art life stuff

Thoughts on the offer & the various conversations I have had with others (not necessarily commissioners). Three things have struck me.

1. Art in everyday life. In some senses, our lives are saturated with cultural products - TV, music, pictures, architecture. We often only allow ourselves to occupy the role of consumer. A lot of this mass-produced stuff is actually very good but we fall into the trap of thinking that the creation of these cultural objects is done by "someone else". I'd like us to emphasize a world where "art" crops up everywhere. The explosion of new media content creation technologies (digital cameras, video, sound recording) and sharing environments (Flickr, YouTube) give us an opportunity to make this a reality. I love the idea of commissioners requesting something connected with their everyday life and being able to reincorporate the output back in normality.

2. Demystifying creativity. If "art" is done by "someone else" then that person must be "creative". And of course, we are not creative. Those beautifully composed photos? Oh, just something I did to relax over the weekend. But that's not proper art because art is only done by creative people and I am not creative. One major rule of improv is that you should never try to come up with the perfect response. You just need to do something. Now. Because now is the right time to do it and whatever you do is the right thing to be done. In some ways, the profusion of high-quality cultural products is an inhibitor to local creative acts. Few of us will ever paint something as beautiful as Van Gogh's Sunflowers. And yet that image is everywhere. I love the idea of commissioners sharing their own creativity at every stage of this process (but I am not going to insist that they do so).

Several people have decloaked as past or present poets when I've brought this topic up. A couple of people have even sent me their stuff (ta).

We need to acknowledge that creativity is fundamentally collaborative & social.

3. The role of technology. As mentioned earlier, I think the new media have a major role play. This role is subtle however. I've been using tech because the commissioners so far have not been based in Sydney - not because I especially want to use technology, just because it's helpful. Visual artists are way ahead of writers in terms of using new media tools but I think it's time we imagine a world where the novel, the short story and the poem are only three of many textual things to be worked on. There was a big, self-conscious rush into hypertext in the mid-90s which then died a death. People got bored with it. There needs to be more exploration of digital media as vehicle for language-lovers (of whom I count myself one).