Introducing sciartica newsletter
art | science | digital culture | design | creativity | words | tech
Issue #0: Reading in/out
[You might be getting this because you were on my previous email newsletter list. I sent you a note from there but who knows what happens to email these days.]
When people ask me what I do, I don’t know what to tell them, at least not in a concise phrase. Part of what I do is to try to work out what I do.
I suppose I could say I make things. Not make things in as in the kinds of things you usually think of when you hear “make things”. Other things. They have forms that I don’t yet understand. And some of those forms aren’t even physical or digital.
Reading in/out
For me, the making of things requires a “reading in” of the world and a “reading out” of what it has changed me into. The reading out is words and images and art and design and thoughts.
In this newsletter, I’m going to share some of my reading in and a little of my reading out.
The reading in will be about the things I’m observing and that is going to include art, science, digital culture, design, creativity, tech, and probably other things. But to categorise is to miss the point. I read to make connections between categories, to experience the blurring of categorical boundaries and to try to blur those boundaries myself.
The reading out will be the result of my digestions. Some of these will be the result of ideas that have been floating around for as long as decades. Others will be far more immediate. And much of it will show my process as artist/designer/scientist/maker. There will be thoughts and writings but also images and video of projects I’m working on.
My perspective on creativity
In contemporary times, we have been sold a bill of goods about creativity. As Oli Mould discusses in his very interesting recent book “Against Creativity”, creativity-as-individual-quality has been promoted by business interests in a way that shapes the expectations and practices of the labour market and position individuals within it.
“Mould offers a radical redefinition of creativity, one embedded in the idea of collective flourishing, outside the tyranny of profit.” - Verso publisher’s blurb
If we go back in time, creativity was primarily seen as a group phenomenon. And so it is for me. That happens however in a variety of forms that might not be through face-to-face or even contemporaneous discussion. Reading in over time allows for creative acts to occur, often anachronistically, particularly in what Margaret Boden calls combinatorial creativity. My practice includes plenty of her other two forms, exploratory and transformational creativity, but those tend to occur while making or during face-to-face discussions.
In any case, I’m interested in the creative process itself, and I love to explore how to engender creative outcomes, particularly in groups, and often with my students.
What you’ll get in this newsletter
One of the real benefits of email newsletters is that they can help provide a foundation for discussion and a sense of connection to the writer. As you can guess from what I said about creativity, I think those connections are a good thing. I have had numerous collaborations in the past that arose from incidental discussions about ideas and projects.
There will probably be two key parts to the newsletter. Here on substack, you can send a newsletter that is sometimes public and sometimes for paid subscribers. I’ll be doing both.
For the first part, I anticipate that I will have a regular free newsletter that is centred on my consumption of ideas and will probably take the form of annotated links and images with the ideas they evoke for me.
For the second part, there will be a subscriber-only newsletter centred on my creative work-in-progress. The subscriber part isn’t about the money: it’s that sharing work-in-progress is an intensely personal thing and having people subscribe represents a kind of seriousness of engagement that makes the whole process of sharing both more comfortable and more intimate. This part is likely to have much more about what I’m actually making, with images, videos, and often thoughts in progress. I will be particularly keen to hear responses from subscribers about what I’m up to. And perhaps there will be ideas I can work on further with you.
So, seriously, what is it you do?
I still don’t know. Seriously. But some of the ways I get labelled are as an artist (mainly interactive media and particularly connected with science); a lecturer/instructor at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia; a PhD candidate exploring the nature of the interactions between art and science in creating knowledge; an ex-physicist; and a sometime-but-once-fulltime science journalist.
One day I’ll figure out what I want to do when I grow up. I’m hoping the conversation I have through this newsletter will help me sort that out.
I am struck by your reading in/reading out ideas. I like the concept of science/nature/information in -> black box of the self changing -> art/project/writing/making out. It feels complete versus just taking in, in, in... what the firehose of social media invites us to do, making us bloated with information. You are implying that art can be a manifestation or documentation of transformation. (Perhaps in doing so we can move on to the next thing - true in my experience.) I need to make more art. ;)