8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: meta monday

Chapter List

  • Tools Troubles

    Fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan told the world that the medium is the message[1], and I have long taken that to mean that it is as valuable to study the tools and techniques as the final product if we are ever to understand the whole.

    The artist can easily get lost in the tools, though. Photographers can bang on about their camera specs. Writers can wax poetic about their favourite keyboards. And musicians these days it seems are just as apt to post content about the subtle tonality differences between brands of violin strings as share their music.

    Yet, creativity is and always be an intimacy with the tools and techniques. The art and the mechanisms that enable it are inseparable and interwoven as two things can be. 

    Maybe that’s why we get hung up on the medium and the message and often confuse the effort to concentrate on them both with the attention they deserve. 

    Or maybe I just like writing about my toys and I am going to devote some space on this blog to share my thoughts about keyboards, cameras and violin strings. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.