Sometimes it seems like curation is ninety percent of running a website.

This topic has been forefront in my mind recently while working on my Elden Ring Photography Tour. I’m almost done with playing the game at this point, and the process of editing photos has become second nature. I can put on a stream or listen to some music, and carve through fifty or sixty photos in a sitting, discarding another hundred along the way.

And then my brain says “Cool, job done! Time to put a new album up on the website.” and I have to intervene. Because the chasm between merely having the photos and having an album with flow and an internal narrative - not to mention a wider macro narrative of the progression across my whole Elden Ring project - is vast and meaningful.

Elden Ring, in particular, draws attention to this difference. The sheer number of branching paths, the openness of its world, the near-infinite possibilities of routes I could have taken through the game, all make the idea of a single narrative difficult to set in stone.

But I’m a storyteller. I don’t want to provide a chaotic window into a world; I want to share with you my journey. I want you to feel the flow of my progression, and given FromSoft’s incredible work with building tension through art design, it would be foolish not to want to leverage some of that as part of this chronicle.

Without curation, the photos I love don’t get to shine, because they’re buried in a morass of other art.

Without curation - without winnowing out images that don’t work, without setting the images into a meaningful order, without alt text and intent and everything being in its right place - I don’t get to tell a story.

I launched this site four months ago. In that time, I’ve featured eighty-two stories, essays, photo albums and blog posts on the front page, each hand-selected to share something about who I am as a creative.

And each week, when I sit down to curate my body of work and decide what to share, I find new things to love about what I’ve made over the past decade. Curation is living with your work, but perhaps more importantly, curation is part of setting your work into a wider narrative of your creative life.

Beyond your own work, curation is engaging with the work of others, of finding creative expression that resonates with you. Curation is an act of communication, just as much as art is.

In my first blog post on this site, I touched on the topic of curation as one of the failings of the modern internet, that we collectively outsourced curation to media companies with promises of endless algorithmic content. We believed the lies that a chance of going viral was better than slow, persistent growth.

We believed that curation was something to be performed by unthinking software, not as personal expression.

I had a conversation with a friend this week about a company who are trying to solve the problem of discoverability in the indie game space by using LLMs and AI voice algorithms to generate Youtube videos summarising high-rated Steam games with few players, in an attempt to drive awareness of their existence.

I have a number of issues with this approach - not least the use of unethically-sourced and environmentally destructive AI models - but after some discussion I found the core of my distaste for this otherwise well-meaning project. They’re trying to solve the problem of curation - lack of meaningful signal - with machine generated noise.

It’s a doubling-down of the idea that curation isn’t meaningful, that curation isn’t an artistic or creative act. The idea that curation isn’t cool.

Let the machines do it.

But as a rule, we don’t like taking recommendations from machines.

Algorithms don’t understand us. They offer us a thousand books about unicorns because we loved one specific book about a particularly beautiful friendship with a unicorn. They beg us to buy a thing functionally identical to a thing we just bought. They recommend us games because our friends are playing them, or because we liked something in the same wide-scope marketing genre, not because this game in particular will resonate.

Our friends understand us. They tell us about a book that they like, that they think we might like, and their eyes light up as they tell us about the connection they made with the characters and the narrative arc.

“You have to play this game,” they say. “I can’t tell you anything about it, but you’re going to love it.”

Curation can even come from those who do not know us, but who have cultivated that consistent sense of What They Like. In their blog posts, in their social media mentions, they talk effusively about What They Like, and you know - just by reading - that you’re on board with whatever follows.

I have some other thoughts on curation and the modern internet, but they’re still burbling away while I figure out my own solutions.

At the heart of it is the idea that we need to take curation back. We need to talk more about the things we love, to cultivate that bubble of These Are The Things I Like, And I Think You Might Too. We need to share sites and posts and books and songs that resonate with us, so that our friends and acquaintances see us glow bright with the fire that art has lit in us.

We need to make curation cool, once again.