Art & Creativity Quote by Jack Bowman

Mauled is the right verb for the late-modern media diet: it suggests not just overload, but injury. Bowman isn’t lamenting that we know too much; he’s arguing we’re being bludgeoned by the same facts, takes, and formats reheated until they pass for reality. “Recycled information” reads like a shot at the algorithmic loop: headlines that mutate into hot takes that mutate into memes, each iteration feeling “new” because it arrives in a fresh wrapper.

The pivot - “We need to shut it out” - isn’t anti-intellectual so much as self-defense. He’s describing attention as a finite resource that can be strip-mined. When the world becomes an endless feed, opting out becomes a creative act. That’s why he goes straight to “bizarre.” In Bowman’s framing, weirdness isn’t novelty for its own sake; it’s a crowbar. The bizarre interrupts pattern-recognition, dislodges the viewer from passive consumption, forces the body back into the experience of looking.

His actor’s sensibility matters: performance art isn’t just content, it’s confrontation. Unlike a screen, it shares space, time, and risk with an audience. That immediacy can’t be fully “recycled” because it’s contingent - on breath, discomfort, confusion, presence. The subtext is a critique of culture’s smoothness: the polished, shareable, instantly legible thing. Performance art, at its best, refuses easy legibility. It breaks the loop by making meaning feel unstable again, which is exactly what a numbed attention economy can’t easily metabolize.