MetaFilter posts tagged with Creativity

The only people who can change the world are people who want to.

Miko — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:38:08 -0800

Ignore Everybody: Reflections on living a creative life, via No Depression blogs.

Billboarding

mippy — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:15:18 -0800

Striking Billboard Ads. Note that while one is horribly sexist (can you guess?) the others are pretty cool

Chain reaction

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:53:18 -0800

A year before his passing at the age of 102, LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann pens a letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs (who had remarked publicly about his own use of the hallucinogenic as a creative factor) asking for Jobs' support for further research into the use of LSD in psychotherapy. In the remainder of the article, Ryan Grim touches briefly on the use of LSD by scientists and computer programmers who have transformed the world through novel discoveries and inventions.

What Would It Look Like?

netbros — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:13:44 -0800

The Global Oneness Project is exploring how the radically simple notion of interconnectedness can be lived in our increasingly complex world. They travel the globe gathering stories from creative and courageous people who base their lives and work on the understanding that we bear great responsibility for each other and our shared world. They hope that by showing the diverse ways oneness is expressed—in the fields of sustainability, conflict resolution, spirituality, art, economics, indigenous culture, and social justice—others will be inspired to create solutions to personal and community challenges from their own lived understanding of oneness.

"Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."

amyms — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:47:14 -0800

There are times when having a fully developed brain can almost seem like an impediment. Are babies more aware of the world around them than adults are? Can "thinking like a baby" lead us to be more in tune with our creativity and our ability to learn? Scientists have taken a new look inside the baby mind, which is "unfocused, random, and extremely good at what it does."

The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination

jrb223 — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:35:53 -0800

"The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination was established to promote an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of creativity and the imaginative process." To this end they hold regular roundtable discussions, streaming videos of which are available online. Some past highlights include: Psychogeography: The Landscapes of Memory (featuring Andre Aciman, Vito Acconci, and Russell Epstein)
Paraphilias (featuring Arnold Davidson, Richard Krueger, Linda Williams, and Susan Winemaker)
The Body and its Image (featuring Marina Abramovic, Paul Campos, Marcel Kinsbourne, and Sabine Wilhelm)
Hypergraphia and Hypographia: Two Diseases of the Written Word (featuring Alice Flaherty, Alan Jacobs, Jonathan Lethem, Francis Levy, and Pedro Reyes)
The Presumption of Rationality: Psychological Challenges to Legal Certainty (featuring Peter Brooks, Carol Gilligan, Nomi Stolzenberg, and Kenji Yoshino)

Buying a scalpel set doesn't make you a surgeon, but...

cthuljew — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:03:33 -0800

Not all of us need, or want, $10,000 worth of Adobe and Microsoft software to be creative. So, here's some alternatives, each available on every major platform:

GIMP, for all your drawing and photo-editing needs. (Windows and OSX.)
Inkscape, for vector graphics creation.
Scribus, for incredibly powerful document creation.
FontForge, if you want to make your own fonts.
OpenOffice, the old standby for word processing, spreadsheets, and all those other office needs. I'm a personal fan of Inkscape for its wonderfully intuitive interface, as well as Scribus for its stylesheet-based power. I hope these links improve your productivity, instead of ruining it for the day.

How We Kill Geniuses

sarabeth — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:41:18 -0800

How We Kill Geniuses. "[Elizabeth Gilbert recalls] a story that musician Tom Waits told her years ago. One day he was driving on a Los Angeles freeway when a fragment of a melody popped into his head. He looked around for something to capture the tune -- a pencil or pen -- but had nothing to record it. He started to panic that he'd lose the melody and be haunted by it forever and his talent would be gone. In the midst of this anxiety attack, he suddenly stopped, looked at the sky, and said to whatever force it was that was trying to create itself through the melody, 'Excuse me. Can you not see I'm driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment ... otherwise go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.'" Gilbert explores the idea that we might stifle genius by demanding that creative people be somehow larger than life and something more than human.

Liberal Arts 2.0

divabat — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:44:16 -0800

"What are the new liberal arts?", asks SnarkMarket, inspired by Jason Kottke's tagline and Edge. The blog post has turned into a pitch for a new collaborative book, with spirited discussions and over 100 suggestions including photography, design, relationships, mythology, intuitive thinking, synthesis, knowledge mastery, search, archiving, play, and home economics.

Creative mind, troubled soul

jbickers — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 05:32:42 -0800

"The arts are more dangerous [than other professions] because they require sensitivity to a large extent ... If you go too far you can pay a price -- you can be too sensitive to live in this world." Pondering the link between creativity and depression. Also: famous writers, composers, poets and artists with bipolar disorder.

Technology + Art = Magic

netbros — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 01:10:21 -0800

Behind Pixar’s string of hit movies, says the studio’s president, is a peer-driven process for solving problems. How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity (alternate print link for those having trouble with the first link), by the co-founder of Pixar and the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios Ed Catmull. "For 20 years, I pursued a dream of making the first computer-animated film. To be honest, after that goal was realized — when we finished Toy Story — I was a bit lost. But then I realized the most exciting thing I had ever done was to help create the unique environment that allowed that film to be made. My new goal became, with John, to build a studio that had the depth, robustness, and will to keep searching for the hard truths that preserve the confluence of forces necessary to create magic. In the two years since Pixar’s merger with Disney, we’ve had the good fortune to expand that goal to include the revival of Disney Animation Studios. It has been extremely gratifying to see the principles and approaches we developed at Pixar transform this studio. But the ultimate test of whether John and I have achieved our goals is if Pixar and Disney are still producing animated films that touch world culture in a positive way long after we two, and our friends who founded and built Pixar with us, are gone."

Condensed: 'Care, constraint, concise, cut, character, clarity, and charity.'

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:35:00 -0800

How to Write With Style.

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

hadjiboy — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:03:38 -0800

Come, take a ride and look at some of the Islamic Art of the past. Or, you could call it Art of the Islamic World if you're so inclined. If not, then how about taking into account some of the major milestones of Islam throughout the centuries, from past till present (more examples here), including the art of Calligraphy and Architecture. Not to mention the Arab world's contribution to music, both old and new. [Previously mentioned, here, here, here, and here, with a wonderful comment from nickyskye as usual]

Imagine It!

divabat — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:00:39 -0800

Teams of student entrepreneurs around the world had six days to add value to a stack of Post-It notes as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. The results are documented in Imagine It!, which aims to promote creative thinking. Some of the projects generated from the Post-It notes are a fundraising fast-food service that uses Post-It notes for orders; an elementary school class on entrepreneurship; a collection of notes and wisdom from top minds around Stanford University; awareness-building systems for disabilities, pedestrian crosswalks, and the Thai Constitution; mass fundraising for Kiva microlending; an open-source factorial music program; and some comedy based on organizing girlfriends. The video also features interviews from Guy Kawasaki, John Hennessy (president of Stanford), Richard Caruso (Entrepreneur of the Year), and other people in academia, business, and social entreprise.

Oxford Muse

divabat — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:07:02 -0800

Oxford Muse - "a foundation to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional and cultural life". Browse the self-potraits (autobiographies), participate in projects, go universal, or just learn what the Muse is.

Generative Creativity

weston — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:31:43 -0800

Generative Creativity is a course offered by the University of Sussex through their Informatics department. The lecture series discusses tools and techniques for generating graphics, music, jokes and riddles, and more.

sonic interpretations

madamjujujive — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:29:04 -0800

"What is the sound of color? We asked that question of 5 musicians. We assigned each musician a different color. They wrote 5 tracks. We gave the colors and tracks that inspired them to 5 directors." The Sound of Color contains the songs and videos that were created. The site and free downloads are only available through March 15. (Via Carolina Vigna-Marú) Disclaimer: This is also the color of pepsi blue. The project is sponsored by Gap: "Gap is crossing the line between being an advertiser and a patron of the arts," Brown says. "There’s no gratuitous khakis flying around the videos." Even so, one can’t help but wonder whether critics suspicious of the brand's sponsorship will pan the tracks regardless of their caliber. The artists aren’t sweating. "From our perspective, we just want as many people as possible to hear and feel our music," says the Raveonettes' Sune RoseWagner. "And since most radio/TV stations are too lame to play it, we need alternative outlets." More on the campaign in Advertising Age - "The artists were given almost complete creative control by Gap and Rehab; there were a few mandatory constraints -- no political endorsements, no obscenity, etc., but other than that the artists were allowed to create whatever they wanted to. And in the end the rights to the tracks revert back to the artists; they can use those tracks however they want. Gap has no right or license to use the works in a commercial way." More on the musicians Jimmy Tamborello Marié Digby Swizz Beatz The Blakes The Ravonettes

Cash rules everything around me

Blazecock Pileon — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:29:49 -0800

CASH is the Coalition of Artists & Stake Holders, a project conceived and initiated by musician Kristin Hersh. CASH is "read-write" — more than consumption; a collaborative online effort — helping make music ownership more of an interactive affair facilitated through Creative Commons licensing.

Not Your Ordinary Barcode

Lush — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 04:31:15 -0800

Bar Code Revolution! With more than just lines and rectangles, Japanese company Design Barcode works around the basic elements of a barcode and infuses real, functional barcodes with creative designs and silhouettes. See barcodes as tomatoes, stomachs, rain, pianos, guns, train tracks, waterfalls, cliffsides, and yes, even combovers.

Portraits of the artists as young scribblers

madamjujujive — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:57:09 -0800

Now Then is an exhibit of 25 comic artists showing a comparison of their drawing style now and when they were just kids. Also, check out 50 artists riffing on the theme of Duck! Fun stuff from the Museum of Comic & Cartoon Art.

Creativity grows in rural Kansas

Hugh2d2 — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 06:18:18 -0800

The Harveyville Project, located in Harveyville, Kansas, is a small town and getting smaller: There are only about 250 residents, and most are elderly. But after an artist bought an abandoned school to live in two years ago, there are some colorful new faces in town.

Conveniently located at the corner of No and Where. Nary a McDonalds nor Starbucks as far as the eye can see, but still a comfy drive from civilization. Housed in two mid-century school buildings on nine acres on the edge of a tiny rural town, the Harveyville Project offers a quiet, secluded, distraction-free environment to jumpstart your creative work.

Such a cool idea. If I was still single I'd move there in a second to soak up the creative vibe.

Interview with Ze Frank on creativity

jouke — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:50:56 -0800

Interview with Ze Frank on creativity Ze Frank discusses some techniques he learned himself to harness his creativity. Apart from his quite creative daily online video, which is now defunct, he's apparently also an adjunct professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons School of Design, and SUNY Purchase.

"Do you hear voices?" "Doesn't everyone?"

srs — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 08:33:19 -0800

INTERVOICE (International Network for Training, Education and Research into Hearing Voices) "offers information, publications, research, and good practice on hearing voices and other key issues." Voice hearing is surprisingly common, even normal. Many people find it a pleasurable and positive experience. Find everything from stencil graffiti to a recent New York Times magazine article on the work of the Hearing Voices Movement. (w i k i s)

Free Energy for Art's Sake

pt68 — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:56:21 -0800

Ohio Valley Creative Energy Ohio Valley Creative Energy was founded to provide a heat intensive multi-arts facility for glass, clay, and metal artists that will be powered by methane, AKA landfill gas.

Napkin Fiction

divabat — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:12:23 -0800

Esquire sends out 250 napkins to writers across America - from prolific novelists to those finishing off first works. Nearly a hundred respond back - from sex to frustration, poetry to twisted liaisons, even a mini book and plans for murder.