AA014 — Creative Navigation
I’m plagued by doubts throughout the creative process, but they’re particularly pronounced when I’m in between projects. What should I make next? Will it be as good as the last thing? Has it been done before? Is it bad? (Oh God, it’s definitely bad.) Am I going to die poor and alone? Worse — am I going to die poor and alone and unknown?
I’ve learned to plough through the waves of creative uncertainty regardless. This isn’t an act of bravery, just an absence of better options. The waves keep coming whether I’m stationary or moving. When I’m taking a battering, it feels better to be making some progress, no matter how small, rather than hunkering down and weathering the storm. If I don’t persevere, when the tempest clears I’m back where I started or – worse still – blown wildly off course.
My relationship to change is contradictory. I know and accept that everything is in flux all of the time and sometimes I even find this comforting: this too shall pass, etc, etc. And yet, I still feel a yearning for certainty and security. When I’m immersed in a creative project the rush of insights and new experiences energise me. I don’t know what’s coming next and I can’t wait to find out. But this same sense of uncertainty feels threatening when I am in a lull between projects.
Without an explicit project on the go — like now — I’m at risk of death by rumination. In fallow periods, my thinking tends towards the existential. Often I start to weigh up new directions with reference to external factors — where will this project take me, what will people think, will this solve my problems? Then the deeper, crueler questions start to surface — will I ever create something of substance? Will I ever ’make it’? What’s the point of all this effort? You’ll notice that none of these questions will produce practical answers. They don’t and can’t tell me what to do next, how to do it and why I might want to. This is because they are focussed on outcome, not process. They’re focussed on things beyond my control; not within my control.
This mental chatter starts to subside when I start to move again. The direction doesn’t matter, I just have to be active and creating material. When I remain static and explore by thought alone, it’s difficult to decide on the right course of action. The ‘results’ that this process returns are arbitrary and illusory— a product of my hopes and fears. No matter how much I aspire to rationality or accuracy, they’ll be born of my emotions, untethered to reality.
But when I start to take small steps and make small bets, I gain momentum that I can reinvest into more ambitious action. Each step I take acts as a micro-experiment. It gives me valuable information that I can feed back into the system. It’s much easier to get a sense of my emotional and intellectual response to new work when I have something tangible to check my feelings against. Why decide my future using the response of an imagined audience to my imagined output, when I can start to make something, see how I feel about the result and refine the process from there?
A key part of this wayfinding process is asking good questions. How is this scene serving the narrative? Is this colour palette creating the mood I want? Does this word convey my meaning? These questions are precise and therefore produce useful answers. Precise answers give you the information that you need to move forwards. Even if you can’t answer your question definitively, you can often sense whether you are moving towards or away from your goal, no matter how fuzzily it is defined. This doesn’t have to be a difficult process — in some ways it’s literal child’s play. Take a step. Warmer? Cooler? Try another step. It’s not efficient, but it is effective.
I found the following in my notes when I was looking for things to write about this week:
Creativity is more like navigating than planning
This feels like a deep truth to me and I think it applies to more than creativity alone. In life you are always in motion, you never have perfect information and the future is unknowable. You’re buffeted by forces beyond your control and there’s no choice but to steer the best line you can through the chaos. When you navigate you take into account the conditions as they are, and work within the constraints they impose rather than against them. Whereas when you plan, it’s easy to fall into wishful thinking and later, rigidity. ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’ — if you’re committed to a ‘perfect’ plan, it’s difficult to change tack when reality doesn’t meet expectations. Better to set your initial course based on where you are and where you want to go, but be flexible about the route that you’ll take to get there. The key is to have enough of a plan to stay disciplined and efficient, but retain enough slack in the system that you can take advantage of good opportunities and mitigate the worst of your misfortunes.
Links
To Read
There are many ways of looking at speedrunning: a game within a game that mocks the latter’s actual objectives; a deep exploration of a digital environment’s contours; or a supreme waste of time, intentionally pointless outside of its own context and even dumber than the overarching game itself, a nihilistic statement that forces us to question the ultimate purpose of anything. It’s games all the way down.
Cryptocurrency and the Great Unbundling
A speculative look at how blockchain technology and cryptocurrency could revolutionise finance, education accreditation, the creator economy, commerce and social media. It’s a generally positive take but also details some potentially large drawbacks including a few I hadn’t thought of before. For example,
‘…someone will do an on-chain publishing solution that supports anonymity and pseudonymity, where you can take payments for content, and then some turkey will stand up a “FreeNYT” or “FreeWaPo” account on it and just mint money by republishing paywalled content on it in the clear and taking tips for it…The paywalls are about to come down everywhere’
Why not faster computation via evolution and diffracted light
An insane piece about evolved circuits and diffractive deep neural networks. Many of the evolved circuits look like a mess but function properly. Things start to get weird when it turns out that 20% of the components cannot be removed without impairing performance even though there is no connected path by which they could influence the output…
To Watch
Flawless Demo
Brilliant but creepy demo of a new process that dubs films into other languages. Not only does it use the actor’s voice, but it reforms their mouth movements to match the new words.
To Listen
Between No Things by Suso Saiz and Suzanne Kraft Electronics meets contemporary classical in a warm soup of strings, drones and pulses.
0181 by 00110100 01010100
Delicate electronica, reminiscent of Fourtet. A wide-ranging album that maintains its distinct sound despite moving between jazzier and bass-heavy moods.
Update: The reason this album is ‘reminiscent of Fourtet’ is that it is in fact made by Fourtet. Imogen just googled the binary of the artist’s name and it means ‘4T’…
