Creativity isn’t about generating something from nothing.
Creativity is the emergence of a third thing through the relationship between two things.
The more dissimilar the source material, the more “creative” or “novel” the result is likely to be. Also, the less likely it is to be coherent.
Coherence is aesthetically satisfying.
Mathematicians talk about beautiful results.
Most creativity that happens through people doesn’t get recognized because it is happening simultaneously in so many minds.
Have you ever had the experience of having an aha moment, thinking it was totally novel, and then realizing people all around you were having the same realization?
Have you ever written a draft of a blog post, then read someone else’s blog post on the same thing and decided not to publish because it wasn’t novel anymore?
The ones I find fascinating are the times someone picks up an idea early and what seemed out there and wild when they started writing a book lands at exactly the right moment culturally when it is published five years later.
Humans anthropomorphize and ascribe agency and intent. We compare what we cannot understand to what we already think we understand. We concretize abstractions and take metaphors literally. It’s how we make sense of the world and predict the impact of our behaviour.
Language, memory, animals, society, money, weather, literature, art. Everything is filtered through comparison to the our subjective experience of being in the world, part conscious, part unconscious, part driven by choice, part constrained by circumstances.
When we perceive new sense impressions, the nervous system reacts to those impressions and combines them with the remnants of past impressions that have found physical form in our bodies, creating new physicality.
In flow, that new physicality creates ripple effects that result in behaviour.
The behaviour will emerge in forms that have been grown in our bodies through the development of inherited patternings or trained into our bodies through lived experience.
I have deep training in writing, moderate training in performance and experience creation, low training in technical development, and no training in playing the oboe, so I am far more likely to act through writing than through software development, and I’m never going to spontaneously express myself through an oboe concerto.
Craftsmanship enables the coherent outflow of information.
But information must flow.
Everything that exists is in constant interaction with its environment, responding, adapting, absorbing, being absorbed, separating, and exchanging.
Creativity is an inherent property of existence.
Conscious information flow between individuals is a challenge because it requires intermediation through human bodies. Willful information flow requires craftsmanship.
In Feeling and Form, philosopher Susanne K. Langer distinguished between good art, bad art, and propaganda.
Propaganda is selfish creativity: pulling together ideas and the knowledge of what will influence other people and create circumstances that generate the response you want in other people. Propoganda is a direct attempt to shape the behaviour of others. Propoganda can involve good art or bad art. It is an application of art.
Art, on the other hand, doesn’t have an agenda beyond the attempt to create mutual understanding. Mutual understanding can only be created by creating a mediating something that creates an experience in the audience that mirrors the experience of the creator. It is a translation of the experience of the creator into the patterning of the observer.
Good art, according to Langer does this successfully. Bad art or poor art attempts to make this translation and fails.
This distinction between good art and poor art is interesting to me because it raises the question of how consciousness and creativity and willfulness play together.
Information is always flowing. Even when we consciously try to block it, the blockage merely redirects the flow. What is created when information meets a blockage is new information.
As agents in the world, bringing wilfulness to our action, we need craftsmanship to have impact.
As participants in the world around us, we are faced with a lot of poor art, unskillful communication from others.
Can we enhance creativity, learning, adaptation of a social system by striving for mutual understanding, learning to look beyond the craftsmanship with curiosity about the inciting experience?
Do we want to? We are the embodiment of information flow. Creative output is the result of being changed by input.
Even if all we consciously do is pass information through us, we are holding that information in our bodies as it passes through.
This then is our nature as human beings, embodied vehicles of information flowing through us. Inherently creative, whether we engage with that information flow consciously or not.
Every interaction between things, whether it is at sub-atomic, human, or cosmic scale, creates something else. Patterns of such creativity repeated in similar circumstances aren’t “novel” so it is easy to miss how generative they are. That’s how the zeitgeist flows, through a critical mass of simultaneous parallel creations.
Always evolving. Never beginning.
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