Less Is More

Not Everything Needs to Move, Talk, or Sing

collage, 2022

I’m a still image person. That might be giving away my age, but so be it. I’m also a words person. I don’t need things to move. Or be said out loud. I like to look at stuff. All of it. The details. The context. I like to read. Pause. Re-read. Reflect. I don’t need things to be animated. To move. To be read to me. To come with a soundtrack or voiceover.

No videos. No reels. (No audio books either.)

As if scrolling through hundreds of — by now mostly — videos on any type of social media, including places like LinkedIn, isn’t bad enough, these days everything comes with a ten-second snippet of music or captions read out by some creepy AI voice. Does anyone listen to this? The cacophony would be mind-numbing.

I have to spend some time on Instagram every day to update PCC, and as if the platform itself weren’t bad enough — with its twisted algorithm, sponsored content, ever-changing backend, and the money-obsessed monkeys running the show — the music everyone is told to add, supposedly to increase engagement, is beyond me.

Who came up with this? Who decided that a medium where people spend fractions of seconds with things they barely register needs music on top? Someone’s clearly profiting. I just can’t be asked to look into who or how.

And yes, I can turn off the sound. The music is just a minor nuisance. I also don’t want to write yet another rant about social media on social media. I already have a long one lined up.

So, back to still images. Finished pieces. Unfinished pieces. Before and after pieces. Abandoned pieces. Old. New. Whatever. Just stills I can spend time with.

Even The New Yorker started to use animated illustrations. Only on occasion. And fairly tastefully. But still — why? Because everyone is doing it? Because we’re told it’s the only way to cut through the noise? Be noisier? Scream louder? Move faster?

It’s not working.

There are exceptions, sure. But let’s be honest: most of us aren’t the exception. We’re just piling more motion onto already fractured attention. We’re overwhelming ourselves.

I’m not sugarcoating this. Less is more!

If you’re an animation or video artist, go for it. Everyone else, don’t. A studio or exhibition walkthrough now and then? Fine. An animated slideshow of your last ten pieces? Not needed. The artwork itself animated — I’m a collage artist, so I see this a lot — even less.

Research over the past decade shows a measurable drop in our ability to focus. A widely cited (and probably overstated) Microsoft study from 2015 claimed that the average human attention span had shrunk to about 8 seconds — shorter than a goldfish's. These days? Probably closer to 3–4 seconds.

While the goldfish comparison is more metaphor than science, a nice one though, the underlying trend is real: we're training our brains to constantly chase new stimuli.

Neuroscientists link this to the constant barrage of digital content and notifications, which condition the brain to seek novelty. Dopamine* — the brain’s reward chemical — is released every time we encounter something new, causing a loop of scrolling, tapping, swiping. It’s not that our brains can’t focus anymore; it’s that we’re rarely asked (or forced) to. Sustained attention is a muscle, and we’re not exercising it much.

Media researchers warn that constant visual and auditory stimulation makes deep engagement harder. Everything is urgent. Flashy. Loud. But ironically, the more stimulation we add (including music), the less we absorb. It doesn’t stick.

So yes. Less is more. Not just aesthetically, but neurologically. Stillness has value. Still images ask us to slow down, consider, and actually see.

Therefore: stop moving! Please!

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*Arte has a great little series called Dopamine on how all our favourite apps are built to be addictive. Available here (in English)