[-empyre-] Hello from Hell

[Simon Biggs]

Living in Scotland I have evidence for the opposite take on creativity and
temperature. Even in the Summer it is can be so cold you do not want to get
out of a warm bed. Being originally from South Australia, a hot place at
times, I remember the blistering heat and its draining effects on energy.
However, I also fondly remember long nights in the studio working during the
cooler (eg: less than 40c) hours. I am not sure which is the more
deleterious to creativity.

But, putting the weather to one side...and addressing each of Kriss's knotty
and knotted points.

1. I hope we are not restricting ourselves to the visual. My hope was that
this theme would allow us to discuss creativity in general, not visual (or
any other) art in particular.

2. I agree that experience is creative and therefore a form of agency. I
would also argue that it is not something restricted to particular forms of
experience (eg: interpretation) nor to certain kinds of agent (eg:
conscious). I would like to suggest that creativity is about relationships,
interactions rather than actions. You mention Deleuze on this point, but we
could also look to Tim Ingold's thinking concerning the nature of relations,
interaction and agency. To some extent he counters but also augments
Latour's approach, describing the eliciting of creativity as less a quality
of interactions than "lines along which things continually come into being.
Thus when I speak of the entanglement of things I mean this literally and
precisely: not a network of connections but a meshwork of interwoven lines
of growth and movement" (see ref), possibly evoking Deleuze's use of the
metaphor of the rhizome. To me this (poetically) evokes Darwin's "tangled
bank", itself a metaphor for creativity and agency beyond the human and
certainly beyond the narrow conceptions of an exclusive creative arts
discourse.

3. From this position it is impossible to disagree with Foucault's take on
art being about sign value and property. One could regard art as the
utilisation and capitalisation of creativity (the Situationist position and
one that Baudrillard echoed). This dynamic can also be seen to affect other
domains of creativity, such as scientific inquiry or invention (tinkering,
relating to your reference to tacit knowledge). Governments and corporations
(and many of us in our daily lives) refer to this as innovation, seeking to
neuter creativity as agency and deploy what is left as art. We hope to
render the potential of our interactions (creativity) safe. Our institutions
are there to ensure this happens. The question then is how we remove these
safety barriers and, perhaps more probematically, how we could live in such
an unsafe world? Perhaps we really do need to be protected?

4. I am not sure how to approach the idea of thinking images in this
context. Images can be thinking, but can they think? I would be tempted to
agree. It depends on what you mean by thinking (and meaning). Can images
have agency? Yes. Can images make meaning in their relations, irrespective
of human intent? Yes. However, agency is about interactions. Can the
interaction between images, without interpretation, be meaningful? I'm not
sure. If there is no reception in this chain of events then is there meaning
(what is meaning)? Perhaps. But I like the idea and often use it in my own
(auto-generative) work (writing that writes itself and is not intended to be
read by people but by other instances of automatic writing).

5. Nothing ever only takes place in the brain and lots of our interactions
do not involve the brain at all. As for the mind, does that take place in
the brain? I would treat the relationship of the mind to the brain
similarly.

6. Innovation (utilitarian creativity) possibly does require privacy. I am
not so sure about creativity per se.

7. ...and yes, intimacy and privacy are not the same thing.

ref: Ingold, T (2008) Bringing things to life: Creative entanglements in a
world of materials, presented at the Material Worlds symposium, Brown
University, http://proteus.brown.edu/cogutmaterialworlds/4080

Best

Simon


Simon Biggs
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk  simon at littlepig.org.uk
Skype: simonbiggsuk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/

Research Professor  edinburgh college of art
http://www.eca.ac.uk/
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
http://www.elmcip.net/
Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts


> From: Kriss Ravetto <k.ravetto at ed.ac.uk>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:13:49 +0100
> To: <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: [-empyre-] Hello from Hell
> 
> 
> Hi [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology community,
> 
> I have been baking here on the East Coast of the US with the record
> heat wave, and I agree with the point about creativity and temperature
> (I do not feel very creative).  Apologies if I am not coherent, there
> is still some morning breeze here.
> 
> Given that I come to the question of creativity and social networking
> through critical theory ? I teach film and media theory at the
> University of Edinburgh.  I am aware I am going to change the tone a
> bit.  I would like to start by rethinking a few points (particularly
> terms)  that came up in last week?s discussion, and ask if James and
> Simon had some thoughts about these issues:
> 
> 1)  ?a tendency to focus only on the visual.? Hasn?t this  focus on
> the visual changed with immersive and more interactive work that
> attempts to be more affective (trigger kinesthetic as well as
> emotional responses)?
> 
> 2) ?complex nature of our experience? ? How do we understand
> experience? Isn?t it also creative? Or are we back to oppositions
> about active / passive, the singular and the general.  Experience
> seems to fall into the category of what Deleuze called the problematic
> since it cannot be singular (yet we perceive it as such), since it
> requires action, interaction, mediation, and some creative
> interpretation.  When we talk about ?our experience? are we talking
> about something that is also a creative network ? that is not owned by
> anyone?
> 
> 3)  artist genius as Foucault argued is now a question of signature
> which means copyright and legality.   The social science network seems
> to operate on different principles and I would argue that it is a
> platform designed to produce social creative ontology.
> 
> 4)  I am curious about what people mean by the ?ideology of the
> visual.? If images think then they must not think in terms of
> language, but in terms of images, no? Therefore, if we are talking
> ideology, aren?t we talking the creation of visual concepts.  The
> problem here is can a single image think, or do we need a chain of
> images to think (like the Lacanian chain of signifiers, i.e. the
> cinematic)?  This has been debated since the 1960s (Metz, Pasolini,
> Dayan, Mulvey, etc.)
> 
> 5)  When we talk about sense, we talk about it as tacit knowledge.
> Where does sense take place: take vision for instance, do we claim it
> only takes place in the brain? Or are there other interfaces? Do they
> make sense?
> 
> 
> 6) When we talk about Privacy or secrecy / trade secrets (i.e., no
> open lab) then yes, innovation needs privacy in its inception. (This
> is the subject of my husband's Mario Biagioli?s, current work, "From
> Ciphers to Confidentiality" in States of Secrecy).
> 
> 
> 7) Intimacy leads us in a completely different direction. Privacy is
> the problematic term here: when we refer to secrecy (in terms of
> innovation, we are talking trade secrets, and nothing intimate), but
> rights to privacy do touch on this, yet again, privacy seems to me,
> not to be intimate.  Innovation or creative communities need not be
> intimate, unless we are redefining what this term means.   Also, I am
> not sure that intimacy is related to place.
> 
> But this leads to the question of platforms as space.  How does a site
> relate to space? Yes, we can reveal intimate secrets on such sites,
> but there is something spatially distinct an estrangement, and at the
> same time the spectacular (as Victor Burgin argues).
> 
> 
> -- 
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre



Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201