Tag: Creativity

Bookmarked https://www.theredhandfiles.com/how-do-you-reconcile-your-faith/ (theredhandfiles.com)

Our lives are complicated and we all think and do things that are often unfathomable to one another, but we do so because we live our experiences and find our truths in different places. To my considerable surprise, I have found some of my truths in that wholly fallible, often disappointing, deeply weird, and thoroughly human institution of the Church. At times, this is as bewildering to me as it may be to you.

In the end I suspect that it is within the music that we will all find one another.

Source: The Red Hand Files #280 by Nick Cave

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Nick Cave on the importance of the artist being honest to themselves and finding each other in the music.

Listened Mary Catherine Bateson Living as an Improvisational Art from onbeing.org

Krista Tippett speaks with Mary Catherine Bateson about her life, work and beliefs. The two discuss changes in our relationships over time and what ‘home’ means:

Creating an environment in which learning is possible, that is what a home is.

Maria Popova has also written a useful introduction to Mary Catherine Bateson and her book Composing a Life, in which she includes the following quote:

It is time now to explore the creative potential of interrupted and conflicted lives, where energies are not narrowly focused or permanently pointed toward a single ambition. These are not lives without commitment, but rather lives in which commitments are continually refocused and redefined. We must invest time and passion in specific goals and at the same time acknowledge that these are mutable. The circumstances of women’s lives now and in the past provide examples for new ways of thinking about the lives of both men and women. What are the possible transfers of learning when life is a collage of different tasks? How does creativity flourish on distraction? What insights arise from the experience of multiplicity and ambiguity? And at what point does desperate improvisation become significant achievement? These are important questions in a world in which we are all increasingly strangers and sojourners. The knight errant, who finds his challenges along the way, may be a better model for our times than the knight who is questing for the Grail.

Source: Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson

ᔥ “Doug Belshaw” in TB872: MCB and ‘being what we are willing to learn’ – Open Thinkering ()

Bookmarked https://www.theredhandfiles.com/jobs-that-are-so-necessary/ (theredhandfiles.com)

I appreciate the fact that you acknowledged those of us that work in jobs that are so necessary that nobody really ever thinks about it (Issue #274). I worked in the sewer system for over 35 years cleaning up everybody’s crap. The wealthy and the poor. I went to work every day and night and missed a lot of my children’s stuff so everyone else could go on spewing their crap in the world. Everyone in the Hallmark world is a writer, artist, antique shop owner, and it isn’t real, so give me a freaking break. Yes, I speak in past tense and present tense but I don’t give a crap about that either. Pouring a lot of crap out there, but I actually am a very happy person and love The Red Hand Files.

Source: Red Hand Files No. 275 by Nick Cave

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Nick Cave responds to the comment about the thankless job of both those who work in the sewer system and the artist.

Just as the New York sewerage system is a critical pillar of public health, so too is art, and although art may not literally protect a city from plague and pestilence, it does, in its way, make the world we inhabit that little less noxious. And without pursuing the comparison to absurdity, art has its equivalent trials – blockages abound and gloomy artistic ‘fatbergs’ clog the pipes of inspiration, yet still we gallantly gather up the brown water of experience and rinse it through the purifying vats of our imagination!

Source: Red Hand Files No. 275 by Nick Cave

This reminds me of Brian Eno’s argument that “beautiful things grow out of shit“.

Liked Ownership: The Creative Person’s Greatest Weapon Against Layoffs (Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet.)

With disruption hitting the media industry acutely in 2024, now is the time to lean into owning your creative work. Have a say in your creative destiny.

While the internet struggles with collective action, every movement starts from a single action. If you’re a creative person, one of the most important actions you can take, full stop, is to take some ownership over your work. Maybe, if you want to have a financial upside, you can’t own all of it. Maybe you have to pick and choose what your ownership picture looks like. But own some of it. Make it yours.

Create for free. But create for yourself. Even if you don’t get paid for it at first. Because someday, you might.

Source: Create For Yourself by Ernie Smith

Bookmarked https://www.theredhandfiles.com/ever-felt-alien-to-yourself/ (theredhandfiles.com)

A committed artist cannot afford the luxury of revelation. Inspiration is the indolent indulgence of the dabbler. Muses, Tam, are for losers!

Source: Red Hand Files Issue #274 by Nick Cave

Nick Cave responds to questions of inspiration and muses, arguing that what is important is to just keep going. This also reminds me of another letter in which he spoke about ‘talent’ and ‘success’.

Art gives much, but it asks much in return. It demands nothing less than complete commitment and significant sacrifice. Talent is nice if you have it, but in some ways it is a secondary requirement.

Source: Red Hand Files Issue #138 by Nick Cave

Reading amd listening to numerous music memoirs recently, one of the things that has stood out to me is how many succeed simply through the persistence of turning up again amd again.

Bookmarked Self-Assessing Creative Problem Solving (brainbaking.com)

So what’s the point of all this? Well, since we now have a self-test that measures more than simply divergent thinking and is specifically geared towards computing education, we could start experimenting with interventions in courses and measure its effects pre and post intervention using the CPPST

Wouter Groeneveld discusses his development of the Creative Programming Problem Solving Test (CPPST), a self-assessment test that measures more than just divergent thinking. It explores various aspects of problem-solving associated with programming with the intent to help developers test the efficacy of interventions. I am not sure I am really a true ‘programmer’, but a part of my work is involved in creating solutions for problems with the tools at hand. What I liked about the test was the way in which it helped think and reflect through the act of answering the various questions. Whatever the outcome, I felt that there was something in the actual asking of the various questions.

It all has me thinking about the ATC21s project from a few years ago and the attempt to capture the capabilities in themselves. One of my takeaways was that capabilities are often captured through something and the ability to separate the doing from the thing can be very hard.

Bookmarked I would like to be paid like a plumber by Shaun Usher (Letters of Note)

I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There’s no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

Shaun Usher provides an insight into the creative thinking of Steve Albini through his pitch letter to Nirvana regards In Utero. He breaks down his philosophy:

1. If the band decides to pursue something, I’ll see that it gets done.

2. Remixing is for talentless pussies who don’t know how to tune a drum or point a microphone.

3. Predicating the recordings on my tastes is as stupid as designing a car around the upholstery.

4. Where we record the record is not as important as how it is recorded.

5. I have to be comfortable with the amount of money you pay me, but it’s your money, and I insist that you be comfortable with it as well.

ᔥ “Austin Kleon” in Winning time – Austin Kleon ()

Bookmarked Creativity Self-Assessment Is Nonsense by Wouter GroeneveldWouter Groeneveld (brainbaking.com)

Curiousness and persistence slightly increase your chance at creating something that will be labeled as creative by the field. But only ever so slightly. All the other parameters need to match up as well, and we are at the mercy of entropy for most of these.

All this is somehow soothing to me. It could mean that the difference between great creative individuals—Einstein, Nietzsche, Edison, von Neumann, da Vinci—and people like you and me is not so much the intelligence, perseverance, or insight, but rather being in the right place at the right time1.

Wouter Groeneveld explains that creativity is not in what is created, but rather in the critic.

creativity is in fact a label that is put onto something (not someone) by an expert in the field that is not the maker. No single painter can claim his or her work is very creative: that is a job for the art critics—who are the domain experts that probably used to paint themselves. It is the work, the produce, that is creative. We say that someone “is creative”, but we really mean that someone “produced something creative”.

This reminds me of the work done by the ATC21s project to assess ’21st century’ skills. They offer the follow suggestions in conclusion:

Moving these aspirations from curriculum documents to classrooms is a more challenging task. Several policy strategies appear to be key in supporting this process:

  • Developing materials that illustrate where and how these skills may be integrated into content area plans and lessons, which are the common organizers of curriculum.
  • Incorporating pedagogies for teaching these skills in pre-service preparation and in ongoing learning opportunities for teachers.
  • Ensuring that classroom tools are widely available for enacting these skills – including access to technologies, materials, and exemplar tasks that will allow teachers to organize and students to engage in productive activities.
  • Creating assessments that can evaluate these skills and that create incentives for these abilities to be widely taught as a regular part of the curriculum.
  • Developing an understanding of how these capacities may develop overtime – with opportunity, scaffolding, and instruction – so that teachers can envision how to organize supports for learning in these complex domains.

Page 308

Replied to Richard III – a tragic history with a very human ‘villain’ (Bianca Hewes)

At my previous school, I taught Richard III as part of a comparative study with Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard. I was in the privileged position to select any texts I wanted to teach, and because …

Bianca, I am really enjoying your dive into Shakespeare. I was particularly left thinking about the idea of Shakespeare ‘being super stoked’:

It’s so great, Shakespeare must have been super stoked with himself after writing that scene.

I wonder if that is how it works? With creative genius, is it in the creation or the fine craft of those a part of the process?

For example, I wonder if Kurt Cobain was super stoked with the opening chords of Smells Like Teen Spirit? Or it Butch Vig’s work behind the desk which gave it the punch?

In regards to writing, I remember reading a piece about Raymond Carver and the influence of his editor, Gordan Lish.

Replied to #tdc3393 #ds106 It’s Just Like Riding a Bicycle (The Daily Create)

Show us your bicycle, or someone else’s bicycle, or just something about bicycles. flickr photo shared by Tony Fischer Photography under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license Tweet your response …

I was really taken by the creative responses to the arrival of oBikes in Melbourne a few years ago.

RainbO Bike Curious?

“RainbO Bike Curious?” by neonluxe is licensed under CC BY-SA
Liked Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #131 – This world is shit. (The Red Hand Files)

As for shitty art, all art is perfectly imperfect — like the world itself — and to some extent value judgments on art are largely subjective and beside the point. Creating art is about growing the world and increasing its reach, and it has more to do with the act of creation itself than what is actually made. Anything that animates us creatively in a positive way — be it the grand design of a great architectural wonder or the Big Bang of a child’s drawing — is a re-enactment of the original creation story. Whether we realise it or not, making art is a religious encounter as it is our attempts to grow beyond ourselves that energise the soul of the universe.

Liked The #globalthankswondercut project (amyburvall.com)

If you were to write a love letter to the world what would it be? A Crowdsourced Creativity Project In the midst of this global pandemic and subsequent isolation, I think about my friends and acquaintances all over the globe…they are gazing at the same moon, after all. This brought me to putting out a creative challe