little c creativity
It’s been a while since I’ve ruminated about anything on this blog.
I’ve been caught up in things — where I should move next and distance. When I say distance, I mean in all senses, personal, physical, communication. I’ve also been thinking about art, which gets brought up a lot as an object, a description, a lifestyle. Maybe because I’m considering joining an art program. Maybe because I’m confused by the fuzziness between “art” and “design”, “content” and “aesthetic”. For example, Gehry and the work on flight404.com have always confused me. Art and distance are linked like any two nebulous terms, which is ultimately a personal way, but Tolstoy’s What Is Art is an interesting starting point.
The distinction between high art and low art, which Tolstoy says is the values they embody, reminds me of the distinction between Creativity and creativity (note the big C and little c) that Resnick descibes. Whereas Creativity is an elite endeavor, creativity is for everyone, a redefinition of communication. I’ve often wondered how creative tools, aimed at improving literacy and establishing motivational environments for everyone to dump their mind, will change the image of art. Art as status. Art as meaning. Or maybe better, what is the meaning in art?
I think the meaning of creativity is to let us appreciate art. When you dismiss something as “uninspired”, as purposeless or fake, the dialog there is on a level of empathy that doesn’t surface often. Maybe the distance between egotism and empathy is a bad day.
I don’t think I’ll ever be impressed with noise. I think some people try to play it as emergence, the idea that meaning arises out of the layering of /arbitrary/ complexity. A long time ago I did my own experiments with noise — how much prettiness can a black box generate? How many patterns? A lot; infinite. Some are cool. Ken Perlin showed that entire worlds can be built out of numerical twittering. In some sense hiking used to mean this to me — an exploration of the unknown. A think a more profound interpretation would have been a connection with what is.
I think it’s common to see now, with the emergence of computational design, arbitrariness, commonly in the form of primary or derived data , spun as meaning, or a conceptual backbone. E.g. ambience (the number of sodas you drank this week colors the sky); explanation (the amplitude of vibration is based on how many hot words are in the paragraph). It’s hard for me to connect with this — I feel mostly it’s more of an exploration of the unknown than a connection to the what is.
This post is getting too long and I need to hack tonight.
p.s. a new site design is coming soon! It’s a real charley’s girl theme