Dear user.. welcome to tsubi.club. I am grateful you’re here. This inaugural post goes up on the 5 year anniversary of our first release, burbank house. It’s kind of like a birthday.
In an attempt to repel the death anxiety that comes with celebrating the passage of time, I’ll be opening up my tscrapbook (tsubi scrapbook) to conduct some kind of examination of everything that’s happened so far.
This will come in two parts: the first post being a look at my approach to creating for this project, and the second being a more exhaustive beat-for-beat recounting in which I’ll speak on every plot point, marking the impact it had on the evolution of tsubi club overall.
First things first (and it is hard to put this eloquently without sounding totally lost in the sauce): tsubi club is a catalog of work about the process of making it. It is art in exploration of why it is being created.
Early on we adopted the mantra “a means to an end, an end to the means”, which is an optimistic spin on the adage of ends “justifying the means”. In my experience as an independent artist in end-game capitalist American dystopia, a life dedicated to creating is impossible without commodifying what you make in some kind of way. Everyone is familiar with what a mess that can become.
Tsubi club is an attempt to remedy this situation. Maybe it makes more sense to say I’m (naively) trying to make some kind of chicken and egg scenario for myself where the ends=the means and it all gets to be the parts that I enjoy and spiritually align with. This is all an attempt to close the gap between craft and what necessarily follows after, which is the laborious refinement and presentation of what you make in some kind of marketplace.
Confused? So am I. I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. Do you see the pattern here? Let’s continue.
I’ve made a timeline chart outlining everything that’s happened in the world of tsubi club so far:
Some of the points in this timeline are outlined in red. I’ve made that distinction to highlight two different kinds of tsubi club releases.
In red are the more “official” tsubi club projects, which I have a difficult time defining. These are the projects that employ tsubi club as more of a collective methodology. Each of those releases originated from a place of wanting to create something outside of my own personal means and abilities.
They are collaborative multimedia efforts shaped by an emphasis on all contributors having the opportunity to do the same: to stretch their legs and work toward something large-scale, yet independently expressive. They are oftentimes incohesive in style and technique, yet focused in execution.
With each official release we had a clearly defined goal at the onset of the project: an overly polished indie debut, a multidisciplinary artbook, a narrative-focused music video incorporating various methods of animation into live action footage. It is important to note that these goals always walk the line of being too elaborate to pull off independently, which I’ve found to be profoundly motivating in a collaborative scenario.
Regardless of the given project at hand, the commonality remains that we are looking to see ourselves in what we individually contribute, and feel accomplished in the unique flavor and grandiosity we’re able to achieve when we combine our strengths. I hold on to that approach like it is the one diamond truth I will ever find. It has provided me with some of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
Is that just how it feels to collaborate with an open heart and it’s not some awesomely unique thing we specifically discovered? Probably, but I’m going to choose to make it my whole thing anyway because I find it all very epic.
The unmarked points on the timeline contrast that approach completely. These are personal projects and experiments that come from a focus on exploring my own craft as an artist. They have no clearly defined goal at the onset, and I am less interested in their accomplishment than what I find in my process, which I try to keep as close to playing with clay as I can. Projects like trinket or the rhythm game experiments come to fruition by distilling a disparate collection of work created with zero intention other than to play into a singular and meaningful form.
Despite the differences I can identify in these two approaches, I can liken both methods to using combination as a tool to legitimize ideas. In my personal work, I combine small, unfocused ideas and experiments to create something larger that I can retroactively narrativize. In our collaborative work, we combine individual skillsets and creative contributions to operate on a scale outside our individual means.
All of this comes from a very unplanned place. It feels like a sleight of hand trick where we all throw whatever we’re most excited about into a bucket, dump it all out on a table, and then find a way to make it seem like the mess was our plan all along. I am like a moth to the flame of how it feels to pull that off.
Curious. Any psychologists reading this with insight on everything I just said should consider emailing soren@tsubi.club.
With my (our?) approaches laid out, It’ll be a lot easier to derive some kind of meaning from my next post, where I’ll play-by-play break down every point in the timeline. Again, thanks for being here. I am excited to have a blog I can yap on. I hope you find all this interesting.
Until next time :)
