8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: Part 1 – Setting out to Nowhere

The creative self from the one you left behind to the one you are looking to become. The basics of creativity.

Chapter List

  • Knots Blocks

    How does one go about unlearning what society probably taught us about talent?

    I know from personal experience that almost everything I believe about what it means to be good at something is wrapped up in an expectation from an audience: an employer, a customer, a friend, or even a parent (reaching right back to the beginning.)

    As I write this blog and parse out the various topics I want to explore I realize that I have already written a lot about those very expectations and how to first recognize them and then later prioritize how much heed they should be offered.

    Even as I was sitting down to write this I had just come off a few moments of drinking some tea and scrolling through my social media feed. My favourite feed these days is a collection of photographers promoting their work. And yet noting just how rigid the conformity is within the confines of that feed has been nagging at something in my mind. Every post is some glamorously lit epic nature scene or a broody black and white bit of urban street photography or a smiling family squared into the frame with a rustic backdrop to set the mood. Kudos abounded for those posts because, yes, they were solid works of technical skill—but also, maybe, perhaps because they fit into a mold of social expectation and consumer value. 

    Are those guideposts for other to follow? Or is there something mundane lurking in aligning creative outputs with social expectations? 

    Under the category of Knots & Blocks, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Fifty Walks

    As I write these posts and use this blog as a weekday creativity exercise I am approaching fifty.

    (Don’t ask me! I don’t know how that happened either. I certainly don’t feel so old.)

    Many of my running friends mark milestones in age with a race distance to match. For me that would me running a fifty kilometre race before I roll over the odometer on my age. It is not necessarily impossible, but as I have informally stepped away from such long races (a post for another blog) it does not seem a good fit. 

    Instead, I have opted to celebrate and commemorate by trying to do fifty walks before I turn fifty.

    Loosely structured, those walks will follow a couple rules: they must be of a certain distance, need to contain something I would consider “exploration” and also they should present me with an opportunity to create. What this will almost always and usually mean is that I will be walking a photo expedition.

    I used to do these photo expeditions, as I called them, quite frequently: camera charged and ready, I would just go out into the suburban wilderness near where I live and snap hundreds of photos. No rules. No restrictions. No checklist. No forcing myself into boxes. Just taking photos for the sheer joy of exploring the craft.

    Some of my best pictures and much of my best learning happened when the only goal was fresh air and having an open mind to opportunity.

    Maybe what I’m really hoping to achieve with rekindling my long walks this summer isn’t so much about the walks but finding fifty opportunities to take photos.

  • Junk Drawer

    I have a collection of jars and each of them are filled with a mismatched array of screws left over from a long list of household projects: building our backyard deck, fixing the fence, installing drywall in the garage, assembling a doghouse with the kid, and a long list of other things I’ve long since forgotten. 

    Whenever I need to fix something, work on something or the urge strikes to connect two pieces of wood for some reason, I rummage through the screw jars and inevitably I find what I need.

    I hadn’t realized that not everyone does this. I assumed that it was just a universal trait of the average, everyday, homeowner: keeping a jar or two of mismatched screws on the shelf for those just-in-case moments.

    But no, and rather I have started to believe that it is more the habit of the creatively minded. A jar of screws has the potential to be useful in the future. And in the same way I also keep loops of string and bits of interesting wood I find on a walk or a bag of curious stones from the river or lists of writing ideas or recordings of curious sounds or introspective thoughts that lead to no where in particular… at least not yet.

    But maybe someday that junk will be worth more creatively than the collection itself.

  • Toys Tots

    Whatever happened to the artist you were as a child and can you find them again?

    As I start out to wrap my head around the roots and purposes of creativity inside this little blog I could not help but look back to the very beginning of the individual journey we each take. After all, by training I am a biologist and walking in perpetual lockstep with the core idea that development and childhood is intrinsically linked to both developmental purpose and evolutionary advantage. I don’t have the research chops or educational bonafides to dig into this in any scientific way, but it certainly seems to shade my approach to how I think about the play-like creativity that paints and colours the life of many (if not most) modern children in the western world. 

    Was it something about the opportunity youth presents or maybe the lack of structured limitations yet to be learned until later in life? Perhaps the notion of the creativity of youth is entangled with the lack of social expectations to be productive, make money, or have a formal role in this consumer-driven society. Maybe there really is an evolutionary and developmental aspect to kid seeming to be more creative (if generally less skilled at those creative pursuits) that has already been studied and I can unravel with deeper thinking and reading about it. Or it simply may be that my bias is glaring through the window of western privilege and the notion that kids are creative at all is wrapped around a generous interpretation of personal observation. 

    Who can say?

    Under the category of Toys & Tots, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Digital Analog

    Flip-flopping between digital art and physical media—and often the fuzzy spots in between—is a dichotomy of form that is something quite unique to the modern world. 

    As the fidelity of our digital tools improve many (if not most) art forms have found analogs in the digital realm: words, photography, design, sound, and sculpture to name but a few. 

    I consider myself an artist, and one who has (more recently as my access to powerful computer tech has increased) often started in the digital realm before investing in the physical tools to try my hand at the so-called real version of it.

    Why buy expensive paints when I have an app on the device I already own?

    Why purchase a space-consuming musical instrument when I can noddle on my laptop with some free software?

    But I also wonder: how has being a digital-first artist affected me? What is the effect on my approach because I have not needed to overcome that initial struggle incurred by the costs and barriers of physical media? Does the creative approach from using technology suffer because the media is more forgiving, erasable, redo-able? Is the technology a crutch or a learning tool?

    I can’t redo my approach, and honestly there are forms I would never have tried without first attempting with the safety net provided by digital modes. But what was the effect of that on my skill and my mind?