What is creativity?
How de we define creativity?
Where does creativity come from?
How philosophical is the notion of creativity?
Is everyone’s ‘creativity’ different?
Or is it an ill conceived, simplified term that is used to describe a very specific series of neuronal & bodily reactions to certain stimuli?
These are all the questions I’ve been thinking (and googling, and youtubing) since beginning this Capturing Creativity studio* and I have found some answers or maybe I’ve just found more questions:

Creativity is generally defined as the ability to make new things, or come up with new ideas, it’s an ability to think outside the box, to see unique solutions and employ them in inventive ways. In this sense creativity is not always utilised when being ‘creative’, as to be creative is simply defined as the ability to make or produce something. However I guess that depends on your definition of creative, how different, unique, special, once off, un-influenced does something have to be, to be classified as creative?

This is where creativity get’s tricky.

It’s all well and good to be like oh this is what creativity is, so it’s easy to investigate it, but what if you don’t define that as being creative, maybe that was just following a formula, a somewhat inspired formula, but maybe it is just a formula. Creativity to most people seems to be a random mix of once off genius combined with solid skill and hard work and for us humans these percentages are unique to us.

Maybe creativity to you is 90% unique idea, 5% skill and 5% hard work.
Maybe creativity to you is 40% unique idea, 50% skill and 10% hard work.
Maybe for you creativity doesn’t have to involve any hard work at all.

For me when it comes to creativity I’m most interested in that unique idea portion; where does that unique idea come from?
Is it simply random?
Is it a gift from the gods?
Is our unique idea just a product of a lot of subconscious effort, only made aware to us in the sense of a ‘random’ idea?
Have we been influenced by something, processed it subconsciously, then come up with a creative idea, only to be unaware of the original influence?
Or is creativity a combination of genetic preferences, individual tastes, things you viewed on tumblr that day added together with a little bit of ‘what your friends like’?

I’m not sure what creativity is, but this is a good thing.
That allows me to be open minded and to listen to what my artist is saying, without pushing the narrative in a specific direction. My artist can inform me of what they think creativity is, how they are influenced creatively and what they believe the route cause or process to be. Maybe i’ll agree with their version or maybe I won’t, but by the end of the studio myself, the artist and our class of film students will be a little bit closer to understanding our own definitions of creativity.

Catch you later,

Louise Alice Wilson