The outsider
I remember the first time hearing the term “outsider art” being applied to work I had done. It was spoken by a colleague in the back-handed way people with positional power speak. When I heard the term I knew immediately the real meaning of the words, it’s hard not to know on the outside.
I was already familiar with non-success in art by the time I heard the term. I had failed earlier with an attempt at music. I wrote, recorded, and played rock songs both independently and with friends in groups for years in my early twenties. As the traditional story goes, I never made it big. I bought the drum kit off my band’s last drummer and kept it in closets in the next few apartments I rented. Today I only have some gear left and a few remaining recordings.
The work required for maintaining and growing a music career is done by the artists themselves. The successful ones have someone else’s wealth supporting the effort. I was attempting to pay the dues myself and burnt out ultimately. I did learn a lot about marketing, writing, music, collaboration, production, and more in the process and created what I call art in the end. My music was never brought inside for more than a listen however, and the market picks what it does.
Throughout my time playing music, I was also working at various video game companies as a contract software tester. After my last band ended, I focused on work and secured a full-time position at a casual game company downtown. It was there that I started teaching myself my next artistic pursuit: video.
I was using what is called “imaging” software to test parts of software on PCs. When someone loads up an image state using the software, it reverts all the data of a hard drive, matching the data to when the image state was created. It’s a nuclear fix the IT guy will do to you if needed today. At the same time, Adobe used a timer on their software’s trial period that easily restarts when an image was loaded and the software was reinstalled. I was working long hours software testing with access to lots of computers so I always had one loaded with the Adobe Creative Suite on it to tinker with on down-time. I taught myself Flash CS3 using Adobe’s tutorials and youtube in the same way I had taught myself guitar in high school.
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Part of my self-education included understanding Adobe’s scripting system, actionscript, and that ended up being very important to my story. I wanted to learn it as I have always liked programming. I enjoy solving programming challenges and writing tools for myself. Having some actionscript knowledge in my skillset helped me land my first marketing position at the video game company I was working at. I grew my abilities in Flash, Photoshop, and Illustrator immensely by working alongside professionally trained artists in the department. It was my actionscript abilities that saved me from a jobcut culling though, because of it I was able to transfer to software localization for about a decade. I later returned to marketing with more programming experience (mostly python and javascript by then) to then add professional use of After Effects to my video software skills.
About a year into my second marketing gig, I couldn’t avoid the 4th round of layoffs. The company lost a major lawsuit around being sleazy to their customers, and the covid lockdowns made firing the marketing department easy. There was a glut of unemployed tech workers and video professionals when I lost the job, and most my time at the company was spent performing software localization and testing work, not marketing or video work. I ended up working contracts at other tech companies in their localization departments.
I really enjoyed working with video though. I loved creating a concept, pitching it, storyboarding, timing, audio mixing, and refining the video assets and didn’t mind the short turnaround times and different aspect ratios for each ad. I would very much like to work with video professionally again. With my short experience working marketing at the casual game company (about 2 years total with a good 10 years between marketing jobs), my portfolio needed more and better content to compete however. So like when I was playing in bands while also working, I started creating my own videos while also working.
And that is where I am today. I have found that I prefer making my own stories. Pitching and editing from feedback are good skills to have, but experimenting and failing doesn’t feel bad with my own ideas. I get to collaborate with friends on silly concepts, try new things all the time, and don’t have a deadline for any of the projects. For a while I was playing with deepfake tools, and have recently been focusing on using EbSynth to make rotoscope-type animations. It’s very freeing to have no limits on what I can make.
I may never be accepted as a real artist, I may always be seen as an outsider by comfortable people in power. But I know what I call my art is awesome because I enjoy it, and doing awesome stuff seems like a good idea to me.
Thanks for reading. If you want to check out my videos, this is my favorite so far:
