Personal Statement

There are so many blocks in the creative process, starting with just getting past the blank page. You may need to get through a desert of ideas or control an impossible swirling flood. There are the thoughts that sulk and hate you and hide while you try to catch them. Even more painful, though, can be the concepts that are full and bursting but have no extant path to escape the boundaries of your mind. Computational media and physical computing are the closest I’ve gotten to a natural language for expression that can hold some of those ideas trapped in the corners of my brain. They are perhaps also, of any media I’ve tried, the least satisfying in which to engage. For example, slotting a microchip into a circuit isn’t close to being the same dramatic, physically satisfying act as smashing a lump of clay onto a potter’s wheel.

So much of current technology saps movement from our lives: cars, keyboards, remote controls. Even worse, replacing the motion is not a meditative stillness, but a fussy stagnation. We move a tiny little bit with a lot of repetition. As a result many people spend their day lost in a swarm of small ideas.

This doesn’t have to be the case. Technology could instead serve as a platform to help people literally stretch into a full expression of their ideas. Technologically I find hope in wireless technologies like Bluetooth and WiFi as well as advancements in video tracking and sound recognition. The fewer fetters, the more options for natural movement. Conceptually, Art projects, science fiction and blogs like engadget.com are constantly feeding my dreams of possibilities.

I am hoping to learn how to harness all these new developments, not just to improve the work I produce, but improve the quality of my experience doing it.

Tools themselves evolve over long periods of time. Cameras took at least a century to become light and portable and flexible; they have been revolutionized again by the digital age. Likewise, an person approaching tool making should be prepared for an endeavor that is best sustained over time. It is not something that all artists and designers do, or need to. It isn’t just about learning how to use a particular technology. It is adjusting your frame of mind to approach the creative process with the belief that you can even edit how creativity itself happens for you.

This is why instead of just making a tool for my thesis I went after creating a framework, an approach, a shifted mental model that could carry me after leaving the structure of an academic degree program.