Time Spent

This is the chart of how I spend my day. According to the chart, I spent most of my time doing the school things, including taking the class, finishing my homework, and doing some reading, which I guess is the normal life for a student.

Team Presentation

In order to do the presentation, my partner Michael and I started with doing some research about what "creative process" means. My idea was doing music maps - play a piece (or several pieces) for the class, and ask a student to draw something, and then ask another student to add or change something in the picture, and so on and so forth. We can compare the original picture to the final version and see how it changes. But Michael thought that we do not need to limit ourselves to music relating things and he suggested that we could do advertising things since advertising is one of most creative fields and the class can definitely show their creativity through making an advertisement. I thought advertising was a great idea, so we finally decided to do it. We decided to split the class into two groups and each group will try to sell one product to the rest of class, so that students can not only experience creative process (through making a commercial) but also learn to collaborate with each other. 

We really had lots of fun doing our presentation. Everyone was participating and  showing their creativity during the whole process. Although the products that we prepared for the class were very boring and unappealing things, both groups had brilliant and creative ideas about selling those produces. No matter the acting of the dry shampoo or the introduction of floss's multifunctions was very impressive and even beyond our expectation. 

If we had more time, we can try to extend our activity by adding the stage of "feedback and refine": after one group shows their advertisement, the rest of class should give feedback to them and then that group can try to revise and refine their project. 

Partner Project

For our class this semester I was paired up with Jude. I was really excited to get to know him as an artist better and try to create something with him. In figuring out what we wanted to do, we met for tea. Both of us were very exhausted, and knew this was the only little bit of time we had to put something together. Initially, I had a different idea in mind which was to have one presentation of a song or other piece of art that the participants would then reinterpret and create another song or piece based on the original. After talking with Jude we both agreed that might not demonstrate a process of creation as well as another idea. In the end we decided to take two elements of music (melody, and rhythm) and form a circle with other class mates. Jude took a rhythmic idea and I took a melodic one. We started playing and then walked to the next person in the circle who then was supposed to change something in the melody or rhythmic structure that Jude and I would take to the next person in the circle to change again. In our heads this was a very straight forward and efficient way to demonstrate how an idea develops with different influence and perspective. I feel like the project didn't turn out the way we had in mind. Instead, it turned into a more improvisatory game, which was interesting, but didn't really display what we were trying to show. I think we could have made our intentions more clear, by setting up a few boundaries, like "change one note in the melody," "or change the meter, or subdivisions in the rhythm." These restrictions would have made it less confusing and would have yielded a more concrete change and development.
I do like the idea of our project, especially the movement of peeling away in a circle. We could experiment with movement in the creative process. If ideas change when people are stationary or in a circle, spread out, or if they were to come to us. Overall, what this project taught me is that we must not confuse the creative process with improvisation, and that boundaries and guidelines often help a more solid product in the end.  I also learned from this project that the concept of 'the creative process' is very obscure and when considered as a tangible teachable thing, can get frustrating and misguided.

Time Spent

Here are two graphs I made after tracking my time for two weeks. I feel that in school and in such a busy place geographically and in life, none of my days were the same. As seen above, my average day actually has more than 24 hours in it.  It is very full. I broke it down into four different parts…Things I have to do to stay alive, things I must do at this time in my life ( transportation, school), things I do to do well in school and work, and things I want to do.  Most of my time is spent doing things I have to do for work and school and getting to those places. I spend less than two hours a day relaxing, taking care of my health, reading for leisure, and creating the things I want to as an artist and musician. An Ideal day in my life is much more simple, has much more sleep and more quality time practicing, creating, spending time with friends, and taking care of myself. My lifestyle has already changed in the past week being out of school. What I have discovered from tracking my time, is that I need to set aside a chunk of time, just like I do for practicing my violin or doing homework, specifically for my creative process. If I do this, I believe my output of work and my creativity in general would most likely increase. 

Ira Glass on the Creative Process

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY


Please watch this short video. I think the idea of practicing creating is an important thing to consider.

Creative Credo

To call myself a creator is nothing more than to acknowledge that I am a human and that humans regularly participate in the process of making something new from their surroundings. We constantly put pieces together to form order or take things apart to generate newness.  Calling myself a creator doesn’t make me a new person or a better person or even an “artist”. Instead it is more a reminder to myself that I have the ability to unpeel or to rebuild something, that no one else will in the same way. 

Igor Stravinsky said that poetry is nothing more than creation. With this in mind, I would like to call myself a poet.  I take pieces of the world around me, I force them into my head where they mull and turn, usually without meaning. Sometimes a face or a melody will stick out to me, and then subside into the pile in my head. Then usually late at night when I am unaware, not thinking of any of the specimens I have collected, one will emerge and float right in front of me. I usually see it a little higher than the top of my head an arm’s length away.  I see what I want to form and what it might become when it is tangible in form.

Then comes the hard part… pulling my skills of organization, practice, experimentation, new and old discovery together to try and make this image become real. Usually I scribble some words on a paper that only I can understand to make my plan concrete, like it’s a real project someone else has given me. Generally the beginning of a creation, weather it be a song, an improvisation, a self-portrait, a dance, comes from me freely doing and trying things until the “right” thing stands out. Sometimes it helps to document these processes when I am under the influence of some “drug”. By this I mean my creations usually come to life when I have either had a few glasses of wine, or if I have stayed up all night and am in a new space of consciousness. I can force myself into this space if I am not bogged down with other demands. Sometimes, when I am most stressed with schoolwork, or other things I must do in the world I produce a piece of art, because the stress puts me in a different state of being. 

I usually piece a creation together in a tangled web form, not from beginning to end, but rather little pieces here and there that I splice together in the end.  I have found I have two ways of creating. The first is the planned out , well organized way, which usually takes several months or even years to process the thoughts I have and to “perfect” them. I have found that with this process, I usually give up on a project before it is completed. I have many great starts to works of art or songs I have written that are still sitting in the back of my brain or on a paper, that never became more than a plan. The other process I have is the fast, almost spontaneous, furious way of creating. This process is a very focused one, it is one where I feel as if the idea inside must come out of me as quickly as possible. Usually the things I create this way come to fruition and are completed with out a break.  Most of these creations are small works that are done within 2-6 hours. 

Studying the creative process has been an interesting journey. To me I have detected my frustrations as a creator.  I have observed how noticing something by documenting it allows me to hold on to more possibilities for generating future works. It has also shown me how much is out there, and how little time I have to make what I really want. I have found by analyzing my life and how I spend my time, how much of my life is spent not working on my creations. I must change this. I would like to merge my spontaneous self with my planned and organized self to make larger works more conceivable.  I feel that as long as I call myself an artist, a creator a musician, a dancer, or a poet, I put the responsibility on myself to live up to those labels and to get out there and create. I must also remember to practice and change my own process to adapt to my ever-changing lifestyle and perception of the world around me.

What is the creative process

What is the creative process? That is what I have been searching for several months now.  Before the question was asked, I hadn’t really thought of it. To me I believed that I was either creative at certain times, which were usually spontaneous, or I was stagnant.

. What I have discovered since studying my own creative process is that my analysis has become less about “significant” creative output such as songs I write or me actually sitting down and choreographing something, but rather my study has turned into more about the creative process in every day tasks. Noticing how I go about walking home, cooking a meal, opening a door, have become more intriguing to me.

When I was younger, I did several things differently when I created than when I do now. I used to notice smaller details and become enthralled and completely distracted with them. I used to take photographs of the same space as it changed over several weeks, and I would get more wrapped up in creating something like a painting, or writing a play, without judging who would see it. As I have grown up and gone to school for music, my creative process has been about priority of “importance” and if something will satisfy an audience or myself at the end. This mindset has generally stunted the beginning and the further development of most creative ideas that pass through my mind. Another aspect of creating that I have lost somewhat is spontaneity and improvisation. I find now that I think very hard about what I want to hear if I compose a piece of music. When I was younger, I would sit at the piano and play for hours just composing, following the flow of my fingers and would often record these, but not go back to them to revise.

I am working to use my analytical developed “refined” taste and sensibilities as well as skills such as time management, organization and combine it with the more innocent and organic flow of creativity that I tucked in the back of my mind from my childhood. The concept of practicing the creative process is a conflicting idea to me. In some ways I see the benefit in analyzing my own process to make it stronger and more effective and efficient to me. I also see that this could be detrimental to the free flowing or impulsive or even instinctive imagination I have inside.