8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: Part 3 – Clicking In

The creative human fits into a bigger picture spanning the gamut of society, technology and tradition. The grit of creativity.

Chapter List

  • Hot Toast

    I have been finding myself tired a lot lately and (without getting into the gritty politics of it) I think it has a lot to do with the state of the world these days.

    It’s a problem of multiple levels: geopolitics are nutty, local troubles are swirling, and even my own personal day-to-day struggles with identity, aging, and finding a fit in society weigh on my mind.

    Every one of these things takes up space in my brain, running in the background always, day and night, like an app that you can’t uninstall from your phone, and eating up battery life.

    By mid-afternoon I’m toast.

    We can’t escape our worlds, and one of the biggest struggles that anyone who tries to create and make and share faces today (and has probably faced through all time and history) is that we live in a society that demands a certain share of our mental battery.

    It is inescapable.

    Politics. Society. Climate. Culture. War. Famine. Economics. Life and death.

    None of us get to park our creative selves into a bubble and create outside of reality, no matter how much we might convince ourselves of the opposite.

    I don’t claim to have a strategy to deal with it, to fight the feeling of burning toast in your soul, but I do think that accepting the reality of that fact might be a big first step.

  • Nowhere Beyond 

    Is the hotspot a myth?

    Are there places in the world that are better for certain types of creativity, or is it possible to find community outside of noted centres of imagination: San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, to name a few that come to mind when pause to I think.

    I find when evaluating spectra of a thing, it helps to look for the opposite: if we are asking if hotspots for creativity exist, what is the opposite of that?

    As I write this I am coming off of a temporary gig up in the northern parts of my province where I was even deeper into nowhere than I usually am. I was in a small rural community for a whole week and out of happenstance and curiosity I tried to figure out if I could buy some watercolour paints (I’d left mine at home.)

    “You’d probably need to get something like that off Amazon.” The hotel receptionist suggested.

    Imagine that, I thought to myself. 

    I personally got started in watercolour because I was in an art store and I impulse-purchased supplies. Then I took a local class. Then I found other people who could paint and I used them as inspiration. 

    My home city is hardly a hotspot for watercolour painting, but it is very telling to see what something looks like when it isn’t even a “spot” let alone a hotspot for a specific kind of creativity. 

  • Doodling Inspiration, two

    (Continued from Doodling Inspiration)

    Once I get past the idea of seeking quality in my art, I often find that doodling is a kind of meditative randomness that drives me creatively.

    Doodling is different than drawing, of course. Drawing and sketching in my mind implies an external subject, and turning what one sees into lines and colour on the page. Sketching is the act of replacing a camera with a bit of ink or pencil lead. 

    Doodling, on the other hand, is the freedom of the pen on paper to explore shapes and express notions that are mere thoughts in our own heads. It is generative. It is creation from ideation into shape and form upon a blank canvas. It is something from the intangible and ineffable. It is an outlet for our deepest minds to express themselves. 

    I have been re-reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes[1], a controversial book of pop psychological theory that speculates that consciousness arose from the conversation that happens inside our own minds between the two lobes our our brain. 

    Whether you buy it or not, its central premise of Jaynes’ book relies on the notion of two plus two equalling five: or that is to say, that the union of two things is often more than the sum of its parts. 

    In as much as my doodles combine with my fiction writing to make more than the sum of their parts, a mental creative union of something perhaps just as curious and interesting as consciousness itself, no?

  • Creative Positive, two

    (Continued from Creative Positive)

    I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

    The darkness is insidious. It is sweet like raw sugar upon the tongue, lighting up our emotions with an ability to draw us in and feast upon our time and energy.

    You may be reading these words—all of them, the blog and every post and every image and all the adjacent works of public performative creativity that goes on around it—and pondering the purpose. 

    I have a hundred reasons to write and create and sketch and make and build and do interesting things. But I have a very short list of reasons to share: it is, yes, about money and brand and fame, of course it is, it always is—but it is also about balance. It’s about holding my little patch of digital ground against the darkness. 

    It is about creating human-made ideas and sharing them into the ocean of slop.

    It is about being a net-positive in an electronic sea of rage.

    It is about finding the good of the world and launching it back into the universe for something bigger than myself.

    So long as I have hope that the world still needs something bigger and brighter than the dim shadows of this societal chasm we seem to be traversing I will get up each morning and try my best to find something positive to make …and share.

  • Never Enough 

    I recently came across a social media thread that got my head churning. 

    A person whom I follow, a prolific nature photographer, had received a comment from another of his followers demanding—demanding!—that he reveal the location of the photograph. He posted screenshots of their conversation and it went pretty much exactly how one might expect a dialog between a proud creator and an entitled audience member might escalate into digital fisticuffs. 

    Such is the nature of making anything for a large audience these days, and the the online market in which we all abide merely seems to amplify it as it sends our work to the furthest reaches of culture and opinion. This, and a long list of similar reactions I’ve had personally with people online lately, illustrates a point that has been gnawing at me: you can never know what your audience expects from your art.

    In this case, the photograph was beautiful and interesting and since it was shared for free with tens of thousands of people one would have thought there should be little to complain about. In fact, one would have thought the creator had been more than generous giving away their work. But the person who complained was aggrieved and argued that the photographer was required to go one step further and provide geographic coordinates for the location of the photo.

    Why?

    Unclear.

    But I’ve seen this effect emerge with increasing frequency.

    What you believe to be generosity and quality, giving one hundred percent for very little in return is viewed as insufficient by an invisible audience.

    And you can choose to agree and shrivel at the criticism, adapt to the feedback—or just keep doing what you are doing.