The artist is hunched over a table top of sketches stained with coffee rings, deadline looming, until an “A-ha” moment—where the dark clouds part and a solitary ray of inspiration shines through—and everything falls into place. It’s great drama, just like the witness breaking down on the stand and tearfully crying, “Yes! I did it!” or the bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam to win the big game. All of these things actually happen from time to time, but seldom mark the end of the journey. Tomorrow, the lawyer will file paperwork, the baseball team will practice for the next big game, and the artist will endeavor to turn that perfect sketch into valid XHTML.

It’s one thing to remind ourselves that great works take great work. After all, Thomas Edison was famously quoted, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” almost 100 years ago. Or you could look to Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, and passage 94 from Art of Peace.

Progress comes
To those who
Train and train;
Reliance on secret techniques
Will get you nowhere.

These are lessons that, despite those among us always looking for a short-cut, reside deep in our hearts.

It’s another thing to fully embrace what many creative professionals consider the ultimate enemy: the revision. Yes, the dilution of pristine output into stuff barely recognizable as art, fit only for lowest common denominator mass consumption. That’s certainly one way to look at it, but if that’s what is happening to your work, I have to say “Ur doin it wrong“.

The guys behind LOLcats inspired a lot of these concepts, actually.

For the last four years, I’ve served as a webmaster for a non-profit organization. A good definition of webmaster is a web designer that has to live with the consequences. My organization had big intentions online and my first few years were spent sewing a patchwork of beautiful but disparate designs we’d commissioned from multiple agencies into a quilt that provided some sort of comfort to the people actually visiting our site. Before long, I took the reigns myself, started saying “no” to a lot of otherwise enticing ideas, and focused on traffic stats and user behavior while re-crafting our online presence. In a year, the Web Team had decreased our bounce rate by almost 20% and dramatically increased conversion to both our email list and online donations.

I don’t fault the agencies. They each danced the dance that all designers do, partnering stated client needs with personal choices both informed and intuitive. That is the ultimate role of an expert, listening carefully and then leaping forward with confidence and experience.

But they only did it once.

Briefing, brainstorming, delivery, invoice, goodbye. What made the in-house designs more successful (if the goals were objective visitor conversion and not subjective aesthetics) was each day’s attention to the previous day’s decisions. “Living with the consequences” was ultimately the fast path to good design.

Creative work is at a crossroads, struggling with what it means to be an expert in the face of the wisdom of crowds. I believe a path has presented itself and, by not taking it, we are missing a chance to fully engage the interactive nature of today’s culture.

The first books were oral traditions written down; it would be centuries before the chapter was invented. The first films were plays with a camera aimed in their direction; the innovation of the close-up caused hysteria. The web, even as it manages to wriggle out from under the book’s metaphors of pages and authors to achieve its destiny as a mode of communication, still labors under an obsolete model for its design process.

Am I just talking about Agile web design? Yes, but also how it must effect our relationships.

What would a better model look like? Consider regular check-ups with your doctor, “Looks like we’ve made some progress on your cholesterol, let’s keep working on that. How’s your back feeling, any better?” Good designers do this already. They form plans with their patients, earnestly listening to their ailments before writing any prescriptions, and providing supplemental education when important… but why stop there? Why not have the same conversation with the data?

I love the duck-billed platypus. Besides being a web-footed, duck-billed, egg-laying mammal, they also have poisonous claws and can sense electromagnetic fields. No designer, no matter how inspired, would have presented the duck-billed platypus and no client, however savvy, would have approved it. Yet, after generations upon generations of adapting to fit its environment, here it is.

It’s not hard to imagine a design process that places evolution at its center. Instead of projects guided by hunches and filled with pre-determined deliverables, we would have extended engagements guided by research with more milestones after a launch than before it. Client and designer both would sit down with statistics and decide which numbers should go up and which down, leading to either subtle or radical redesigns on a weekly basis. All of this would result in a final product quite different than anyone had expected at the onset, but evolved to fit its environment.

True not only for visual & interaction design but copy-writing, viral videos, or anything else you could measure the success of.

This kind of process requires a certain kind of designer and a certain kind of client. Both have to be willing to try new things but temper their own enthusiasm with the cold hard facts. It would require a creativity that can maintain its vitality when mixed with reality, a confidence that expertise still has a place in a world filled with data. It would require a faith that putting process over product ultimately yields a better product.

And it would require diligence.

For what better a word than diligence to describe the act of enthusiastically doing your best each day and soberly evaluating the fruits of that effort the next day, knowing that this behavior—and not any “secret technique”—is the character of great work?

It is my experience that designers and clients such as these are bountiful. My last five years in the non-profit and responsible business communities have introduced me to a great number of people and organizations that pick big fights, take on insurmountable odds, and somehow get up each morning with the same devotion. They are guided by a trust that victory, while in some circumstances a long way off, is inevitable in the face of diligence.

Maybe you are one of these people. To work with me, please visit DiligentCreative.com.

The exact meaning of the word “Dada” is unknown. Some speculate it just means “yes, yes” from the Romanian. Others insist that it deliberately has no meaning at all and that’s the point. Whatever the word means, the movement primarily one of utter nonsense, irrationality, and chaos… aided by a profound cynicism stemming from the terrible predicament (the first world war and the dawn of modern warfare) that science and reason had led us to. While there was no collective aesthetic (like the enforced playfulness of Rococo) but works in the form of collage were popular, as were pre-surrealist illogical landscapes.

There’s art these days going on in museums and things, it’s true… Still, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s primarily a bunch of wankers chortling at one another about how inaccessible they’ve managed to become. In the meantime, some amazing things are being done by—for lack of a better label—the Boing Boing set: dressing up like zombies and mobbing downtown businesses, intense rivalries between the fictional stereotypes of pirates and ninjas [sic], a formalized dialect for adorable pets, and robust religions made up for the sole purpose (never admitted to) of pissing off other religions. All of these ideas are loosely but not entirely connected and online economies have sprung up to support them.

There’s already been a Neo-Dada movement (in the 60s) and it would be hard to label what’s going on now as distinctly Dada—as it replaces the critique of rationality with a distinctly nerdy science bent. But the new and old do share a general distaste for the faux sincerity of the establishment and contain an implicit attack on alienation by institutional means. Whether it’s religion or technology or public space, if feeling like it actually belongs to someone else has left you apathetic and disenchanted, put on a ridiculous costume and take it back. Then blog about it so others can follow your example.

Protecting the cultural commons might be the proud point-of-intersection for all of these seemingly random phenomena. The lack of any sort of copyright for “I has a flavor” allows an entire community to use and develop it. One might go so far as saying that this movement (which, if they ever admitted to being, would only do so ironically) is working hard to create a modern mythology so twisted and ridiculous that it just may be resistant to further exploitation.

Of course, once Dada went Surrealist it started making some serious money.

I was watching the final showing of the final film in San Francisco’s International Film Festival, to which I had vowed greater attention this year. Takushi Tsubokawa’s “Aria” begins with the methodical tuning of a piano by protagonist Ota. My mind drifts to the mathematical nature of music and, as Ota tests and corrects octave intervals, I think of how a note an octave higher than another vibrates at precisely double its frequency.

Having spent the previous week in Mexico reading (among other things) “Society of the Spectacle“, my mind is steeled against attempts to assert any unexamined narratives into my head. I am delighted with “Aria”, as it seems to speak an entirely different visual language than the ultraslick MTV style pervading our media. Shots are framed with excessive white space (a head and shoulders against a bleak sky, for instance) and prolonged to the point where I become aware that a less elegant movie would’ve cut long ago. The characters—a piano-tuner, an antiques dealer, a puppeteer, a high school principal, and more—are eccentric without being caricatures and resist any taxonomy I try to impose upon them. I become hopeful that an escape from the Spectacle is possible.

We are lucky that the director is available to speak with us afterward. He takes questions from the audience, via an interpreter who does his best to translate both Japanese to English and ethereal director-speak to something comprehensible. He does a good job until someone asks about the “Wizard of Oz” nature of the film. It hadn’t occurred to me before the question but all the elements are there: characters leaving home in search of fulfillment, a brightly colored path (albeit red trellis instead of yellow brick), a wizard telling them to go home instead of solving their problems but then having a change of heart and helping them on their way, even the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is included (though played on a musical saw).

“Yes, someone asked about that in Korea, too,” the interpreter offers. “All I can say is that it’s a coincidence. I haven’t seen that film in thirty years, but I guess I need to again. And that’s the only song the actor knew how to play on the musical saw.”

Walking out of the theater, I’m reminded of Spider Robinson’s “Melancholy Elephants“, as it was recently featured on Boing Boing. The story, which I’ll let you read on your own, posits that we artists are not creators but discoverers. Beautiful music exists in some universal form and we, as artists, merely stumble upon it. Art, then, is an applied science—the application of fundamental wisdom (like the Golden Ratio) to express aspects of the human condition. As such, the raw materials of art (be they characters or chord progressions) are as finite as the raw materials for any other industry.

Takushi Tsubokawa says that he wrote “Aria” the last time he was in San Francisco. He didn’t know any English and felt very alone, spending most of his time at the beach. In contrast, Frank Baum (author of the Wizard of Oz) cites Lewis Carrol’s “Alice in Wonderland” as a major influence. From drastically different methodologies, such similarities yet surface. Is it possible that life is and has always been the same old story rehashed over and over using different languages of varying quality? That The Spectacle is not a bourgeois plot, but merely a manifestation of the plot? That “all the world’s a stage”?

“Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily/Life is but a dream.”

The description in the SFIFF guide pitched the movie as a sort of tragic buddy movie, two friends learning that things weren’t going to go as planned. I had two fears as I waited for the film to begin. First, that it would be entirely light-hearted and offer me nothing to make sense of the very similar situation I’ve found myself in (my best friends are currently living in Indiana, Florida, Colorado, and South Korea) and second that someone was going to commit suicide (not an option for me). Before the film began a presenter explained that, while technically “Reprise” was the first film from director Joachim Trier, he has made a lot of skate videos in his home country of Norway. My hopes were not lifted by this foreword, as I had hoped for something more insightful than Nordic youth wrestling with becoming middle-aged Peter Pans—an “SLC Punk” set in Oslo.

The first 5 minutes sketches an alternative plot, where everything goes right, before spending the remainder 100 minutes telling the story as it happened to go. The device is revisited multiple times in the film, giving us access into the hopes of the characters before we see the reality unfold. In this way, the film well captures both the idealism held by the youthful protagonists and makes us feel, not just watch, their disillusionment as nothing seems to go as expected. Even brilliant success is not quite what it’s cracked up to be. My first fear, that the film would lack any depth in its stroytelling, was clearly unfounded.

The second, fear of suicide being the only way out, was harder to dispel. Obviously, I would tend to spoil the ending if I confirmed whether or not this fear was realized. Instead let me just say that the filmmaker and actors all do an excellent job of keeping the option on the table throughout the whole of the film. Mental breakdown, unnecessary risk, star-crossed lovers, professional envy, utter artistic disintegration—they’re all there and their consequences are palpable to characters and audience alike. (I just used they’re, there, and their in the same sentence.) Top it all off with an opening credits slow-motion scene awash in a booming Ian Curtis (see intro paragraph) shouting, “a loaded gun won’t set you free/so you say” and you can sense the countdown.

Such depth of storytelling, real concern for the characters, and a healthy sprinkling of genuine humor make this a wholly wonderful film. Possibly the best review is contained within it. Talented author Erik, talking with his new publisher, discovers they share a favorite book. “It would’ve been a bestseller if it were written in English.” It’s got everything that made “Garden State” a hit, I’d even put Victoria Winge up against Natalie in the oh-too-cute-girl-next-door category.

Last year I managed to make it to three films:

“Who Killed the Electric Car?”

I describe this movie, whenever I get a chance, as the Schindler’s List of Electric Vehicles. To watch the amazing EV1 get shredded to bits because some fat cat is trying to hide that they’re better than the stuff GM currently makes is absolutely heart-wrenching. Well, it wrenched my heart at least. Plus, I’m dating one of the supporting actresses.

“American Blackout”

I acknowledge that Cynthia McKinney is a little batty, if not very batty. But the House of Representatives is supposed to represent America and I know plenty of people who share both her politics and her penchant for conspiracy theories. Ignoring her controversial ego, the much stronger part of this film was the rigorous documentation of how systematic the campaign to suppress the black vote has become. The Republicans have quite an impressive playbook for that game.

“The DaVinci Code”

Okay, so I didn’t quite make it to three. Embarrassing, I realize. Given that both of the above films are the kind you can’t just walk into a theater in Middle America and watch, it’s truly a crime not to take better advantage of this festival.

Keeping with that sentiment, here are the ones I’m planning to catch this year, alphabeticalish:

“The Deal”

The writer/director combo of “The Queen” swings their attention to Prime Minister Tony Blair and shady backroom wheeling and dealing among Labour Party. Intrigue! World politics! British accents!

“Everything’s Cool”

As I work for an environmental non-profit, this one’s hard to miss. Promising to be a vaguely comedic send up of what my girlfriend calls (only quasi-ironically) the “Non-profit/Industrial Complex”, the film follows the re-explosion of environmentalism thanks to climate change going mainstream. My only hope is that Nordhaus and Shellenberger aren’t framed as the heroes.

“Paprika”

It’s only got one show time, which I’m going to miss, but someone really should see this just to make sure it’s as wonderful as it looks. I’ve been an anime fan for a long time and very pleased that the genre has grown up with me (Thundercats, on the other hand, is completely unwatchable now).

“Reprise”

A group of 20-somethings determined to stick together whose careers take them in different directions. Considering that very well describes the last year of my life, I’m treating this one as a documentary—and praying that it doesn’t with the death of the main character or something suitably tragic.

“When the Levees Broke”

Spike Lee. Katrina. Documentary. Should be intense.

“Aria”

I have a feeling that this one’s going to be very Murakami-esque. Maybe because it takes place in Hokkaido, a place inextricably linked in my mind with magical sheep and a seemingly perfect destination for vaguely surreal character-driven drama. Of course, I might be off.

I’m planning on going fully Ebert (sans the missing jaw) this year and posting reviews as I cross the above off my list. You may have to sit tight for a bit though, as I mentioned before, I’ll be in Mexico next week.

I really will be in Mexico next week, but if I wasn’t, that would be a great way to end every post, eh? “Thanks for reading and, before I forget, I’m going to be in Mexico next week.” Kind of like, “Most likely kill you in the morning…“

I’ve always found urban decay beautiful, or I guess specifically I’ve found it hauntingly beautiful. Walking around the scenes from Henk van Rensbergen’s abandoned places photography really puts perspective (“Too much fucking perspective” I can hear David St. Hubbins say) on what we think of as major achievements. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” comes to mind.

I think we can agree that the ruins of modern advertising, while perhaps a worthy monument to a substantial victory in reclaiming our own mental environment, are a bit depressing. Fortunately, there are a great number of things with which we can replace these former monstrosities. Some of them might even be useful.

Solar panels are an obvious choice. I’ve been to Brazil before (they call it “Brasil” there… don’t they know how to spell their own country?) and I recall it being quite sunny and smelling like gasoline. I believe the term I used was, “like a wildlife preserve where the zebras drive Hummers”. Even putting aside any mock and/or pathological jingoism, solar would seem to be an excellent decision.

Art is another viable option. Why should big multi-national corporations get all the fun? Local communities should get a chance to decide how to decorate their own neighborhood. People are already doing this, just not entirely legally, which leaves a lot of people with important things to say—but who won’t jump a fence to say them—silenced.

Finally, call me crazy here but we could just take them down.^* Leaving them up as skeletons suggests that they need to be filled, whereas taking them down would leave our next generation with an impression that they never belonged there in the first place. Then, if advertisers ever wanted to put up billboards again it would represent a change in the status quo, both physically and mentally—much more difficult to accomplish. We’re never any farther than one generation away from an entirely different world.

There are other things we could do, certainly. Windowbox-style local gardens, windmills, dynamic information (temperature, traffic conditions, etc.), or even painting each one a different bright color could all satisfy the need to turn commerical chaotic into populist pretty. What would you do with your own billboard?

* Actually, this hadn’t even occurred to me until I asked someone else what they would do in the situation.

He set down a case—his surgeon’s black bag—and pulled two trashcans out from an alley to form a makeshift barrier from passersby on the sidewalk. The surgeon’s bag opened and out came a simple Krylon spraycan. One of many. He stepped back and surveyed the three flats of particle board. Shaking the spraycan sounded a rattle that may have evoked a ball bearing stirring up gas-compressed paint to you or me; to him it was power, energy, excitement… art.

Three puffs into the air, to clear the nozzle, and a deep breath. He pulled a gas mask over his mouth and nose. Suddenly, any doubt vanished and with a samurai’s deft strokes his arm sliced through the air and paint met particle board. Thick black scribbles dashed across the wood. Grain yielded to gloss. Canvas yielded to creation. Bold shapes began to emerge from the barrage, he doubled back to fill them in. Chunky letters materialized.

Across the street eating in my favorite breakfast spot, I was unable to see exactly what was being written. I am notoriously bad at deciphering graffiti and, had a tree not partially obstructed my view, I would still have a hard time with a translation. My best guess was “DIE, PLAYGROUND, DIE!” which would make sense as the storefront belongs to Upper Playground and, as mentioned above, it had recently received the business end of an entire car.

Nor could I hear the conversations with pedestrians, but body language betrayed most of the subject matter if not the details. The young girl in a pink jacket and matching pink boots wanted desperately to touch the bubbly letters—probably unaware that they they said “DIE!”—but her father kept her reined in. A group of high schoolers, themselves neither skinny nor white, seemed to be searching for the right balance of “nice piece, man” and “fuck you whitey, that’s our subculture”. They watched for a while, passing a joint back and forth. Two hipster girls, replete with all the necessary two-tone bangs and cheap-looking expensive accessories, gathered and pointed.

The artist’s friend joined him. The first stepped back—looking much older now, white flecks of paint salting his hair—and the second stepped up, grabbing a blue spraycan from the array of colors. Shapes gained outlines. Lines gained depth. The audience nodded. Where ten minutes ago destruction had rendered a city block derelict and depressing, now there was life, color, and culture. They were still going as the rain started and I headed home.

When I left Indiana years ago, one of the reasons I cited was Hoosiers’ general disdain for marginally il/legal activities such as street art, underground music events, and controlled substances. Having my morning coffee and watching my neighborhood come together over exactly that, I realized that whatever I was searching for in a community, I had found a long time ago.

First, there are lots of contexts in which noise specifically contributes to signal. George Lucas often quotes Akira Kurosawa on the notion of “Immaculate Reality”. In an old interview with Wired, Lucas says,

“[O]bviously everything is kind of dirty in the real world, and everything is kind of beat up, and everybody doesn’t drive around in a brand-new car.”

However, isn’t this really just noise serving as signal? The signal in this case is the Immaculate Reality used to convince movie-goers that what they’re seeing is real and a little dirt here and there is “value added”.

The case for noise is better made by the lives of woks and Yixing teapots. A wok is never washed with soap, but instead allowed a patina seasoned by the dishes it has cooked before. Similarly, teapots were traditionally for personal use and would be flavored by the past teas brewed by its owner. Thus the same tea from different teapots might have a subtly different taste. In this case, non-random data (the tea is brewed deliberately) is affecting the current signal in a random way, with the intention of enhancing the content.

Lest you think noise’s only friends are entirely Eastern (though I should mention that Buddhism’s First Noble Truth is Dukkha, or dissatisfaction, before moving on), let us not forget the West’s very own Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution. Afterall, if DNA got the signal right every single time we reproduced and there were no mutations, we would not only be just like our parents (scary enough) but our parents would still be single-celled goop. Noise is the driving force of evolution.

The question that is left for me is how noise can be allowed for in digital media. It’s one thing to imitate it with distressed text and bump maps, it’s another to let external forces actually affect your work. Signal vs. Noise has a post about Wabi-sabi, but mainly praising its comfortable simplicity and kind of missing the point. Will a format made out of 1s and 0s ever achieve the chaos of an unprimed canvas? If so, would it be any better than what we’ve got now?