I sometimes hear people express the fear that technology will make us less creative, or that technological evolutions might destroy art.
I don't agree. I believe technology is just a tool, whereas creativity is an attitude, a talent and a honed skill.
The following five-minute video is a great example of how technology can give rise to new forms of art.
At TEDGlobal 2011, the Swiss magician and illusionist Marco Tempest created an aesthetic, touching and thought-provoking reflection on truth, lies and the power of art:
"Art is a deception that creates real emotion
A lie that creates a truth
And when you give yourself over to that deception
It becomes magic."
I have written about stop motion before. It's a video / animation technique I really like, especially when it's applied in new and original ways.
One of the most impressive stop-motion videos I've ever seen is Oren Lavie's music video 'Her Morning Elegance', which has received several awards and has been nominated for a Grammy.
The video consists of 2096 still images, played as a sequence to give the illusion of motion.
It's so well done, and I love the song and its lyrics - but I'll let you judge for yourself:
If you want to know more about how they made this video, have a look at the 'making of' and the photo gallery on the project's website. You can also order photographs from the video.
Stop motion (also called 'stop action' or 'frame-by-frame') is an animation technique where you create individual scenes, take a photograph of each scene and then play the photos as a sequence, creating the illusion of movement.
In previous years, we have made a few stop-motion films with our students, using clay figures they'd modelled. It was great fun - and a lot of work. Every movement and every position has to be thought out, set up and photographed.
To give you an idea of what this technique can accomplish when wielded by professionals, I want to share one of my favourite stop-motion animations: 'City of Books'.
'City of Books' is a delightful little film that was produced by Apt Studio and Asylum Films in 2008, to celebrate 4th Estate Publishers' 25th anniversary. It took them 3 weeks to make, and I'm not surprised!
What a great commercial this video would make for libraries worldwide, and what a great technique to use for a creative book trailer!
I'm a big fan of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's books and research on creativity. (In case you were wondering, he's of Hungarian origin and his last name is apparently pronounced cheek-sent-meh-hai-yee.)
One of the chapters in that book deals with 'The Creative Personality', where he explores the characteristics creative people from all walks of life have in common.
He comes to the conclusion that creative people have complex personalities. They contain contradictory extremes, and they are able to move from one to the other if the situation requires them to.
He distinguishes 10 pairs of traits he has discovered:
1. 'Creative individuals have a great deal of physical energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest.'
They can concentrate for a long time, work long hours, but manage to radiate enthusiasm because they are so focused. These periods of activity are followed by times of reflection and idleness. Alternating those two are very important to their success. They are able to control their energy and recharge their batteries when they can.
It's also interesting what he writes about sexuality, as one of the manifestations of energy. Creative people seem to be paradoxical in that respect as well:
'Without eros, it would be difficult to take life on with vigor; without restraint, the energy could easily dissipate.' (1996 : 59)
2. 'Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive.'
They seem to be able to solve well-defined, rational problems (convergent thinking) as well as have the mental flexibility to come up with a lot of ideas (divergent thinking). They can follow one idea through, but also switch perspectives to come up wtih unconventional solutions.
3. 'Creative people are playful and disciplined, responsible and irresponsible.'
They have a certain light approach to life, but are also capable of sinking their teeth into a problem and persevering.
'Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not.' (1996 : 62)
4. 'Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.'
They are able to escape reality by imagination and come up with original ideas, but those ideas are still rooted in reality. By going beyond what is real and true now, they create a new reality for the future.
5. Creative people seem to be both extraverted and introverted at the same time.
Personality is a highly debated topic in psychology, but extraversion and introversion are considered the most measurable and stable traits that differentiate people. Creative individuals seem to be both sociable and solitary.
6. Creative people are humble ànd proud.
You would expect many of them to be arrogant or sniffy, yet when you meet them, they are self-deprecating and even shy. They have a sense of perspective about their own work, knowing they themselves stand 'on the shoulders of giants'.
At the same time they are aware of what they have accomplished, which gives them a certain confidence and pride.
7. Creative individuals, to a certain extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.
The women artists and scientists in his research tended to be more assertive, self-confident and openly aggressive than women are generally brought up to be. The men generally showed a greater preoccupation with their family and a higher sensitivity to subtleties in their environment. Still, they retained the 'usual gender-specific traits' as well.
Csikszentmihalyi calls this a kind of 'psychological androgyny', referring to 'a person's ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender.'
'A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses and can interact with the world in terms of a much richer and varied spectrum of opportunities.' (1996 : 71)
8. Creative people are rebellious as well as traditionalist.
It is impossible to be creative without having learnt and acquired a domain of culture. In order to learn its rules, they have to see the importance of that domain. But being only traditional doesn't motivate to change that culture, while being only rebellious without regard for what has been valued in the past, rarely needs to new ideas that become accepted as an improvement.
Creative individuals are grounded in tradition, but willing to break with its safety in order to realise interesting ideas.
9. 'Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
Without the passion, they would lose interest in the difficult tasks they have to take on. Without the objectivity, they wouldn't be able to take criticism and improve on their work.
10. Creative individuals' openness and sensitivity 'often exposes them to suffering and pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment'.
The sensitivity that drives the quest for novelty can cause a lot of anxiety. Being at the forefront of a discipline exposes a person to criticism and misunderstanding.
'Most would agree with Rabinow's words: "Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them." A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.' (1996 : 73)
At the same time, they thoroughly enjoy the process of creation, the fun and the excitement.
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Which of these creative contradictions do you recognise in yourself?
A few years ago, John Cleese was one of the keynote speakers at the Creativity World Forum in my home town. Parts of that talk are available as an online video, and I want to share it here for several reasons:
I think he's brilliant.
Monty Python (and many other projects he was involved in), has had a huge impact on my sense of humour. (Whether or not that's something to be grateful for is of course open for debate.)
I totally agree with what he says, especially about the importance of giving our unconscious minds time and opportunity to digest information. He also talks about creating the right mood for creativity rather than using brute force.
Here's the (10 minute) video:
3 takeaway quotes:
'Each day I want to learn something new, because I'm very very old and will be dead soon, so I want to be as well-informed as I can possibly be when I die.'
'You have to create boundaries of space, and you have to create boundaries of time.' (Interruption is disastrous to the creative process.)
'To know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it does to be good at them.' Or, put differently: 'Most people who have absolutely no idea what they're doing have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they're doing. It explains a great deal of life.'
As I've confessed in a previous article, in another part of my life I'm a teacher. I'm also a huge fan (and advocate) of student diversity, since long before 'diversity' turned into the stale, nausea-inducing term it is now. But somehow, being a fan of 'multifariousness' or 'heterogeneity' doesn't sound much better, so I'll stick with diversity for now.
Fact is, we are all individuals. Some of us even more than others (hah!). We're part of a diverse and specialised but social species. We're born and bred to cooperate.
For that reason, I'm a firm believer that education should focus a lot more on:
helping pupils / students to understand their individual talents
showing them in which ways others are different
providing them with plenty of opportunities to combine their efforts and work towards better results.
I am convinced that this approach is much more effective in order to teach them to deal with the challenges real life is throwing / will throw at them.
It's a simple truth that most of our students / pupils / ... are going to end up in different jobs, different personal lives, different careers, different locations, situations and quite possibly different countries and cultures. How could we prepare them for that any better than by helping them develop a healthy and realistic confidence in their own talents? In their personal, individual ability to contribute to the world?
To avoid misunderstandings: I'm NOT pleading for educational pampering. To the contrary!
We all learn by being challenged. We feel better after we've tackled something that was really difficult. What is important is that we wereable to tackle it.
The challenges we present to our kids / pupils / students / trainees should be tailored to their level and their needs. Not to a standardised programme or idea of what a person should be able to do at a particular age.
This is something that game designers have understood a long time ago. They throw challenges at players that educators can only dream about. And players overcome them. Game designers create difficult circumstances based on clever insights like risk versus reward, or team effort.
Their customers choose the roles they naturally prefer: some of them play healers, others pose as fierce warriors and still others manage and organise their fellow players. These game events, like life, wouldn't succeed without either kind of participant.
We simply can't expect everybody to be good at everything. It's unrealistic and above all unneccessary.
Instead, we should offer our kids, pupils and students opportunities to shine at what they're good at, and show them ways to use those talents for the greater good of society, (wo)mankind, industry, ...
After all, isn't that what so many adults these days are desperately trying to find out about themselves? Wouldn't it be more efficient if we'd start working on that before frustration and disappointment have already clobbered people down?
I wanted to share a great (animated) speech from author and educational advisor Sir Ken Robinson. It deals with a lot of these aspects. It's only 11 minutes long and even if you don't care about the message, the animations are fun to watch.
