I’ve had 1000 word long Instagram DMs, songs made in response to them, or invites to come and speak across the world. These haven’t been on the posts that have the largest engagement statistics either. But they moved someone enough to make a tangible difference in their world because of it. That is what we want our art, writing, music or whatever we are sharing to do. This can happen whether you have 20 followers or 20,000.

Elijah
Elijah on Instagram: “A rare 🟨 on friendship”
February 23, 2023

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Experiment with mediums

‘New music won’t blow through old distribution’ was one of my early notes that connected. What I meant by this is if you are a musician, don’t limit the way you share your music ideas to songs, to streams, to pop star style roll outs, when you likely don’t have the resources to compete at the same level of visibility. Doing all the things that the stars in your world don’t do is a different way of letting your ideas cut through, and finding an audience in an unusual way. This is a constant state of an openness to experimenting and a fearlesses of putting ideas out there. Most won’t work, but when it does, it will work in a different way to everything else. 

Fold the real world into your socials

Whatever your core messages are, they need to find a way to live outside of these apps. My way of making my messages connect outside in the real world was by putting up billboards of my posts in the area I live in. The people that saw them, and recognised it as my work, took photos of them, posted it on their socials too. It created this feedback loop of discovery, that wasn’t advertising to buy anything. But it was giving people a reason to come into the world I’ve created. That's enough of an ask from your audience sometimes. Buying something can come later.

Bringing Yellow Square to life IRL

Give yourself space to create work that you need no public validation for

Creating art, and trying to make money from it is hard as it is. But what can completely take away all the joy from this is creating, feeling like you need this next thing to hit another metric. If it needs to be a side project, a collaboration, something completely different. Create things that have no intention to live in this ecosystem. What you learn from these experiments will no doubt blend into your public work too. Nobody needs to know. 

What’s changed since I’ve started the project?

It’s made me question the work I do thoroughly. The reasons I started aren’t the same reasons I’m here today and that realisation has taken a long time to adjust to. It’s been a journey of self reflection and most of the positive change that this helped me make in my life will never be shared with the public too. That makes me feel at peace with wherever the project goes next. 


MØRNING asks Elijah

- which social media accounts do you think are worth opening the app for?

I enjoy following artists when they aren't in campaign [not working with brands]. That's usually when they are more interesting. Things can be random, and you can see some tweaking ideas in real time before they find the next thing. 

- what's your most recent saved IG post and why did you save it?

I don't like or save anything, if it's worth remembering I'll remember it. It's a good mental test. 

- what's the weirdest account you follow?

Maybe not so weird, but I enjoy watching the Space X progress, so probably that.

- what was the last piece of art to blow your mind?

Jim Legxacy - HNP

- what's the best place to find inspiration offline?

Live everything - music, sport, comedy, art. People creating in real time in this city will always be a buzz.

- if you had ownership over the internet, what's the first thing you'd do?

Make sure everyone across the world has access to high speed connections for freeeeeeeeee

Elijah
Elijah on Instagram: “Man like July, man like 36. A mad 12 months. Thanks for all the love on the album with @jammzthemyth, the lectures and the ideas. Some of the things I’ve learned through this project over the last year: There’s no social media metric that means anything to me. If I’m tracking anything it’s deep feedback here and in real life, the attendance at events, and the things that people are making in response to the work I do here. A lot of people want to DJ. If you have new ideas and can organise you should start labels. Put some new music into the ecosystem. Label in the broadest sense - a collection of ideas organised by a small group or one person. Whatever format or medium that the music works in. The convergence of my interests that previously never used to overlap is making my life a lot easier and work possibilities infinite. Small number of views / dm’s / vibes on ‘original’ idea on owned platform > mid number on the thing everyone does. You might be onto something when you don’t have a direct comparison for an idea you are building. I’m now old enough for young people I speak to to be describing a back in the day that I was actually there for as better, that I can inform them, wasn’t better, just different. I’m going to spend the majority of the summer away from the internet to give this part of my brain and the squares a rest, and develop some more layers to this project. Have a good summer 🖤💛”
July 1, 2023

That’s (almost) all for today. One final thing from us: if you want to see a MØRNING panel talk, we’d love it if you voted for us to be at SXSW here.

Now go forth and create! We’ll see you next time.

Words: Elijah (@eli1ah)

Editor: Letty Cole (@letty_cole)

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026 - SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CANVAS

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026 - SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CANVAS

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Emily Chapps
Aug 10Author

"Social Media is a Canvas" is my go to quote - loved reading this Elijah!

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