September 27, 2005

Ze Frank: The Creative Act

Wow. Ze Frank gave a really almost dichotomous lecture to our class on Tuesday night. The first 20 minutes or so were bits of little technology stand-up routines he has been doing for awhile. Yes, it's much better than "technology stand-up" would make you think. Nothing geeky. I was actually planning about blogging it in realtime but it was so funny I decided to just put the computer away and pay attention.

Long story short, this is his history: In 2001 or 2000 he made a little dance video thing online that he sent to his friends to inform them of a birthday party. The thing blew up, and a few days later he was getting millions of hits on his webpage. He quit his job and went into the creativity business full-time. He's now an adjunct teacher at ITP and at Parson's. His class at ITP is called, "The Creative Act."

In the second part of the lecture he got serious and went very hard-core new-media on us. He was pretty jumbled in what he was saying—he kept telling us he was trying to fit in an hour into 20 minutes—but it was clear that he has a lot of very intelligent ideas about the nature of creativity, the different facets of design and innovation in the digital world, and the new face of society ("authorship society" he calls it).

At one point he told us that we should try to figure out what our goal(s) is(are) and stop preparing for them and start doing them. This is good advice, and it's something I've struggled with for awhile. I really started to notice in myself in the past couple years that I, under the guise of "preparation," have stalled (to the point of dismissal) a lot of my best ideas. I used to think I should a) learn java and b) do something neat with it. So I would buy a book on java and spend a long time pouring over boring code and lose interest, and never do anything neater than following through a bunch of examples.

Now I'm thinking a better model for creating is to be idea-centered: start with the idea, don't back up to the reference book, and just wing it and learn what you need to know as you go. It's harder said than done, of course, but I'm really going to try to make an effort to do that. I feel like a large part of what ITP is all about for me is learning both the techniques (flash, java, physical computing, etc.) and especially the follow-through. My mind has been bubbling over with ideas lately, and if I try to wait until I know exactly how to do them before I start, I'll never get them done.

As for a goal, I'll put a few down here:
-Create a web startup.
-Be a person like Ze Frank, someone who is known for his ideas, and has the opportunity to pick and choose projects to do and people to work with, and is invited places to give lectures and help further ideas.

I guess that starts here.

Posted September 27, 2005 03:10 PM. Categories: Week 4 | Permalink