Improve your creative output with mistakes, perfection through imperfection, less shortcuts – more soul.
This essay is meant to destroy gatekeepers – even the ones in our heads – so we can creative with what weâve got, in the service of what matters.
You probably learned to be creative digitally, and unfortunately that means taking as many shortcuts as possible to get to the result. I mean making things as easy as possible is baked into how we do things and hard to resist in this competitive society.
The result we desire is also influenced by the high production standards of âprofessionalâ creative output – which has inaccessible until recently and which we still tend to want to emulate to elevate our art in others eyes.
Contained here are some ideas to counter that, which feed my creativity day in day out, in music production, visual design, web design and game dev.
Theyâll make you immune to creative blocks, and will help you find new creative satisfaction in whatever youâre making.
Look, here are the main takeaways if you think this post is too long.
Get into the process as if you were in kindy. Own as much of the process as you can. Embrace the naivete if youâre not an expert: things donât have to be as polished as they used to.
When you make things, imperfections will be embedded in every layer. Your work will have a different effect. Avoid adding fake analog effects as post-process to achieve some kind of feel. Developed the feel as part of the process.  When you make things, thereâs an unfolding process that youâre never in full control of and often leads to much more interesting and personal creations.
Computers have democratised creativity, making it easier and faster to make things. But there have been real tradeoffs with this. When youâre creating as means to and end, you take as many shortcuts as possible, like using assets, or AI. This is less organic, less human, and encourages loss of skill.
Now all that isnât important when youâre not trying to be an artist. But digital production techniques are designed for efficiency, so itâs hard to engage in a full creative process in digital mediums.
For example, assets. When elements are sourced from third parties, theyâre as good, clean and professional as can be. The opportunity for mistakes, and even a little naivete, is limited.
But look, Iâve been working with shortcuts since I started out creating digitally. For example sound loops and presets are built into my music production software, and WordPress themes and theme builders are handy starting points.
None of this is bad, they just tends to discourage process, in the name of making creativity more accessible, which is also really, really good.
But to be honest I regret starting with those shortcuts and wish I learned more in-depth processes. I wish I recorded more sounds and understood synthesis. Recently, Iâve started learning how to add the humanity back into my work by owning more of the process. There is ugliness, but there is more of me in everything, and Iâm leaning into the grit.
Dirt is this term I use for this because itâs the opposite of clean, which is what you tend to get when you skip parts of the process.
But this is not about âdirty vs cleanâ with dirty being good. Itâs really about improving your creative process, to recover integrity and humanity, and produce more interesting, personal, organic and ultimately, satisfying work.
That work I guess could end up being clean if you wanted it to and you had the skills. So hmmm. Anyway though, Iâm sticking with âTheory of Dirty,â because for most people, thatâs what it will mean. Embracing the imperfections of a high-integrity creative process.
OK so now how does this work in practice. Letâs start by breaking the concept of dirt down:
Itâs the same reason we like anything: it makes us feel good. It humanises things, making them closer.
Itâs unpretentious, redirecting focus to the intention, rather than execution.
Dirty is belies a process rich with thought and care, showing us that a thing has meaning and value for the maker, and inviting us to discover meaning and value for ourselves.
Imperfections tell a story, a story of the making, and over time, a story of the using. They lets us feel the weight of honest human endeavour. It connects us to the artist.
It also foregrounds non-technical aspects of the artwork like meaning and intention.
Dirt, or imperfections, invite us to use our imagination. There is more to look at, more to feel. Our eyes are stimulated, as are our minds: subtitles that hint at greater context, giving rise to open ended questions about it.
Weâre talking about a human appreciation for naturalness and imperfection. Maybe it makes things feel natural or accessible. Itâs not hat-tipping to the past. These are all things that arenât bad, but in terms of creativity and creative process, theyâre a little⌠bothersome. 2010s were influenced by the hipster aesthetic, which was mostly shallow. Dirtiness conversely it the result of what we do, and if we specifically like it dirty, we do things in a way that will be dirty. But the medium is not the message.
Later Steely Dan is 100% analog. But itâs not in any way dirty. Its tight. I remember dad using it to show me how tight the bass was in his new speaker setup (1990). In this theory weâre not arguing digital vs analog. Both can be clean or dirty.
I donât blame digital, really, or even the computer. I blame the race to the âfinish lineâ they enabled.
Dirtiness of any form shouldnât be the intention. For example, taking photos just so you can have a grainy photo. This is a part of dirtiness as a result of artistic process. The art would still be art without the dirtiness. The dirtiness just makes it more human, relatable, and hints at the process, the magic.
There are effects everywhere to make something seem older. They usually take a finished process and apply the kind of destruction that youâd see in a particular type of medium, like VHS. These are all about the effect, like the hat-tipping mentioned above. And as weâre talking about creativity, weâre going to ignore these because theyâre applied after the thing is made. Of course thatâs not to say you canât use them creatively, but letâs face it itâs a little cheap. Not that a lot of art in the digital sphere isnât cheap.
The best examples of dirty are analog as analog lends itself more to dirty (but by no means exclusively). I have a book of posters from punk bands. This counts highly. From a purely design standpoint, these posters are pretty uninteresting. But their low-end production methods make them pleasurable to look at, to mull over. There are stories everywhere⌠the fingerprints of the artist are clear. Its unskilled, careless, on top of plenty of medium and capture noise.
Dirty shouldnât be a style, it should be come from the method. The process should be a dirty. Even if the results are the same (they wonât be), a dirty process is more fun.
At one end, youâve got dirt as a completely incidental result of process, where dirt is incidental to the intention of the art. In the middle youâve got encouraged or teased dirt, where the dirt is incorporated in the message. At the other end, youâve got art that exists as a medium for the dirt, where the dirt is what the artist wants to achieve.
Now you can fake that in digital, getting most of the way perhaps. But it will be a destructive process, not a constructive one â and thatâs different. And youâll be going for a look, instead of making a thing. Thatâs different too. To someone looking at the results, perhaps it wonât matter how it was made (Iâd wager that over time, the constructive process will be come out on top), but to the person making it, thereâs a world of difference in mindset. In one case, youâre wagging your tail. In the other case, youâre chasing it. Wait- is that what âthe tail doesnt wag the dogâ means?
Zines too â when made with a photocopier⌠not so much when theyâre made to look like theyâre made with a photocopier. (But who has a photocopier?)
Restricting yourself additive process can help in this regard. Think about how when writing with a manual typewriter you arenât able to change words already written. If you want them to be different, you need to re-write. Itâs a completely different process, one which lends itself to the artefacts of process. In electronic music, try not deleting sounds but capturing your production at different stages and re-working the samples into itself.
It can be naivety (naive art), which I personally think of as art made by people who are inspired to make, but donât have a high level of skill in the medium. This isnât to say what they make is bad, people love naive art. It takes a fair bit of courage and also a fair bit of disregard for gatekeepers (they can really get in your head and stop you making things sometimes). To me, the underlying structures and meanings of art is more important than the competence of the production. When I think of this, I think of punk rock,
That brings us to our next topicâŚ.
Making something in the computer, with no process, is easier, and requires less investment of time and material. The downside of this, artistically, this means a lack of commitment. I know in my own case, I was able to explore many creative roads, digitally, and that has effectively meant I never travelled very far down them â or at least not all the way. None of them needed to pay off because I had only really invested my time.
The upshot of all this is that I now have an incorrect understanding of the value of time. I think our generation is beginning to understand where we have gone wrong here, and we are starting to slow down a little.
Again, digital workflows are fine, but consider not taking advantage of all the shortcuts people tend to take with digital, and create your art with as much manual input as possible. It sounds like Iâm arguing for absolutes here â but really Iâm just looking for ways to improve my process and evolve my own creativity â and unlearn some bad habits.
One of the advantages of real-world processes, is that they are more social. When physical resources are required, you need to get off your chair and out in the world. Sometimes you might need to do whatever art socially.
I feel like younger people get this, whereas people in their late 30s and 40s might be slightly damaged due to the infatuation with digital processes they that has dominated the last two decades.
While Iâm not advocating explicitly for analog, I guess the workflows I think would work best with dirty are not computer-based, or are perhaps in and out of the computer.
In my early 20s I and worked in Melbourne while producing music late into the night in my bedroom. I would walk past many clubs on my way home, attracted, but shy. Even at uni for design in my 30s, I would avoid group work. As a creative loner, I would love to go back in time and be more social with my art.
Donât be like me! Get out of the computer! Join a club and meet people who love what you love!
Wes Anderson films are dirty. The fingerprints of the filmmaker are all over them. There are subtle and human imperfections everywhere. Camera shots are always straight on to the background, but the lenses are wide, distorting the lines. You can see the flim-making â itâs not invisible like it âshouldâ be.
All this is deliberate. However in the directors commentary on the Darjeeling Limited, Wes takes a phone call. And leaves it in. Dirty bugger.
Wrong notes, bumps and static, these things let us feel the humanness of art. Electronic musicians not quantizing their melodies to the beat. Or not even quantizing their beat to the time.
Digital production can give us things that technically correct and realistic, but weâre waking up to the fact that realism â immersion. We can suspend all kinds of sensibilities when it comes to the surface level of things, but what we canât suspend is a need for deeper connection with art.
This applies to capturing images, but could be translated to other mediums. Dirty framing means things like dirty lenses, shooting through windows or other imperfect screens. It distorts the image, but is wholly natural and often translates to a sense of place and time.
Wong Kar Waiâs films are dirt extravaganzas. The dialog is only loosely connected to the âplot,â as if everything is slightly off tangent. Aside from questionable white balance and saturation, his frames are often abstracted with refraction, reflection, angles, and what looks like diffusion filters the kind which are becoming popular in photography. Handheld camerawork with no or little stabilisation. Itâs not like there is no care put in. The compositions, lighting, it all looks very deliberate. But once the scene is set and the camera is rolling, things play out very naturally and freely.
Wong Kar Waiâs cinematographer is Andrew Doyle. Usually there is no specific shot list, instead the crew turns up to a location with a script (or not), and looks for inspiration in the location. This means going over time and budget, but leads to unique synchronicity.
Check out Why THE BATMAN Is So Beautiful | A Cinematography Video Essay.
Reproducing things, for example digital to analog and back again â a technique used in many mediums, is a good way to introduce dirt â usually a constant, slight dirt, unless the margins are captured in some way.
The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails was recorded in the mid 90âs on an early version of Pro Tools running on Mac. Reznor digitally captured analog performances which were treated and arranged the software before being recorded back to analog tape (or something like that â more on the process here). The main point is the back and forth between digital and analog, using both or either when it suited the creative vision. This made The Downward Spiral unique and as timeless as it is hard to listen to in parts.
This medium is a great one to explore dirt because the mainstream still thinks a good photo is âtechnically perfect,â and there are so few creative photographers compared to the rest.
Thereâs a lot of ways to do it: grain/noise, ICM (intentional camera movement), focus, off-framing, dirtying the frame, diffusion (or other filters), off white balance, long exposure, resolution, saturation, and multiple exposure â all ways to dirty up your image.
Daido Moriyama has popularised âare, bure, bokeâ â or ârough, blurry, and out of focus.â
The most common way to achieve dirt in photography, is to use grain or noise. This is mimicking older mediums. Most digital photos are so clean these days that most apply noise it in post, but you can also shoot at higher ISO to achieve noise. Some cameras also apply a noise filter automatically, which I use without too much guilt. Shooting at high ISO isnât always practical. This is why other ways to achieve noise are perhaps better.
Photo filters (and post processing film simulations) are right on the borderline for me. They finish my photos in a way that feels part of the process, but yet they are filters you whack on your art after the fact. They make your photos look analog, but they also make them look⌠better⌠and here lies an important distinction: the intention behind your digital process.
As an alternative Iâve been experimenting with setting the simulation in camera, as well as limiting the effectiveness of the camera in other ways. This definitely results in a less âusableâ photo (not that I ever âuseâ my photos), but always a more interesting one.
This started as an attempt to inject some fun into photography, to bring the creative process back into the tool and back into the moment.
Iâve also been messing around with writing on my photos, digitally, using procreate. This is a great example of a digital process that incorporates the human element.
You could think of glitch art as the art of digital destruction becoming creation. Itâs great because not only is it all about the process- how things are copied, transferred, displayed, itâs about stressing the underlying system in ways that produce unpredictable results: the process is an attack on the medium itself. Itâs a great conceptual example of dirt, because the dirt becomes the actual art (there is no art without the dirt here).
Glitch art is pretty technical â youâre screwing with digital systems in ways that are much more likely to break them completely than result in some pleasing artefacts. But you could translate the interruption into other mediums. Any level of jitter in the âbackgroundâ of the medium might be a way:
Iâve been longing to get back to a more natural state in my creativity. But with the conveniences of digital, it feels weird to be going out of my way to make something more natural. The more I do this though, the more I learn that it is worth it.
Iâve been wondering what it is I like about analog â and specifically, dirty analog.
Digital as the transfer medium, not the medium.
Being dirty in production means the dirt of one stage will feed into the next, so dirt accumulates â here hidden, here poking out.
Sonic Youth is dirty. The dirtiest, maybe, if you donât count the 5,6,7,8s who sing with no regard for frequency, in their second language. But itâs not just loosey goosey analog music that can be dirty. Electronic music is evolving this way too.
In the 90s you needed a room full of heavy, power-hungry and prohibitively expensive equipment to make professional music. But in 2005, I had a track released that I had made exclusively on a computer. I would not be able to have done this in the 90s without a next-level level of commitment.
So I canât say that we shouldnât make things with computers. And I donât want to! But maybe itâs fun to limit the involvement of the computer sometimes, and producing sounds in the real world, and use the computer to put it together. Great dirtiness is found this way â in play. Achieving dirtiness deliberately takes the fun out of it. It still might be fun to listen to, but Iâd bet not as fun.
You can get dirty in sound by modulating digital sounds with analog ones. For example, changing the volume of a track by side-chaining in another loop. In my track Gravity in Space, I ran a noise gate over some of the sounds and modulated like that. Once I had setup how it worked, it was out of my control, and thatâs what I wanted.
Electronic music is by default clean.
Using textured samples directly in your music is a bit cheaty and potentially not that dirty.
In 2004 I bought a world music sample CD to help me produce the kind of music I liked. I was shocked to realise all the samples were already in my favourite music.
Try record your own sounds. Mix them with your digital sounds in weird ways, like modulating midi and plugins with side-chains. Skip quantization on some, or most, of your tracks, especially when it isnât really necessary.
Stop buying plugins and sample packs to get more sounds and start working with what youâve got.
Grunge
Strangely, a lot of metal and grunge isnât that dirty. Thereâs distortion, but itâs well controlled and pretty consistent over time. Smells Like Teen Spirit (my actual favourite song) and much of Nirvanaâs Nevermind fits this, especially in contrast with Nirvanaâs other music. Metallicaâs Enter Sandman is another example.
Holeâs Live Through This is a good example of a grungier grunge.
These are some artists who make music that reveals the process. I love them because they didnât have to go through whatever process to make their music, but they did, because they like it. Feel free to suggest a listen below.
Dirty means different things when applied to different medium. If you take the laziness of Sonic Youth vocals and translate that to the web, what have you got? Dirty on the web could mean raw, unrefined websites. It could mean graphically dirty elements, but I donât like this because it would need to be done carefully to ensure the content is accessible. The web is a complex and volatile medium which you can break easily even when not being experimental.
Most of the time in web design as it is today youâre designing containers for content, meaning you create templates that will be reused, such as the layout for this page.
Itâs hard to think of what dirty web design is. Web design is a very subtractive process. People donât often use the web naively. But one example might be Myspace profiles at the peak of the early (1.0) net before Javascript fucked everything up in the early 2000s. Another might be Geocities, or early 1.0 user-generated pages in general.
I admit, Iâm not much of a reader. But dirty writing could be writing that gets distracted, that lets the author jump around a littleâŚ.. disjointed plots, writing that maybe even shows some of the process. Of course, it wouldnât be spelling mistakes etc, but it could be a relaxed use of ârules.â
Itâs easy to produce in digital, but paradoxically, only when youre doing it in predictable ways. Itâs sometimes harder to do something new, when you donât have the âsoftwareâ for it, or the digital skillset. Thereâs a learning curve that isnât there in analog, and sometimes that makes it harder, to the extent that a creative will choose to do something else, something they know how to do, and abandon their inspiration. This is fairly tragic, and Iâd like to encourage anyone who encounters this feeling (because it is barely conscious most of the time), to think about how they might achieve what they want in weird, unplanned or analog ways.
In the short term, AI is set to replace a lot of creative output for business. Services like canva make it easy to combine elements, services like Chat GPT make it easy to produce content and generate ideas, and products such as Dall E and allow non visual to create the images they need.
In the long term though, mainstream use of AI in the creative process will mean the art of human makers will be more valuable. Less people will be able to create new and unique art from scratch, and the ones that do will be those that value process. People interested in creating art will avoid the kind of shortcuts we take today because there will be no point in partial processes (why not just use the AI). The creative arts could even bifurcate, with means-to-an-end, commercially driven, AI assisted production on one hand, and more personal, process-driven art on the other. This isnât a bad future at all, I just hope AI generated things will be labelled.
(c) Me forever
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