The internet wants process, but process is private

I keep seeing this advice everywhere now: show the process, not the product. People love a time-lapse of hands pulling a print, the ink going down, the registration being slightly off. Fine. It works. I know it works.

But here's the thing nobody says. The process is the part I actually need to be alone with. That moment when a screenprint is failing and I'm over-inking and the paper is curling and I have no idea if I should finish the run or throw it out, that's not content. That's thinking. I cannot perform it and also do it.

So I post the okay version of the process. The ones that look like a craft video. And the real thinking stays off-camera, and I wonder if what gets seen online is just the choreography of the work, not the work.

I've been going back and forth about this because the numbers are real. The 40-second pulling-a-print clip gets ten times the reach of the finished piece. But I started printmaking because of what the printed image says about copies and originals, not because I wanted to be an ASMR account for paper.

Maybe the answer is boring: post the process that's already done. The work in the frame, not the work in the moment. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned and the performance is part of it now and I should get over myself.

What do you all do when the thing that gets attention isn't the thing you're doing?

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Camille Laurent·1h

I know exactly what you mean. There's a version of process that's presentable and there's the actual thing, and the gap between them is where the work happens. When a figure isn't holding and I'm scraping back paint for the third time, that's not a story I can tell while I'm living it. It's just me and a bad painting.

The time-lapse thing, I get why it seduces people. It looks like honesty. But it's a performance of honesty, and the camera changes the thing it's filming. The hand moves differently when it knows it's being watched.

I've started just not posting the process at all some days. Let the finished thing be a mystery. There's something to be said for that too.

Giulia BrunoOP·1h

"It's a performance of honesty", that's exactly it, and I've been chewing on this for months. The second you set up the camera, you're composing. You're choosing which part of the mess to show. And that's not fake, exactly, but it's not the work either. It's a portrait of the work.

And yeah, I've also stopped posting some days. The weird thing is, the silence gets more engagement than the process posts ever did. People read the gap as something. Maybe they can smell the difference between performed struggle and the real thing, even when they can't name it.

Curious though, the scraping back paint thing. Do you find you can talk about it after, when it's solved? Like, the story only becomes tellable once you're out the other side. That's been my experience with etching, at least. The failed plates are the ones I can finally describe. While I'm in it, it's just noise.

Teddy Lin·24m

the "camera changes the thing it's filming" bit is so real. i tried documenting a piece once and caught myself stopping mid-brushstroke to make sure my hand looked good on the phone, and i was like oh no this is over. it's not honest, it's just a different genre of performance and it's exhausting to maintain.

also "scraping back paint for the third time" ... that's the part nobody wants to watch anyway. it's boring and miserable and you look insane. no wonder we keep it. some things should just be private.

Sol Reyes·1h

God, yes. This is the thing I've never been able to put into words and you just did.

I paint like a disaster. Charcoal everywhere, oil on my arms, and the actual moment where something is FIGHTING me, where I've gone too dark and I don't know if I'm fixing it or destroying it, that's not a behind-the-scenes clip. That's me alone in a room having a crisis. The second I'd point a camera at it, it becomes a performance, and then it's not even the same act anymore.

And I think people can tell the difference too. There's a version of process that feels staged even when it isn't, and there's a version that's real but you only get to see it because the artist already survived it. We post the aftermath and call it the process.

I've started posting the "okay version" too and hating myself a little for it. But the alternative is performing the worst moments of my practice for likes, and that feels like a betrayal of the work itself. You're not alone in this.

Giulia BrunoOP·18m

"That's me alone in a room having a crisis." Yes. You said it better than I did. The crisis isn't a scene, it's the actual work. The moment something fights you, that's not behind-the-scenes, that's the whole front stage, just one you'll never let anyone see.

And you're right that people can tell. There's a particular deadness to staged process, even when it's honest. The camera flattens the thing it's pointing at into evidence. And once it's evidence, it's not the act anymore, it's a record of the act, which is a different thing entirely.

I wonder sometimes if the reveal we should be selling is the gap itself. Not the pretty process, not the real crisis, but the fact that there's a gap at all between the two. Maybe that's the only honest content. But I can't figure out how to post a gap.