The Nature of the Experiment

So I'm starting this thing as a way to work out my rather tangled mass of thoughts regarding the creative enterprise. Being nominally a young graphic designer who also works in the fields of motion/video, audio, and some bastard version of the fine/decorative arts, I like to think all my enterprises are united by a common vision. However I've been very aware of lazy thinking and lazy designing on my own part, which makes me wonder just how that came about, when making stuff is the primary focus of my life. So, if I'm making lots of stuff and not being as rigorous and thoughtful about it as possible, what exactly am I doing? This is where I am starting.

I call the process Casual Aesthetics. Here is why.

Aesthetics, being the study of / appreciation of beauty in art in nature, is a rich philosophical subject with a long history, the details of which I will not pretend to be well versed in. I am, however, familiar with the Casual concept, of leisure and informality and generally takin' 'er easy. Thusly, we have an area of study that is concerned with, but not overly concerned with, things that are pretty or harmonious, and the reasons why we should care about them.

THE BASIC TENETS OF CASUAL AESTHETICS

1. Seriousness, Sort Of – If you consider yourself a serious person, it is likely that you have a serious investment in the things that occupy your time. If your occupation is of a creative nature, then you would want your creative process to be rigorous and thoughtful to maximize your efforts.

2. Propriety – Creative pursuits all stem from a problem that needs solving. Whether the problem is concrete and physical or interior and expressive, creative output is the act of filling the void left by the initial problem. The most important aspect of problem solving is propriety – determining to the best of your knowledge what the appropriate response to a given situation is. Here appropriate doesn't necessarily mean 'stodgy' or 'conservative', but can encapsulate any response that by all reasoning seems to be the correct solution.

3. Formal decisions code for larger values or value systems. Much as proponents of modernist architecture once claimed that 'ornament is crime' in response to the supposed excesses of their predecessors, we as creatives must understand that what elements and attributes we choose to include or exclude in our creations are, in a sense, shorthand for greater or more expansive concepts. However, Casual Aesthetics also holds it to be true that these observations are not absolutes by any means.

4. Elasticity – Casual Aesthetics embraces a sort of sliding-scale approach to problem solving by identifying both the merits and shortcomings of various solutions. What emerges is a gradation of values linked to formal attributes, which ultimately becomes an expanded matrix as more and more elements and ideas are analyzed and added. This is achieved by organizing and analyzing existing objects and media that exemplify various characterstics and extruding their latent meaning.

5. Inter-Media Attributes – Concepts and conditions that exist in one media are certainly applicable in others, from music to film, athletics to page layout. There are certain traits that may exist only in their parent media, but parallels exist throughout.


That's all for now to begin with – pardon the convulted prose, notice I didn't include 'writer' in my list of proficiencies. My subsequent posts will deal mostly with a single topic or thought and try to flesh it out, break it down, and start assembling my conclusions into the aforementioned sliding-scale apparatus thinger.

Again, my goal with all this is to erase some of the less desirable parts of my creative process, with the hope that anyone who follows the model can do the same for themselves via their own specific tastes and values. Ciao.