Tag Archives: Creativity

Fridge magnets, Porpoise & the power of language in Innovation.

15 Thursday Dec 2016

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Words are funny things.

Haphazard, abstract, profound, silly, shape shifting, infinitely playful, confounding, eternally powerful and utterly malleable. Language is a remarkable technology.

Glyphs, scratches and symbolic signing of sounds eventually dragged kicking and screaming into some vaguely coherent order that ticks a few syntactical boxes and language rules and shazzam! the fun begins.

Suddenly these scatters and blocks of marks, letters and symbolic sounds forge themselves into desires expressed, thoughts formed, theories expounded, opinions offered, information fixed, stories told and dreams captured. Sounds cut into the wax cylinder of our minds and played out through sharp stone point, stylus, quill and nib onto cloth, wood, parchment, stone and flax.

And our eyes scan across them and our tongues run along them like a needle in a vinyl groove, transforming them into the sound of speaking.

As time has marched the expression of our expression has been altered by the nature of how we generate the text. We have hopped skipped and jumped from painful rendering every letter by hand over vast tracts of time, illuminated by curlicues, cartoons, motifs and scenes – and the silent furious industry of re-rendering the same again and again for the benefit of a rare few – to carved crafted blocks to be set in lines, paragraphs and pages – inked rolled and pressed into sheets to be shared and distributed amongst the many.

Technology elevates technology as the presses become mechanised and the inks become jets. Vast universal printed broadsheets supplemented by the intimate particular of typing machines that throw metal letters through ink ribbons onto pages layered with carbons for multiple copies. Until the binary marks of programmes on a different ribbon digitised everything at the speed of light.

So we now find ourselves with the ability to use these marks and symbols at the speed of swipe and type in real time to fire them across the world via networks and platforms.

Yes the books still fill shelves and the magazines still scatter coffee tables. But they have become the paper monoliths of what was. The  printed word and how we consume it versus how we consume its digital cousin have become fundamentally different.

For your words to be ‘in print’ still carries a deeper value. Words on a physical printed page feel more meaningful, eternal, immortal. They are the Easter Island Statues of the written word. Their digital counterparts the writing in the sand on the beach.

The way new technologies have gamified they way we think and more importantly the way we express those thoughts through writing enables a very particular kind of playfulness rooted in eclectic multidirectional multi channel distribution. The Ephemeral Passing nature of the txt blog tweet and the written content of the live in-flow constant beta site allows everyone to ‘play’ – text as balls to be lobbed tossed kicked, rolled and scattered in every direction, only to return transformed, tweaked, built upon liked loved berated and bludgeoned.

The creativity inherent in the technology of language and subsequently in the technology we use to generate language in flow seems to have two forms when it comes to words and how we express ourselves with them.

Creativity is still as much about liberating expression as it is about liberating distribution. Language as a technology has been tinkered and played with by everyone from the lowest order to the highest mind since the technology was invented. Derivation. Disruption. Disorder. All of these traits have been alive in the spoken and written language since its inception.

New technology does not advance innovation. It accelerates our ability to unpack and play with the given wisdoms and expressions to seek something new and different. This is the fuel of innovation – new technology merely the accelerator.  And the role of language in innovation and technology’s ability to accelerate it is remarkable.

Word play – a lightness of spirit and a subversive nature in regards to language – has always enjoyed turning the given rules upside down and back to front – messing with words and language because we can – as a mark of our individual nature and curiosity.

Thats why vernaculars and slang and idiom are so important to individuals – and why corporate language is so disliked avoided and derided by ordinary people. Corporate language and ‘speak’ smacks of an Order of the Few inflicted on the Spirit of the Many.

It is an intellectual door policy – if you ain’t got a ticket you can’t come in – the bouncer on the door of the exclusive club.

Ordinary people like to own and share the language they use to express their most individual selves, in their own way on their own terms. They reserve the right to speak as they wish, express in the manner they feel most comfortable with.

It is unsurprising that fads and trends especially in the highly socialised accelerated age see @everything and #anything already running out of steam. This is not due to the academics deriding them. It is mainly due to ‘rules’ being applied. A new higher order or High Priest of Digital Expression has risen out of the chaos – defining rules of use and relevance. Thankfully it spikes the oldest of human responses. Dissent.

Rules? #myarse.

The intellectualisation of language will always occur while the human nature of assertion and pursuit of social exclusivity remains. We simply can’t help ourselves.

Language gets used to include and exclude. It always has and it always will in some shape or form. It is a tool in our tendency to assert and control. You’re not in our club. How you order sentences. How you punctuate. How you correct and edit yourself. How you use common signifiers of expression. Words and language are the cutlery of expression. How you use your knife speaks volumes about you. And there will always be those that use it against you.

BUT.

If thats the case, I say fill your boots. Subvert at every opportunity. Break a language rule everyday. Smash the shackle.

Start with fridge magnets and madness. before you take one step towards the workplace, make some shit up out of a load of words on the fridge. Set your mind free. Gobbledegook is good for the soul. Have a BFG day. Using phantasmapoppingful words. Go Yoda and reorder a sentence – like someone’s put a Germanic grammar filter on your English. Pop some nonsense in a sensical world. Embrace puns at every opportunity.

And if you’re in business – especially one that involves speaking to ordinary people – use pub speak in board meetings. Ask a 70 and a 7 year old to edit the CEOs keynote. And see the tyrannical use of language for what it is. An ugly veneer behind which mediocrity and insecurity can often lurk.

If you are working with multiple nationalities there has to be some common ground. But at least allow every one to bring a little of their own cultural idiom into the room before you set out on some highly controlled over strung and soul-less corporate conversation. Allow their free mind out as a matter of course. Build a ‘Sling Some Slang’ into every meeting. Allow each nationality to ‘play’ in their own language and share it. You will be far more likely to find yourself with human beings in the room. Much more helpful to collaboration and co creation.

Innovation starts with language and how it is used and embraced. Rote cultures create Rote people. And innovation and creativity withers on the vine. The confidence to ‘mess’ with language shows an ability to break from the norm, to turn something upside down and the wrong way around to take a different view. Mistakes are the fuel of invention. Failure is a central tenet of Kaizen. We should embrace failings in language. Before dispensing with them, check to see if there is anything good hidden in there.

So can everything be chaos and subversion? No. Like anarchy, it only exists meaningfully if there is a counterpoint to it to keep it relevant and focused. If everyone is an anarchist. Their is no anarchy. Just conformity.

A perfect example of deconstructive/destructive language play was to be found in a conversation I had with a friend of mine. Both utterly child-like far to often, we found ourselves discussing Purpose and Purposeful businesses and the manner in which this word has been taken and chiseled into a corporate straight jacket. It has lost its original profundity; replaced with a pompous self-righteousness. We found ourselves having to use ‘cod’ Noo Yawker accents to continue the conversation with any feeling.

So Purpose became Poiypuss. What! Who knoo! Badda bing badda boom. I gotta poiypuss ‘n’ I’m gonna use it.

Cue more cod accenting until eventually Blackadder and the Prince and The Porpoise sketch prevailed. And so Purpose became Porpoise.

Happiness.

PORPOISE. The prefect name for an agency that believes deeply in Purpose but with a profound dislike for the way in which it has been hijacked; made humourless, confined, dislocated; rendered inhuman and spiritless.

Porpoise. Creating Purpose with a difference: purpose with a human touch. Nice logo. Disney meets Vector with a scattering of fun.

Ridiculous. perhaps. But I do have evidence that this childlike view of the world can sometimes create breakthroughs in communication and engagement.

In a recent project – Socialising the Genome – I worked with Dr Anna Middleton to try and unpack the arcane language of Genomic science and the impenetrable academic and clinical terminology it uses when speaking to ordinary people. The objective? To be able to engage with a greater number of ordinary people around the benefits of GENOMIC science and data gathering to improve individual and collective health care.

We found that in almost every qualitative research group people had a tendency to drop the first E in GENOME, and quickly deconstruct it into something far more friendly and more palatable and less scary. GNOME.

So the massed intellect, discovery and genius at work in the world of GENOMIC science and discovery – and the gateway to understanding our most precious personal selves and the data that defines it – was enshrined in a picture of a small bearded man with a fishing rod. Cue Double Helix fish and chats about fishing in our DNA for answers – and the idea that sometimes that fishing just comes up with an old shopping trolley and river bed junk. And sometimes with something more remarkable and enlightening.

So language – a beautiful technology accelerated by newer ones. But it is not sacrosanct. It demands that we flex with it, play with it, mess it up, test its edges. Because in doing so we test our selves and the ideas we have – and through it we find new iterations and expressions.

Which is a good thing, No?

 

LANGUAGE NOTE: My use of No? at the end of the final sentence is in homage to the idioms of the French “…, nest pas?”, the Spanish “…, No?”, the Scandinavian “…, Nej? and the Glaswegian “know whit ah mean, big man, no?” and ending one’s sentence with an upward inflection “No?”.

And because it really, really irritates purists – as does the doubling up of adverbs like ‘really’.

 

Creativity, the Cosmic Fizz & the storytellers of science and faith

14 Friday Feb 2014

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Adult Pi Patel: So which story do you prefer?

Writer: The one with the tiger. That’s the better story.

Adult Pi Patel: Thank you. And so it goes with God.

Writer: It’s an amazing story.

I love this piece of writing from the Life Of Pi – because it goes to the heart of everything I believe in as a storyteller by trade and by passion.

It also points to the most sublime collision of existence and creativity for me.

The brutal truths of everything we are, that we come from, exist amongst, experience, endure and prevail upon are in themselves poetic and beautiful. But there is something so human about our need to embellish the flat dry expanse of these truths; to make them greater, more fantastic: our need to story tell around them. There is for me a perfect conflicted symmetry: of both hubris and humility in our need to do it.

That we want to use our consciousness, and the gifts of existential self-perception that it brings to ‘big ourselves up’ in the species department is par for the course. The ascending arrogance of increasing predominance is so expected as to be almost dull.

But in seeking to story tell around such profound and all enveloping concepts: of existence, creation, death, belief, faith, survival – we are also admitting that the base nature of them is simply too overwhelming to us to comprehend in their pure form, too complex and exceptional for us to divine without reduction and simplification. (Sustainability experts take note!!)

So story-tell them we have. Between Reason and Faith, the scattered facts and dynamic data of our human condition and the absolute nature of our relationship with the world in which we bear it are rendered.

In the parables, cautionary tales, prophesies, miracles, fairy tales, wisdoms, mythologies, metaphors, legends, monoliths and dream catchers, we find storytelling that is wonderful, hopeful, brutal, yet optimistic – transforming the data of our reality into ‘the one with the tiger’.

The giddying ascent of some of these ‘tiger stories’ as I will now call them into regional and world movements of dogmatic faith inevitably has seen them dragged into service as the spiritual slings and arrows of marauding armies. In doing so they have both exported a negative arrogant shading of their ‘tiger story’ while importing a culture of cruelty, violence and division into the heart of it.

It is unclear to me whether this conflicted nature is inherent within the cosmic fizz or purely a product of it. Regardless, in the evolution of these ‘tiger stories’, they have proven themselves wholly capable of extreme polarities of positive and negative outcome: the Atomic Bomb and The Inquisition being two such glorious (western) examples.

I would venture though that it is the base corruption of the storytelling concepts – and the flags and actions that they are seen to have resided over that despoils them, not the nature of the story itself or the faith or reason upon which they are built.

As Oscar Wilde pointed out quite rightly – there is not such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. The storytelling is not where the problem lies.

It is the questionable moralities of human interpretation and subsequent actions undertaken in the name of something; be it science, faith or any other where the spoiling starts. A wantonly childish and proprietary approach it seems: It’s my toy so I’ll smash it if I want to.

I believe that if we took the smashers from all sides – the pedants, the inquisitors, the lunatics and the absolutists – the ‘my book’s better than your book and oh, by the way it’s the only book’ crowd and the equally intransigent and nihilistic ‘faith is the great cop out, the great excuse’ polemicists and shoved them in a large room and closed the door we might start the conversation again.

If we did, I think we might find that the people of science and the people of faith are connected at a deeper level than either their rigour or dogma would like to admit – and the immutable truth of that fact is being obfuscated by what is in fact on deeper interrogation a stylistic disagreement – like the one that exists in the land of storytellers between the purveyors of muscular contemporary prose and those of classic highly mannered poetry.

There is a tremor of violent agreement that runs between them that remains unnoticed (to themselves certainly) probably due to the deafening and cacophonous nature of their own ‘combative noise’.

When particular men of science call religion a fiction the only issue that arises in that emphasis for me is the inference that it is a fiction rooted in no factual or reasonable truth. Well, I am currently jury’s out on that absolutism and here’s for why.

In my wish to not polarize or propagandise my children and in answer to the question “what is heaven daddy?” (the inconvenient inquisition of children is the most brutal of examinations) I have netted out at this story-teller’s logic, and it begins with science:

Atoms never die. They just reassemble re-task and reintegrate themselves in a new form.

So, we are all one great big mass of finite circulating particles. Amazing.

In which case, if we were, theoretically at least, able to pull focus on the physical world in which we exist to reveal that great big mass of finite chaotic swirling particles; to reveal its sub and supra atomic nature, we would perhaps reveal a singular phenomena – the cosmic atomic fizz of everything. (Eat that challenge Google Glass!)

133,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms swirling around dynamically, condensing clustering conflating and coagulating for a brief while in every visible and invisible material thing we know and many we don’t, before deconstructing and reconstructing themselves somewhere else along the way.

Now your brain might be so huge as for there to be little issue for you in contemplating the jaw dropping magnitude of this, but (certainly for my tiny self absorbed brain) this is a concept so vast so complex and so overwhelming to the average human being that we would struggle to grasp its meaning.

And we hate that, us humans, the ‘can’t quite get it’ thing. It makes us feel a little small, stupid and out of control, so, we use storytelling to simplify and sort the problem. To order the cosmos. Bring ourselves closer to it.

In this instance I think we’ve effectively taken the jaw dropping magnitude of the cosmic particular mass, stuck a beard on it and called it Norman.

This is not to say that the creation of the mass, how it got there, what drove it and what the point of it all is doesn’t exist in the pantheon of life’s big questions, but I’ll leave that to David St Hubbins of Spinal Tap to ask that question for all of us:

“If the universe is indeed infinite, then how…what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then… if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end you know, is my question…to you”

The moment where human interpretation and the nature of our existence meet is at the moment we decide to call the infinitely finite cosmic particular fizz a name, embody it in some divine yet recognizable (like us) form, allow it to take human form, or simply see itself at work in ourselves and in all things around us.

But if we’re tooling down the storytelling pathway of the immortal atoms, lets round out the characters first shall we.

That the breath of Moses, The Christ, Buddha and the prophet Mohammad are still in the world, atomically speaking, is an incredible, philosophically charged and mind-boggling thing. But in that we must also accept that so too are the breath of Hitler, Genghis Khan and Jack The Ripper.

Our simple survival evolutionary selves have spent millennia trying to identify filter and prioritise the data of danger, relentlessly, restlessly seeking clarity around what might hinder or hurt us. So even the earliest storytellers will have been thinking of and framing our existence in very simple structural terms predicated on understanding the simple signs that guide us:

Crisp bright coloured plant: tasty and makes me feel perky = GOOD

Dark brown stinking plant: Whole village dead from soup of it = BAD

Large Screaming Drooling Sabre Tooth: Ate my mother. Ugh = BAD

Small trembling rabbit like creature: Ate for supper. Yum = GOOD

I sense the same simple storytelling principle has been applied to the cosmic fizz.

That the particular nature of the cosmic fizz can cluster and form into larger entities beautiful, brutal or otherwise inane and inert (read Turner, the Terror, Trousers and Taramasalata) demonstrates that the cosmic atomic fizz is indeed nuanced positively and negatively in ways far more cognitive and philosophical than just how those particles are charged

So, it’s no surprise that some of the earliest storytellers will refer to similarly complex concepts in the simplified form of perhaps good things and bad things, nice place not nice place, or a heaven and a hell perhaps.

We have ample evidence of where the commonalities of our beliefs, philosophies, reasoning, values and mantras – the cultures of science faith, culture and philosophy – meet, in turn finding little to differentiate or choose between them. In The Picture Of Dorian Grey the collision of ancient greek texts and philosophy, Christian morality, Islamic beliefs, eastern mysticism, Romanticism and the mind of the scientist and mathematician we find in the author’s use one of the texts from the Rubaiyat Of The Omar Khayyam (translation: the shoulder of Faith) is to me the most perfect of examples:

“I sent my soul through the invisible

Some letter of the afterlife to spell: 

And by and by my Soul return’d to me, 

And answer’d: ‘I Myself am Heaven and Hell”

Storytellers from every shape and shade of tribe and belief have either knowingly or unknowingly reshaped and molded the brutal nakedness of this atomic dynamism into concepts of things, beings, feelings, spirits or forces, eternally alive within everything, including ourselves.

Over time we have come to believe that our ability to connect with these forces – the ability to feel them, see them, understand them, call on and capture the essence of them – is representative of a higher state of being and existence – something to aspire to and yearn for – as an elevation out of the brutal reality of survival.

Trans-substantiation, The essential Fire, The Holy Spirit, Nirvana, Reincarnation, The Great Spirit, Sacred texts. Every one of them resides at the junction where the storyteller sits. But to simply dismiss them as ‘spun’ fictions is to mitigate what they intend to communicate, the beliefs they contain or what they are seeking to point to, however clumsily or fantastically the critic might feel they are doing it.

I believe that these stories are part of what makes humanity more resilient (not always a good thing). They exist because our evolutionary gene-pool need to prevail and the traits and tools that we need to endure in extremis require far more than just physical attributes.

It demands a strength of mind that perceives itself far greater than the sum of the physical parts it controls. An absolute belief in ones ability to complete an action, test or challenge, come what may, is what enables us to prevail against all odds.  These examples of shared and disseminated storytelling enable human beings, social by nature and with an innate sense of collectivism, to transcend the confines of their physical truth. To prevail is to be optimistic (a form of positive delusion or illusion perhaps but no less powerful because of it), disposed to expecting the best of things.

But Optimism needs to be written, because it is not innate.

We all understand the brutalities of existence. Fight or Flight is innate. Primal ferocity as a predatory or defensive mechanism is innate (learned gleaned or forced over time) a living echo of all previous experience of our ancestors. We all understand that science is emotionally inert: it carries no sentiment other than through the emotional human impact of its comprehension or application.

Our emotional nature as seen through the scientific lens is simply a transportable cache of sentimental data – a form of big human data collated and conflated over millennia; cross related through social memory and learning by us to create what we believe to be a conscious, feeling aware creature with inbuilt reflexive and intuitive responses.

But the positive halo of optimism – a mannered elevating way in which we choose to capture the positive outcomes of the brutal innate truths – is in itself a lever and generator of resilience in regards to human existence and our ability to prevail.

Story telling, especially that which is designed to be passed down and around is a massive factor in predisposing fractured scattered battered tribes and communities towards constructing more positive outcomes for themselves. The shared beliefs that storytelling can engender is testament to that.

Storytelling is where the resilience of humanity lies. Even in the realm of science and the learned institutions, I would venture that there is a marked difference between those professors who light a fire in the heart and minds of the students who seek to learn from them and those that don’t regardless of both academics singing from the same curricular song sheet. The education that stays with you is that which is shaped to be remembered, not learned to be forgotten. It is only through the stickiness of more enlightening communication that we ascend and improve and bolster ourselves against the odds.

Is the culture of ‘stories spun’ open to abuse? Yes: The speed at which storytelling can moves from parables, myths and cautionary tales of improving and guidance, and of things greater than ourselves to being a corrupted propagandised text with the sole intention of suppressing, controlling and excusing untold inhumanities and predations is all too clear across history.

Should it, for that very reason, be set aside and simply forgotten? Should we make do with the less dramatic, less shiny, less embroidered version of our existence? What surrounds us and is within is us is certainly beautiful and amazing enough (though some would argue even our driest concept of self has been brilliantly inked to some extent by millennia of human storytelling)

Should we look at ourselves in the mirror without gods, tigers, and miracles to obfuscate the view? Some would argue most certainly.

Nonetheless, I would not (and given my trade could not) dismiss the story teller from the court of human existence. I could not contemplate a life without ‘tiger stories’. I believe that humanity would be less capable of great things and less resilient without them.

And rest.

Of Knowing, UnKnowing & the creative pillars of polarity. AKA Creativity Pt. 2

09 Sunday Feb 2014

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Funny thing. Creation. Everyone’s at it.

(The ‘hey! lets do something creative!’ version that is; as opposed to the Birth and Big Beard Versus Big Bang kind.)

It’s all the rage: like cocaine, Taylor Swift, snapchat and uprisings.

And taking some of the creative people I’ve come across in my own ‘creative’ career as an example, rage seems the most apposite of words for this tempestuous trend.

The creative endeavor as a civilized form of howling at multiple moons is all so ‘Now’, and a lot more populist and less ‘rare’ than it once was.

The infinite collision of technology, accessibility, social collectives, the relentless inspirations of the internet and the democratization of creating offered by the endless tools and networks populating our digital lives is shifting the social paradigm of creativity.

In many ways this is a wonderful thing: but it makes the ‘purist’ creative creature out there very nervous.

For the pure creative; someone who has probably invested an enormous amount of time and energy in developing their otherness this new ‘thin’ democratized creativity is a hellish confection.

To someone who has invested their whole being to all that zigging while others zagged, the ritual disemboweling of the inner Id: all those hours crawling through the primordial intellectual soup of abstraction and expression, little known philosophers, off beat gothic novels, performance art, turbulent emotional algorithms and the most impenetrable art shows, not to mention all that self harming, disorder development, and the habit of watching certain films just because they make other more ‘normal’ people nervous: imagine what horror at the idea of ‘’er next doors being craytive‘ too.

‘It’s just not right‘ they howl moonways: ‘it lacks, well, it lacks commitment’. Being ‘different’ – being of a creative persuasion is to be frank, exhausting, very particular and shouldn’t be for everyone. The democratization of creation: the auguring of an age of everyday creativity is sending shock waves through the existential halls of the mighty.

But don’t panic! If you are in the purist club, there’s always the madness and utter self destruction to fall back on.

The newly democratized creative people out there can get as fancy as they like with their 3D printing Maker movement sculptural maquettes; and their evolving algorithm art music BUT can they take an overdose?

Exactly.

For all of these new sweeping gestures towards ‘social creation’ the old model of what constitutes the white hot crucible of true creativity is still there: the final filter: and one studiously applied by those still inhabiting the rare academies of the creative mind and spirit.

You’ve always got the get out of jail card of being or becoming (certifiably if required) nuts – troubled with a capital T and an accompanying life-threatening addiction of some form or other.

‘Real’ creativity is conflicted.

‘Real’ creativity and the people who hawk it should exist in some hellish b-polar vortex, stumbling through quantum surges of creative doing wrapped in creative being.

‘Real’ creative types must be to a lesser or greater degree consumed by their art or creative nature, usually to some destructive degree.

Twas always thus.

It has indeed always been quite the fashion for the ‘Real’ creative person to be seen to enjoy an innate disposition for ‘explosive’ expression. This is romantic and poetic phrasing for what you or I might call losing it: getting shouty and throwing shit around.

Allowing their ‘passionate’ nature to overwhelm them and most everyone else within 5 emotional yards of them has always been quite vogue for the ‘tortured artist’ (though anyone who has read the conceptual treatise of any Art Installation works recently might say that it is the observer who is in fact being tortured, not the artist.)

Raging is and always has been quite the rage.

This rage it seems has two broad brush strokes.

Sometimes the rage is internal, turned inwards on the person; consuming themselves, their mind fracturing and splintering quietly in a room.

And at other times the rage is of that of the smashing, brutalizing murderous kind. One quick leaf through the stories of Caravaggio and Shakespeare’s contemporaries will find that the quick-tempered madness of the creator is at its sharpest in the act of destroyer – of lives, of chattles, of dreams, of stability, of innocence.

Even in the secondary (or some would say basement) of the creative world – the communications industry – this polarity, once celebrated, and now mostly disappeared, is still visible every now and then, stalking the corridors of the creative floor.

Sometimes the rage is a quiet cold cruel internal force compelling the sociopathic intellectual knife twister to ever-greater heights of creative depth; and much of the product, though very funny or terribly clever, can often seem to be utterly lacking in joy, even with 26 million youtube hits.

Other times, the rage takes the shape of a shambling, fog horn, noisy trousers, whoops where’s that wrap?-chat-chatty, self-conscious-shoe-wearing creative peacock (2 syllables – stress on the second syllable) crashing into their creativity like, well, like an overjoyed drunk into a shut door in Soho House. A krispy kreme variety box of joy with toffee sauce.

This bi-polar view of creativity seems further ratified even with the smallest rummage around on http://www.creativegeniuslunatictypes.com/madness/.

In the rarer and purer atmospheres, regardless of whether the form of creativity is being applied in the sciences, music, mathematics, literature & poetry, drama, engineering, product design or architecture, the polarities at work become even more marked, though only amongst a precious few. 

Most of us pretenders scuff about somewhere in the space between these manic-depressive book-ends, floundering around for some premature pop of immortality played out for a very-mortal few days or weeks on a page or a screen – a pantone book of middlin’ shades of creative variation.

(Given 3D printing’s new role in illuminating the creative txt of our invention, the great news is that we can actually render these bookends in pure alabaster; one a polished relief depicting Andy Kaufmann and Steven Wright in a Same Sex Marriage; and the other played out in a bass relief of John Belushi and Jeff Koons Buddy-Jumping from a burning pink plane)

Though highly one-dimensional, as a first-meeting finger in the air Type A Type B approach to identifying creativity in the world, these bookends do a fair job.

Though flippantly rendered, these two types do point towards something of a deeper less facile creative truth.

Take it as a given: this law of polarity is at work in all realms of creative endeavor, their two schools, distinctive and immutable opposites in most every way, still finding time to integrate, interrelate and conflate, sometimes in the same theme, often in the same person.  

These pillars of polarity represent the two furthest points of the inventive lateral compass, the divine hyper-tensile high-wire of creativity, strung tight and humming between them.

Standing atop these two pillars are two quite opposite schools of thought, nature and effect.

One is founded on the Scholarly pursuit of Knowing – a relentless curious incremental acquisitive reductive sparse sharpening intellectual inquisition in an ever-reducing space, theme or manner. A spirit level approach to creativity for a Jekyll-like persona.

The other collapses backwards into the Scholarly pursuit of UnKnowing – of breakage and unlearning, fracture, disruption, chaos, danger, bestial, unruly, anarchic – the smashed train-set approach to creativity far more suited to a Hyde-like approach to life.

Yes, there are myriad confections scattered between the two but, much in the same way as with the The Hunting Debate and the discussion of Benefits Cheats, we rarely hear the dulcet tones of those in the middle, trapped as they are between the deafening silence, atomic nature and cold eye of the Jekylls and the clanging-gong parachute silk pants and rocky horror debauch of the Hydes.

On the Knowing campus we find the likes of Andy Kaufmann, Gallileo, Ferran Adria, Robert Fripp, Seneca, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Steven Hawking.

The Knowing are clearly defined in the world, set apart, celebrating their otherness through a celebration of the reductive forensic interrogation, construction and engineering of every piece of what it is they are in the process of creating.  Their closed and in some ways highly scientific rational approach to the irrationality of creativity creates the dynamic tension in what they do.

The downside of the Knowing trajectory was beautifully bought to life in the first of the artist potter Grayson Perry’s Reith Lectures – in which he reads out the conceptual treatise from some art work. An over complex, over blown piece of cod-intellectual arcana; like a dysfunctional Rubik’s cube of pompous phrases that could never align to anything resembling human meaning, whichever way you might try and spin them. A corrupted bastard child of the Knowing school.

On the UnKnowing Campus we have John Belushi, Caravaggio, John Nash, Oliver Reed, Diogenes, Byron, Iggy Pop, and Kurt Cobain

The UnKnowing’s ability to traverse the fractured, chaotic randomness of creative disorder, embrace the madness of invention and all that comes with it is an anathema to the average person. The UnKnowing’s capacity for clutching to the edges of life, merrily pumping the visceral, wheezing soul of the moment and of their own mortality is simply staggering. They also demonstrate an appetite for seeking redemption through destruction. In this paradox lies the dynamic tension of their tempestuous nature.

The vertiginous nose-bleed nature of their creative leaping and scrabbling up the stepping stones of madness in search of the creative ‘it’ is reminiscent of the snow leopard character, Tai Lung, in King Fu Panda.

In the scene where he escapes from the Chor-Gom prison, he does so by springing and scrambling up falling rocks, using them as descending elevators to rise back up out of the abyss: against all the laws of nature, his upward trajectory enabled by their downward one, the opposite of all that should be. That is the against-nature nature of the UnKnowing. 

But often the most transcendent moment comes when we experience someone who makes the journey or transition from Knowing to UnKnowing or vice versa. Or when someone relentlessly and seamlessly shifts from one to the other.

At its simple journey level, Picasso is a good example of the shift from Knowing to UnKnowing. His skills as an accomplished artist in the traditional mold: his sense of scale and context, his draughts-manship, his painterly skills, brushwork, colourist’s eye and capture of the subject were exceptional. So when he chose to smash the vase of his traditional expertise, reassembling the fragments of what was in a new and abstracted disruptive way, he made the journey from Knowing to UnKnowing.

But in their extremes, especially that of the transcendent form, lies the greatest turbulence and far greater likelihood of a dark mortality.

So to be creative or not to be creative and in which sphere is not really the question. But whether we choose to be of the Knowing or the UnKnowing variety.

Perhaps, if you are creative yourself or know or work with creative people, the question that we should ask is this: am I, or they the Knowing or The UnKnowing kind: or the transcendent other?

Lets start there.

(And perhaps we should also spare a kind thought for those who find themselves imprisoned by these pillars, their only escape coming when the whole edifice collapses upon them.)

 

Creativity, Troubled Spirits & The Art of the Commercial Creative Tantrum

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

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Creativity. What a cursed word this is. Its stain and shadow seems to riddle anyone truly touched by it with a silent screaming see-saw yaw of insecurity and brilliance so profound it staggers them to a deathly stop, sooner or later.

And when I say truly touched by creativity, I am talking not of the noisy swaggerdaccio of  commercial creatives who you’ll find buzzing around the ad agency, digital content and brand consultancy hives of most major and supposedly civilised cities.

That kind, my kind, are simply echoes, re-percussions in its truest sense of the dark, glittering, brilliant bangs and crashes of those truly blessed and cursed with creativity.

When I speak of creativity I speak of those people who carry their creativity deeply within themselves, not worn as a badge of entry to the latest and so, so self consciously flagged eatery as metered out on any latest given social network living or virtual.

Perhaps it was the news that Seymour Hoffman was found with the needle sticking out of his arm still, dead of an overdose that enraged me enough to wish to write this piece.

Seymour Hoffman to me was simply a reason to think that there was a god.

An actor whom I found to be so audacious in his characterisations, so breathtaking in his personification of characters whom, until he lit a torch inside them, lay across the page, inert and inhuman. His rendering of legendary and well-documented Characters like Truman Capote, surely an impossible task, simply allowed Seymour Hoffman the opportunity to be more Capote than the man himself. He has utterly delivered on the concept of a performer and performances that transcend every possible preexisting point of reference or comparison.

And for that I feel he deserves a prize as great as any our druid forebears could give to any man or woman who could encapsulate the human condition under the gaze of he gods in such a way as to enable every observer to learn something profound, however small and in such a way as to improve their own.

His bravery in putting out there what he felt to be the prima version of what was expected of him reaches so far beyond the cowardice of the average commercial creative it is hard to even begin to measure the distance between them

The renaissance nature of him – his ability to reach into corners – his breadth depth and well of influence was simply staggering.

The depth of his creativity – of observation, on human nature, the tics and flinches of human behavior, its emotional eddies and whip-pools, its penchant for small tragedies played out in the inane and banal – and the wealth of invention required to conjure all of that into a moment under the cruel and unforgiving gaze of the camera. That is what I call creativity. It is naked and raw, and spiritually incapable of being repaid.

But perhaps in the cruelty of the lens lay a black truth. Maybe that was the masochist at work in him. Throwing himself relentlessly at the feet of an unforgiving master – one whom he knew would ultimately never let him go.

It is when I look at creativity at work in people like him that I wonder at what seems to pass so often otherwise as creativity.

I am bored with the wannabees and the almosts. There are times when the crippling truth of the real deal should make us draw breath and admit for perhaps even the most fleeting second that the pure genius of those that truly have it make those of us who simply exist in their slipstream, small and recondite in nature.

And then I view creativity through the eyes of the scientists, the poets, the architects and the mathematicians and then look through the rear view mirror at the communications jonnies and wonder where their arrogance came from.

No Cloths of Heaven. No Suspension bridge. No Higgs Bosen. No Rubik. No 3D printers.

What in god’s name have the commercial creatives given us that illuminates our life in such exceptional and poetic manner that they deserve one passing second of attention beyond some Cannes obsessed self gratifying accolade?

That we, the Ad kids think that creativity demands eating the last 10 D&AD annuals and spewing forensic facts about who won what for typography or platinum content really matters: that both being difficult and using the comedic sums of money that we’re paid to buy some more toys to throw out of our pram.

Like we really do exist in some rarified existence with the answer to anything bar selling 100 more txts and minutes packages and 2 million more 7 blade razors with pointless emollient strips.

Have we ever considered the beauty and commitment that it requires to deliver a Caravaggio into the world? That we might consider for even a moment what the exceptional requires of us beggars belief.

That I have seen the most average of creative thinkers claim some primary space in the world based upon the mediocrity of what spews from them troubles me to my core.

Their only reason for existence is that they feed the creatively inert business ambitions of the corporate gristle that pays their bills. That it should succor their self-belief is a weak and ultimately nihilistic pursuit and an exercise in self obsessions.

The creative people that I value in my life are indeed the butcher the baker the candlestick maker. The real creators in this world we live in.

And I add to them the performance artists that make me stop, heart racing, befuddled and illuminated by their capture of the human condition.

I also add those that disassemble the scientific condition of our existence. Creating new intellects and formulae for understanding.

And I feel it is time to call it on the idiots and the fakes. Lets hear it for the true creators and let the rest go to overpaid hell.

If you ever walk into a room with a budget in your pocket for creativity and purchase some distant echo of what purports to be it, please call it as so.

How many more times do we need to sit in a room and listen to a commercial creative play a youtube clip, show an artists work, stream a song, or catwalk the work of a designer far, far greater than they and be told ‘it’ll be something like that’ and asked to pay top dollar for it?

I say go to the source and buy it pure.

If you need this fix to drive your business or your ambition forwards, die on the needle of purity or stop pretending.

And if you are some Byron obsessed creative with your self-destructive, insecure (but strangely enough never ultimately critical) tooting and gacking crutch, or your strategic side kick who believes that you have a god given right to be heard in your creative mewling, be true and be real and die on the commercial sword of what you suggest.

Never expect someone to expend hundreds of thousands of pounds on something you barely believe in yourself beyond what It might bring to your own personal glory.

If glory and recognition is what you seek there are a myriad collection of garrets and studios in lost forsaken places populated by people earning nothing fighting for their art.

If that is what you seek stand up and next to them and take what comes.

But if you are the person who endeavours to commercialise the creative process, remember, just prior to your next tantrum, that in greater footsteps than yours you travel, be respectful, and endeavour to be as close to the pure genius of them as your pay check allows.

Remember greater creative spirits than you die with a needle in their arm. God help them and god thank them for the price they pay for what you imitate in a room somewhere and for which you will never ultimately pay the price.

If this makes me a Wyndham Lewis, damning my own ‘creative’ class, I’m OK with that. Why? Because they’re fine. They are Ok in their tower, never really having as their only option a mine shaft, a production manufacturing line that steals their life, a trawler boat that goads their nerve and heart, or the banality and drudge of Till 3 on the check out at 4pm on a wet wednesday. 

The Needle and The Damage Is Done.