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citation and credit - 20.10.2024

recently i’ve been thinking about citation and influence, how we credit the ideas, works and people that inspire us. i think we sorely lack a comprehensive and representative language for how we mark the turning points of the creative process.

this is part of my love for the social media and link saving site are.na. developed after the closure of serveral popular link based apps in the late 2000’s, they are one of the few success stories of alternative social media. the beauty of are.na is its placement as both a tool and platform for sharing idea’s. it’s like a repository of citation, a chain of idea’s stretching in every direction, showing all the small things that inform a persons creative process and the people they are in ‘dialogue’ with as part of that. sort of similar to the maps of old islamic manuscripts, organising locations by their proximity and routes to other locations.

fig1. excerpt of "Map of Arabia" from the Book of Roads and Kingdoms

fig2 screenshot of the are.na connections tab.

despite the impression given by art shows, artist interviews and the commercial culture of the artistic creative, nothing happens in a vacuum. i feel the biggest influence on my work is the moments of conversing with friends, lovers, acquaintances and strangers, not necessarily just the moments of bouncing ideas for works off of people, but even the smaller conversations. how we are feeling recently, what we’ve done and the texture of the current season.

besides thanks sections and the more formalised editor and reader processes of creditation, we lack a comprehensive way of marking these conversations. giving them the weight they deserve in the creative process. rebuilding my website and revisiting old works i’m realising my own failings in this. hours of conversations lost, with no trace of the lines that informed my early practice other than those given the authority of formalised creditation.

talking with my partner in bed one morning, i was brought back to thinking about what it must have been like when updates in citation allowed people to credit the web materials they wanted to reference or the websites they’d been influenced by. i wonder where that next leap will come. whether it’ll include a more informal structure of creditation. an allowance for the connections made in community with others.

kat

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