Ork plays grantfarmer

General
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I mentioned on Funding for musicians & devs that I have less than zero experience obtaining funding for music from what may be considered Established Channels.

Well, zero experience is understandable. We all gotta start somewhere. But how can one get less than zero experience?

Well, cringey story time. Might help someone understand something. Might confuse someone. Both help.

Someone came up with a way for me and my labelmate to get a national art grant once. Sure, let’s get free money from the house. As if that happens.

No grift was involved, simply submitting an application form in the worst website ever, and describing some things in such a vague and pretentious way that we eventually got away by delivering something completely different from what we planned. And we hadda do that because the same friend who brought us the lead also later sabotaged/procrastinated away their role in the project.

It all helped a largely uninvolved then-friend get out of debt, which is cool I guess except that a prime mover in it didn’t make a penny.

Such we were. Total shitshow to be honest.

Next year the consultant assigned by the ministry to count the money was invited on national radio, where he would talk to some kind ladies about whether there would be any accountability for some of the absolutely outlandish projects people did with that year’s grant funds. (because Art Must Be Serious! no Book Of Dirty Poems! no Museum Of Agricultural Implement! bad citizen! bad! … do you imagine how down they keep us…?) He casually dropped a (foreign) mob word when asked a Serious Question by the radio host, and, well, then I stopped listening.

So, I guess we all with our petty dramas were unwittingly running interference for a government-based money laundry?

Thus, maybe I know less than nothing about how this process would occur in any civilized sort of society with, like, established institutions and an actual non-second-hand culture and shit.

Do share your experiences and advice!

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Should Art Be Jerb?

So, the only way for me to fund my research into those things which I actually find interesting and valuable, remains to have a draining bullshitjerb – and lead an unhealthy lifestyle while I’m at it.

Sure, like any creative, I’d prefer to instead live off those things that I find worthy enough to be doing on my own time for their own sake.

But I’ve never in my life made art with selling it in mind, and I honestly don’t know if I should, or would, or even could make anything worth selling. I approached my only ever art grant with scamming the state by blinding it with science, which surprisingly (and concerningly!) worked :person_facepalming:

I feel like there are enough people doing that art for money thing already, all of them better than me at making things people like. While far too few are managing to pull off that other thing, the “disturbing the comfortable” as that old adage went. (Or, for that matter, the “comforting the disturbed” part. Are people really turning to AI for their therapy needs now, or is all that written by ChatGPT)

But suppose I caved and decided to make music not for the sake of making friends and enemies, but for the sake of making a living. My present existential threat model would anyway require me to publish any “for sale” art in a way that’s impossible to trace to my meatspace identity even in theory. Otherwise the art just doesn’t get made, and that’s that. Perhaps, as the indieweb music ecosystem matures, all that may change for me.

While maybe technically possible, at the moment this “ghost of a ghost” sort of modus operandi is only practicable for agents of the oppressor – spooks, shills, gangsta rappers… Unsavory types which I unfortunately have observed to exist not only in movies, and lean more “lawful evil” than “stupid evil” honestly.

I could of course just buy a Windows box, install Ableton again, maybe get into Max/MSP or PD or for that matter Jeskola Buzz to give people something totally esoteric to drool over, yet familiar – but where’d be the novelty in that? Maybe VCV is a less explored medium?

But all those other weird art/tech concepts that cross my mind still not infrequently enough to give up on, these days I see them being independently implemented by some unrelated third party only about once in a blue moon. A few years back it was a few months between me having some far out idea and seeing someone post a working and sometimes even money-making implementation on HN :grin:

But these days the remaining labor capacity of the programmersphere has largely been swept away by the AI boom, which I don’t fuck with at all. I get them – they uncritically believe it would be the only way for them to keep having a jerb, and it feels so novel besides. Unlike the ingloriosity of e.g. playing technical facilitator to an artist, which is also something I’d be ok with making some money out of.

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Yeah, I reckon most grants are local or country-specific. NLnet is the only one I’ve seen that does fund international devs, but I’m not really up on the tech grant scene.

EU wise, there’s this:

Also, worth mentioning that a lot of “opportunities” are posted on Instagram. It’s shite, I want to get off Meta completely next month! But arts grants, residencies, writing open calls… a lot of them are there, and sometimes I can’t even find it on their websites.

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Lots of good people make the tradeoff to be there. People goes where people is – while us orks be relegated to silently rearranging the furniture… :chair:

I guess https://proxigram.lunar.icu/ is a thing for viewing scraps of profiles, but it’s pretty crummy. There are a few of other instances of that, most of which don’t work. I sure as hell feel locked out of that entire resource. Lost some friends to it, too :sweat_smile:

Maybe worth looking into doing how them badmen do, and using some means to feed info from Instagram accounts to something nicer, like an RSS feed. I guess if it lets you export your follows, or somehow prepare a list of institutional accounts of interest, before you jump ship, something could, in theory, be figured out to keep afloat of them. (In an ethical and self-hosted way of course – ain’t giving no deets to no botfarmer…)

Dammit, I just keep piling more projects onto myself, don’t I :person_facepalming:

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More to the point, now this looks like a proper resource. :folded_hands:

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