Art does not discover truth, it makes it
Posted: October 26th, 2008 | Author: ouvyt | Filed under: Conversations | Tags: cep917, creativity | No Comments »This week I am reading Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein’s Sparks of Genius. They describe thirteen tools to combine internal imagination and external experience.
Primary Tools
- observing – paying attention to what is sensed
- imaging – recalling senses
- abstracting – turning complicated things into simple ideas
- recognizing patterns – realizing two different things share similar properties
- forming patterns – creating new combinations of similar things
- body thinking – bodily sensations leading to formal thinking
- empathizing – a function of bodily thinking
- playing – becoming another person, place or thing
- dimension thinking – take what is flat and make it dimensional
Higher-Order Tools
- modeling – combo of dimension thinking, abstracting, analogizing and body thinking (e.g. making sketches in prep of a larger masterpiece)
- playing – combo of body thinking, empathizing, modeling (e.g. irreverence for conventional procedure)
- transforming – combo of observation, experimentation, abstracting, pattern making (e.g. move from feelings to communication)
- synthesizing – combo of observing, imaging, empathizing.
The problem of course, is that we have become disconnected between the internal and external. Our culture seems to value the external, mistakenly labeling it as real, or more real than the internal. We mistake “fiction with false”. In addition we only allow those labeled as artists to live in imagined worlds.
The solution is to cultivate the ability to live in illusion and reality simultaneously. Our perceptions of the world depend on the illusions we conjure. In other words, our external realities are a function of our illusion. Understanding our tools of imagination become essential for interpreting our external reality.
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