Creation, Re-Creation and Media Education
I was once asked to look at the philosophy of creation versus re-creation. Is it composition when you let a machine grind a few loops into a timeline and spit them back to you ? Is this OK for video makers who need such a quick fix? Is this OK for students who want to learn understand the nuts and bolts of communicating through music?
Well?. It?s a great question and one that goes beyond the notions of simple re-mix culture I?ve discussed in other lectures. I would start with the assertion that re-mixing is an act of pure-creation that is as old as human evolution and innate to human existence. Indeed it could well be argued in philosophical terms that human beings are completely incapable of creation from nothing. We are entirely unable to imagine that which does not, or isn?t drawn from, what already exists and our experience of that existence. For example, describe for me a new colour that doesn?t already exist in the spectrum without using names or terms related to already existing colours. It?s not possible. The notion of creation from ?nothing? is the genesis well-spring from which human culture has crafted and created (pardon the pun) notions of an omnipotent and omnipresent god or deity. Indeed it might well be argued that a ?God? Creates, Man re-Mixes and therein lies the distinct position or mortality.
But I would subsequently argue that our established notions of creativity are flawed in their common understanding of an act of bringing forth ?something? from whence there was ?nothing?. That this notion of creativity is not useful or indeed functional.
Lawrence Lessig, major proponent of Creative Commons and a universal re-evaluation of copyright law and intellectual property protections, has argued that our comprehension of Copyright and Ownership (and so, by-proxy, Creativity that drives the desire to establish Copyright and Ownership) is a concept born of the industrial revolution and an economic colonialism that desired to impose control on any element of society (including culture) that had the potential to make money. Prior to the Industrial Revolution culture was largely not something bought and sold and traded (and so, subsequently, owned) but rather something that was exchanged, shared and, most significantly, built upon. Thus, as Lessig describes so eloquently in the documentary Copyright Criminals, we moved from a Free-Culture to a Permission-Culture. The key example being the wandering minstrel who, wandering (as a minstrel does want to do) from town to town playing a tune leaves not only the memory of the melody in the minds and on the whistling lips of his audiences, but also leaves behind the freely-accepted idea of the tune being changed, re-worked, altered, added to by those who had once been audiences, but who now might be considered minstrels themselves.
In other words, the notion of Creativity is not one of a dark and mysterious ?genesis? born of deity-like omnipotence but, rather, a process of assembly and building, of craft and development. The wandering minstrel leaves behind not a tune; complete and fixed, but rather they leave behind building blocks. We might then see Creativity as a duplex process both gathering of building blocks and dissemination of building blocks?
Is a child who builds a tower from Lego blocks considered un-creative because they did not mould the blocks themselves from molten plastic?
So, where does this then leave us in the context of measuring and evaluation creativity and creative worth (not always of itself a bad thing), judging creative measure in regard to technology and the creation-machine?.?
Not wishing to begin another thesis, I might distil a longer argument into the relatively simple notion of ?Ownership?. Creativity, and the measure of creative worth for the individual doing the creating, to my mind, comes from evaluating the level of ?Ownership? arrived at through the creative process.
Composing a symphony, note by note, into a cacophony of sound from dozens of instruments might be considered a definitive example of Creative Ownership. Short of the composer ?stealing? musical motifs from other composers gone before (which is arguably not just commonplace but inevitable) the composer would, and should, feel a great deal of personal ?Ownership? in that work ? from scratch it is ?theirs?, a self actualising process of creativity as it is commonly/traditionally understood.
But what of the film editor? What of Sergi Eisenstein?s notion of the editor as all-powerful force in the construction of meaning? Anyone familiar with simple Eisenstein Montage theory will know how meaning is subjective to sequence and so, more broadly, creativity and the power to be creative in dictating emotional weight, mood, tone style and meaning, is subjective assembly? the assembly of parts. To argue that the editor is less creative than the music composer is to stare into the face of Kulesov effect and say both versions mean the same thing ? that the image of the man smiling after the image of the pointed gun means the same as image of the man frowning after the image of the pointed gun. Clearly they are not.
But, can we say that the level of ?Ownership? on the part of the film-editor is as ?great? or as self-actualised as that of the composer?? Probably not owing to the collaborative nature of cinematic form as opposed to the composition of a symphony (at least up until the point it is played by the orchestra ? is the composer less creative because they don?t play every instrument in the ensemble?)
So this brings us to a specific case-study we might see in the comparison of three common and popular music software applications ? Sibelius - notation based music creation tool, Acid - loop-based tempo and pitch correcting sequencer (and the father of similar tools such as Audition and Soundtrack) - and Cinescore - one of a newer bread of audio tools (along with Soundbooth and Sonicfire) that 'generate' music according to parameters chosen by the user.
All three applications make music, all three can make many (even all) kinds of music. But simply asking ourselves what are the relative levels of personal creative ?Ownership? that are possible across these three applications would lead us some way to evaluating the creative ?worth? of the tools.
But, this may also not tell us the whole story ? for ?ownership? is also about ?engagement? and ?accessibility? and a student?s level of, or ability to attain, ?ownership? is severally hamstrung if they are short on supply of engagement and accessibility. Whilst this line of thinking certainly has room to be extrapolated out in a number of directions, in simple terms it might be said that ?ownership? is wholly dependant on engagement and accessibility. Thus, for the student who has never created a musical note before, never assembled sound according to the pure definition of music, Cinescore will provide a strikingly profound sense of ?ownership? over any project it generates ? if for no other reason than the fact that there is a tangible process of decision making that affected outcome; the choices the student made altered the music they created. All the teacher/educator/facilitator need then do is ensure that the student feels ?ownership? over, if nothing else, the choices they make for a profound sense of creative ownership to take place.
The rest is an evolution of that idea? Cinescore?s ability to satisfy the student?s ?creative ownership? will quickly run dry (as I have always argued is the flaw with Movie Maker and I-Movie, their ability to grow with the user and so have a longevity of creative ownership of process, is problematic on account of both their severally limited functionality and, more particular, their template-driven approach and the hiding of key technical process from the creator). A creator, consciously or sub-consciously, will then continue to seek 'ownership' leading to more and more complex tools - loop sequencers, midi sequencers, soft-synth engines and notation systems.
So, as an over-arching viewpoint ? with the notion that Creation is Assembly not Manifestation, each and every software tool (no matter how ?mechanical?) has the ability to deliver profound ?ownership? over a creative process but the real question is whether this creative ownership can be sustained. And perhaps this is a perspective from where we can view the role of creative media educators; ?facilitators of creative ownership?. With that as a positioning title there will never be a ?correct? or ?better? tool for teaching, promoting or inspiring creativity; rather there will only ever be the right tool for a particular person or group that meets the binaural balance of elements between Accessibility and Engagement that produce creativity.
As said by Harry Allen (of Public Enemy) ?
?it?s like asking if the colour ?red? is creative? Well? it is if you use it creatively.?
Posted at 01:00AM Jul 13, 2007
by Mike Jones in media education |
