THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY · VOL. 001
Twelve imaginary records about the things that never got top billing: a rehearsal, a revision, a quiet friendship, a footnote. Flip each one. Listen with your eyes.
An original interactive fiction. No commercial songs, samples, or artist impersonations.
A NOTE FROM THE ARCHIVIST
Sometimes attention and quality overlap. Sometimes timing, gatekeeping, networks, marketing, chance, and context help decide what gets heard. A B-side is our metaphor for work that lives outside the spotlight—not a claim that obscure things are automatically better.
THE FICTIONAL CATALOGUE
Choose a record. Flip it to read what the public-facing title leaves out. Add the tracks that speak to you to a concept album.
YOUR PRIVATE PRESSING
Move tracks up and down to tell your own story. Your mix lives in the URL fragment, not on a server.
Sharing a link shares only the selected track numbers and their order. No accounts, cookies or analytics.
THE READING ROOM
Interpretive essays, not empirical verdicts.
Every list is a door and a wall. Curation helps us navigate abundance, but its omissions can look like judgments about value. A list reflects a purpose, a point of view and a set of constraints. Asking “what is this list for?” is often more revealing than asking whether it is definitive.
To curate responsibly is not to pretend to see everything. It is to disclose the lens, revisit exclusions and leave room for discoveries that do not fit the original frame.
Attention is finite. Platforms, publishers and people therefore rely on shortcuts: familiarity, social proof, repetition, novelty. These are useful for deciding what to examine next, but weak substitutes for deciding what is meaningful to you.
Being noticed can create opportunities for more notice. That feedback loop explains some visibility without proving anything about intrinsic merit. The reverse is also true: being overlooked does not confer hidden genius.
Taste is partly learned and partly situated. A work can reach us because it belongs to a particular evening, friendship, memory or mood. That connection may be real even if it cannot be converted into a universal ranking.
There is freedom in saying “this matters to me” without requiring everyone else to agree. The aim is neither contrarianism nor conformity. It is attention generous enough to notice your own response.
Finished work has a visible surface. Behind it may be drafts, experiments, conversations, corrections and discarded versions. Some of the most important decisions are subtractive: a paragraph removed, an apology made, a design simplified.
The workshop is not always glamorous. That is precisely why it deserves an archive. The B-side asks us to honor the labor without romanticizing every unfinished thing.
END OF SIDE TWO
This exhibition is an original metaphorical work. The twelve tracks and liner notes are fiction; the essays offer interpretation rather than measured scientific conclusions.
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