MOOD BOARD MYOPIA & CREATIVE STAGNATION

It's not just the algorithm, it's us

Hello! Thanks for sticking with me over the past couple months while I had to take a pause. I’m hoping to pick things back up on here, and this post is a bit of a warm-up.¹ I won’t be covering a trend per se, but a pervasive issue that I think is worth exploring: Although we all enjoy blaming algorithms as the evil villain perpetuating creative stagnation and impeding originality — (everyone dresses the same! it’s impossible to make anything new!) — I think mood boards are an overlooked culprit.

Rest assured, I am a longtime lover of mood boards.² And I personally aspire to

Dianna Cohen

’s level of peak mood board (that office wall 🥹). But that doesn’t mean they’re exempt from critical inquiry. Crafting a visual display in your home is not the same as using mood boards as part of your design process or creative workflow.

I first identified their potential for misuse in my dissertation on cultural appropriation in fashion (2015). While investigating the never-ending cycle of designers repeatedly called out for cultural appropriation, I realized that the common technique of creating concept mood boards was often a key ‘fatal flaw’ in their processes. Many creatives use mood boards as a design tool. They tend to be the foundational basis of any project; a convenient and aesthetically pleasing way to collate visual research. Fashion designers ideate based on these artfully curated collections of images — often without any knowledge of their historical provenance or cultural meaning.

In my dissertation, I examined various designers’ processes. For instance, Karl Lagerfeld used very sparse and superficial visual mood boards. Comparatively, John Galliano used in-depth research journals incorporating written context.

The problem with most mood boards is how they divorce imagery from context. When we create these collages, we pull images from everywhere and anywhere, removing source information and any related descriptions. Separating visual depictions from their physical, temporal, and cultural context, can facilitate naive misinterpretations and insensitive appropriations. The mood board itself enforces a myopic perspective by entrapping the imagination in a superficial world of visual imagery, wherein a lack of citations or textual annotations precludes any deeper research or analysis. It’s a sort of mood board myopia, and its consequences extend far beyond the specific topic of cultural appropriation.

A Malaise of Creative Stagnation

I’d posit the same premise of mood board myopia functions as an underlying current propelling our contemporary malaise of creative stagnation. Many insightful cultural theorists and strategists have written about this struggle:

Kyle Chayka

on the filterworld flattening culture,

Matt Klein

on cultural stasis amidst creative surplus, and

Beth Bentley

on meh-ification. The focus has generally been on how algorithms have warped contemporary culture.

The real problem is that despite everything we now have access to - the tools, the tech, the time, the AI, the networks, the sharing platforms - it’s becoming systematically harder, not easier, to put anything new, original, interesting, provocative, strange, challenging out into the world than it was even a year ago.

…where actual cultural production is replaced with cultural reproduction.
…where what looks like innovation is actually really iteration.
…where innovation eventually becomes algorithmically impossible?

— Beth Bentley

However, while algorithms are a driving force, I think they have simply accelerated the preexisting problems inherent to practices of tech-enabled visual extraction. I wrote my paper in 2015, and Instagram was heavily referenced as a contributor to the issues I discussed. But the platform didn’t introduce its algorithm until 2016. By that point, we were already well on our way on the trajectory towards creative stagnation, as Chayka explained in ‘Welcome to Airspace’ (2016).

Mood boards, pre-smartphone, required sourcing references from magazines or books, which meant there was some sort of editorial writing, or context, for the image being pulled. If it was a book from the library, perhaps you’d make a black and white photocopy, or draw a quick sketch, and perhaps jot down some notes — creating an abstracted reference. So later, when you started working, you weren’t simply looking directly at an image and reproducing it. The depth of research required to source and gather these visuals provided the cerebral stimulus to inspire original creative output.

This process began to evolve with camera phones, which allowed you to quickly snap photos of, say, a sculpture at a museum for later reference.³ Since it’s unlikely that you’d have recorded the artist and historical information; you now have an image divorced from context. And then we had simultaneous advent of iPhones (2007) and visually-based social media. Platforms like Tumblr (2007) and Pinterest (2010) translated the mood board process into a fun and easy digital activity, introducing the broader public to the behavior of curating aesthetically pleasing visual collections. The rapid rise of Instagram (2010) soon made everyone a photographer and curator, and a barrage of millions of newly decontextualized images began flooding into circulation every day.⁴ We proliferated the phenomenon of moodboard myopia at an exponential scale.

Pinterest Newsroom

This visual inundation, eventually amplified by algorithms, impedes imaginative thinking and original creation by leaving a lack of space for the mind to wander. The easy answer is to just unplug from it all (not quite as easy in practice). But beyond the sheer overwhelm, we’re all stuck within the hellish confines of these platforms because the vast majority of images we encounter are devoid of any ascribed provenance.⁵ This eradicates any potential for truly spontaneous discovery and creative exploration. Context empowers us to pursue independent research outside of our personalized feeds: to delve into the museum archive where that uncannily futuristic painting came from, to go visit that architectural wonder the next time you travel to its city, to read about the life journey that led a ceramicist to create that show-stopping sculpture. Contextless visuals strip us of these opportunities, relegating us to algorithmic dependency.

A Crisis of Creative Ownership

Contextless visuals also strip artists of creative ownership. I think the behavioral shift I mentioned above, of Instagram making everyone a photographer and curator, seems to have propelled a trivialization of imagery in general. We no longer necessarily treat visual culture with the respect we once did. We constantly save, pin, screenshot, and share images for ‘inspiration’ without any knowledge or awareness of who created the things that are inspiring us, or why the visual exists — What is the story behind the image? If we don’t know, can we really claim to be ‘inspired’ to create something original, or are we just superficially motivated to reproduce what we are looking at?

ashleymarcosstylist

A post shared by @ashleymarcosstylist

I was reminded of these questions earlier this month when I came across the controversy around Matilda Djerf copying the set design and prop styling for a photoshoot.

Bobbie Notcutt

wrote about the incident, uncovering how “the Djerf Avenue team voiced that they thought that this was a vintage photo from a magazine,” and emphasizing that directly replicating the prop remains problematic “no matter when an inspiration was made.” Essentially, duplication ≠ inspiration, regardless of what era the ‘inspiration’ is from. I think this whole kerfuffle really comes down to the fact that someone on the Djerf Avenue team put Ashley Marcos’ work on an art direction mood board devoid of any context. If any provenance had been ascribed (or if they reverse image searched it!?), the team would have known that reference image was not from a vintage magazine, but rather a brand campaign from less than one year prior.

The issue of how mood boards and decontextualized imagery promote creative misappropriation is thoroughly examined by

Kate Van G

in a recent essay that I would encourage everyone to read.

Artists in most mediums deal with theft of some kind. Designers, writers, painters, photographers, ceramic artists - we are at the mercy of a greedy, hyper-individualistic population that has not been taught to value the maker. If we’re not having our ideas plagiarized then we’re seeing somebody else copy our designs. We’re having our work taken and passed around, like something somebody dug up from the ground and discovered on their own, when in actuality whatever it is, it is a real thing with an identifiable creator whose labor and skills went into creating it.

We’ve all seen hundreds of posts like the one above, sharing a collection of beautiful images without any indication of where they came from or credit to a creator. It’s problematic for all the reasons already outlined. But Kate also alludes to future consequences:

We already have AI stealing our creative work (and finite resources) left and right, do we really want to contribute to erasing the human hands and minds that created the good stuff ourselves?

The rise of mass AI image generation will rapidly exacerbate the issues associated with mood board myopia by endlessly regurgitating reimaginings of existing visual culture, potentially locking us into an infinite loop of sameness. Continuing to share decontextualized images is increasingly irresponsible, since it will be increasingly impossible for anyone to track down an original source or creator. Perhaps more motivational: providing provenance will soon become an aspirational differentiator — a proof point of human involvement.⁶

Seeking Originality

Meanwhile, escaping mood board myopia is a conundrum. As I mentioned before, you could just completely unplug, even for brief periods of time. I think for any artist or creative, that would probably be the ideal scenario. If that’s not feasible, it’s also valuable to take the time digging for provenance — investigate to find out the artist, architect, designer, photographer. Reverse image search is a helpful tool, that can often get you the information required to take you into a little rabbit hole outside the algorithm, discovering hidden corners of the internet the way it was meant to be explored. And when you do create mood boards, try to ensure that you incorporate captions, annotations, notes, etc. Or at least have the relevant information organized and accessible in an index-style document for future reference (that’s usually my personal approach). None of us are perfect, and I’ve definitely slipped up and gotten lazy at times. But the effort is worth it.

Any other ideas? Let me know in the comments!

1. This was supposed to be a short one, big oops…

2. For evidence, please see: my bedroom wall in 2014.

3. Remember when you’d walk around an art museum and see people sketching? Much more rare nowadays. Why bother, when you can snap a photo?

4. Instagram gained 10 million users within one year of launch

5. Reverse image searches can be a helpful tool to investigate provenance, but it’s not very helpful when you end up in a chain of Pinterest posts linking to Tumblr posts linking to Instagram posts, none of which offer any useful metadata.

6. Ironic to use an em dash here, but I love them! Also, I think the next article will expand on this point: Aspirational Humanity