…it is easier to reinterpret the external than what we experienced inside ourselves.
The new digital tools and their ability to capture, slice, and transform information are making the creation of any concept and idea more and more agile. The ownership of an idea is becoming more diffuse; as well as its originality, since there is a collective intelligence that neutralizes every created work.
The remix consists of collecting elements to reinterpret them in something different (or that is what we believe). Gathering collective symbols, crushing them, and preparing them for a new cultural intake. It has thus become the predominant trend of the 21st century. The time we live requires the creative model “no time to waste”:
Take something that works and mix it with something else. In fact, choose a popular icon and make it your own. The formula does not fail.
Living in the era of “copy and paste” has positive and negative connotations. The positive: almost no idea is ever finalized because when you launch your work, it is picked up by another entity that reinterprets it and so on. You know the beginning but never the end. Hyperconnection has allowed us to work and create “things” with a facility never seen before. This has given huge avalanches of new ideas and connections that until recently were unlikely and today seem very natural.
The big problem is that to get a great remix, we should have good elements, and these are running out. We do not know how to create those natural elements, “we can make juices of different mixtures, but we do not know how to plant the trees to create new fruits”. The remix era does not deepen, remains only on the surface. It is only a momentary, fleeting and ephemeral shock, difficult to retain in the long term memory. Reflection does not accompany this typology of ideas generation.
As examples of creative tools that appeal to this model, to take existing things to remix them, we can use the Hybridization by Aggregation technique or the Hybridization by Translation.
Here comes the Catharsis.
If the remix is superficial, catharsis is its alter ego. It comes from the deepest. “The current creativity is conditioned by thousands of external impulses, block them makes you focus on the internal impulses, the real ones, which can lead you to a visceral, Cathartic reaction”.
Catharsis (from the Greek κάθαρσις kátharsis, purification) is a word described in the definition of tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics as an emotional, corporal, mental and spiritual purification. Through the experience of compassion and fear (Eleos and Phobos), the spectators of the tragedy would experience the purification of the soul from those passions ( See the definition at Wikipedia).
How can we generate our own and authentic elements?
The mind must be often purged, if not the inner impulses would be numb and our creation, infamous, artificial, and superfluous. That means we must train our reflection and observation potential. It helps to separate ourselves from the group every so often.
Creative tools that appeal to a process of reflection are Co-Creations with Users (which allow us to discover Insights) and Hybridization by Synthesis.
There is no doubt that we live the happiest creative moment because the great network is connecting us immediately, but we must not forget that great ideas arise from reflection. And that is our biggest challenge since we have the risk of running out of fruit to our juices, or without elements to make mixes.
SOURCES:
Everything is a Remix
Published at 03/04/2018
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