[creativity conversations at the ioct: bruce mason and peter shillingsburg]

"The creative process: views from practice and analysis."

Bruce Mason (New media advocate)
Peter Shillingsburg (Textual scholar)

Peter

"New knowledge is the result of a rational extension of the boundaries of established knowledge through acts of innovative combination, controlled violation of conventions, and recognition of the potentitals of the unexpected, including accidents."

(from Stephen Brown paraphrasing Margaret Boden)



For an innovation to be distinguished from chaos it must not exceed our tolerance for the unexplained thus will be a failed attempt. So there comes the notion that there is a discipline that underlies creativity - a controlled violation (recognising the potential of the accidental).


Art that can be labelled as significant or great usually has two characteristics:
command of langauge
does something not done before

"The old dog barked backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup."

(Robert Frost)

The first sentence has 22 stop sounds (so takes much longer to read than the second sentence). The second line only has 4 hard stop sounds and none is juxtaposed to the other. It has 8 liquids which run on smoothly without interruptions. In this case creativity is the skillful placement.

But what of *serendipity*?

Housman

"Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon ... I would go for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of. Then there would usually be a lull of an hour or so then perhaps the spring would bubble up again. I say bubble up, because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was an abyss ... the pit of the stomach."

Tree Bellicose Graph

"Jaun supine team tree bellicose livid tug adder inner past her honor heel slide. Day word deep tree Bellicose Graph. Dare wuzzy Girt Bag Bellicose Graph, dare wuzzy Muddles Eyes Bellicose Graph, enter wuzzy Ladle Beady Bellicose Graph. Bees hide dare past her render Russian reaver. Juan moaning, dado seeded acrostic past her tweet digress honor udder sight. Bat furs day head topaz oeqvre breech Honda witch dare livid day bag hoary bull trowel."

source

Bruce




Can a group be creative? (think of a million penguins)

In blogosphere there seems to be a consensus that a million penguins was a failure. BUT when wikis fail it is because no one writes anything or it is riddled with spam.

Stats in 5 weeks of a million penguins

• 1500 contributors
• over 11,000 edits
• 75,000 visitors to the site
• 280,000+ page views
  

So, maybe it failed because crowds cannot write well.

Or, maybe it was because there were no rules, everything was left up to the users. There was nothing saying what writers couldn't do.

But we have plenty of evidence of crowds writing. Aarne-Thompson 333

type - AT 0333 the wolf or other monster devous human beings until all of them are rescued alive from his belly
1)wolf's feast
2) rescue

motifs - 1) Wolf poses as "grandmother" and kills child, What makes your ears so big? Animal swallows man (not fatally)
2)Victims rescued from swallower's belly.

So this might be related to a digital tradition:

Wiki transmission
what about edit histories as transmission?
what kinds of wiki edits succeed and what fail?

Traces of Digital Authors


Oral culture leaves relatively few snapshots of texts
Digital culture leaves billions
Gibson's blog shows his latest novel Spook country coming together

but a reader of Gibson's new novel noticed that it sounded familiar...it was from Gibson's blog:

"So I can tell you now that Spook Country came together for Gibson in October 2004. That month is a record of all the little shocks and perceptions and historical forces and traumas - in seriously minute detail - that at some point stewed together in Gibson's brain into what became Spook Country.

According to the early plot outline which Amazon.com has up on the book's page (quoting the blog), he started writing his novel in June 05. That's the boiling time for the novel, I guess. Gibson has several times called writing a novel at the same time as the blog "boiling water with the lid off", meaning it's something he has to stop doing in order to generate enough energy to write the novel. Looking at these links, I'm not so sure. I think instead the blog has become a record of, and an integral part of, the idea-generating stage of writing his novels. Maybe he couldn't write the book itself, but the ideas certainly came about at these exact times."

Bruce's note that you need to work within constraints so tried to create a tardis in second life but SL doesn't allow something to be different (spatially) on the inside and outside. So, a workaround was allowing one to teleport to somewhere else (bigger) from within the tardis.

Peter: Henry James and embedded clauses and deferred, Falkner and long sentences, relative duration of time to live life and then talk about it (Shandy!). So telling good stories, creation, is verbal so you need a good command of language. We build our worlds and transport ourselves with words (Coleridge).

[UK launch of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1]

Lastnight was the UK launch of the ELC, the cd and online collection of web works put together by the Electronic Literature Organization.

Guests included
- Scott Rettberg (http://retts.net/, writer, co-editor of ELC Volume 1, co-founder and first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization)

And the UK-based writers who feature on the ELC Volume 1, who will show their work and discuss what Electronic Literature means for them:
- John Cayley (http://www.shadoof.net/in/)
- Jon Ingold (http://www.ingold.fsnet.co.uk/)
- Chris Joseph (http://www.chrisjoseph.org/)
- Kate Pullinger (http://www.katepullinger.com)

and me, in the place of Dr. Donna Leishman. Sadly I could not do a Scottish accent (I struggle with my own!) but as I spoke about The Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw (Sept 2004), Chris interacted/played with the story so audience members were able to enjoy exactly what Donna terms "the fragital":

"an uncommon pairing of the digital experience, involving the individualised remote onscreen touch, and the sense of a material and sensitive tangibility which is located in the drawing, movement, composition and the responsive actions of the visual practice."

[the earth and sky of jacques dorme]

On the train up to Leicester I began reading a new - non-research related - book: The Earth and Sky of Jacues Dorme by Russian Andreï Makin. Although I am reading the translation, (I know, tut-tut) the writing I find truly poetic. The language is...delectable, edible, exquisite, I am pulled in and I don't want to leave. Have a taste:

"Amid the fierceness of their lovemaking early in the night he snapped the thread of the old necklace she never took off. The little amver beads clattered onto the floor and as the rain began to fall, it at first mimicked this fine rattle of grapeshot, then changed its tune, turning into a downpour, torrents of water and, ultimately, an ocean surge that flooded into the room. Afte ra blazing hot day, with the dry wind rustling like insect wings, this tidal wave reaches their naked bodies, filling the sheets with the damp aroma of leaves, the bitter freshness of the plains" (3).

nb: I'm quoting from an uncorrected bound proof - so this could look different in the published version.

[spam e-mail - mais non?]

there is something poetic in this: Note the use of txt spk and the final line ending on a question:

"Against, themif writes dont.
Suspect consult provider strongly recommends,
physician beginning. Julie andrews bowen christie delpy dreyfus newmar. Saving
uploading server bandwidth theft? Hall rice biel lange pare jet li. Wednesday
thursday friday saturday.
Than what, already chances seek, isnt readily.
Mexico easiest childhoods child dropped met biological adopted.
Writers refrain journal ended reason daily.
Ashton kutcher audrey tautou ben. Aniston beals
connelly esposito gimenez, grey love, hewitt.
Eliza dushku geri halliwell gillian. Child dropped
met biological, adopted committed suicide husband. El camino school oceanside spent.
Hard stud biggest besides ghost indecent. Both,
overall rating exotic? Tree hill house smallville prison break, blanket keyword
dogs! Emergency personnel press charges ibanezwild ryanthe enoughdr? Why going
friend, relative coworker may presence impede.
Kiss even pull knife. Background, make, them, more
attractive animals. Entirely choicedont psycho stalkeryou shouldnt! Celebrity
photo gallery by. Brewster jorge posada joseph mcginty nichol josephine baker josh.
Illegal case complain layout show script graphic.
Them more attractive animals that eat.
Annette bening ashlee, ashton kutcher audrey
tautou! Wallpaper music contact still ab cd ef? Sarah gellar parker, scarlett
johansson, tara reid. Andrews bowen christie delpy.
Elmos, fire rest young cast including. Naomi
campbell natalie portman neve nicole kidman imbruglia ornella?
Marc jacobs york annual toronto festival party
volver. Material note, frequently changes date?
Bad girl, think carry dark secret im obsessed,
death. Jones christina aguilera ricci cindy.
Behavior erratic feared, safety claimed physically
verbally. Stacy saysjolie tertium quid mon?
Shields bruce willis
bryce?"

[new river journal is ba-ack]

After a period of dormancy (in the eloquent ELO's words) the New River Journal is back and kicking. The first issue includes work by Jason Nelson, David Herrstrom, and Dan Waber. Waber's piece is most interesting as it deals with the temporal dimension of writing.

[line breaks and flow]

I came across this poem today over at Cassis's blog at Frontline Books. In her post, Cassis talks about flow: "Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi uses the term 'flow' to describe the state of absorption in the creative process. He defines flow as "an automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness." Ah...where is my flow? With flow rustling in my mind, I read the remainder of Cassis's post which contained this poem:

Woman Writing

A woman writes at a desk in a study. Furiously
awake
at five a new theorem buzzing, she constructs it
with her pen-
Thermodynamics and the Heartbeats of Tree-
Frogs in Sarawak. Her hair is
electromagnetic:
why brush it, it is white thought. Behind her a model:
molecules, a tree of them, primaries, red, yellow.

Today is blue.
She allows it to happen. This is not
a woman writing her memoirs . She is
writing off the edge
of the planet. What mirror? What toothpaste?

She is newly painted vibrant criss-cross dashes:
her sweater,
glasses, the lines on her face.
This hour could have been a century blasting
away a stockade of men in white coats.
Today she is eighty-five. So much
to do. So far to go.

["pureangel," Images of Women, eds. Dilys
Wood and Myra Schneider, Arrowhead Press]

Rather interestingly, instead of flow, I found myself very aware of the line-breaks. Perhaps I was more aware of them simply because the idea of flow preemtped feelings of continuity, effusion, succession. What especially made an impression on me are these two enjambments:

"she constructs it
with her pen..."

and

"She is writing off the edge
of the planet."

The way the lines seem to break the flow of thought startled me as I was reading. As if each line contains (at least) two possibilities, constructing something, and constructing something with an aid...as if the flow then attains a clarification or a (re)focus. Re-reading these lines now also seem strangely metafictive; the poet describing the creation of her poem. For the reader too, my eye-movements mimicking the break, falling to the subsequent line. I especially enjoy how "edge" switches from noun to adjective - but this is only clear to me when my eye makes the leap from one line to the next.