How Instagram and a short attention audience changed and shaped the work of writer and author Dean Cocozza.
There’s plenty of artists that have discovered and chosen social media and particularly Instagram as their main platform to share and showcase their new creations.
The aesthetic and statement driven platform has probably inspired more people to read or try their own luck in creating, designing and writing than the unfortunately increasingly less common habit of reading a book has done in the past 20 years.
One artist who’s work has been shared by many and yet doesn’t seem to have lost his very own style in the mix of ‘Instagram aesthetics’ is @deancocozza.
I discovered him after seeing a few of his writings shared on different pages and they always really stuck with me and more so made me feel something.
Frankly, you have to have a spot for melancholy, darker thoughts and if you look at his profile, undeniably a little bit of a David-Lynch-type of aesthetic.
But if that’s what you’re into you’ll definitely appreciate his work. Earlier this year, he released his second book ‘zero dark thirty’, a collection of poetry, some of which he had shared on his profile before.
We messaged him to find out what got him into writing and particularly into sharing his work on Instagram. The reply we received from him was that he ‘started writing for songs years ago and mostly worked as a ghostwriter for artists’ before he thought about different ways to share writings that he didn’t want to connect with music.
‘It didn’t take me more than a couple of posts to realize there is no chance people will pay attention to anything longer than a second unless they’re already into what I do, so I challenged myself to put everything I really want to say in a single line, two at most.
The response was instant and after a couple shares from big artists and platforms I realized this could be really interesting. It definitely shaped my approach from there on.’
He added ‘In my opinion there is nothing wrong in adapting your communication style to an audience. I guess in other ways of communication that is called intelligence, in order to be understood. So if I do it in art, to be felt, I don’t see a difference.’
That is as much as we got from him, but he told us, that he is ‘currently working on an exciting new project that will take things to a different level and direction’.
So we’re definitely keeping our eyes open for what’s to come!