Ask the Box

24 aug 06

"What inspires your "art" projects. By the way, I'm a big fan of your sites in the past and I think this one is great."

thanks! i really do appreciate the sentiment -- praise means a lot to me. putting all of one's projects online seperates one from one's audience, if there even is an attentive audience, something a web-creator can never be never sure about. so, it's nice to know that someone is listening.

a lot of people ignore everything that's on a computer screen, or at least don't consider it more than some trivial, useless and passing nonsense. they don't put as much thought or appreciation time into it as they would, say, a book, or a museum piece, just because a thing presented on the computer is so insignificant to them -- any computer-presented project is considered akin to "minesweeper" (under `start > games` on windows xp pro) -- not anything to take notice of. but if you had created minesweeper, i assure you that you'd be pretty damned proud of it. some people just don't see the work behind these projects, or make an effort to appreciate them.

most importantly, we often don't think of the people who put their hours and months into projects like "internet explorer" or the "zonealarm" firewall. maybe these are poor examples, because those "artists" are contracted. but, there are a few people like me out there who put their own projects online, and don't have any interest in making money from them. we don't get a lot of credit, i'm afraid. or rather, we don't get as much credit as we would if our realm of presentation weren't "the computer screen".

it's nice to know that there are some people who are able to see past "this is just a computer" and consider the person, work, and thought behind some of these projects. thank you.

i suppose there are people who don't care about paintings, or who don't care about film, and that not caring about creative projects on the computer isn't any more egregious than the former sentiments. but it feels that way to me, because most often the reason people don't like these projects isn't because they dislike the projects themselves, but just because they've decided that they "don't like computers", or, necessarily, "anything that's on a computer".

i can see the distaste at sitting in a chair and looking at a screen, because it's so passive. maybe the same people who "hate computers" also "hate tv". there are two classes of computer-haters: those who hate them because they're unsatisfactory, and those who hate them because they feel that they can't use them. i suppose i have some sympathy for both groups, but it's still annoying that they can't get past these psychological issues to look at someone's work -- a screen projects the same electrons that bounce off a painting and onto one's retina. oh well; those folks must know something i don't.

i'm glad you like this project. google likes it too, because it very clearly does what the web was designed to do, aeons ago: provide information. google's AI knows that this site contains informative content (i'm not going to speculate on how good that information is), and it therefore hungrily eats up these pages. my most-visited page is the hairy-backed man article, which gets a lot of hits from searches like `hairy back man attractive`. i see one almost every time i check my web stats, which is in fact not all that often.

one more self-important rant: one of the most annoying things someone ever said to me was "how can i make cool sites like yours?" i'm not sure what they meant. let's assume that my writing is thought-provoking, my images are attractive, and my sounds are soothing (or whatever). is creating these things included in "making a web page"? a web page is like a portfolio -- a more or less dead thing that contains other, living things. literally learning to make web pages is easy. this, of course, doesn't include the art of designing visually attractive pages, which i most certainly don't do a stellar job at; as i explained in another question, my design serves usability first and foremost (is my site easy to read and use?). i suppose that's a quality of the website, per se, but i don't know how good i am at usability design, either. anyway, my sites are so simple that it's not really an issue.

but anyway, the question was "what inspires your 'art' projects?" i'm glad the asker put "art" in scare quotes, because i'm not sure what "art" is, either. "what inspires your creative projects?" might be better, except the word "creative" carries with it baggage similar to the baggage the word "art" carries, except the definition of "creative" is a little more solid. creative: the quality of being created, or being able to create -- to make something, whether it be a piece of music, drawing, essay, scientific hypothesis, schematic for a new kind of generator, etc. one creation might be deemed more creative or less creative than another, based on how original it is. ie, whether or not recognizable previously-created elements or ideas are present.

however, nothing can be created totally out of thin air -- we all have our influences, and our building blocks, however twisted and intertwined they may or may not be. for instance, for a toy, one might dream up a soup can on wheels. "wheels" existed, "soup can" existed, but especially the idea for "a thing that's not supposed to be on wheels, on wheels" existed. this last one might make this idea a not-very-creative one.

i guess it's a natural ability -- the ability to pick and choose (perhaps subconsciously) disparate and unobvious source material, and combine it in novel ways. however, "inspiration" might be a different beast than "creativity".

anything can be an inspiration. a way to generate semi-abstract paiitings might be to grab a dictionary, thumb to a random page, and put your finger down in a random place. then, base a painting on that word ("larva"). that said, i don't get inspired as in "the beautiful blowing leaves on that tree inspire me", but rather something more subtle. i can't really place the origin of an idea, because it's so tiny and grain-like. several tiny and grain-like sparts of ideas slowly combine and grow, such that it's impossible to ask "what was the source of this?" that said, i think a lot of my visual ideas come from cartoons.

maybe "where do you get your ideas?" is a better way to phrase it. from lots of different things i experience, which combine in a subconscious way and then jump out after some proper stimulation. for instance, i came up with that "stupendous chrissy parker project" where i pretended to be a girl, travelling around the country and accumulating love letters based on a fake profile on match.com, by actually having an account on match.com and wondering about qualities that cause someone to respond to a particular profile.

i suppose experience inspires me -- something will catch my eye, and other stored experiences will associate themselves with it, and the idea for making something based on this combination will manifest. this "ask the box" isn't all that original -- it's just an answer column; a web-version of "dear abbey". "go ask alice" is already on the web, even though that's about gonorrhea in teenagers and things like that, whereas this one is apparently about my feelings on my pet dog.