Seeking the Creative: Graythorn, Essayist

Graythorn. CREDIT: Graythorn

How would you describe your art in three words?

Textured, self-conscious, claustrophobic.

I have only made five video essays so far. Four are still public. Fun fact: I initially made the channel to post a short story on tech legibility efforts like Google Maps, which “swallow” the world, making it more exploitable through photography and mapping. I do feel like it’s pretty ironic, now that I make content so focused on making things (media, people) legible.

Video on VR: about the medium-specificity of VR compared to non-VR video games and how the discourse surrounding VR (as an “endpoint” of video games) misinterprets its usefulness as a creative medium.

Video on Elden Ring: an analysis of the structures created by game designers to harmonize player experience in open world games. Discusses how to maintain ludic flow in a gameworld format that seems to strain against it.

Video on Autism and Games: a sprint across various autistic stories, with video games and movies as a reference point for external and internal perceptions of autism. Movies represent the through-a-telescope POV; video games represent the on-the-moon POV. Audience reception should fall along those lines, depending on the POV they have had the most experience with.

Where/how do you gather inspiration?

Form and substance emerge separately. Video essays are a “language” I have spent years learning. I’ve been watching video essayists like Razbuten, Jacob Geller, Adam Millard, GMTK, and Hbomberguy since I was in high school. I am a product of a second generation of video essayists: those of us who grew up with video essays as status quo. Like any successive generation, part of my effort is conversational — my videos engage with the first generation’s “language.” I aim to fracture the format in small ways — to make it engaging for a different type of media consumer, one that values snappiness and density. Unlike older essays, which are built from outside-in to fit a long video frame, my essays are extensions of little self-contained stories that I can chip off and present as naked and digestible.

The other part of my effort is more indulgent. I aim for a perfection of daily performance. If, every day, I try to perform suave normalcy as an autistic person and yet my uncanniness betrays me, how would it feel to get the balance right? How would it feel to put more of my autistic self into the persona, but to polish it with an editing knife so I am always quick, always interesting, always finding full sentences without audio processing issues craggy in my stride? My videos are crystallizations of an idealized self.

Substance comes from my monotropic motor. Finding the right inspiration for a video is, therefore, more a process of exclusion than a process of inclusion. Autistic peoples’ brains generate, on average, 42% more information at rest, because we hunger for input. My brain always has a thing it is chewing on: a video game mechanic, a cultural phenomenon, a social dynamic. When I have a chewable thing, I cannot write about anything else. Most things may be chewable, but they cannot be written about and must be excluded: I spend far too long deconstructing my politicized existence or systematizing (often harmful) femininity discourse. I will never make an essay centered on either of these things. So, inspiration comes from a steamrolling interest in one topic — consumption of everything associated with that topic — then exclusion of the inappropriate parts. I call my videos claustrophobic because I work consciously off of my limitations — fencing off the correct parts of my thought-murk for consumption. In some ways, content creation is exactly like autistic masking. But re-enacting the masking process, with a tighter control on the output, can be healing.

What do you hope audiences retain from your work?

There are a few audience postures I appreciate. Firstly, I value when viewers allow themselves to be challenged by a video. Some of the responses I was most impressed by on my video on autism and gaming were from non-autistic people who found the video dense, difficult, and fast-paced, but who took the time to see the outline of a person I was sketching— a person very unlike themselves. Whenever I can challenge someone’s initial framework for processing information— information like an autistic person acting strangely, a video game being slow— then, I have added value. Even if the viewer ultimately disagrees, their conceptual framework has become a bit more complex, because it must have grown tendrils of “but”s, “actually”s, and “well, if”s to defend itself.

Secondly, I love seeing people validated by my videos. I love when people feel I have put their experiences “into words.” I hope people feel like their experiences matter more after watching my videos. Post-authenticity meme culture has wreaked havoc on our little brains. More irony and we’ll shatter. There is something so delightfully sincere about a long essay on video game experience: private, self-pleasuring media consumption filmed and shared with thousands or millions. Layers of news anchor voiceovers, visual detailing, calculated sound effects, and melancholic music — all to evoke what it feels like to bring stars to a fairy in Mario Galaxy while struggling with academic expectations. Video essays will soon be precious cultural artefacts.