Maybe our parents were right, and it is these damn phones. Everyone is pixelating every inch of themselves every second of every day, and squeezing all 32 bits through the algorithms’ merciless fingers, hoping to escape into the vastness that is being perceived as “influential”. So how do we make space for depth when relevancy and frequency are almost inextricable? Galleries are one of the most striking examples of how we’ve been taught to engage with the world.

Do you know who invented contrapposto?

If I say the words “Kritios Boy,” do they mean anything to you?

Do you know how that fine art print hanging in your house was made?

And why did you record it all instead of asking questions?

Endless information at our fingertips, and we’re more uninformed than ever.

Our days consist of saving recipes we’ll never cook. Looking at places we’ll never go. Immersing ourselves in the lives of others while silently doomscrolling ours away. We’re seeing it all. And we’re feeling absolutely none of it. We ignore the beauty in our own backyards—save for when it serves as an aesthetic backdrop for our feeds. And the spaces meant for us to connect, teach, and inspire— like galleries— have merely become backdrops for our lives.

In an effort to look smarter, or dare I say, more interesting, we’ve denied ourselves the simplest human pleasure there is: learning. We’ve convinced ourselves that not knowing is embarrassing, instead of realizing that caring about something deeply enough to explore it is the point of it all. When’s the last time you sat with something long enough that it changed how you ideated and how you saw the world?

Becoming is not a process of immediate gratification. Developing a pursuit that isn’t merely an amalgamation of whatever the algorithm has force-fed you is the difference between being exposed to culture and critique, and actively participating in it. You may know what everyone is talking about, but do you know why it matters? The former is being sold to us as the latter, and suddenly we’re scrambling to take photos at the next exhibition to signal that we’re in the know— all the while sprinting past the didactic labels too fast to ever read them, and with too much empathy to ever even care that they’re there.

There is something deeply human about creating. About looking at the world as it exists and deciding, arrogantly perhaps, that you might be able to make some small part of it work differently. Better. But creating is messy and inherently inconvenient. And that’s really what 2Twelve signifies. The goal isn’t to reduce friction; it’s to introduce enough of it to get us to start talking again. 2Twelve is what happens when you stop treating creativity merely as content, and you begin using whatever format best serves the conversation and gives us the ability to slow down just enough to become participants instead of consumers.

The approach may change. A dinner. A podcast. An exhibition. A campaign. But the reasoning has not: We have grown increasingly suspicious of a culture that mistakes visibility for substance, and we’ve decided that the resistance lies in our ability to believe that the most radical thing you can do in a culture that desperately craves your fixation is to avert your eyes and be yourself.

The algorithm can have your attention. We’d rather earn your curiosity.

Welcome to our room.