Last night I was wondering whether my ongoing quest to do things creative stems from the reality that there are always going to be others out to destroy what I create.
Yesterday, the brothers metabolic, authors of schizophrenia + architectures, 1999, took a stroll along the beach of Cape May Point. The quondam eroded beach has been recreated this past winter.
I think creativity comes from being critical and always questioning the status quo. Critical thinking and continual rethinking leads to creative solutions.
Aug 18, 05 1:34 pm ·
·
mwad, does your answer above then also explain where your creativity comes from? Are you critical and always questioning the status quo when you are being creative?
I try to. But unfortunately budgets and time constraints come into the picture a lot more these days. In school definetely. It was always asking what else architecture could do beyond the basic programatic requirements, along the lines of Moss's essay in Gnostic Architecture. And honestly its a whole range of experiences, influences, and ideas that affect how and what one questions in being critical (creative). All these things help create the ground zero that one begins from. I've gotta get some CAD done now...
i'm not creative, but i work hard and that is enough to make people think i might be. it's all a game, the creativity thing, with the goal being to not overindulge the urge for novelty and orgasmitronics.
cuz orgasmitronics are soooo fun the effort to resist can be too much for some, leading directly to hermaphroditic behavior and Wal-mart. Yeh, it's a vicious problem; ending with the penultimate question...
what is creativity? and the realisation that maybe the whole idea is just a bad joke. like pantomime.
Sadly, mwad, I imagine it's probably value engineered revisions.
Dave Hickey once said that if you are ever in a conversation in which someone calls you "creative", you should end that conversation immediately.
He says, and I agree, that we are all "creative", whether designing a building or making cookies or figuring out the most efficient way to mow the lawn or choosing a tie or answering a question or performing surgery. But not everyone is aware of their potential to be creative, and that's why we get tragedies like school shootings and possibly the Iraq war - a failure of imagination.
(I'm paraphrasing fast and loose here - read Air Guitar for a better rendering of what I'm talking about.)
lb, indeed we are all creative. the book 'the world as design' by olt aicher hits on that very point. in it, he states that we are all designers.
Aug 18, 05 3:21 pm ·
·
Well, we all operate metabolically, that's for sure. And the operation of fertility is definitely part of our design. That leaves, for sure, assimilation, electromagnetism, osmosis, and then all high frequencies.
They say metabolism is in every cell. That might be true for every living human cell, and even if it's only almost every living human cell that has metabolism in it, imagine then a destructive-creative duality going on in nearly all the cells of your body the whole time you're alive. (This exercise is actually an experiment in first stimulating the assimilating imagination.)
i'm not so sure about creativity since everything is always changing anyhow. to think of yourself "as creative" seems more like an attempt to believe that you have control over something. if we are all just surfing along the changes/permutations of time, then i guess sometimes we jam with the right wave and it feels good, as though we created when we've really only harnessed it. but then sometimes we crash and that hurts, and maybe that is what drives us "to create" or at least find something more comfortable to dance with.
i should probably think things through more before writing, but i'm curious for any (potentially corrective) feedback, so let's hear it
It seems like there is a confusion between "innovative" and "creative".
Everyone creates something, an arrow, a CAD file full of window details, whatever, etc....
innovative, is trying to do something "new"....
So you an create anything is a question of how innovative it is....
Creativy stems from awareness, intuitive thinking and experimentation.
Allowing my mind to wander and allow solutions to come from iteration and practice,(hand-sketching, exploration, discussions with professors and colleagues) , as well as quality critiques that unfold and allow a wide exchange of ideas that further the creative process.
What would hinder creativity in the mind of a designer or architect is being overtly critical too early in the project and not allowing the project to become a manifestation of ideas and discovery.
because i like to draw, i like to think in shapes and colours and blobs. half the reason is because i like aesthetics. and the other half is because i like new experiences that come with new objects/spaces.
Aug 18, 05 5:46 pm ·
·
I think the metaphor your searching for is 'ambidextrous'. That's funny anyway because my right hand did this. Very metabolic!
Although we are all creative, it is the degree to which we believe we can control and influence our environment which dictates the scale of our creativity. Or:
C[N1]:N2[CI]
Where C = creativity, N = the quantative factor, and CI represents the qualitiative degree of control and influence we possess. When both quantatative factors are equal, we have good creativity, when they are not, there is a destructive capacity on ourselves or the environment.
If we believe that we have a high degree of infulence on our environemt, but lack the creative skills to affect the environment, the environment suffers. If we believe that we are highly creative, or have developed creative skills, but we dont believe we can impact on the environment, then we suffer.
I'm not so sure I am creative. sometimes I wonder if I don't just subconsciously rip everything off, you know?
Aug 18, 05 6:14 pm ·
·
Sean, I think the only collaborative works presently at museumpeace are most of the collages done in May 2001 with the assistance of Anna DiCicco. There might some other stuff done with Anna in the summer of 2001 as well; I'm just mindful right now of everything that is presently on the site.
And I'd say diabase's creativity theorem applies pretty well to my concern that a failure of imagination leads to destructive tendencies - imagination enabling one to figure out how to impact thier environment, or how to otherwise managing not being able to.
Why aren't we teaching at in schools anymore?
Aug 18, 05 6:17 pm ·
·
Well, the two most prodominant modes of imagination under which humanity presently operates are the assimilating imagination and the metabolic imagination. It will remain that way for almost 200 more years. Then like at least a half century of predominantly the metabolic imagination in operation.
Pretty momentary [and I'm no mathematician]. However, I have been thinking about this for a while, particularly about how I can achieve control and independence in my professional life.
I've been forced to - my job has steered me from designing buildings, to designing buildings and project managing them, which is a whole other ball game... I need a whole other set of systems and practices to ensure success. And of course, creativity plays a massive role in organisation.
Perhaps not a zeitgeist, but a collective consciousness:
'At six, children are obsessed with being accepted by the group and become incredibly sensitive to violations of group norms. They've been gripped by yet another conformity enforcer which structures their perceptions to coincide with those around them.
Even rhythm draws humans together in the subtlest of ways. William Condon of Pennsylvania's Western State Psychiatric Institute analyzed films of adult conversations and noticed a peculiar process at work. Unconsciously, the conversationalists began to coordinate their finger movements, eye blinks and nods. Electroencephalography showed something even more astonishing - their brain waves were moving together. Newborn babies already show this synchrony - in fact, an American infant still fresh from the womb will just as happily match its body movements to the speech of someone speaking Chinese as to someone speaking English. As time proceeds, these unnoticed synchronies draw larger and larger groups together. A student working under the direction of anthropologist Edward T. Hall hid in an abandoned car and filmed children romping in a school playground at lunch hour. Screaming, laughing, running and jumping, each seemed superficially to be doing his or her own thing. But careful analysis revealed that the group was moving to a unified rhythm. One little girl, far more active than the rest, covered the entire schoolyard in her play. Hall and his student realized that without knowing it, she was "the director" and "the orchestrator." Eventually, the researchers found a tune that fit the silent cadence. When they played it and rolled the film, it looked exactly as if each kid were dancing to the melody. But there had been no music playing in the schoolyard. Said Hall, "Without knowing it, they were all moving to a beat they generated themselves." William Condon was led to conclude that it doesn't make sense to view humans as "isolated entities." And Edward Hall took this inference a step further: "an unconscious undercurrent of synchronized movement tied the group together" into what he called a "shared organizational form."'
diabase: I agree with all that you say. My mind lacks the agility, I'm afraid, to see any huge difference between the zeitgeist and the collective consciousness. Does the latter have anything to do with Jung's collective unconscious and the Archetypes?
has anybody else out there read kwinter's "architecture of time"? i'm only half way through it (one of those books that i have been reading for as long as i can remember)but it seems as though he talks quite about about some of these issues. e.g., realization vs. creation (via actualization)
it'd be nice if some of you who are smarter than me (and i know that many of you are) could succinctly summarize some of this stuff...but to answer rita's initial question (and i'm borrowing from kwinter here), i'd have to say that i'm creative because i work with time and in time by way of an ongoing process of evaluation and evolution. i emerge when it rains and as the relative humidity slides, i disappear.
yes yes yes.. you see.. creativity is a wave.. and as it travels through time it disturbs objects in its path. and the stronger the power of the wave, more it will destroy. that's why people who are really creative actually change the space around them.. they have a tremendous power of their brain.. and we know that not everyone is so gifted.. how does that happen?
well if you look closely, at the position of the solar bodies during the year.. you will notice that maximum electromagnetic charge that is emitted from the sun is around.. umm.. july..
so, children who are born during that equinox have that maximum brain power.. and it helps if you are closer to the equator and preferebly at a higher altitude..
i really think it would be quite marvelous if we could transform the space station into hospital, where mothers could give the best to their children..
Why do you think you're creative?
Last night I was wondering whether my ongoing quest to do things creative stems from the reality that there are always going to be others out to destroy what I create.
Yesterday, the brothers metabolic, authors of schizophrenia + architectures, 1999, took a stroll along the beach of Cape May Point. The quondam eroded beach has been recreated this past winter.
I think creativity comes from being critical and always questioning the status quo. Critical thinking and continual rethinking leads to creative solutions.
mwad, does your answer above then also explain where your creativity comes from? Are you critical and always questioning the status quo when you are being creative?
I try to. But unfortunately budgets and time constraints come into the picture a lot more these days. In school definetely. It was always asking what else architecture could do beyond the basic programatic requirements, along the lines of Moss's essay in Gnostic Architecture. And honestly its a whole range of experiences, influences, and ideas that affect how and what one questions in being critical (creative). All these things help create the ground zero that one begins from. I've gotta get some CAD done now...
*Budgets and time constraints also lead to creativity.
because manipulating reality is fun.
And chemical imbalances too.
because my mommy said i was.
i'm not creative, but i work hard and that is enough to make people think i might be. it's all a game, the creativity thing, with the goal being to not overindulge the urge for novelty and orgasmitronics.
cuz orgasmitronics are soooo fun the effort to resist can be too much for some, leading directly to hermaphroditic behavior and Wal-mart. Yeh, it's a vicious problem; ending with the penultimate question...
what is creativity? and the realisation that maybe the whole idea is just a bad joke. like pantomime.
"I think that this question is sooooo deep, Im not sure we can solve it.
"
Good now I can get back to revisions.
mwad, creative revision, I sure. You little god you. ;-)
*Good now I can get back to creative revisions.
Or wait...is it creative revisions or intelligent design revisions...
Sadly, mwad, I imagine it's probably value engineered revisions.
Dave Hickey once said that if you are ever in a conversation in which someone calls you "creative", you should end that conversation immediately.
He says, and I agree, that we are all "creative", whether designing a building or making cookies or figuring out the most efficient way to mow the lawn or choosing a tie or answering a question or performing surgery. But not everyone is aware of their potential to be creative, and that's why we get tragedies like school shootings and possibly the Iraq war - a failure of imagination.
(I'm paraphrasing fast and loose here - read Air Guitar for a better rendering of what I'm talking about.)
lb, indeed we are all creative. the book 'the world as design' by olt aicher hits on that very point. in it, he states that we are all designers.
Well, we all operate metabolically, that's for sure. And the operation of fertility is definitely part of our design. That leaves, for sure, assimilation, electromagnetism, osmosis, and then all high frequencies.
They say metabolism is in every cell. That might be true for every living human cell, and even if it's only almost every living human cell that has metabolism in it, imagine then a destructive-creative duality going on in nearly all the cells of your body the whole time you're alive. (This exercise is actually an experiment in first stimulating the assimilating imagination.)
i'm not so sure about creativity since everything is always changing anyhow. to think of yourself "as creative" seems more like an attempt to believe that you have control over something. if we are all just surfing along the changes/permutations of time, then i guess sometimes we jam with the right wave and it feels good, as though we created when we've really only harnessed it. but then sometimes we crash and that hurts, and maybe that is what drives us "to create" or at least find something more comfortable to dance with.
i should probably think things through more before writing, but i'm curious for any (potentially corrective) feedback, so let's hear it
It seems like there is a confusion between "innovative" and "creative".
Everyone creates something, an arrow, a CAD file full of window details, whatever, etc....
innovative, is trying to do something "new"....
So you an create anything is a question of how innovative it is....
the little man with the moustache who lives in my hair tells me what to do.
he's the really creative one.
agfa8x, who lives in the little man with the moustache's hair? I bet that's who the little man with the moustache listens to.
Why do you think you're creative? Because im left-handed.
In Latin, that's being sinister. I like it! I like it!
how gauche.
new thread?
Why do you think you're destructive?
because i'm both gauche and sinister: left-handedness as a characteristic of those who are both creative and destructive.
Creativy stems from awareness, intuitive thinking and experimentation.
Allowing my mind to wander and allow solutions to come from iteration and practice,(hand-sketching, exploration, discussions with professors and colleagues) , as well as quality critiques that unfold and allow a wide exchange of ideas that further the creative process.
What would hinder creativity in the mind of a designer or architect is being overtly critical too early in the project and not allowing the project to become a manifestation of ideas and discovery.
because i like to draw, i like to think in shapes and colours and blobs. half the reason is because i like aesthetics. and the other half is because i like new experiences that come with new objects/spaces.
I think the metaphor your searching for is 'ambidextrous'. That's funny anyway because my right hand did this. Very metabolic!
Although we are all creative, it is the degree to which we believe we can control and influence our environment which dictates the scale of our creativity. Or:
C[N1]:N2[CI]
Where C = creativity, N = the quantative factor, and CI represents the qualitiative degree of control and influence we possess. When both quantatative factors are equal, we have good creativity, when they are not, there is a destructive capacity on ourselves or the environment.
If we believe that we have a high degree of infulence on our environemt, but lack the creative skills to affect the environment, the environment suffers. If we believe that we are highly creative, or have developed creative skills, but we dont believe we can impact on the environment, then we suffer.
Lets call this diabase's creativy theorem.
diabase! Nice to see you, you haven't been around much lately...off formulating brilliant theories I see!
Liberty,
I spent this last weekend here on an all-expenses paid trip, drinking, dining, touring etc, and I havent got back into the mode yet...
Rita are all those pieces on that website yours? Or is it some sort of collaboration
Memo to self: Hate "diabase"
;)
Which also reminds me that travel is one way in which we can increase qualitatively both sides of the equation.
i'm definitely not ambidextrous. but rita, you sir are apparently both adroit and dextrous.
I'm not so sure I am creative. sometimes I wonder if I don't just subconsciously rip everything off, you know?
Sean, I think the only collaborative works presently at museumpeace are most of the collages done in May 2001 with the assistance of Anna DiCicco. There might some other stuff done with Anna in the summer of 2001 as well; I'm just mindful right now of everything that is presently on the site.
Wow, diabase, gorgeous!
And I'd say diabase's creativity theorem applies pretty well to my concern that a failure of imagination leads to destructive tendencies - imagination enabling one to figure out how to impact thier environment, or how to otherwise managing not being able to.
Why aren't we teaching at in schools anymore?
Well, the two most prodominant modes of imagination under which humanity presently operates are the assimilating imagination and the metabolic imagination. It will remain that way for almost 200 more years. Then like at least a half century of predominantly the metabolic imagination in operation.
And I promise this is my last post/link of today:
While I was photographing Anna modeling my "fashions" from the mid-1980s, I said, "Now reenact the Rape of the Sabine Women." Anna was a great assistant.
diabase was this theory a momentary conclusion or something you've had in the works for awhile?
diabase was this theory a momentary conclusion or something you've had in the works for awhile?
to live a creative life grasshoppers, we must learn to lose our fear of being wrong.
Pretty momentary [and I'm no mathematician]. However, I have been thinking about this for a while, particularly about how I can achieve control and independence in my professional life.
I've been forced to - my job has steered me from designing buildings, to designing buildings and project managing them, which is a whole other ball game... I need a whole other set of systems and practices to ensure success. And of course, creativity plays a massive role in organisation.
I go with JordantHarris: we all feed off the same zeitgeist
John,
Perhaps not a zeitgeist, but a collective consciousness:
'At six, children are obsessed with being accepted by the group and become incredibly sensitive to violations of group norms. They've been gripped by yet another conformity enforcer which structures their perceptions to coincide with those around them.
Even rhythm draws humans together in the subtlest of ways. William Condon of Pennsylvania's Western State Psychiatric Institute analyzed films of adult conversations and noticed a peculiar process at work. Unconsciously, the conversationalists began to coordinate their finger movements, eye blinks and nods. Electroencephalography showed something even more astonishing - their brain waves were moving together. Newborn babies already show this synchrony - in fact, an American infant still fresh from the womb will just as happily match its body movements to the speech of someone speaking Chinese as to someone speaking English. As time proceeds, these unnoticed synchronies draw larger and larger groups together. A student working under the direction of anthropologist Edward T. Hall hid in an abandoned car and filmed children romping in a school playground at lunch hour. Screaming, laughing, running and jumping, each seemed superficially to be doing his or her own thing. But careful analysis revealed that the group was moving to a unified rhythm. One little girl, far more active than the rest, covered the entire schoolyard in her play. Hall and his student realized that without knowing it, she was "the director" and "the orchestrator." Eventually, the researchers found a tune that fit the silent cadence. When they played it and rolled the film, it looked exactly as if each kid were dancing to the melody. But there had been no music playing in the schoolyard. Said Hall, "Without knowing it, they were all moving to a beat they generated themselves." William Condon was led to conclude that it doesn't make sense to view humans as "isolated entities." And Edward Hall took this inference a step further: "an unconscious undercurrent of synchronized movement tied the group together" into what he called a "shared organizational form."'
Excerpt
I guess I'd posit that imagination is a submachine of creativity, in the same relationship between the subconsicous and the conscious mind.
To clarify, imagination is to creativity, what the subconscious mind is to the conscious mind.
diabase: I agree with all that you say. My mind lacks the agility, I'm afraid, to see any huge difference between the zeitgeist and the collective consciousness. Does the latter have anything to do with Jung's collective unconscious and the Archetypes?
has anybody else out there read kwinter's "architecture of time"? i'm only half way through it (one of those books that i have been reading for as long as i can remember)but it seems as though he talks quite about about some of these issues. e.g., realization vs. creation (via actualization)
it'd be nice if some of you who are smarter than me (and i know that many of you are) could succinctly summarize some of this stuff...but to answer rita's initial question (and i'm borrowing from kwinter here), i'd have to say that i'm creative because i work with time and in time by way of an ongoing process of evaluation and evolution. i emerge when it rains and as the relative humidity slides, i disappear.
yes yes yes.. you see.. creativity is a wave.. and as it travels through time it disturbs objects in its path. and the stronger the power of the wave, more it will destroy. that's why people who are really creative actually change the space around them.. they have a tremendous power of their brain.. and we know that not everyone is so gifted.. how does that happen?
well if you look closely, at the position of the solar bodies during the year.. you will notice that maximum electromagnetic charge that is emitted from the sun is around.. umm.. july..
so, children who are born during that equinox have that maximum brain power.. and it helps if you are closer to the equator and preferebly at a higher altitude..
i really think it would be quite marvelous if we could transform the space station into hospital, where mothers could give the best to their children..
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