Goals, Projects, and a Quick Update:
Happy new year!
I’ve set some goals for 2025 that I thought I’d share and chronicle here - as good a place as any I suppose.
Art wise I have a few projects I’m excited about:
A new photo every week
An EP of field recordings every quarter
A blog post every month.
Four Imaginal Space Travel videos
A finished prototype of the Transmissions Device
These are some ambitious goals, but I need something like them to push the work forward. I was able to meet my New Years resolution for 2024 (learned to skateboard and had a consistent yoga practice) so I figured I could add 5 more things no problem! /s
I may change my mind, but for now I’m posting my weekly photos on Instagram and Bluesky. I’ll link them below for you to check out.
https://www.instagram.com/jessekblack/
https://bsky.app/profile/jessekblack.com
I anticipate the challenge will lie in all the audio projects. They’re relatively time consuming in a way that photography or even the video pieces aren’t. The device prototype will also take considerable trial and error with a good amount of moving parts in terms of hardware.
I’ve still been making recordings, but I haven’t seen a through line in them that makes sense compositionally. Hopefully that will change this summer at the latest: Jamie and I are strongly considering going to the Black Hills for our birthdays, and I’m sure I’ll make an EP from the trip. The Mississippi River keeps popping into my head for some reason as well.
Lastly, I’ve been meditating frequently on preservation. I’ll speak about this further in another post, but I recently picked up a copy of Rare Earth by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, and am slowly getting through it. Unfortunately, I think it’s triggered some cynicism in me I thought was at bay. The Earth is such a special place, and the disregard towards the effect of our choices is seeming to grow.
The following thought has been spreading throughout my mind: maybe the only thing left to do is thoughtfully record as much as possible so that when it’s all gone, we (or some other species) might have some idea of what’s been lost.
Which begs the question:
How do you preserve the truth of a place? Of our experience with it? Photography? Audio? Something else? When I’m standing in the prairie in awe of the cosmic circumstances that had to align for that moment to be possible - how can I communicate that to someone else? I feel an urgent need to make something that can capture all that, but maybe that individual experience is what makes complex life like us special.
I’m beginning to understand that these questions are what I aspire my art to engage with, and I hope to gain some insight on these thoughts by the end of 2025.
Below is the first photo of the year - A group of friends running during some crazy snowfall in midtown.
