We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Erika V a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Erika, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

Our time in this life is relatively short. The developed human mind is keenly aware of this fact, and also very good at solving problems. One of the problems I see in this world is a potential for humanity to lose sight of stellar progress. So often, we have knee-jerk reactions to clickbait news headlines and believe what we are told without doubt – confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, the works: these tendencies keep us mired in confusing muck. We all need to be on the same page in order to turn it without tearing the paper and causing unrest. I wanted to help our existence by creating a fun way to teach all ages how to pursue truth founded on fact, to be okay with the vulnerability that is the unknown, to question all information we perceive. But nobody likes a doomsayer long-term. So I wanted it to be FUN. Fractal Force was born of this drive: a meaningful project to make a world of difference.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My career path is quite convoluted. I have held many different positions in the service and science industries, but few of them gave me any sense of purpose. Day to day, sure, I felt I was helping, but it did not have meaningful weight. Being born in 1991 I grew alongside the internet, and it alongside us, while also immersing myself in the wilds of nature. I saw how the internet could both be disastrous but also massively helpful and started to dabble in coding and digital artwork before I was a teenager. Long has the electric and biological language been a part of my name. Eventually the skillset grew to the point where I started selling those skills. In this vast digital age, many others are doing the same. So what sets me apart? Perhaps diligence, though there are plenty of others who do this far better. There is a significant % drop between those who dabble and those who dive in: I found that I liked this type of work enough to start investing a lot more time and resources into a business model, and sell many of my works online. Some of it is passive income, which I prefer, while others are physical prints I must mail out on a semi-regular basis. Of course, much of this skillset translated well into the development of Fractal Force, my main project. Fractal Force is what sets me apart: it is a paradigm of thought captured in cards, a combination of the digital and life itself, trademarked, and a dream made real – but there is still so far to go. When it comes to entrepreneurship, that’s the sacrifice: if you stop, it all stops. You simply must dive in and keep swimming.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Affirmation. Happy customers who have deemed my creations worthy by actually making purchases, returning for more, leaving good reviews, and so on. This is proof that what I am doing is appreciated, and wow does that go a long way. I could create for the sake of creating, but knowing that it serves many purposes is so much better for me personally.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Respect the money. Recognize that our society would be sorely bereft without creative expression: almost everything you do for fun is the result of an inspired artist, or a group of them. That museum you visited? The show performed live on stage? The fliers for those events? That is all art. So much is provided for free because it is core to the nature of our species, but such liberal distribution is often taken for granted. Artists must sacrifice so much time to the grind, for both employment unrelated to their passion and the passion itself. If our society could recognize the monetary value of this time, of the life spent towards these goals, this sacrifice, so much MORE could be created. An infinite array of beautiful possibility allowed to grow, instead of being stifled or outright prevented by day to day necessity of obtaining enough money for food, medical expenses, shelter, and for many, their children. To me the solution is not so much individual customers being willing to pay a fair price: that’s happening all the time, just barely enough in many cases. A better solution is society itself, as in politically, funding this lifestyle for qualifying individuals and groups. A sort of application for grant money, to compare it to the science industry. Or even a signature type of basic income, so long as the individual keeps creating to justify the hand that feeds. Programs like this exist already in some institutions, but I’d like for them to be the norm and far more well-known and robust.

Contact Info:

• Website: fractalforce.carrd.co
• Instagram: instagram.com/dracovisions

Image Credits
All digital artwork and photography within provided visuals is © Erika V of DracoVisions LLC, with permission to publish granted to canvasinterviews.