What is inspiration? A deflationist approach. Against the gift and against the touch of gods. We need a better representation of what triggers and constitutes inspiration if we ever hope to devise strategies that foster inspiration.
Inspiration: may be understood by the interactions of 3 poles + 1. Inspiration is like the central area of an upside-down tetrahedron (4 triangular faces and 4 vertices).
This little representation does not focus on interpretation and meaning, but on the levels and factors of invention. It does not represent a self, and correlates the collective and personal aspects of inspiration.
▽
The upper triangular face is the playground of conscious sensations and rules, technical mastery and imaginary combinations: the realm of social invention and personal invention. It is where stories are told, movies are directed, paintings, sculptures, poems crafted, etc.
This surface is a public and complex fabric of rays, strings, ropes and cables: the realm of symbolical relations. It is composed of three vertexes and angles (representing 3 poles of art-production):
>
Education, rules and public languages, from the history of art to sciences, from abstract knowledge to assimilated gestures. This angle represents the traditional, but also institutional aspect of art (can also be represented as a frame by the three horizontal edges of the upper surface). Our personal will emerge from education (in form, motivational content and strength), in the already-formed and transmitted maze of languages.
<
Mediums and matter, techniques, work, the practical assimilation of skills and methods, from mechanism, tool-use, to intentional realization. Imitating, mastering and then inventing technical ways to produce art. It represents the evolution and the art of understanding, imitating and coming to grips with matter (measure of looseness, porosity and randomness).
^
Sensations, conscious aesthetical material, phenomena and memories. This vertex represents the pole of perceived colors and patterns, the personal pole of imagination and memory, remembrances, objects and situations.
×
The spatial center of the tetrahedron is the node of inspiration, half-obscure, already faded in the visible shadow of the nadir. The centre correlates what is known, recognized and rearranged with new elements, winds, molecules or heats. It is the place where materials receive a new name and form, at the limit of consciousness. Not-yet-conscious and subconscious associations arise in this node, which is also a state of immersion: in rest, contemplation, repetition or discovery.
v
"Below" education and work, below sensation and imagination, under institutional and individual art, even "below" the spatial centre of inspiration li(v)es a dynamic and concrete realm of raw sensations, strange drives, unconscious emotions, elemental resources, physical remembrances… forming indistinct and powerful currents which move, melting and forging new conundrums and new alloys, influencing the essential atmospheres, elemental affects and visceral assimilations.
Think of this low vertex as a nadir of unexpressed and muted "things": not because it lacks noise, rhythm, music or even voices – on the contrary: symbolical nets unravel, remaining glyphs derive and merge without the strings and rays of consciousness, awe, angst and vertigo without the boundaries of definitions, or the clear use of categories.
"Fear" is a category, as well as "blue" and the other colors, or the 5 senses ("taste" is always tactile, "touch" does not distinguish between shape, temperature and feeling, etc.). It is other than the structure of language; neither desiring Unconscious nor neural Web, it is other, below.
This underground realm is finite, and its extreme point is linked with the exterior of the tetrahedron. The vertex itself is the portal between raw sensations and the ineffable.
⦸
The exterior of the tetrahedron doesn’t exist. It could be the realm of things in themselves: completely silent and transparent by definition. Transparent, because pure transparency evokes invisibility, a deeper blindness than darkness (the objective disappearance of sight, when darkness is its failure, its death or corruption in blackness). It might be the realm of pure uniqueness, on which we cannot but stay silent, from which we mysteriously receive (?).
▽ ▽ ▽
Back to the tetrahedron of inspiration: its shape and colors are changing over time, as time is change; these changes are continuous but irregular (aesthetical shocks, unbalances, temporal stability, inertiæ, momentum...). Creativity derives from learning how to shift or modify – from sensitivity to the murmur and roars, to skillful taming of raw materials.
Because it is changing as a whole (the relative values and degrees of the angles, lengths of the edges…), there is never one identical encounter. Therefore, repetition is not useless, but is a strong strategy of Inspiration – for instance: looking at the same video material, listening to the same story… will have slightly (or greatly) varying effects. Inspiration is assimilation, nourishment and containment of the wild.
Both feeding others and eating otherness Inspiration comes from the multiple interactions of 3 + 1 poles:
area of art/science + mediums = art projected
work + imagination = heuristic, productive experimentation
technique + randomness (i.e: glitch…) = artificial raw material factory
proximity of a strange source (children, tribal art...) + rest = rapid change
sudden change in environment + rest = hidden rearrangements
history of art + sensation (repeated) = new resources, alloys
resource + immersion = possible aesthetic experience
▽
This is not a satisfactory representation of inspiration, just a way to remember inspiration is complex and can be influenced, if only chaotically. The tetrahedron moves, since it is made of life, and the structures or meaning and trauma can be altered, even though they are hard and constraining.
This requires more work, but let's consider from now on that inspiration in general requires as much work as it is serendipitous, it requires as much effort as it is dispositional in nature. Some triggers will fade and some will remain longer, albeit changing their effects. Inspiration can be trained, and just like inspiration can become more intense, more subtle, it can morph into new experiences, and become something more.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire