Why do I create? Because I’m compelled to. The unrelenting urge has been with me as far back as I can remember. My earliest creative memory dates back to early grade school age when I stayed up late at night making up songs in bed. I was one of those people who decided very early in life that they couldn’t draw so my creative urge was channeled through songs and music. I have notebooks filled with a couple hundred songs written during my middle school and high school years.
I started shifting towards visual art on the day I got my first Macintosh. But it’s only been maybe five years since images and video have eclipsed lyrics and music. Since then, blogging and social networking have turned a predilection towards creativity into a full blow compulsion. And truth is, it’s hard for me to separate the drive to create from the craving to publish. In some ways, the urgency to post something every day has gotten in the way of creating works that require more than a few hours to be completed. That seems pretty fucked up now that I’ve put it in writing. The Muse is a harsh mistress.
Agnes Sharple
Botgirl Questi
Bumblebee (Wendz Tempest)
Canary Beck
Carissa Arthurine Somerset
Eva Marie
Fuschia Nightfire
George Coghill
Ironyca Lee
Jeremy Owen Turner
Joseph DeLappe
Kathleen Cool
Katie Vizenor
Krista Hoefle
Kristine Schomaker
Lizzie Gudkov
Aero Bigboots
RMarie Beedit
Marmaduke Arado
Isabella Medici
Nadya Tolokonnikova
Nathan Shafer
Pixel Reanimator
Ravanel Griffon
Scarlett Luv
Strawberry Singh
Tabitha Raincloud
Toni Tyldesley
Trilby Minotaur
Vanessa Blaylock
Xue Faith
Yordie Sands
Ohhhh I totally know what you mean about the quick and dirty creative spurts and the seperation between publishing and creating. It’s nice when they both come together. But I look at my paintings on my work table and think… it will take too much time. I can sit at the computer and whip something out that expresses how I am feeling at this moment and share it with people and get that immediate validation and feedback that painting just doesn’t give right now. Crazy how that work. Sigh!!
I can really relate to the situation you describe:
“But I look at my paintings on my work table and think… it will take too much time. I can sit at the computer and whip something out that expresses how I am feeling at this moment and share it with people and get that immediate validation and feedback that painting just doesn’t give right now.”
It’s getting to the point that there’s almost no barrier between conception and shareable expression using digital tools. I’m 99% about communicating at the conceptual level. So it’s hard for me to get motivated to spend a week expressing an idea through a very refined work when I can slam something out in an hour or two. I refine my ideas through small, fast iterations rather than by working and reworking a single project.
Provocative ideas as always BG!
The great Internet font of knowledge, is, I think we all agree, also a font of superficiality. You can be superficial anywhere and you can be thoughtful anywhere, but I do think that Facebook is the world’s greatest baby photo sharing website, and a not so great idea and creativity factory.
Blogs aren’t perfect either, but of the platforms that exist, you may not be shocked to hear that iRez is a “blog” because IMHO it’s a richer idea space.
I saw a Flickr group the other day that had a notice “for every photo you post, leave 3 comments on other peeps pix” — quotas have plenty of their own problems of course, but that was a pretty interesting idea.
Seems like pretty much every writer who’s ever lived has said, “Want to learn to write? No problem: Read!” And bloggers say the same thing. But we get so busy doing our post that it’s easy not to deal with other peeps. I think if we all read a few more, “liked” and commented on a few more, whether that’s here on iRez or at your or Kristine’s or Yordie’s or Ironyca’s… we might both develop our own thinking more clearly, and build a virtual community while we’re at it. For me this space can really be richer than Facebook status updates or in-world IM’s at a dance club (not dissin either) and it’s up to us to sew the richness we’d like to reap.
First, I want to thank you for putting this blog together. I especially appreciate that you’re aggregating posts from people who may not be in each other’s normal circles. As you wrote, the type of community you’re working to build is a great opportunity for cross-pollination and mutual growth.
I’m actually a very avid reader of other people’s blogs. Maybe too avid. I have a few hundred feeds I scan multiple times a day. I don’t comment very often, but do share the most exceptional links. Most of my social networking is on Twitter so I’m used to being very stingy with retweets because I don’t want to hog anyone’s stream. So I appreciate your reminder that we can “like” and “plus” posts without that kind of negative impact.
Hi Botgirl… i’m very curious, do you go back to your many different works, songs, etc and find working ideas?
I hardly ever go back to old posts, but I do often troll through my old tweets to find something interesting to visualize.
Jillian Steinhauer at Hyperallergic just wrote a post on “Why Going Viral Isn’t Always a Good Thing” [for an Artist]
http://hyperallergic.com/54474/why-going-viral-isnt-always-a-good-thing/
Thanks for the link. Interesting read. I’ve often felt that work I post gets noticed for a day or two if I’m lucky and then gets buried under the daily avalanche of new material out there. On the other hand, without the internet and social networking, no one would see it at all.
haha, well, it could just be my fantasy… but that’s why I try to keep things categorized / organized here… I do believe in The Long Tail… and the stats over the life of this blog suggest that our old posts really do get as much traffic as the new ones…
(kk, granted that long tail for us may be a lot of college kids writing term papers on Peter Eisenman and fetishists looking for pix of peeps in catsuits… haha… but at least they find us! 😛
Anyway, if I’m interested in the writings of BotgirlQ I just go here:
http://irez.uk/author/botgirlq/
If I want to know about Cloud Party:
http://irez.uk/category/virtual-worlds/cloud-party/
Identity:
http://irez.uk/category/culture/identity/
Civil Rights:
http://irez.uk/tag/civil-rights/
If you organize it… well… they still may not come… you may have to pimp it too… but I hope we’re creating both relevant as well as easy-to-find content! 🙂
http://youtu.be/M3FtapkiKWI