Abby wonders about intention and meaning and the whole mess. She has a good question:

I walked away from this ‘unlecture’ thinking ‘well if you can guarantee intent, and authorship is such a flimsy notion, then why do we create?

In my own case the answer is because making in itself is pleasurable (we make music without audiences, dance without audiences, so creating often happens without the intention of an audience – all I mean is that creating is pleasurable. The next answer would be that I have things I want to say and share. I have to keep making and sharing precisely because their specific meaning never arrives. The things I make never quite say them right, and people don’t quite understand them as I thought they might, either. So we do it again.