The TEDTalks talk this weekend is all on the subject of creativity, featuring this speech here. It’s a very nice talk by an artist who went to India and was walking along the beach one day and got the idea to use fishing nets to build enormous air structures, they’re kind of like kites but permanent, and huge, and it’s all very beautiful except I imagine that if you have to drive under one of these every day for a couple of years it will start to seem mundane, and after a few years of absorbing pollution in a major city, it may even come to look dingy, but that’s a problem with all works of urban art and, in fact, with all urban structures, full stop.
“Her Secret is Patience” by Janet Echelman. Phoenix, AZ
On a mind blowing art scale of 1-10, I give it about a 6 1/2, perhaps a 7. What’s interesting to me is that it’s about more than art. It’s the application of a centuries old technology in a modern art form which may have ramifications in aeronautics, meteorology (if you can visualize the wind, you can map the wind) architecture and urban design.
Creativity is not just the random spark which occasionally some bright person is lucky enough to be blessed with and smart enough to know what is is. Creativity is also the continuance of that flame, information acting on information as each intellectual discipline interacts with all the others.
In the beginning, as we wandered the savannahs and told stories round the campfires and painted our prey on the walls of the caves where we huddled on fearsome nights, no one distinguished between science and art, and you can add religion and magic into that mix. They were all just manifestations of the same thing, that “intellectual curiosity” which we were beginning to feel.
Somewhere along the line, probably at about the same time that we started having politics and governments, we started to get too specialized, religion and science stopped speaking to each other, religion locked art in the basement for a few thousand years, and magic went off to live in an isolated cabin in the woods.
Maybe now, we are starting to get that connection back. Global village, indeed.
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