At concerts, the pop of a camera flash is constant. You see it on TV at the Super Bowl or some other event. At a Robbie Williams concert, for a Nikon ad, he called upon the crowd to raise their cameras and take a picture. The result:
Category: Creativity
How things are created, mainly dealing with the process and means of creation
-
Finite and Infinite Games
James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
philosophically explores the premise of life as a series of games and infinite games. Finite games have an end and rules may not change, whereas infinite games are never ending and the rules must change. Directly, think of Super Mario versus World of Warcraft. With the Mario games, there’s a set of rules (stomp the mushrooms, fireball the goombas, save the princess, don’t die), but with Warcraft, there’s an entire world with a constantly changing set of rules and dynamics of play.
Understanding that, there are several other tenets:
- Finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries
- Finite players are serious, infinite players are playful
- A finite player seeks to be powerful, an infinite player plays with strength
- A finite player consumes time, an infinite player generates time
- A finite player aims for eternal life, an infinite player aims for eternal birth
Zen koans aside, it’s interesting to distinguish that from a finite standpoint, resources are scarce and must be consumed, but with an endless, infinite perspective, resources are plentiful and can be created. Carse discusses resource issues briefly, however, he mainly applies logic to his thesis to different areas of life–learning (training vs. education), sex (body vs. spirit), family (choosing vs. having), stories (plot vs. themes).
Finite and Infinite Games is a good book for anyone looking for perspective, but it’s not an easy read in the sense that it’s tediously and brutally logical. Perhaps that’s what’s needed to fully explain infinite concepts in a finite span of pages.
-
Art Space Tokyo, a Kickstarter postmortem
After a project, it’s a good thing to capture your thoughts on how you did. This includes everything from the initial idea, the the steps you took to get everything together and complete it, for better or worse. Craig Mod did a writeup about the whole process of creating Art Space Tokyo using Kickstarter as a means to raise funds for his project.
Kickstarter.com is a fund raising website. You create an account, describe your project and set a money goal to be obtained within a specific time period. Anyone in the world with an Amazon account can pledge money to help fund your project. Pledges are tiered, with each tier offering different incentives. If your project doesn’t reach your pre-set (unchangeable) monetary goal in the (unchangeable) time limit, nobody pays. If you reach your goal before the time limit, you continue to raise money until the time limit is up. This system has several interesting implications.
Backers simply can’t lose — if you can’t complete the project, they don’t pay. And if you can, they get both their tier award and the satisfaction of knowing they were instrumental in seeing your project through to completion.
I really wish I had heard about this as money was being raised. The book looks amazing.
-
Inception deconstructed
The Awl deconstructs Inception as a movie about making movies, or the act of creation.
Like 8½, Inception is a movie about making movies; it’s not that the whole movie “is a dream,” though, but rather that the whole movie is an allegory of creation.
Upon second viewing, the metaphor for creation makes sense across the entire 2.5 hours–seeking a muse, finding inspiration beyond that muse and persevering to bring your vision to reality.