the challenge
Our mission today involves taking a walk in memory lane using a family album. Can you imagine creative Insights hiding among your old photos? Well, it’s a perfect playground for our creative challenge and an opportunity to see things we haven’t notice before (or just see things differently).
The Seed we are playing with is Space Invaders. Don’t you have aliens hiding in your family album?
Let’s start.
my insight
Usually when you go to the zoo, you take pictures of the animals. This photo taken in the Jerusalem Zoo, however, is of my youngest son peeking from a burrow designed for children to take a close look at the meerkats.
And today, this strange photo has suddenly transformed to a photo of a little alien in his spaceship, landing on a Mars-like planet.
reflection
When you observe the act of capturing creative Insights, it might seem quite an arbitrary process. How else can one explain finding a creative Insight in an old photo taken with no intent to capture one? Is such “reverse engineering” valid?
Well, you already know everything goes, so the question “is this a valid process?” is not the right question. But a more important lesson is that we can play in different playgrounds. In the same way we take out of context a piece of reality we see on the street and use it to create or imagine something new, we can take a piece of a past reality as captured in an old photo and use it as raw material.
Every piece of such raw material can go through numerous creative cycles. Maybe in a year from now I will use the same photo which has just became a “Space Invaders” photo and imagine something new on top of it. Maybe this spaceship photo will be an inspiration for a short story, or a series of photos… I can’t tell. And that’s the beauty of the creative process.
Such evolution of creative Insights makes the creative process endless. Anything can be used, then reused, and so on. And as we know, even complete and published artworks can be used as an inspiration for future works or other artists.
mental notes
- Anything can be used as raw material.
- Anything can be used as a playground.
- Anything can be reused.
now it is your turn… be creative!