“What am I looking at?”
It’s usually my first question. Someone puts a deck, a budget, a photograph, or a sentence in front of me and asks what I think. And then I ask:
“What am I looking at?”
How did we get from point A to whatever point we're at now? Can you provide me with a brief history of nearly everything before I engage with this subject? It drives everyone insane and sends me into recurrent bouts of self-reckoning.
Someone I hired asked me to write this. I could use the space to complain about TikTok. Attention spans. But you have every right to ask me: “What am I looking at?”
CONTEXT is intended to answer that question by showing you who we are as an agency. You see the work Tractorbeam produces. Maybe you think it’s great. Or fine. Or terrible. But how did we get here? How are you supposed to respond to it? What difference does it make in your context, if any?
We’re strategists, designers, writers, producers, digital experts, and people with other specialties that don’t fit neatly on a list. We care about what we do, and we have opinions about how it should be done. This publication is a place to unpack those opinions through the work: why we made the choices we did, where we succeeded, where we fell short, and what we’d do differently next time. It’s how we figure "it" out, over and over again.
What we publish here will not always be literal. Sometimes, it will just be a peek inside someone's mind as a means to understand a creative process and an analytic approach. Sometimes, we will just be hyping someone whose mind we admire. There will be lists.
So, that's what you're looking at. The beginning of the answer to my tired question... "as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen," to quote a poem no one read in high school.
Here is some CONTEXT. We hope it helps.
