What I learned about the creative process, mainly I learned that the creative process is long and complicated. To create a thing, firstly it is very important to catch the inspiration. The source of inspiration is usually a moment, an intuition or a long time of thinking, it is not necessarily specific, thus, after you got an inspiration, you have to make it into specific. For the next step of creative process, it has to be based on your theme or ideas and then preliminary depiction of its image. However, during the process of preliminary depiction, it is very necessary to make constant attempts and modifications, because your ideas may not be achieved in your current level. Also, you may fell stuck, and you may ask for others(teachers,classmates) help and advice but still based on your own theme or ideas. Then, after all your attempts and modifications, your idea is gradually achieved and your work is gradually clarified as well, however you still need to make better and more precise modifications to improve your work, or you will even add more new thoughts and achieve them. Thus the creative process is long and complicated.
For the techniques of interactive art making, I have learned a lot. First of all, interactive art is an art, the art work needs to be considered in many ways, whether it is in his size or material, they all can be represented as the theme and idea that the author wants to express. Moreover, interactive art is an “interactive” work, which means it needs users to participate to express, and it usually includes computer and sensor response, light, heat or other types of sensing technology (however there is interactive art’s device is human body), thus users are necessary to be considered as a part of the work. There are basically two ways in which users can participate. One type of interaction is that users actually operates the device, and the other does not need to operate(like mirror setting device). Thus, for the device which needs actual operation, the device is usually simple to operate because the users may not be professional and does not understand complicated operations. And for the device which does not need to operate, it usually simple and interesting and more encourage users to use emotion to participate, investing in feelings to reflect.
I have made three different works so far, and all three works have things I think are successful. First in the creative stage, I did a lot of research on other people’s works to draw inspiration and finally came up with three different ideas and themes of my three works, thus I think I have been successful in thinking and research. Also, at the stage of building, though the three works are simple, they still express the theme and ideas very well, which the first work present the idea of simple monochrome mirror setting, the second work present the idea of contrasts between the fancy world and pure heart and the last one use “remove” to represent the concept of life’s depletion. Moreover, I think I did successfully in the aspects of team work as well. The study 2 is a group study, which needs team members participate in the discussion and research of theme and ideas, and finally build up work together. During this time, all four of us show and fusion of ideas and successfully assigning the building work, so we have completed the team work very efficiently. Overall the three studies, my abilities of creativity, expressing ideas and editing device are gradually improved, it also can be considered as a successful part about my work so far!
For the three works which I have done, all of them have some shortcomings that need to be improved one step further. Through the three studies, I am deeply aware of the limitations of my thinking and the creativity of weak, which leads to no new ideas in the last three work. And interactive work is a new and fresh thing for me, my understanding of it is not deep and familiar enough, so my works are slightly insufficient on the theme, and there is kind of weak of interaction. Thus, it is very necessary to do more research on the interactive work to consider about more deeper theme and ideas, and trying to open the mind to increase my creativity. Also, my works’s systems on Max are very simple and lack of fun, they are all based on the simplest computer techniques (the study 1 and 2 both based on the basic camera techniques), so for the technique or skills part, I need to do much more exploration and practice, and try to make work more fun to attract users and encourage users to play. Overall, I need to make much effort in many aspects to build my future work better.