#creativity (46 quotes)
I’m a bespoke DJ. Custom micro-music. Nano-ambience.
— , Hopeland Ideas are frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to flowcharts. Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.
— , The Ministry of Time Stop fucking around with the kickdrum and make some music.
— , The Aesthetic of Machinery The only way to know what happens next is to do it.
— , How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.
— , The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucket-loads of crap. Our analogue ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, metres of ink-ribbon and pints of Tipp-Ex. Poor sods. On the other hand, if digital technology is so superior a midwife of the novel, where are this century’s masterpieces?
— , The Bone Clocks The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!
— , A Visit From the Goon Squad There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.
— , Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Paz learned the importance of big ideas but also of the frameworks within which those ideas express themselves. Societies are rule-governed. Whether you’re moving vehicles around an urban grid or shaping and firing clay, the meaning of what you do is socially derived. The collective is the broker of all things.
— , Infinity Gate That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.
— , All Tomorrow’s Parties There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
— Martha Graham It is the nature of the idea to be communicated, written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass it craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows stronger from being stepped on.
— Ursula Le Guin Computers were the bones, but imagination, ambition and possibility were the blood. These kids, they simply did not accept that the world as it is has any special gravity, any hold upon us. If something was wrong, if it was bad, then that something was to be fixed, not endured. Where my generation reached for philosophy and the virtue of suffering, they reached instead for science and technology and they actually did something about the beggar in the street, the woman in the wheelchair. They got on with it. It wasn’t that they had no sense of spirit or depth. Rather they reserved it for the truly wondrous, and for everything else they made tools.
— , Gnomon All landscape art reminds us: we live in a tabula rasa, and must write on it. It is our world, and its beauty is entirely inside our heads.
— , 2312 The work succeeds when all the cleverness and artifice have disappeared, after years of harvest and regrowth, when people begin to experience it as ambience. Any residual aura of me as artist or horticultural dramaturge will have faded. It will no longer matter. That’s when the work gets interesting…”
“Interesting, how?”
“It becomes more than ‘art.’ It becomes part of the optical subconscious. Change has occurred. It’s the new normal, just the way things are.
— , A Tale for the Time Being The difference between right-wing people and left-wing people. You said it all came down to imagination. Conservative people don’t usually have very much, so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them. They can only empathise with people just like they are: the same sex, the same age, the same class, the same golf club or nation or race or whatever. Liberals can pretty much empathise with anybody else, no matter how different they are. It’s all to do with imagination; empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left-leaning. Hard-headed people – business people – didn’t have that sort of imagination; it’s all directed at seeing business opportunities, identifying gaps in the market, spotting weaknesses in rivals.
— , The Steep Approach to Garbadale Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.
— , Spook Country I think efficiency in production processes is key to successful sonic exploration and expression. If one has to do extensive, non-essential computer programming and program navigating in the midst of a creative process in sound, it will definitely retard the sonic exploration process and absorb creative energy. This is because you are doing two distinct technical procedures simultaneously: programming the machine and sculpting a sound. Software as well as hardware should have all the basic system errors fully removed or dramatically reduced before the technology is put to market.
— , Master Organism: A.J. Samuels interviews Gerald Donald It is much to be regretted that so much of the apparent enthusiasm for art at the present day has no foundation in real feeling. In this democratic age of ours men clamour for what is popularly considered the best, regardless of their feelings. They want the costly, not the refined; the fashionable, not the beautiful.
— , The Book of Tea I’ll make technologists a deal, I’ll give up my song copyrights if you give up your software patents. Software patents are even less unique than your typical song. So this should be easy right?
— , Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? In art the importance of the same principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion. In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up the full measure of your aesthetic emotion.
— , The Book of Tea For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this.
— , It’s Going to Take A While There’s a perversion of normal ethical standards, indulged and encouraged by a music industry that feels more important the more it is removed from regular life. For those of us in Shellac and the other bands we admire, being in a band is just part of normal, regular life. You don’t act like an asshole when you go to the barber. So why act like an asshole when you’re in a band?
— , Bad Moon Rising: The Practical Lessons of Sonic Youth Recorded music in the Noughties went from being a high-margin, luxury product to a cheap, low-margin commodity. No other industry has throttled its golden goose so swiftly and disastrously as the music business.
— , Music Business 2000-9: The Medium, the Message In a way Lost worked liked a narrative Ponzi scheme in which the viewer was encouraged by the producers to invest in a story on which they knew they could never pay out.
— , Money; Lost; Damages