Creativity the River of Intent (by sarah)
I decided whilst pregnant with Mary to make our lives what we wanted and began to think how we could get out of the negative feedback loops we had found ourselves in. I wanted to guide where we were going rather than just reacting to events - having decided on what was needed and what was wanted and examining the intersection luck and family and friends helped us out.
I love this guys thoughts on this especially as I grow my creativity networks via Artournament Glos and Centre Arts (for arty-ness), Hack Space Bristol and friends for geekery and social networks for interest groups and publishing oppitunities - I am now in the Positive Creativity Feedback loop and am nearing my tipping point.
More over today I reached my crowd funding target for the my Sensory Cave and have in fact exceeded it! Excess funding is going to be used to run a Science-Art Exhibition in March next year - which I confirmed with the Centre Arts yesterday. So feel free to still sponsor me 🙂
I really feel that things are starting to take off. The last few months have been amazing with winning medals for songs, getting invited to other counties to read my poetry, having my art work shown in science cons, getting short stories published and being booked for more and more festivals to do my crafts. I am completing projects that I started at Uni. It really is amazing and it seems to fitting in with having the girls as well.
But more than this - part of the issue is that we really were in a feedback loop of negativity before - if things are on the edge like say finances are tight when things go wrong there is no buffer, no safety net and so things are worse and the impact of the next thing to go wrong is even worse. Now you can try and plan for these but most people will not be able to cope with more than two big things going wrong at once or in close succession - even on the business course I took they admitted this, including the bank guy.
The issue is breaking out of the loop, to a certain extent you have to reboot the system, you have to crash the situation you are in. In giving up and going to the CAB we basically began to take control of our lives again.
It is a bizar apparent contradiction.
But I gave up struggling to follow the career path I felt SHOULD be followed, the prescribed course that was supposed to happen - it had been shot in the foot by circumstances out of my control. In trying to cling to it I made things worse, in trying to maintain the apparent control in the increasingly ever desperate situation, I helped send us off even more erratically into the network of fail loops that bound us.
We forgot to assess things, everything seemed running away with us and to be pivoting out of control. But it became apparent that the core of us was resilant to this. The US was still an us, we the family and so the reassessment - the important thing?
Me, Al and the girl/s.
Strip it back to basics and build the new system on this.
But there was something else - I needed to do what I enjoyed, the things I was passionate about that I could still do. Moon rocks and impact lithologies denied to me I turned to the more arty things -things that began to grow. They had been growing before but when I tried to force things it didn't work. So I just enjoyed it and it began to flourish.
And opportunities began to present themselves to me. Alaric's theory with this is that if you do what you are enthusiastic about the more you notice or are noticed by those who provide the opportunities in that field. Getting to meet the right people in the first place can be hard and then you can find yourself up against the Old Boys Club. But we are lucky, there is the internet and I have verbal diarhea (even if I can't spell it!) and so things found me or dropped into my radar senses on the internet and now the networks, real and electronic are meshing and melding and growing new constructs which appear to be a career for me.
Also just as a little aside many of you know that I feel that creativity is above Science and Art and that they are simply different uses of the creativity. The thing with feedback loops is that I do very much feel that science and art feed into each other - this does not mean one is the other but more that they support each other and are essential for the continued development of each other.
Science needs art - to communicate and teach and to show the wonders that are there or are being hunted for and Art is forever in need of new inspiration and on a more practicle level new substrates and mediums to work in.
Increasingly I note science friends who are artists on the side or as full time and art/writer friends who have found science isn't the dead subject they were shown at school and who have gone back and have or are currently studying science at some sort of further education level.
Wibble over.
Wed 30th May 2012 5:14 pm 
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