Wiggle your big toe.
An extrapolation on the “One Last Thing” from Kirby Ferguson’s web series Everything Is A Remix -Episode 2: vimeo.com/19447662
Edited by Robert Grigsby Wilson
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Tag Archives: creativity
Everything is a Remix
Remixing is a folk art but the techniques are the same ones used at any level of creation: copy, transform, and combine. You could even say that everything is a remix.
An exploration of the remix techniques involved in producing films. Part Two of a four-part series.
An additional supplement to this video can be seen here:goo.gl/gtArc
Creativity isn’t magic. Part three of this four-part series explores how innovations truly happen.
To support this project please visit: everythingisaremix.info/donate/ Buy the music at: everythingisaremix.info/part-3-soundtrack/ Nelson and Valdez of Wreck and Salvage each produced videos inspired by Part 3. Check ’em out:vimeo.com/25379446
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The dustbin of art history
There is a pattern typical of these end-phase periods, when an artistic movement ossifies. At such times there is exaggeration and multiplication instead of development. A once new armoury of artistic concepts, processes, techniques and themes becomes an archive of formulae, quotations or paraphrasings, ultimately assuming the mode of self-parody.
Over the last decade, not only conceptualism—perhaps the dominant movement of the past three decades—but the entire modernist project has been going through a similar process. Of course, some important and inspired artists have made important and inspired work in recent years—from famous photographers like Andreas Gursky and painters like Luc Tuymans to lesser-known video artists like Lindsay Seers and Anri Sala. But there is something more fundamentally wrong with much of this century’s famous art than its absurd market value.
I believe that this decline shares four aesthetic and ideological characteristics with the end-phases of previous grand styles: formulae for the creation of art; a narcissistic, self-reinforcing cult that elevates art and the artist over actual subjects and ideas; the return of sentiment; and the alibi of cynicism.
But in order clearly to see what is in front of our eyes, we must acknowledge that much of the last decade’s most famous work has been unimaginative, repetitious, formulaic, cynical, mercenary. Why wait for future generations to dismiss this art of celebrity, grandiosity and big money? To paraphrase Trotsky, let us turn to these artists, their billionaire patrons and toadying curators and say: “You are pitiful, isolated individuals. You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of art history!”
Read the article:
The dustbin of art history
Why is so much contemporary art awful? We’re living through the death throes of the modernist project—and this isn’t the first time that greatness has collapsed into decadence
Art by John Campbell via Comics Alliance
John Cleese on the Origin of Creativity
by Maria Popova
British actor John Cleese is best known for his comedic talent as one of the founding members of Monty Python, which makes his intellectual insights on the origin of creativity particularly fascinating. This talk from the 2009 Creativity World Forum in Germany is part critique of modernity’s hustle-and-bustle, part handbook for creating the right conditions for creativity.
“We get our ideas from what I’m going to call for a moment our unconscious — the part of our mind that goes on working, for example, when we’re asleep. So what I’m saying is that if you get into the right mood, then your mode of thinking will become much more creative. But if you’re racing around all day, ticking things off a list, looking at your watch, making phone calls and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas.” ~ John Cleese
Cleese advocates creating an “oasis” amidst the daily stress where the nervous creature that is your creative mind can safely come out and play, with the oasis being guarded by boundaries of space and boundaries of time.
Another interesting point Cleese makes is that knowing you are good at something requires precisely the same skills you need to be good at it, so people who are horrible at something tend to have no idea they are horrible at all. This echoes precisely what filmmaker Errol Morris discusses in “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma,” arguably one of the most fascinating psychology reads in The New York Times this year.
Curiously, Cleese’s formula for creativity somewhat contradicts another recent theory put forth by historian Steven Johnson who, while discussingwhere good ideas come from, makes a case for the connected mind rather than the fenced off creative oasis as the true source of creativity.
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of eclectic interestingness and indiscriminate curiosity. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine, BigThink and Huffington Post, and spends a disturbing amount of time on Twitter.
via Open Culture
Everything is a Remix
“Remixing” has figured centrally in the Web 2.0 vocabulary. But, remixing isn’t new. It has a long history, going back as long as we’ve been making art. Artists have always been collecting material, combining it, and transforming it into something new. Kirby Ferguson’s new video,Everything is a Remix, teases this apart as he brings you back to 1960s Paris and London – to the cut-up literature of William S. Burroughs and the songs written by Led Zeppelin with a liberal amount of borrowing. This video, the first in a series of four, appears on Ferguson’s web site in a nice large format. Have a look and consider donating to his Everything is a Remix project.
from Open Culture
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this…
“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.
Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off… They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating”via Escape into Life
Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion’s free culture
via ted.com
Copyright law’s grip on film, music and software barely touches the fashion industry … and fashion benefits in both innovation and sales, says Johanna Blakley. At TEDxUSC 2010, she talks about what all creative industries can learn from fashion’s free culture.
About Johanna Blakley:
Johanna Blakley studies the impact of mass media and entertainment on our world:
Walking On Eggshells: Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age
“Walking on Eggshells” is a 24-minute documentary about appropriation, creative influence, re-use and intellectual property in the remix age. It is a conversation among various musicians, visual artists, writers and lawyers, all sharing their views on why and how we use and create culture, and how intellectual property law, originally designed to provide people with incentives to create, sometimes hinders creative production far more than it enhances it.
This film is our final project for the seminar “Intellectual Property in the Digital Age” at Yale University.
Directed and Produced by:
Jacob Albert
Ryan Beauchamp
Brendan Schlagel
Interviews with (in order of appearance):
Eclectic Method
DJ Earworm (Jordan Roseman)
Joy Garnett
Michael Cunningham
Dudley Andrew
DJ Ripley (Larisa Mann)
Jonathan Lethem
E. Michael Harrington
Edgar Garcia
via Ariam Sahle
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
~ Thomas Jefferson
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