There are No Mediums, Only Mediums
Image: Gene Youngblood and Buckminster Fuller from Expanded Cinema
I have reached a conceptual ceiling as an artist. No amount of drawings or getting better at my craft is going to satisfy me anymore.
After awhile, I got bored with art. Bored with video games, anime, cinema, porn, hentai, etc. Not because what's being made today is bad (although a lot of media is), it's that we have reached the conceptual limits for what is technically possible and culturally allowed within these mediums.
There's no shortage of conceptually and culturally-rich illustration work being put out by artists today. A quick browse of Gelbooru and Newgrounds will tell you that much. It's the amateurs, those who create art out of desire, that are truly keeping art and media alive today.
But there are few of us that have the radical will to integrate different fields of knowledge, mediums, and technologies towards creating images that are otherwise not possible within any one medium.
That's where I'm at. Not knowing math well. Not knowing STEM (science, technology, engineering, math), is the biggest handicap for me as an artist right now.
Picture this. The moon is approximately 238,855 miles from Earth, and is moving further away from us by an inch every year. The sun is 28,000,000 miles from Earth. Despite their enormous distances, we are able to see these celestial objects with our naked eyes, which demonstrates just how unfathomably large they actually are.
Why am I saying this? It's because we're at a point in human history in which we can create literally ANY kind of image, and observe Earth as a complete system (geologically, psychologically, politically, socially) in full-view. Every history, every art form, every society, and every culture is now available to us.
How this relates to artists is that there is untapped potential within art and media that isn't being drawn out. This isn't a matter of "good" and "bad" art, but leveraging the affordances of the technologies that we have today.
There are no mediums, only mediums. What this means is that in order to create these new images. In order to evolve our media, whether it be comics, anime, or video games, we have to move beyond "medium specificity" towards what is called intermedia, or the "mediums between mediums".