Creativity, blogging and solipsism

My indecision regarding how to respond to the Creative Commons copyright assignment, wide open as it is, has caused me some consternation. Strangely, my reaction to the directive to copyright something on the one hand, and to create something using the tools presented by Web Team 4 on the other, have been completely different. The creative "spirit" in which I use a certain technique like animation or drop down menus (i.e., mostly practical web-design tools) is very different from the creative spirit with which I play the piano or take a picture on a whim. And in fact I find a third case, in which I deliberately present and claim a work as my own -- i.e., by copyrighting it.

In the first case, that of using web tools in Fireworks, my reaction is that of the boy who thinks airplanes and firetrucks are cool -- the latter because it has moving parts (a ladder). I want to make an animation that "looks cool." For this assignment I fixated on the idea of photographing a flag repeatedly from the same angle so as to use the separate pictures as frames in the animation. A simple and (now that I think of it) often-used gimmick on the web. Simple animated GIF files alternating two images to give a simplistic impression of movement are not at all uncommon. When I actually tried this, -- well, first of all I was disappointed that the enormous flag I photographed in the previous post (and the Discount Flooring Supermart Warehouse alongside of which it stands) had been taken down--apparently for the winter.

But secondly, when I did it with an ordinary-sized flag, I found the resulting background more interesting than the flag itself: i.e., the passing clouds (it was a very windy day). And then, since it was just an ordinary American flag, I felt it was very "un-PC" (I confess), since, although I can say I am proud of what the flag represents (to me), it was so almost abused in the days, weeks and months after 9-11 that it feels like it expresses something I don't want to say. In that time after 9-11, the flag began to represent bigotry to me. Mindless rage against the "other". Now, of course that's just my own personal impression, and I don't want the political to totally overtake this post (or this blog), so I'll leave it at that and move on.

But to get back to my narrative, there is a difference between this kind of creative spirit (which I might describe as the spirit of innovation) and creativity in the sense of an artistic spirit. And this creative spirit is something pure in itself that I believe is tainted by self-consciousness -- hence the third category. Blogging feels extremely narcissistic in this way. In other words, as soon as I think of copyrighting something, I begin to think reflectively (reflexively?) about how my work (and therefore myself) will be perceived by others. Creative work tends to have this intensely personal quality to it, with which we identify wholly (as artists or authors). I have mixed feelings about all of this.

For one thing, I don't think the ultimate aim of art is to "express oneself". Art is about Beauty. I know Beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and so should be democratically a lowercase, rather than a proper noun), and more so than ever in this postmodern age, but I have a weakness for the old-fashioned view that says it's an objective truth. There must be a middle ground here. I could go on about the creative spirit being the wellspring of life and all, but the main thing I want to express here is that I am not my art, and my art is not an expression of myself. Of course in some way it does reflect and result from who I am, but the relation is not an identity or an equivalency. It's much more complex than that, and -- most importantly -- it's irrelevant to the work of art. The life of the artist is irrelevant to the value of her art.

I could say that Art serves Life (life being more important). Oscar Wilde would of course reverse that and say that Life exists to serve Art, or Beauty at any rate. But that's just his way of being clever and obstinate. I think if we take a philosopher's a pragmatist's look at it, we can see that the relation is symbiotic, and neither is true. Here's a formulation for you -- let's put in quotes to distance my self from it, pretend that it's something I read in a book -- pretend Oscar Wilde said it: "Life is Beauty, and Art is the statement of the identity." Or whatever.


All this to say that copyrighting a visual creation for me just amplifies all my perfectionism. A copyright is a stamp of ownership -- even though the whole point of this Creative Commons licensing is that it is not outright proprietariness, but a grayer world of ownership where sharing is encouraged. -- Still, my impulse is to be conservative in choosing a license, in part because of all this baggage of ":MY art is an expression of my deepest soul" which is somehow ingrained in me even though I don't really believe it.

So in the end, I made the flag animation but was dissatisfied with that as an expression of myself (I know, I'm contradicting what I just said, see?). And so I had to add a whole photo gallery thing with Fireworks. (And I literally stayed up all night to do it too -- I must be losing it, I can't keep this up!) In any case I'm kind of enjoying it -- I seem to thrive on deadlines in a perverse sort of way. Deadlines seem to spur on my creativity. Here's original first photo of the animation, which is also a link to my page 6, the "Panorama and Side Show" of Image Remora. You want to say slide show, don't you? Me too. But it's a side show. See for yourself.

I posterized the images of the flag to make them smaller for loading (this reduces the number of colors used, I believe -- and I used GIMP rather than Photoshop, for which my trial has expired). I ended up doing a gallery of images like another assignment. An exercise in self-aggrandizement. And at the end, I used one of the most restrictive licenses on the Creative Commons site, because I don't really like the idea of someone using my images for their own purposes. I mean altering them. Not very generous, eh? Of course I wouldn't want anyone to use them for commercial purposes. That was a no-brainer. But still the "some rights reserved" does allow people to use the images, "as is," as long as they're attributed. The Buddha would say "vanity of vanities, all is vanity" I bet, if he knew Ecclesiastes.