TL;DR - Follow me on Instagram — you’ll love it.
Welcome to A Physical Space, where we celebrate all things physical media.
What is A Physical Space? Well, it’s here and over here. A Physical Space is this blog as well as the accompanying Instagram (for now) that features some of the physical media we’re loving at the moment. Not everything can or should be only available to stream.
Who is A Physical Space? It’s me, Noel. But, for the purposes of this informative article, I’ll be using the royal “we” to make it sound like I’m, err, WE’RE cooler and more put together than just some random X-ennial lamenting the lack of video stores, or some such.
Why is A Physical Space? That’s a little longer of an answer…
The advent of digital media has been a game-changer in how we interact with art. It’s made millions and millions of hours of film, music, and media available at lightning speed, as well as reduced the barriers of creating new art. A kid can make a movie with a phone and a dream. This is a good thing.
However, this renaissance of digital and virtual media has also divorced us from the creation of that art. By reducing the physical footprint it leaves, I believe that a completely online product has had an adverse effect on how we value the work that goes into making art. What has more value — the polaroid taken on your first date, one of one, or the cellphone pictures in the cloud, accessible from every device and across every social media platform. There’s a different reverence associated with art you can hold versus that with which you can simply access. More convenient, yes. But I’d also argue that it makes us more detached.
We live in a time where a movie or album that hundreds of people spent years working on, will never be held, spun, or screened, but just blinked into (and out of existence) amongst an endless sea of streaming content. Sure, accessibility has increased, but maybe at the cost of engaging with art and media in our communities. A fully individualized and curated experience that eventually reduces the scope of what we see and can discover.
After decades of moving further and further into streaming, current generations are now moving slightly away from digital-only experiences. Even digital-first content is trying to capture the bygone nostalgia of a video store generation (cough cough Stranger Things). Boutique film labels, cassette tapes and vinyl re-releases, polaroid cameras, board games, arts and crafts nights, film screenings—people across all demographics have a growing hunger for art they can appreciate in hand.
At a time when all of our artistic consumption continues to be a string of 1s and 0s, constantly consolidating into larger and larger global entities, the more I feel the desire, nay, the need, to share the media we have on hand. That’s what A Physical Space is about—to share the cool stuff we can still hold.
