It was a true honor to talk to Martin Adolfsson, artist, photographer, and co-creator of Minutiae. Although the interview is loaded with creative advice and inspiration, including how he started as a photographer, we start by talking about Minutiae, one of my favorite apps.
Minutiae is an artistic social network that prompts you to take one photo a day, at a random minute, for 1440 days. Since there are 1440 minutes in a day, by the end of the process, you’ll have a record of nearly 4 years of random moments. In addition to viewing them in the app, they can be turned into a coffee table book or poster.
You an also watch this interview on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
✨ Poetry Culture is quietly expanding. We’re about to launch new creative tools and resources for subscribers ($50/yr) and founding ($99/yr) members. I’m also handwriting thank you notes to everyone who joins a paid tier. I hope you’ll consider joining us on this journey! ✨ More on that in future posts <3
You may remember we recently ran a post discussing why I love Minutiae, and so talking to the artist behind it was so rewarding.
I hope this interview means as much to you as it does to me—
Alex
p.s. when you’re not on minutiae, you can follow us on instagram @poetry.culture
And now, here is the transcript of the interview with Martin—just in case you’d rather read than listen/watch to the interview.
Seeing so many people use this app and see it resonate with so many people, what's been the part of the project that's been most meaningful for yourself?
I think that that part has been incredibly meaningful to me. fact that I receive emails on a daily basis of people, telling me how much they appreciate the project, how much it meant to them. we had one incredible, email from a couple of years ago of a man who lived in Hawaii and whose home was engulfed in lava during one of the volcanic eruptions. And he didn't have any sort of documentation from his home because why would you care to take photos of your sink or your bathroom or your living room until the day that his home was literally set on flames by this massive lava flow. And he wrote this beautiful email saying, hey, I'm so grateful that I have these memories and these photos to look back at, because otherwise I wouldn't have a single documentation of the home that I spent decades in. And I, for me personally, I mean, hearing those stories are just incredible. Like the fact that you can have that impact on one person's life is incredible. As a person who creates for a living. I I think that's what we all strive for. Like that's what we all want. We want to create something that has an impact and has a meaning on other people. So for me, it's like that's that's hands down, the most important part of it.
Just for listeners who aren't familiar with it, I was wondering if you could give us a brief background of yourself and the app.
Sure, so the project really started in 2014, 2015. And I met another artist, Daniel J. Wilson at a incubator called the New Inc here in New York City. And we were talking and kind of arrived at this conclusion that so much of life is actually recorded in the in-between. and started to kind of think about different ways of recording these type of moments. We talked about mounting cameras at different places that you wouldn't necessarily think to record a photo or a video of sorts. Things that didn't seem obvious, such as exiting the subway or standing in line at the supermarket or just a kind of in-between space really we were talking about this idea back and forth and eventually we kind of realized that, maybe we should make an app.
After a lot of back and forth, we kind of arrived on this idea that the app should have a daily notification sent out to all participants using the app, regardless of where in the world they lived. And the second aspect of that was the kind of time aspect.
How that works is that it sends out a notification to all participants around the world at the exact same minute. And it gives the participant one minute to respond to the notification by tapping on the push notification and opens the app, opens up a camera and you snap a photo. And that kind of process is repeated over 1,440 minutes, which is the number of minutes in a day. So over the course of time, you have the chance to record every single minute of a day, but because you only receive one minute per day, it takes 1,440 days to complete the journey, which is 3.8, almost four years.
And I have major news for everybody watching or listening to this podcast because we proved officially that God exists because while we were setting up for this show, Minutiae sent out a notification and we got a photograph, you can see if you're watching the video version, of us at the start of the interview in the app, memorialized forever. This is a screenshot of that photograph
It just feels like destiny to me.
Minutiae Destiny. to your point, so what's interesting here though is that for me, I'm in New York. was 6.03 when I received notification and I believe it's 11.03 for you. So 9.03, okay, 9.03, yeah. So the hour is different, but the minute is the same. So that's also like this kind of idea that the app creates this kind of global ritual of self-documentation in a way that where everyone, regardless of where in the world you live, participate in this kind of global ritual of documenting in between moments at the exact same time. in your case, it's morning time in Australia, it's afternoon, early evening here in New York. So throughout the day, it does capture exactly what's going on at this particular minute, even though the hour, the time zones are different.
And what I love about it is you are matched with another participant and once they take a photograph you can see their photograph and some other recent photographs they've done. How did you get that idea and to make it more collaborative?
Yeah, so that idea was kind of based on the idea that we thought that no one would bother to take photos of boring moments in their life. Because we thought at this point, this was 2014, 2015. And if you remember, like Instagram was all the rage and there was a certain idea that people would only care about documenting things that look pretty. especially around that time, the quality of the cameras became better and better and better.
And people started to take quite high quality photos around that time. This was, think, iPhone 5 or 6, something like that. And when we were talking about the idea of documenting these kind of in-between moments that would not be visually appealing, people were like, that's just plain stupid. Like, why would anyone do that? And I think that one of the ideas behind the matching was that, well, maybe if people don't want to take photos or maybe people won't be interested to take photos of their own day to day, but they would definitely be curious to see other people.
I've connected with people in Russia, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong. My girlfriend even got one in my hometown. So then we were looking and like, wow, like someone I could maybe know. And I'm from a very small town in Virginia. So.
Yeah, that's amazing. I'm still waiting to be matched with someone in my hometown in Sweden, which is incredibly small. maybe one day.
I also feel personally, I love geography. I love to travel. So for me, the fact when I get matched with someone in Lagos, Nigeria or in Turkey or in places that I haven't been to myself and don't know what everyday life looks like, I get like so excited, I become a little child, I get so, so excited to just first, like the notion that someone in Nigeria is actively participating and documenting their life, but also to get a glimpse into what day, what everyday life looks like, which is often so far removed from the stereotype that I have, and probably lot of other people have of what life is like in a foreign country. And I find that
That to me is like getting these like little glimpse into everyday life in some big cities, but also very remote corners of the world is incredible. Like it brings me so much joy.
That's really beautiful. Is your experience with the app and seeing other people, does it make you realize that everyone is more similar than you thought? Or maybe everybody actually could have very different lifestyles and very different interests.
You know, that's a good question. I've been asking myself that and I feel like I go back and forth because I do think that there are, there's a daily rhythm to life that I feel connects us all. the daily routine, like follows a kind of a certain rhythm no matter where in the world you live. The routine in itself might be different, but it does follow a certain pattern.
I find that often when I look at someone's photos from a remote corner of the world or a place that I haven't been myself, I'm often surprised by elements that are so incredibly similar to my own life. Like, I don't know how many photos I've seen of people sitting on their laptops and working.
remotely or whatever it is, whether it's in Japan or Turkmenistan Ukraine, wherever it is. And at the same time, every now and then you get a glimpse into other people's lives and their life is very, very different from mine. I can't quite answer that question. I feel like I go back and forth because part of me is like, oh my God, it's so similar.
On the other hand, there is a there is a true uniqueness to everyone's experience and how was how they capture it and also what they what they choose to capture, because that's a very decisive moment.
I guess I totally agree with your answer, it's shown me that in some ways people live very different lives, but at a fundamental level, I think we're all like pretty much the same
One great thing about this project is at the end and at the end of every year, you can buy a coffee table book of all your random moments that you've never otherwise captured. Can you talk about that?
Yeah, sure. initially, actually, we had a book before we had the app, which might seem strange. we actually had a limited edition book. We call the book today a limited edition book. And it's a book that's actually hand-bound by a bookbinder here on the Lower East Side in New York. It's a total of 2,880 pages. There's one minute per spread.
So this was the book that we had to begin with and we actually showed this at different art book fairs. We showed it at the New York Art Book Fair, LA Art Book Fair, we were at Off Print in London, et cetera. many people are surprised, but the book actually existed before the app.
The problem with a 2,880 page book is that it's incredibly expensive to print and to bind and to ship. So there were a limited number of people who have ordered it. And so we launched a four year version, which is based on the same concept, but instead it's a one photo, sorry, one minute per page. So it's 1,440 pages.
It takes quite a while and it requires a lot of patience for someone to complete it. So about two years ago, we launched the one year book which people can order as you mentioned at the end of each year. And the idea behind that is quite simple. We have this very strong relationship today with our devices. I myself, even though I don't wish that would be. I'm practically glued to my phone all day long. And there is something about the physical aspect of touching a page, touching the cover and flipping through the pages and kind of reminiscent of many of these moments that now you look back at it.
And it really is a way of kind of an extension of the project itself, of the app itself, to have a physical component.
Well, one thing I really like about Minutiae is that it sort of forces you to be disciplined and, but it doesn't let you obsess over the photo. Do you consider minutiae to be a sort of forced discipline? And if you do, do you have that same discipline in your other art practice?
Yes, I do think the project very much is about discipline. Again, to do something consistently over a four-year time period requires patience and perseverance. So I do think that is definitely part of it. Now, in terms of how the photos are captured,
I don't know if that necessarily requires that much discipline. It's quite the opposite. It's for me, the fact that that you have these limitations, you're forced to to capture things in a way that I, as a professional photographer, find very liberating because I don't have the time to frame things up. I don't have the time to overthink. I'm just forced to capture whatever is happening there and then.
And often those type of moments become way more, become a more honest reflection than if I would have framed it up nicely, asked my wife and my four month old son to pose nicely for me. That would have been a completely different moment and also very different memory.
I was wondering if having a child made minutiae more meaningful and these random snapshots, or did it instead perhaps make you realize that you can't ever truly capture a specific moment with a photograph and you instead have to really focus on living in them?
That's a good question. I feel like he is growing obviously incredibly fast and in a way that the photos doesn't really do justice to all the things that you are experiencing in the moment. That being said, again, the longevity of it kind of will bring back a lot of the memories that I now create with the app. Then when I look back at it, in five, 10, 15 years, et cetera, all of a sudden I would be almost transported back to today and will be able to revisit a lot of these moments that I now capture with the
You're from Sweden originally, but now you live in New York, what do you think you understand about the U.S. that Americans don't?
Oh, that's a big question.
America is built around the idea of comfort. Comfort is built into almost every aspect of life. is a convenience aspect of things that I think is very different from Sweden and Northern Europe, where I'm from. I think that that's perhaps the biggest difference that I see.
And I think especially from a Northern perspective, a Northern European perspective, there's this notion that hardship is good. You shouldn't get too comfortable. That working or suffering is not always a bad thing. I think that's a culturally, that's a clear distinction. Yeah, there's something with the app, like, it might sound strange, but I feel in a way that the project is very kind of un-American in a way, both so I'm Swedish and Daniel, my co-creator, he's Canadian. And there's some aspect to it that is kind of counterintuitive to a lot of things that I think that America represents. One aspect of the app being in grayscale, there is not a single color element in the entire app. We built it in a way to minimize the amount of time that you spend using the app.
So going over to your original projects it documented what I believe you described as sort of the Americanization of upper middle-class housing around the world. Could you talk about that project and also whether you think that that Americanization, if that's the right word for it, exists because other people find that American sort of comfort model very enticing, or is it just an accident because the United States is a relatively powerful country? So if Sweden were the world's superpower, you would, they'd be living the other way.
Yeah, exactly. We're living in minimalistic IKEA homes. They built themselves. The world would look very different, that's for sure. I think it's a combination of both. this project, which is called Suburbia Gone Wild, began in 2006 and I was in Thailand and I accidentally stumbled across this newly built suburb built for the upper middle class. And I found it so fascinating because to me, everything that I experienced and saw in this newly built suburb, I thought of America. at that point, I was still living in Sweden, so I wasn't actually that familiar with American culture. But what it did remind me of was the America that I've seen on TV and movies. And I think that that's really the kind of the true power of America is that it's the number one exporter of culture, and pop culture in particular. it's like that's the kind of version of America that I that they wanted to basically copy paste. And I thought for me, like that was a very kind of interesting idea because I never stumbled across a newly built area that was that seemed to lack any kind of cultural roots in the country where the suburb was born. I thought that was incredibly fascinating. over the next eight years, I traveled around to eight emerging economies around the world.
And I kind of continue to document this development of the basically the Americanization suburban life that as it was understood in these different countries. And I think that as an American, you probably would have seen this differently and it would be similar to America, but it would still be distinct. But what was interesting about it was the fact that all the people that lived inside these gated communities seem to share more of a lifestyle and more kind of an ambition with each other, than they did with the fellow countrymen who lived right on the other side of the gated community or right side of the wall that divided the newly built community and the outside. And Minutiae in a way is a continuation of that project because
What I realized was that you had all these people that live thousands of miles apart, different places on Earth, but they all seem to share the same beliefs and the same aspirations. And with minutiae, like it kind of came full circle because what I was interested in was to further document this movement of sorts.
Do you think that this sort of, if you could call it homogenization is a good thing or a bad thing? And is it, is it just a natural human desire where people will watch a movie and then they like the house the movie stars in. And so even if they're from Thailand, they want to have a house like their movie star just in the same way that after Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl performance, now people want bell-bottom jeans again. Like, is it just an inevitable thing about human culture?
Yes and no. mean, I do think it depends on who the person is or who the country is that broadcasting it. If it's a country that you as a person aspire to be part of, then I think that you're much more susceptible to taking in that message
So I do think that it's still like America has a very, very strong kind of drawing power in a way that people still look up to this country despite everything that happens and happened in the past. And I think that that's like a
That's something that I think might change now that we're going through a very kind of turbulent time and people are questioning this almost monopolistic approach to culture that the US really has.
I know you said minutiae is arguably not an American app, but then I think about both of you meeting in the States and living in the States while you do it. And you could argue it's sort of a classic American story where immigrants come in, hopefully they make something better.
Absolutely,
100%.
I also would say that like in a way it's also truly American in the fact that we are responding. The app in itself is a response to American culture in the fact that Instagram was created here, Facebook was created here. All these apps were born in this country and minutiae is many ways a response to that. if America hadn't created in the first place, we wouldn't have anything to respond to. if Instagram wouldn't have been a kind of showreel of perfectly curated captured moments, Minutiae probably wouldn't have existed in the first place. It's kind of a response both to this kind of doom scroll follower based approach that apps are built around.
And also the kind of snapshot aesthetic that people often take through minutiae, which is very different from the kind of stuff that you would see on social media apps.
Well, since we're talking in early 2025, and obviously you're an artist who works at the intersection of maybe more traditional photography and digital products, what do you think about the generative AI photographs?
I think of it kind of as a continuation of something that began long, long time ago. Photography has always, I feel like has always been a medium that is constantly changing and evolving. And up until recently, 10, 15 years ago, the fact that we would experience photography through a camera on an iPhone, think a lot of photographers would have thought would be very strange. I do think that just like we saw the kind of introduction of a lot of cameras being more accessible to a much bigger audience, how that informed the type of photos that people took then and that in itself kind of inspired culture.
I think that we will see the same thing with a lot of AI. My bet is that the counter reaction will be people taking photos that look even more analog, even more grungy or whatever word, punky, DIY, you want to call it.
Yeah. Do you have strong feelings on whether photographers or artists or animators, inventors of a certain or users of a certain style or certain works need to be compensated by AI companies which may have trained using their photographs or is it sort of a public domain thing where you can't copy a style really? How do you see it?
Yeah, I guess the question is also like, unfortunately, many of these companies have taken the approach of it's, better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. And I don't know if we will win this battle, unfortunately. I think it's gonna be a very tough one. And I also think that for the next generation who are now using this as their kind of as a default tool in the way they communicate or experience the world.
That's going to be a very hard argument for them to all of a sudden start to pay real money to use these tools. Because for them, this is going to be a default, just like we are using, you know, Zoom or whatever it is as a way of communication today. I think that the next generation is going to be these chat tools and image generator is going to be just as default as Photoshop and Zoom is today for us.
Yeah, no, that's true. It's remarkable how quickly things are changing.
Yeah, I should also say that I think that what's interesting and which is something that was unintentional when we created the app for obvious reasons is that because the images taken with minutiae can't be manipulated in any way, you can't upload photos from your camera roll, you can't add filters, you can't do anything to the photo or retake it even. In a way like
the moments that you capture with the app as the closest to a true record of what happened. And I think this will be really interesting, especially as we move forward where we have the next generation who will be questioning everything as a default. And Minutiae being perhaps one of the few apps and tools that actually where you can, the images that you view on it, you know for sure are real, is taken by a real person because there's simply no way of manipulating any of the moments that being captured with it.
For me, this is also an important aspect of it, the fact that what we are documenting today as a collective is something that might be interesting for future generations down the line. Exactly how and where and when that will happen, I don't know, but I do think about these aspects as well.
You accidentally invented the only way to tell if something's a not AI photo. It's like pretty interesting.
Yeah, exactly.
On the photography side We've had a long interview and we haven't even got to your photography gear how you got started as a photographer your advice for young Photographers, can you dive in a little bit and share your wisdom obviously as an accomplished photographic artist as well as creating Minutiae and other great projects.
Yeah, sure. So I actually I started as a photographer over 20 years ago when I was still living in Sweden. It was right at the moment where we transitioned from film to digital. So it was right at that cusp.
And did people think you were crazy? Like when you started digital, you were talking to the person you learned photography from and he thought that you were a rebel or how did you make that decision of that really crucial transition point?
It’s extremely unnostalgic of me. My the main reason for it was simply convenience and the fact that I had more control over the process. At this point, when I began, I was doing a lot of portraiture, a lot of travel and a lot of magazine portraiture and that type of stuff. And often in those situations, you have a very limited amount of time. You don't have a lot of control over your circumstances. And by shooting digital, you just had the ability to get more out of the shoot than what you would have if you shot analog. So for me, it was never a question. I don't have any strong feelings about digital or analog. For me, it's simply about what's the best tool to get the job done. And that has been digital for me. Yeah.
So if you were doing magazines, did you jump into being a professional or getting paid relatively quickly? What was that process like?
Yeah, so I actually had a somewhat strange story, I guess. So I began in Sweden where I'm from. My high school had a semester where you could work as a apprentice for anyone you were interested in working with. And I decided that I wanted to work for a photographer. So I actually reached out to a photographer in Oslo, which is in Norway.
That's so cool.
In this case, Oslo and where I was living was only a few hours away. So I remember I opened the yellow pages in the phone book of Oslo under photographer, and I emailed the first three people that had their email address in the phone book. And one of them responded and said, yeah, you can come here for a week. So I got on a bus and I stayed at my friend's place.
And I thought to myself, if it only lasts one week, that's fine. At least I get some experience. Luckily, he decided to keep me on. So I was his assistant for the rest of that semester. And then I continued going full time as his assistant for another year and a half. And what was incredibly valuable during that time was that I learned not only how to take images, but also just to run a business, how to take care of customers, how to treat a client, how to treat models that you were working with, all these things that you don't necessarily think about before moving into, know, before you start as a photographer. And that became very, very valuable. At the same time, I had access to his camera equipment. So I was actually starting to do a lot of freelance assignments for different magazines that was at that time existing in Oslo. I slowly but surely built a portfolio that way. I basically photographed all my friends, asked them to model for me, had friends of friends, friends girlfriend doing the makeup. Looking back at it, it wasn't particularly good, but it was more just to get my feet wet, and kind of get to build a portfolio basically. And then little by little, I started getting more and more clients. And in 2003, I moved to Stockholm, Sweden. And there again, kind of started from scratch really, had my portfolio and slowly building it.
So I did that kind of in parallel just to earn a little bit of, have a bit more of a steady income. And at the same time, I slowly started to get more more clients.
When I moved to New York, at that point, I'd been working full time as a photographer for two and a half, three years, probably. And I built my website in a way that it was particularly targeted towards a lot of international magazines that were doing stories on Sweden.
Whether it was travel related or they were interviewing celebrities in Sweden. So I got a lot of very good network of photo editors in the UK, in Germany, in the US. So when I moved to the US in 2007, I already had a pretty good network of photo editors that I'd been working with. so...
That's kind of what I started with when I got to the U S and then slowly by surely, I started to get more commercial clients, which is often where, you know, where you kind of make a living from, often the editorial work at that point paid, you know, if you're lucky, maybe 2000 bucks, but often a couple of hundred dollars. So was really the commercial work that kind of sustained you. and then over time, you start building those relationships based on the portfolio that you build through your editorial work. And then at the same time, a lot of my work was what in the photography world we would call personal projects, which is basically work that is not paid for. So that was when I went and started working on Suburbia Gone Wild. And I did a number of other projects kind of.
in the same vein, starting to kind of establish my own, both my own visual language, but also my own conceptual language in terms of understanding what I was interested in pointing my camera towards. So that eventually led up to the fact that I decided to join this Art and Tech Incubator in 2014. And I think that for a lot of people that especially into photography business. Joining a Art-Tech incubator was probably very far-fetched, but for me, that was, again, like I didn't have this kind of nostalgic relationship to photography.
That's really interesting. do think you can really plan a creative career in advance or do you just have to be open to what happens while trying to shape it as best you can?
I think you have to be open and — So I'm the first to admit I'm quite stubborn. I don't like to give up. I just like keep at it. And that might sound strange when I'm also suggesting that you should be adaptive and kind of embracing the new. But I think that you can combine both of those two. For me, the concept has always been more important than how it's being executed. The fact that we're using phones for minutiae, like if there was another technology that would have worked better, I would happily have used that. If there was another way of documenting these moments, I would have, yeah, again, happily used that instead. So I do think that like leading up to minutiae, I can see that there is a somewhat clear path. I've always been interested in the everyday. I've always been interested in understanding group behavior, why we act in a certain way as a group as opposed to how we act individually. I've always been interested in patterns and behavior. How we react and respond to different situations based on certain choices that we make, based on certain identities, based on certain hats that we wear. So those have always kind of informed my work in one way or the other. The fact that minutiae became minutiae, again, like if I hadn't taken the photography route to begin with. I don't know, I don't think that I would have ended up creating an app.
Have you thought about doing a video version of Minutiae?
No, not really. because, the fact of the fact that the, the process of taking a photo I find is really interesting because with a, with a photo, you're forced to make a decision. you're forced to direct your camera at something and say, this is what matters with video. You can make that decision.
in post, you can make that decision once you've recorded your video. And for me, that the decision making is the core kind of concept of minutiae in many ways.
Yeah. On the photography side, really quick, what do you use for professional photographs and do you have any recommendations for beginners looking to get a camera like beyond a smartphone?
I'm the worst person to ask that. I often, if I'm on a shoot, often have to ask my assistant what type of camera I'm using because I, again, like I don't really have a strong relationship to the make or the lens or whatever it is. I often have a very clear picture of what I want to communicate and whatever tool I can use to communicate that concept, that's what matters. At the moment I have a Sony, but again, I could have had a Canon or Nikon, whatever. Like I really don't care. I know for a lot of photographers, that's very controversial, but it's, yeah, I'm more interested in the output than the mechanics of capturing the moment or the photo.
I think that's a deep creative insight where you need to focus on the end result and what you want to create versus worrying too much about the tool.
I find that the tool often becomes a distraction and it often becomes an excuse for what to capture and what not to capture. And I don't want to be in that situation. Again, for me, a lot of my projects, the concept is more important than the execution. And I think that's really kind of that's if there's like a common thread throughout all my projects is that they're not
Yeah.
Visually, there is no visual perfection, but it's the more the conceptual underpinning for me is more important than anything else.
We need to put that in like the email announcing this interview or maybe at the top. think it's like the concept is more important than the execution is a good quote and like.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Do you have any other bits of creative wisdom or like something that you're told you that really stuck with you or that you thought of?
I think that if for anyone who's listening or watching this want to make a living creating stuff, I would say that it's constantly, it's work in progress. If you feel that you've reached a certain level and then you just cross your arms and said, okay, good, I made it then. I think that technology and the world is gonna advance in such a that you're gonna be left behind. For me, I think that it's really important just to, again, focus on what the message is, focus on what the story is that you want to communicate, whether that's through images, through technology, through painting, it doesn't really matter. to me, the idea is always what wins in every instance. I feel like if you have a strong belief that you have a certain set of ideas that the world needs to hear, I think you're gonna be able to make a living as an artist. I don't think you're gonna necessarily make a ton of money. But again, most people don't do this to make a ton of money. They do it because they don't have any other way of they don't have any other output. And art making art is kind of what is the only thing that they really can do. I also think that there is a lot of people who are very drawn to art because they want to be artists, but for the sake of being artists. And I think that's a terrible idea, do something else. to put it this way, you can't, Art in some way is something that you do because you don't have an option. You do it because that's the only thing that you care about and the only thing that you really can do. If you don't feel that way, then you probably should find something else to do because you will never be happy or satisfied with just being an artist. But that would be my advice.
What's next for Minutiae and what's also next for you and your art practice outside of it?
Yeah, so what's new is, or what's next, I should say, is a couple of really interesting collaborations working with two artists in the UK and Paris on a, I don't know how much I should disclose, but let's just say that it's an audio-based project and it's still related to Minutiae.
In addition to that, we're also working on an archive, Minutiae is a very long-term project. So that's also something that we're working on. Again, that's still in the kind of funding stage. So exactly when that happens, TBD. But yeah, we have a lot of fun, interesting things to work with. So I'm very, very excited about it. And then in addition,
We have the books, there is a bit of a redesign of the grid that we're working on. And yeah, some books that I'm thinking about, some posters that's going to get redesigned, et cetera. So a lot of stuff, again, I'm the one running it together with a handful of freelancers. So it's a very, very small team. we do this when basically when we have, you know, bandwidth.
Well, it's a very important project and I really love it. It's made an impact on my life and I know it's made an impact on a lot of people's lives. So I just wanted to thank you for that.
It's so great to hear. Thank you so much. Thank you so, so much.
Just to close, are there movies, books, albums that have changed your life or that you would like to recommend from one creative to other people listening? Something that you've really enjoyed?
Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the most consequential artworks for me, which is an artwork that's inspired minutiae, is the American artist Sol Lewitt, who made a artwork called Instructions, which is literally a set of instructions written on a piece of paper. And anyone can execute the instructions on that piece of paper and it can be performed anywhere in the world that you see fit. So a lot of these kind of principles are part of Minutiae really, where Minutiae is basically a framework and the participants of the project fill in literally the blanks by capturing these in-between moments of their life. So Saul Lewitt has been a huge inspiration for me.
There is also On Kawara, a Japanese artist that did date paintings that I really like. I also think some of the minimalists have done some really stunning work, even though it's not necessarily inspired perhaps Minutiae, but it's something that I just find aesthetically pleasing.
What's a date painting?
So it's a Japanese artist On Kawara. I'm sure I'm butchering his name but he wrote on a black canvas. He wrote today's date in the location where he was at the moment when he wrote it. So each one of them have a different ISO configuration. The date is written in different ways depending on the country that he was in when he wrote it.
And it has a very beautiful kind of, again, continuity that I really inspired by and obviously, he's probably a very, very, very stubborn person as well, which I kind of admire.
Yeah, and I guess, I don't know if this is like over-intellectualizing or something where I just realized you talking about just having a son now and minutiae and continuity in art. You could maybe argue having a child is like the ultimate form of continuity in art because you've created a human who will continue after.
Absolutely. 100%. 100%. And I think it's something that you obviously realize when you're, I just had my parents, they just left yesterday. And it's this idea that you're just like basically a chain, like a link in a long, long chain of people that came before you and that will come after you and how we understand the world today and what we see today. Future generations will look at very differently through a very different lens. And I think that's also what I want to really emphasize with a project and kind of really the authenticity aspect of it that I want future generations to really be able to trust that what is being captured with a moment was actually true in 2017 and forward and not something that was, you know, created with generative means or synthetic in any
I know it's a beautiful project and I really it's been a real honor, Martin. I really love this project. I didn't think when I started a couple years ago, I would be talking to you. so it's really, cool. and thank you.
I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you so, much. I really appreciate it. And thank you for inviting me. This was such a pleasure.
Thank you.
It was so cool how we got you on the minute at the start. That's like a real destiny moment and full circle moment for me. So thank you.
I know, I know. Thank you, exactly the algorithm. That was, that was, again, it's, it's based on a schedule and that schedule is, was pre-made eight years ago. So the fact that it would align so nicely, sometimes it happens.
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Check out Minutiae on the Apple App Store, Android, or their homepage. Check out co-founder Martin Adolfsson’s photography page and personal projects page!
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✨ Poetry Culture is quietly expanding. We’re about to launch new creative tools and resources for subscribers ($50/yr) and founding ($99/yr) members. I’m also handwriting thank you notes to everyone who joins a paid tier. I hope you’ll consider joining us on this journey! ✨ More on that in future posts <3
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