Creativity: "a queer divine dissatisfaction"

I have been a much happier person since the day I shifted my view of creativity from being something I need to struggle to make happen, to understanding that it is something I need to surrender to. It is a force that I believe exists inside everyone, that is hammered out of us by (1) school systems that find it easier (for teachers) to have all the children doing the same exact work in conformed units of study, (2) by a society that is threatened by free thinking and creative expression, and (3) by a learned obsession with judging the work of ourselves and others according to established, artificial criteria imposed by whatever era and culture we live in.


In browsing around for material on "Week 5: Synthesizing and Refining Creativity" for the CMC11 MOOC, I found this story in which Martha Graham shares her philosophy with Agnes de Mille. Graham sees creative work as something that cannot and should not be judged, weighed and measured, and she speaks to the need to be open and to pursue "the urges that motivate you."


In 1943 Agnes de Mille was sipping sodas together with Martha Graham in a New York restaurant after the opening of Oklahoma, which met with "flamboyant success" that de Mille had not expected to receive. She thought about her prior works that she herself considered to be finer examples of her art, but which had gone neglected by critics and the public. In her 1991 book Martha: "The Life and Work of Martha Graham," she recorded the exchange with Graham:

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly:

'There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.'

CMC11

Graffiti down the tubes?

Sue Thomas posted this pic of a great bathroom grafitto-Q, Why don't people write on toilet walls anymore? ... and wonders whether the "Because people are too busy facebooking of texting" graffito-A is true.

click on the picture to open a larger version

CMC11

Classroom

a box, a
yellow box
with motionless
           figures
   sitting, stranded,
         each wrapped
up in
       his own
   thoughts, worries,
                  feelings,
and bits of trivia
                 flying,
trying
           to find a
       poor, unsuspecting
head to enter
         and
     fill the spaces
       from which the
          dreams evaporated.


(c) ilyse na'omi kazar, 1972, age 15
written while desperately bored in Spanish class

with lasting gratitude to my English teacher Alex McKay
who submitted the poem to Typog (where it was published)
even though the picture the poem draws of school made him sad.

CMC11

The Multi-dimensional Transliteracy of Martin Rieser

I recently stumbled on the work of Martin Rieser when researching the Songlines of the Australian Aborigines. I had intended to blog about songlines, but for now that is deferred as I explore Rieser's site, YouTube talks and works.

Rieser was an early pioneer of interactive electronic and digital art:

Martin Rieser's Electronic Forest

In 1988, he exhibited at the First International Society of Electronic Artists (FISEA) conference held in Utrecht. In 1990, he created an interactive exhibition utilizing giant digital panels and interactive sound installations with an accompanying multimedia program on the theme of the Electronic Forest.

This collaboration with Electronic Musician Edward Williams featured 12 panels of Rainforest scenes created in Adobe Photoshop and Freehand and initially printed out in 120 A4 sections per panel.

Interactive sound devices based on "Soundbeam" were ceiling mounted and as an audience passed among the panels they triggered stored recordings of Rainforest sounds. Because the device was based on ultra sound detection, variations in visitor height would change the pitch and duration of emmitted sounds.

Fast-forward through many unique and fascinating projects to Rieser's artistic exploitation of mobile locational technologies.

A site-specific proposal for Manchester, Riverains is a multi-user mobile story game, which collaboratively maps an imaginary world onto a cityscape. Riverains are souls tied to watery energies, running under our cities in rivers, cables, sewers and tunnels. They travel unseen by these invisible routes and cluster around sites of past experience. Participants can use their mobile phone like a douser to discover this hidden world, which will correspond to real underground locations aligned with the sites of notable events, and, then use the Riverain’s overheard tales to map those sites and find clues and directions to others.

One can play as a team and eventually add one’s own stories and avatars. Manchester has a rich underground world of hidden or “lost” rivers, nuclear fallout facilities and command centres and Second World War bunkers, in addition to Victorian sewers and underground railway system. It also has an archeology going back through medieval to Roman times. The Riverains will be drawn from this rich history and from the City’s annals of poverty, industrial revolution, political protest, commerce and innovation, gang warfare, gun crime and uncanny happenings. The project will map video sprites and stories across a large area of central Manchester. 

The reason I consider Rieser's work to be  "multi-dimensionally transliterate" is because it melds digital technologies, including communications technologies, into real-time-and-space (3-D) installations, and many of his projects such as Riverains are mapped along a timeline  (now we're up to 4-D). But Riverains and other installations in his CV "fold time up" by using modern media and living human input to tour ancient times and mythologies, adding superimposed commentary from the present onto the record of and even infrastructure from the past.

How many dimensions do we count, then, now that we're talking about messing around with linear time, and incorporating dynamic unpredictable input arising from human interaction with his work?

CMC11