This piece was originally written for a workplace creativity blog — republishing here for the record.
Although this space is seemingly a slow burner, it’s really interesting to see what it is prompting, encouraging and liberating in colleagues. My bit, then. Will probably struggle to keep it within 200–500 words though 😉
Looping back to Simon’s original prompts, why does creativity matter to me, what am I making/doing/creating, and how does creativity feed into my work?
For as long as I can remember, I have been compelled to somehow express myself through creative means. It is almost an affliction, but certainly a compulsion of some sort or another. No idea where it came from — my lefthandedness maybe, or perhaps having been born in the ashes of the 1960s? That said, there were artists in my family before me, so perhaps there’s a genetic component to creativity.
I have never been able to settle on one medium or another, dabbling in whichever ones I was able to gain the means of dipping my toe into until I’d either got a thought out of my head about something, captured a piece of the world around me in some shape or form, or made comment about something or other. From the dewdrop on a blade of grass on an autumn morning to the horrors of geopolitical conflict, I have always found myself compelled to process the world around me via some form of creative expression or other.
In a painting class in my primary school, I remember being somewhat chastised by my teacher because I’d not followed whatever the original instruction was. I have no idea why it had been in my head at the time, but I ended up painting a shortsighted zoo keeper who was chasing a man through a park. The man, who was on his way home from a fancy dress party, was dressed as a mouse and he was holding the costume head under his arm. There was something instructive in that moment of being misunderstood or responding in a different way to the expectations that someone else had of me.
As a teenager, there was an art school on the street where I lived. I burned through so many mediums whilst there — screen printing, ceramics, sculpture, life drawing, analogue photography, painting — but never quite settled on any one of them as my form. It was like trying on different shoes or shirts to see which one fit best. Mark making as a means of processing the world around me. I’ve carried that approach with me ever since, it seems — cross pollinating here, magpie-ing there — until ultimately coming to terms with the choice of medium as being whatever the best tool might be to get the job done. Perhaps there was something in Marshall McLuhan’s maxim that ‘the medium is the message’ after all.
‘Frank’ (1995); pencil drawing of my paternal grandfather, sat in a chair in a suit, characteristically rubbing his eyebrow
I tried to become a musician as a younger man, picking up or exploring the possibilities of playing saxophone, drums, bass guitar, piano or guitar. In the end, I never quite had the discipline to stick with any one of them. I settled on writing lyrics and singing, making several attempts to front bands over my lifetime, some of which had relative degrees of success or interest, others of which went nowhere.
The discipline of sticking with one thing though did allow me to build my capabilities in it as a craft. Bob Dylan was an early signpost/teacher for how to write lyrics. While I’d never put myself in a category of someone like him, I nevertheless learned useful lessons from Dylan. How to make pictures with words. How to use rhyming. Where and when to balance simplicity and complexity in wordplay.
‘Ghosts’ by Shelf Life (2011); a song I co-wrote and performed with a four piece band I fronted in Tokyo, about making peace with your past
I thought I would be a painter, once. Realising how hard it was to get paid in one’s own lifetime for painting, I looked instead to graphic design. At least there were clear careers paths there. I realised though that I didn’t want to spend my working life designing ever better wrappers for someone else’s chocolate bars.
One time, briefly living with some friends in Florida, we all decided that we wanted to be writers. They set off on a road trip, heads full of The Beats and sleeping on the banks of the Mississippi in order to create the conditions for storytelling. I couldn’t afford to get out of State, so instead I just sat down and started writing. This was very a very instructive moment in terms of creativity — if you want to be, just do (or in my case, if I wanted to become a writer, I just had to start writing).
In the mid to late 90s, I noticed that that the world was becoming increasingly more digitised. And networked, for that matter. I had a dawning realisation that I would need to know how to use computers and the Internet in order to be part of the future rather than stuck in the past, so I got a computer and an Internet connection. As I got to grips with how to use them, it seemed that using digital media enabled at least a perception of an acceleration of craftsmanship. Or rather, it was easier to make things that looked or sounded good enough.
‘Holidays In The Axis Of Evil’ by Control K (2003); a track from my debut album of electronic music, inspired by The Orb (amongst other things)
Over a lifetime, I’ve had dozens of different addresses. It’s hard to hold on to the items you produce when you move around so much. With the Internet, however, there was a storage space for all these ideas. A personal public library. On the participative Web, I published my own writing. I shared my music and my photos, my drawings, my graphic designs. I made my own films available. Pretty much all of them found audiences, some small, some a little bigger. There’s definitely something gratifying about the expression you’ve made about something in the world striking a chord with somebody else.
‘Journeys by #SouthernFail’ (2016); a short documentary film shot on an iPhone 6s as a response to the challenges of long-distance commuting
In many ways, creativity is about theft. Where are the best ideas and what can I take from them to make something new? I’m sure that those artists I most admire, those that pushed the boat out and broke the boundaries of their chosen media, were master thieves too — David Bowie, Miles Davis, Yoko Ono, Frank Lloyd Wright, Zaha Hadid, Pablo Picasso, William Burroughs…
Creativity is also about the ability to combine existing things together to make something new. This is one of the ways that creativity can feed into my work. I ran a session with a colleague once at MozFest, the ‘festival for the Open Web’, where we combined her approach to using gameplay for teaching serious topics and my then emerging urges to open conversations about the ethics around artificial intelligence. We ran an ‘AI Games Jam‘, and very much fun was had by all.
In another case, I happened to have access to a box of drones gathering dust under a school wind tunnel. I brought academics from Engineering and Business together, negotiated access to the university sports centre, and we ran a series of classes teaching students how to fly drones and then consider what business uses they might make with them. Being an Educational Technologist can be inherently creative work as it fuses different disciplinary mindsets together — that of teaching and that of understanding about technology.
Creativity, then. An affliction. A compulsion. Mark making, world capture, and social commentary. Ignoring instructions. Mixing media and sampling different ones. Learning from masters. Finding an audience. Stealing or combining ideas. Just starting.
