A New Disorder

I stand in my studio and wonder if I should be making anything at all. Around me, sheets of metal wait to be shaped, chemicals promise new surface treatments, algorithms generate endless variations on my screen.

But beneath the familiar materials lies an unfamiliar doubt: in a world already drowning in human output, what justifies adding more? This is every creator’s worst fear: that their work doesn’t matter.

This doubt arrives without warning, usually when I’m scrolling through image feeds or walking through art fairs. Thousands of artists are making work that looks remarkably similar to what I’m attempting. Millions of images compete for the same fragmenting attention. The question becomes inescapable: am I creating signal or just adding to the noise?

Previous generations of makers faced scarcity — expensive materials, limited distribution, gatekeepers who controlled access to audiences, and simply the struggle to earn a living. These constraints forced clear choices and created natural filters. Now those barriers have largely dissolved. I can afford most materials, algorithms can generate endless variations, and digital platforms will display anything I upload. The democratization I once celebrated has produced something unexpected: a crisis of justification.

My computer generates images faster than I can evaluate them. Each algorithmic run produces hundreds of compositions exploring color relationships, formal arrangements, textural possibilities. The machine creates relentlessly while I struggle to determine which accidents are worth preserving. But as I watch this mechanical productivity, a darker possibility emerges: if a computer can generate infinite variations, what makes any particular choice meaningful?

The same logic applies to physical work. I can oxidize metal in countless ways, explore every possible patination technique, document each surface transformation. But when I step back from the process, I confront the weight of all the other artists doing similar investigations. The uniqueness I thought I was developing reveals itself as one iteration among thousands.

This isn’t the familiar anxiety of influence or competition. It’s something more fundamental: the possibility that abundance itself has become a destructive force. When everything has been done, signal becomes indistinguishable from noise. When every possible variation has been explored, individual exploration loses its capacity to surprise or illuminate.

The overproduction creates its own entropy. Not the clean entropy of thermodynamic decay, but a messy cultural disorder where significant work disappears into an ocean of similar efforts. Museums store more art than they can display. Archives accumulate more documentation than anyone can process. The internet hosts more images than any consciousness could survey in multiple lifetimes.

Creation itself has become ‘por nihilo’, but not in the romantic sense of art for art’s sake. Instead, it’s meaningless because it disappears immediately into the flood. The work I spend months developing joins millions of other objects in a competition for attention that has already been lost before it begins.

Yet I continue working although I haven’t resolved the doubt. The alternative simply feels like a different kind of emptiness. The question of whether to add to the pile remains unanswerable, but it sharpens something in the process of making. Each decision must justify itself against the weight of existing alternatives.

Working with corrosion, I watch metal transform according to chemical logic that operates independently of artistic intention. The oxidation doesn’t care about my aesthetic goals or the broader cultural context. It follows its own schedule, creates its own forms, establishes its own relationships with time and chance. In these moments, the doubt recedes slightly. The work happens in dialogue with forces that operate outside the human conversation entirely.

Programming algorithms produces a similar effect. The system explores formal possibilities according to mathematical relationships rather than cultural trends. The generated compositions emerge from computational logic that has no awareness of art history or market saturation. They exist in a space parallel to human cultural production rather than competing within it.

These processes suspend the central doubt temporarily. They create conditions where work can happen without requiring immediate justification within the oversaturated cultural context. The metal will rust regardless of whether the art world needs another corrosion piece. The algorithm will generate forms regardless of whether another digital composition serves any cultural purpose.

But the doubt returns, and perhaps it should. It prevents the comfortable assumption that making things is automatically valuable. It forces each piece to earn its existence rather than relying on the general principle that artistic production is inherently worthwhile. Yet working through this doubt reveals something unexpected.

The meaninglessness of quantity begins to suggest its own solution - though “solution” might be too strong a word. If oversaturation makes individual works disappear into noise, then perhaps the response isn’t to stop creating but to think differently about why we create. What if the mission isn’t about standing out from the pile, but about enriching the pile itself?

This reframes everything - or at least, I tell myself it does. The doubt doesn’t disappear entirely, but it shifts into something more productive. Cultural overproduction becomes not a problem to solve but humanity’s fundamental project - our biological mission scaled up through consciousness and technology. Life has always worked to fill every possible niche, to explore every available form. Humans extend this process into territories that biological evolution alone couldn’t reach: aesthetic niches, conceptual spaces, formal relationships that only conscious investigation can discover.

My corrosion work and algorithmic investigations become part of this larger mission. Each oxidation pattern explores territory that wouldn’t exist without human intervention in natural processes. Each generated composition maps formal relationships that emerge only through computational logic. Beyond making more art, I’m expanding the universe’s repertoire of possibilities.

The futility problem doesn’t dissolve entirely, but it transforms when viewed from this perspective. Individual works don’t need to justify themselves within the cultural conversation. They justify themselves by adding genuinely new forms to the total inventory of what exists. The mission transcends personal meaning or market success, reaching toward pushing the boundaries of diversity itself.

This understanding changes how I approach doubt. Instead of asking whether the world needs another corrosion piece, I ask whether this particular investigation explores territory that hasn’t been mapped yet. Instead of worrying about algorithmic output adding to digital noise, I focus on whether the system is generating relationships that wouldn’t emerge through other means.

The disorder persists and grows, but now I see it differently. Tomorrow I might create some works. Not because the world needs them, but because they’re expressions of a larger project we’re all part of - the ongoing complexification of what exists. The wrestling continues, but now with clearer understanding of why we’re wrestling at all.