2021-01-05

Last updated Aug 15, 2023

Sources/Interdisciplinary Approaches to Creation & Innovation - Class #innovation #creativity

To read:

• How to Do Nothing: ‘The Case for Nothing’ & ‘Exercises in Attention’
• Against Creativity: ‘Marginal Creativity’ & Impossible Creativity

Intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dveUrpp6vs8&feature=emb_title

• time is already money
• all activites are economic
• interiority
• authenticity -> put in revised commandments
• The Blobby Self v.s. The Fortified Self
  • “I sit with all possible versions of myself”
• “too weird or difficult to proceed towards the sawmill”
• Manifest Dismantling: our current notions of productivity aren’t creative, but destructive
• Capitalism appropriating everything
• Appropriating myself; individualistic part of me selling off everything else

“In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ==‘nothing.’== It provides no return on investment; ==it is simply too expensive.== This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial.”

_“I hear, see, and smell things in a world where others also hear, see, and smell me. And it takes a break to remember that: a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense ==what, when, and where we are.== I want to be clear that I’m not actually encouraging anyone to stop doing things completely. In fact, I think that “doing nothing”—in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen—==entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change. ==I consider “doing nothing” both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully.”

Cards/Doing nothing is active listening

^^^ omg put in Cathexis

“In such times as these, ==having recourse to periods of and spaces for “doing nothing” is of utmost importance, because without them we have no way to think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves—individually or collectively. ==There is a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something. When overstimulation has become a fact of life, I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out, or if that bothers you, #NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out.”

Cards/Doing nothing is self-care

“…‘To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.’ ==The goal and the reward of Cards/Deep Listening was a heightened sense of receptivity and a reversal of our usual cultural training, which teaches us to quickly analyze and judge more than to simply observe.== When I learned about Deep Listening, I realized I had unwittingly been practicing it for a while—only in the context of bird-watching. In fact, I’ve always found it funny that it’s called bird-watching, because half if not more of ==bird-watching is actually bird-listening. (I personally think they should just rename it “bird-noticing.”)== However you refer to it, what this practice has in common with Deep Listening is that observing birds requires you quite literally to do nothing. Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online. You can’t really look for birds; you can’t make a bird come out and identify itself to you. The most you can do is walk quietly and wait until you hear something, and then stand motionless under a tree, using your animal senses to figure out where and what it is.”

“…individualization is a key factor in the contemporary rhetoric of creativity. But the rhetoric demands even more; you have to be a particular ==kind== of individual. Too often it is white, middle-class, straight, fully abled men that are creative and innovative, and all other forms of minority identity are further marginalized.”

“What we see on our social media feeds, the songs we listen to, the information we are presented with, the news sites we visit, the people we meet and the emotions we feel are all beginning to be determined by coded algorithms. While they can bring new things into our consumption patterns (‘you listen to X, have you heard Y?’), such creativity serves only to keep us consuming. It is newness to maintain more of the same.”

Cards/Creativity enables consumerism

“If creativity is about the power to create something from nothing, then believing in impossible things is its most critical component. We need to believe that impossible worlds can be reached, if these impossibilities can ever be realized and become lived experiences.”

Cards/To create something from nothing, we must believe in the impossible

“The ‘creativity’ inherent in politics is more about holding on to power, rather than thinking of new ways of tackling common injustices.
This brand of politics has created governments that have systematically failed to stop – and in some cases, catalysed – inequality, global poverty, environmental degradation and the threat of global nuclear annihilation. As such, people are taking it upon themselves to manage and create new political institutions. If the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement have taught us anything, it’s that post-2008, political structures are fragile.”

“To be ==radically creative== is to see connections and potential ways of augmenting each path of resistance with the other. To ==collaborate in opposition== is not easy and requires an agonistic mind set of patience, forgiveness, self-restraint and a great deal of emotional energy. Such things are in very short supply in the current suffocating environment of urban capitalism.”

1. The definition of a “creative”
   1. Boo stereotypes boo tech bros
   2. Being “creative” today = trying to fit in a mold, looking and speaking the part
   3. Does this mean people who don’t fit the mold are less creative?
   4. Questions to think about: Who sets the rhetoric? Who defines the parameters? How much agency and power do we yield as privileged citizens of a developing nation? What’s our role in defining this identity as we build our own?
2. We need to resist the notion that to be creative is to constantly grow and be productive.
   1. We live in a world where everything is commoditized, including time
   2. How do we navigate a world where the primary identity of everyone is defined by their level of productivity?
   3. Have a “place of nothingness”, a source of grounding. Have moments of nothing.
3. Falling prey to our “infinite appetite for distractions.”
   1. Is Our Attention for Sale?
      1. information becomes abundant, attention becomes a scarce resource
      2. Cards/The attention economy is when we treat human attention as a finite commodity – one that is to be managed and capitalized on by a few.
      3. the goals technologies have for us don’t align with our human goals; engagement over enlightenment
      4. now our primary business model of this new communication medium
      5. irony: internet is decentralized, but platforms that have emerged are centralized
      6. take into account our infinite appetite for distractions
      7. assert and defend our freedom of attention
   2. People are always strategizing how to alter our behavior in order to maximize profit
   3. How much autonomy do we have when we interact with our devices? Do we do it out of our own will, or because the algorithm led us to?

• What if we viewed creativity not just as an ability, or skill, but as power? Cards/Creativity is power
  • to blend knowledge (what we know)
  • agency (what we are able to do)
  • desire (what we want) to create something that does not exist.
• Relevant questions: Who has the power and the desire? What are their interests and values? How open and inclusive are they? How open are they to change, and for what ends are they willing to change? How social, collective, and inclusive are their endeavors?
• Core Critique: ==creativity has become an individual characteristic that can be traded. Cards/Creativity now has value as commodity==
  • Culture + creative industries are impacted by capitalism’s appropriation of creativity for the sake of growth + progress
  • Irony & Crisis: Capitalism-enabled creativity represents & actualizes power, but are just:
    • continuations of a knowledge used towards profit
    • agency towards sales
    • desires to tickle our same individual fancies as consumers
  • But in the end, who gains from all this?
• The Next Big Thing
  • Elon Musk
    • self-driving cars
    • mass unemployment
  • Stanford
    • mobile computing
    • learning about the human body
    • computing platforms: smart house, smart body
    • machine-assisted services or products
    • anything that saves time (e.g. Instacart)
    • opening up of the automobile
    • people don’t actually know what they want until they see it
• What’s the alternative?
  • ==What if individualism—an individual’s abilities and interests—was NOT central to our contemporary understanding of creativity?==
    • And thus what if we did not speak of creativity as skills we individually possess, or a kind of individual person we aspired to live our life like?
    • Young urban creative
  • ==What if we viewed creativity as== the collision and collaboration of not individuals within the ecosystem of related and similar worlds, but ==a collision and collaboration of worlds?== What if we tried to at least blur the barriers of our small worlds as a way to own up and make amends for the ways we participate in exclusion?
    • How Housing Redlining Contributed to the Racial Wealth Gap and Segregation | NowThis
      • Racism is a result of systems + policies
  • ==What if we listed down all the ways in which we ‘redline’ in not just the housing sense?== And what if we started there in terms of trying to figure out how to proceed creatively?
    • Redlining is the systematic denial of services/goods by the government/private sector either directly or through selective raising of prices
    • Refusing a loan/insurance to someone because they live in a risky area
• ==What if we viewed blind people, for example, as not disabled, rather differently abled—diffabled?== What if that social model of understanding disability—that it represents the way society cannot accommodate the disabled—was NOT merely an indicator for how we can help the disabled but also how the disabled—rather, the diffabled—have abilities we do not have?
  • ==What if it weren’t the blind that need help, rather those of us who can see?== What if we blurred the line between normal/functional and just participate in a world where we are all diffabled?
  • Social Model of Disability
    • disabled = less able
    • in the social model, its the barriers implemented by society that prevent disabled from achieving their potential
• ==What if we viewed creativity in light of its twin: normalisation?== And thus what if creativity was about rejecting the oppressive, exclusionary, and unjust things we’ve normalised and made status quo?
• ==What if, for example, we resisted the following fundamental and normalised choices competitive market societies have made==: market forces over cultural variation; labor over leisure; self-interest over the social; the functioning body over the diffabled; the capitalist worker over everyone who cannot function as one; growth and novelty over the cyclical and regenerative?

• The two books talk about a kind of political resistance that happens ==internally and reflectively==
• 1. Listen and observe deeply and actively
  • How can we do this?
    • Be intentional of what you see/hear
    • Be unapologetically curious of nuances we don’t understand
  • Further refines our understanding of time and space
• 2. Maintaining and sustaining the work
  • What is the real value of unpaid work?
  • A huge portion of doing creative work is ==sustaining it==
    • E.G. teaching, unpaid care work in households
  • Ensure the house (and thus the country) does not burn.
  • Think long-term, and for the welfare of all
  • https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=2972431466135104&set=pcb.2972432026135048
    • Good at ==acute compassion==, bad at ==chronic empathy==
    • Less heroes, more caretakers
      • slightly related but I want to connect this to hustle culture somehow? we see the leaders but never the supporters
• 3. We need to believe in the impossible
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBzerUUMavs&feature=emb_title
  • Jacinta Ardern, PM of New Zealand, revolutionizing leadership
    • Authoritative, forceful, masculine -> deep empathy, quiet strength, feminine
  • To resist the status quo is to continue to hope
  • To sustain hope, we need to take creative action
  • How do we find each other? How do we ensure we all do not fall prey to the comforts of the status quo? In what ways can we work together to build the world that equitably provides for all our needs?

Cards/Resisting makes us creative

• By making us more attentive.
  • Attentiveness that does not assume that there is something ’new’ to be seen
  • Instead, it’s deeply attuned to what we were too distracted to notice in the first place
• By making us more open.
  • True openness rejects the feeling that we as individuals, with our own abilities, are enough
  • It rejects the belief that observations alone in any moment are finished
  • It rejects the eagerness to dispose the ideas the reveal themselves to us
• By making us less about the “next big thing”.
  • It encourages us to do the same things all over again, but that’s okay
  • Creativity = revising, recooping, regenerating
• By making us protective of time and space.
  • Resisting the ways the world can distract us and clutter our mind
  • Add to Cathexis 5
• By making us more receptive.
  • Culturally, we’re trained to analyze and judge too quickly, way too often. Resist against this!
• By allowing us to participate in collective imagination and collaboration.
  • NOT machinations of individual genius
  • NOT acting like self-sufficient lone wolves
• By encouraging us to view everyone —ourselves included— as diffabled.
• By encouraging us to do more of nothing.
  • More waiting > always looking

Revise your nine commandments to reflect your processing of the input from class materials, class discussions, and feedback.

Elaborate on each commandment such that it’s clear what’s informing each and how each includes a processing of class materials and class discussions.

The elaboration of each commandment can come the form of your liking:
a) paragraph form
b) footnoting
c) other ways of commenting, elaborating, annotating

• delight, sublime
• does it extend us as human beings? or is it destructive?
  • E.G. Ursula K. Guin’s carrier bag theory
• connected with the world, hyperawareness
• Creativity is sustainable