Style degradation and the emergence of evolving context

The other day I was talking with a friend, discussing the importance of context and how we need to understand what we surround ourself with. You see, for the longest time I believed I could watch horrific images, videos and stories, and become stronger by desensitizing myself by overcoming the disgust of it all. All the classic internet underground stuff, from beheadings to perverted acts – sites like stileproject, ogrish and rotten (I know, I know, terrible stuff.) I had also been interested in the idea of “creating reality” where you supplement your life with positive thinking to help manifest your own desires. Intrinsically, I think I’ve always felt that “attraction mechanism” to be a little bullshit, but it has been recently linked to some theories of quantum mechanics, (the observer theory) and I realized that we still pretty infantile in our understanding of reality, so I thought “hey, maybe this IS possible!”  But after a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that surrounding yourself with certain things works, but not as effectively as many of those activists might tout. It can be explained simply by science: the waking memory is a place that records relevant experiences that are later transcribed to the other part of the hemisphere, and then used conceptually. But during that process, some information is lost, so the quality of the data is degraded. It’s sort of like upscaling a raster image – you lose pixels along the way, and the clarity of that image suffers. And the most important part of our ability to memorize experience is our ability to understand the context of that experience. So in that respect I think trying to surround yourself with pain and misery, simply to desensitize yourself and thus make you less vulnerable is a fallacy, because over time there is a degradation of context  and the reasoning behind it begins to blur, leaving you with negative feelings that are hard to grasp.

Well having said all that, you might wonder, how does this relate to ARTISTIC STYLE?! Well, I think the same principle of quality degradation applies – but in this sense it’s actually more of a positive result. I can’t think of any artist that hasn’t gained some foresight without idealizing someone else, or without the help of a mentor. It’s the “standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants” principle, and it has worked time immemorial to help evolve the styles of every profession throughout the ages, just like genes evolve through natural selection. But in the process of this foresight, an artist seeks to copy the style of another artist (and as we know, imitation is the highest form of flattery) but is not able to keep the context and clarity of that experience 100% in their mind. So this, in conjunction with each daily experience, and the individual talents and physiological structure of that person, creates a “degraded” style that is unique to them.