Context is always very important. It is hard to know whether it is as important as it should be. Especially when context is lost in social media at times. Not all of the time mind you but at times it disappears. Censorship is another issue. You don’t really need to be censored directly. Slander and innuendo can be enough. My video work this year really pushed some buttons. Issues around mental illness, context, expression came through but what won in the end was slander. This started me getting blocked and that has built over the year even though I don’t post videos now.

Is it populous pressure? It was more for my daughter’s sake that I stopped. They thought I had lost my mind. In a way I had lost my mind but I was sharing it. I was owning it. I was toying with all of the ideas around stigma. I sprinkled it with humour at times. Is expression really that bad? Is it that confronting? In a way expression is a very sharp tool. Just look at entertainers far and wide. They make you believe something that is far from reality yet just close enough.

Dada expression is needed now more than ever. A protest of the ridiculous state the world is in. An expression of it. We are all in each others faces these days. We see thoughts everywhere. Yet we want conformity. We want to think the same. Be different yet think the same. When really we are all different. In the end slander makes us censor ourselves. It is another tool in the chest. This isn’t why I am not doing video work at the moment or putting it on social media. It is that I am not in the mood. Video or direct expression isn’t my current interest.

My current interest is writing about these issues and analysing them. Looking at the bricks and mortar and what keeps the whole thing up. It is slander as censorship (a certain election comes to mind) and the lack of context is taken advantage of. That is how slander can attach itself so neatly. Then the tide turns.