Musings on Creativity

So for my first blog post I am won­der­ing about the left and right sides of the brain and the dif­fer­ence between the ratio­nal lin­ear way of orga­niz­ing and under­stand­ing the world and the intu­itive, non ratio­nal, gestalt of the right side. A lot of oth­er peo­ple have been think­ing about this too, when try­ing to fig­ure out the best way of being more cre­ative or com­ing up with new ideas.

The most con­ven­tion­al meth­ods are for artists to look for ways of cir­cum­vent­ing the ratio­nal left side by doing things like writ­ing or draw­ing with their non dom­i­nant hand. This is explored in Bet­ty Edwards’ clas­sic, “Draw­ing on the Right Side of the Brain”. The trick is to con­fuse the order­ly habits of the left side so that the right intu­itive abil­i­ties will come to the for front and release the infor­ma­tion it’s using to your con­scious aware­ness.

I’m think­ing more about this because of how com­put­ers have changed the way we artists/designers work and how much it’s effect­ing how we think. For visu­al artists draw­ing is the way we devel­op our skills and put our ideas togeth­er. We per­ceive the whole three-dimen­sion­al image on the visu­al cor­tex of our brains and write it out as an image on the two-dimen­sion­al sur­face of a piece of paper.

The com­put­er, how­ev­er has lift­ed our hands off the draw­ing pad and on to lin­ear tools of the mouse and key­board. At the same time it gives us access to more visu­al and writ­ten infor­ma­tion in one place than ever seemed pos­si­ble. It’s a new dimen­sion of images, movies and the writ­ten infor­ma­tion which has it’s cre­at­ed a new real­i­ty to explore. How does this make us think? Did con­cep­tu­al artist know about this before the per­son­al com­put­er entered every­day life, or was break­ing the world up into data points just a log­i­cal step on the path through mass media?

Inquir­ing minds want to know.