The creative ask and reward

Double Dutch was a prominent measurement of my personal Black girlhood but moreso, it was an underlying understanding of my structuring. The legendary jumping game, consisting of ropes and choreography, was not only one of the most animated activities to partake in during youth recess time; it conditioned a minute form of social positioning. The framework of operations was simple: there were jumpers, and there were turners. Turners were the kids that either brought their own ropes from home or were quick enough to locate wires once there was declared interest. Jumpers worked in collaboration with the turners to create a performance comprised of footwork and other movements. If you were neither a jumper nor turner you watched in awe, or anticipation, as a supportive observer.

While standing across from one another, turners would swirl ropes in a rhythmic circular motion, creating an overlap in the middle. Depending on how many could fit, one or more kids would jump into this short-lived, revealed entrance. Its condition was reliant on the apparatus’s length, the size of the jumpers, the turners’ kinetic skills, and timing. Jumpers would enter from either side of their turning agents, and subsequently have a chance to perform as long as they could. Though there were no true winners announced during these games, it was still vital to accurately sense when to commence as a prospective jumper. If you didn’t know when, or how, to enter the opening you’d miss your shot of performing a routine impressive enough to wow your peers. Likewise, if you got in, but didn’t know how to anticipate the turners’ motions, you’d risk getting whipped in the legs (or worse, your legs) by the ropes — which was equally as devastating socially. Double Dutch was relentless and exemplary for this reason. It visualized the greater risk-oriented scheme we all partake in our own social systems.

Systems generally exist with and without labels; terraforming off of, and out of, control. Paradoxical as they function simply otherworldly. Living outside of us, and within us, all en masse. Even the word performs in this manner, flowing through itself. Mouths utter open and proceed to shut with its enunciation. Merging lips and completing a cycle in its process.

‍System..

A system at work is a visual of nodes and connectors. Or as the rooting of a vine that stretches underground and above, forming contacts that mark both a beginning and an end. Long have they been markers of understanding due to this movement — emerging as natural entities such as weather patterns, mathematics, and planetary organizations. Other familiar types, more man-made, can be judicial, or diagnostic, designed to distinguish between experiences of being. Historically, a system is created when we need explanation, a description of structure, or a place for patterns to live. This origin — natural and artificial — points to their dual existence. To that end, traditional systems should also be distinguished as either a technology or phenomena in layman conversations. The technological system points to the apparatus of meaning-making (how we build frameworks to understand experience) exceeding the computational, though it includes it. The phenomenical persona refers to the acknowledgment of liminal futures in comparison. This system would define the metaphysical, the intangible, and what we perceive as “natural”.

That said, the system that we as creatives operate within sits somewhere in between the two. The “Creative Industry” as we know it is a societal product with exercised social intelligence, hierarchical titles, and mediums that represent vessels for navigation. The tools used, whether mechanical or crafted out of organic mediums, reflect the technological end. Switching on our phenomenon eye, we watch a budding enthusiast travel towards roles across sub-industries; picking up skills and specialties along the way. They walk a nonlinear, but sensible journey, in order to update their social footing and internal safety. They choose between the two popularized creative parties: Specialist or Generalist. They learn that their knighthood between the two means everything, and nothing, all at once. They then choose their weapon of choice based on comfort and almost repeat the cycle as time goes on.

Due to this and more, the Creative Industry is large in stature and fairly ominous to newcomers and veterans alike. There is an ongoing emergence of shiny newness which greatly affects its working model, no matter if the emergence is an industry shaking printing technique like Ticha Melody Sethapakdi’s Thermochromorph, or a new sneaker hitting the footwear market. The Creative Industry is an ever-growing variant with new influential factors appearing almost daily. Interestingly enough, a familiar term, creativity, can only arise out of the Creative Industry when individuals choose to lean into its sporadic, and unpredictable nature — as opposed to rejecting the uncomfortable it inevitably inspires.

Creativity…

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As I write this I’m surrounded by the messy walls and desk of my westside office in New York City. There’s some sense of order, but still a guaranteed misplacement of supplies and stationery. Thoroughly reflecting my work in higher education as second in command within a graduate program. Generally, around this time I invite students to steal ideas from me in exchange for a glimpse of their love for the craft. When the time comes, we close the transparent doors to the outside world and have a “creative check-in” so to speak. They share their goals, their strengths, weaknesses, and general feelings as artists. Unanimously present under all of their shared devotion is an interest in the photography world. Some care more about exploring editorial-based work, while others dive into improving their skills in costume attire, or digital and analog technicality. Despite the difference in journeys, all choose to cultivate a range of experiments that are either external aspirations they plan to mirror, or reflexive inspirations that spawn organically. Forms of artistic persistence such as these lead them towards vital points of their career. Even more so, they all appear to audaciously make decisions based on their own assumed individual odysseys. This audacity, and willingness to choose a direction without guarantee is important. It defines the phenomena they participate in. This audacity, or even an arousal of one, isn’t limited to the visual, and provides more to what is aesthetically catered to us from our industry. It is a paradigm of its own that relays a future of innate power. Power being less about the strength of human ability and more purposed by a will of skepticism. Like that of Franco Berardi's power in Futurability, where he describes that the origin is, “the insertion of automated selections into the social vibration”. There is a belief that

Automation is programmed by the human mind according to its projects, visions, ideologies, preconceptions: the automaton replicates the embedded intention and the established form of the relation.

With power as its metric, creativity carries a cyclically designed body as a result of this audacity. Through replication, the motion persists, inviting participation and a guaranteed outcome.

Within the established forms of what photography (or any medium, broadly speaking, honestly), the embedded assumptions about commercial viability, and etc., creativity emerges in the refusals. The cycles never stop, the ropes never stop, and if anything creativity has the potential to inspire more vibration in these motions. There is a willingness to risk “the whip” for the chance of exploration, of doing something the system naturally rewards for but doesn’t easily share the secrets to. Creativity asks for, and lives within, these circumstances. The caveat? This isn't a simple binary of conformity versus rebellion.

Creativity almost acts like a croissant. With its dough and butter folded incrementally into infinite, inseparable layers, you’re tasked to view these layers as what they are: folds of generative, playful, destructive, and innovative spaces (and, with any luck, delicious ones). In these spaces you sink into interpersonal development, a sense of safety, and a vehicle to take you further. One space of note and commonality is research. It gives room to the curation of epistemologies and intimacy for criticisms, it also curates in order to better understand practice. Chus Martinez once referenced research, though as “artistic research”, as an effort. An effort without a predecessor, but with a guaranteed future if activated. With research existing within the layers of creativity, the system distributes itself across time and space, exceeding human capacity to map its full extent. Research, though often thought to be more uniform (since people choose to view it as a bi-product of science solely, and fail to see science as a sibling to creativity), leads to more abstractness. It takes simplified shapes as product, as art, as topics of discussion — yet stubbornly, it remains subjective as what we see as facts and truth updates over time through new discoveries and context. As jumpers, turners, and observers of the Creative Industry, we are all performers in this plot. Holding the ropes in our hands, the system asks us, “What if we treat the making itself as a way of knowing?” And we ask back, “How do I know unless it’s made?”

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