This week I’ve set up setting up my web space (using a separate install of WordPress in a subfolder of martinlugton.com, to give me more flexibility), working through the initial readings, and making my first two daily creates.

I thought the Robert Hughes video was liberatingly iconoclastic.

I think his argument that modernism lost its way can be applied more widely. He says that we’re not obliged to think that “this is the real thing, this is the necessary art of our time; this needs respect. Because it isn’t, and it doesn’t, and nobody cares.” So let’s challenge and experiment, and not be subservient or docile.

Hughes does retain a rather high standard for what art is, which is a bit daunting: “The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible. To restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness; not through argument, but through feeling. And then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way to pass from feeling to meaning.”

I found John Cage‘s Rules for students and teachers a helpful companion to this challenging statement of what art is.

10 rules for students and teachers from John Cage. (View in original context on the ds106 bootcamp week 1 assignment page)

Cage suggests that we “consider everything an experiment”, and that “Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch onto things.” Keep freely making and experimenting, enjoying yourself, and you’ll get somewhere. It feels like he’s trying to remove obstacles to free creativity. I’d imagine that the main obstacle to creativity is not doing something.

Stephen Johnson‘s ‘Where good ideas come from’ argued that ideas often take a long time – sometimes decades to form, or to be useful.

Johnson argued that good ideas often come from the collision between smaller hunches; the combination of half ideas.

So ideas need to collide with other ideas to develop and grow. So we need to express ideas and collide them with other people’s ideas. To put it slightly differently: we shouldn’t worry about ideas being half-formed. This fits with Cage’s imperative to keep creating, thinking of everything as an experiment and nothing as a mistake. And we need to share these half-formed experiments: “chance favours the connected mind.” So social media and making connections is great for developing ideas.

Kelli Anderson‘s presentation – Disruptive Wonder for a Change – helped me start to tie together some of the themes in these readings.

A lot of what I do in my day job (digital communications and websites) is about understanding people’s  expectations, and trying to meet them. Very often a good design is one that is intuitive and unobtrusive – one that matches with the user’s existing mental models. Kelli explained that “People arrive at experiences … with expectations. When we make things we’re actively choosing what to do with those expectations.”

Rather than providing people with what they want, Kelli seeks to create disruptive wonder and confound people’s expectations. This can challenge how we frame our reality and the assumptions we make about the world. ”small things can come out of leftfield and jar us into reassessing our complacent expectations about reality.” So rather than thinking about how to best serve a person’s immediate need, Kelli is thinking about how to challenge people and free them from existing ways of thinking. “The world is full of order that doesn’t necessarily deserve our respect.” Things are often good and sensible; but they often aren’t. Seeing things differently  liberates us to mess things up and try to do something better.

Often our assumptions and ways of doing and thinking need challenging. The assumption that newspapers state facts is an important one to challenge: ”We sleepwalk through our assumptions about the authority of media” and political reality. So we should be skeptical of the limited reality we’re presented with. In 2008 they produced a fake New York Times and distributed it to hundreds of thousands of commuters. Set 6 months into the future, it was utopian, with a pro-popular pressure message.

This is all interesting, and I’m sure that Kelli’s produced work that has shaken up people’s assumptions. But I’m curious as to the impact of TED(x) talks. Do they actually change anything? Who watches them, and what do they do next? What does it mean to take an idea forward? How can a moment of wonder be sustained? If art can confront us with something new and special, or challenge and change us for a moment, how can we make that effect last? I wonder how many people who read the fake New York Times had an altered conception of truth and the media one week on, or whether they returned to previous habits and assumptions.

One way forward might be to confront ourselves with art at every opportunity. I’m not sure how easy that would be to achieve. Perhaps a better way for us to continually challenge how we see the world is for us all to become artists. In this way, we move towards a state in which we see ever more possibility and subversion, rather than just being shaken out of our entrenched ways of thinking from time to time.

This must be where the #ds106 imperative “make art damnit” is coming from. Now I understand the purpose of the daily creates. Making a monster out of stuff in your kitchen encourages us to see something terrifying and wonderful in the mundane functional arena of kitchen utensils. I tried to go for something more simple than the multi-item combinations that other people had created – I wanted something more sinister, so I went for a combination of a plunger and a menacing breadknife-wielding washing up glove. Drawing an insect in such a way as to make it look cuddly or adorable got me thinking about what visual cues make something look cute – in my case it seems to be big eyes, charming imperfections, and a small number of clear, gentle forms rather than a multitude of impersonal, spiky, appendages with mysterious, scary and non-human functions. I chose to draw a millipede as I find them a bit creepy and unpleasant. I’m worried about producing ‘art’ that is vacuous or uninteresting and a waste of space or attention. But with John Cage and Stephen Johnson’s advice in mind, I hope to relax that anxiety. The act of creating, of experimenting with seeing the world differently, is the important thing. I’m looking forward to more daily creates and to developing my ability to see things differently.