forever WIPs

Again, why do films have to be these static, fixed things? Why can’t they be these fluid, storytelling structures that you could keep adding things to and keep revising? Yeah, it’s always been this constraint of the medium, that now, when everything is digital, there’s no physical media that we’re dealing with with film. So, why are we still held... See more

I feel like Eno is exploring this question of what creativity is and what that process looks like for different people. The way OpenAI talks about what a large language model generates is, by definition, incurious about creativity. It’s like, what if we just spit stuff out and you have no idea where it came from?

WIP was now a kind of soft production, and uploading half-baked concepts and early explorations became a genre in itself. The finished product – if it was made at all – mattered less than the ongoing stream of updates.

Acknowledging this bias or incompleteness is perhaps the most important part of the work.

Answers are mere theory.

So, it’s like it doesn’t ever have to be finished. We can keep adding things to it and increasing the variety and seeing what the juxtapositions are and just keep evolving it.

In life there are no final statements, no final acts, and even the most final of acts is a question. Which is: where am i going ?

And: did it matter ?

One solution I’ve been practicing: I ask for permission to "say it imperfectly".

I’ll say something like, “hey, I want to talk about this, but I don’t know exactly how to say it. Is it okay if I say it imperfectly?”

Remember, people are often drawn to things that are done imperfectly. Whether it’s art, movies, or books, people tend to talk more about the flawed things that get stuck in their heads than they do the obvious, perfect things.

As Malcolm Gladwell says, “You want an aftertaste, and that comes from not everything being perfectly blended together.”

“We can use technology as a structural tool to do interesting things with the narrative. This idea that a film has to be set in stone and always linear is obsolete, I think. There’s another possible path here for filmmaking going forward.”