creativity

good art—at least the art I am spontaneously drawn to—has little to do with communication. Instead, it is about crafting patterns of information that, if you feed them sustained attention, will begin to structure your attentional field in interesting ways. Art is guided meditation.

This means that if we switch what we pay attention to more often than, say, every 30 minutes, our system will be more or less decohered—different parts will be “attending to” different aspects of reality.2 There will be “attention residue” floating around in our system—leftovers from earlier things we paid attention to (thoughts looping, feelings c... See more

As cultural theorist Raymond Williams has argued, restricting creative value to elite artistic production obscures the social and political functions of imagination. It sidelines the creative labor embedded in care work activism, community survival strategies and everyday sensemaking. Limiting imagination and creativity to specific professions and ... See more