Manifestation:
My roommate Alex, an architecture student, has a unique and inspirational perspective on creativity. Alex loves to notebook. He lives by the quote: “There are no precious pages”. He believes in process over product when it comes to creativity. Notebooking, and creativity in general, is not about perfection, it’s about creation and exploration. “If you fail to act on your creative ideas, you will simply stop having them.” Through this mantra Alex has changed the way I approach creativity.
Alex and I together hold a similar distaste towards our screen obsessed generation. On any given night you can find Alex and I creating. Creating everything from large scale collages, to process driven marble paintings, or paper-mache globes the size of beach balls. The process usually begins with the same conversation, “I’m bored” … “Let’s make something”. The following 10 minutes are usually filled with pacing, collecting, and ideation. After about 5 or 10 minutes, Alex and I usually sit at our table now covered with supplies of every kind, things like glue, paint, cut up magazines, cardboard, markers, crayons, and funny enough, usually some left over trash.
Then the fun begins. An unpredictable storm of creation and experimentation. The joy of freeing yourself from the fear of creating something “good” is what drives Alex and I’s creation. We are obsessed with art as a process instead of product even though most, if not all, of our creations are hanging on the walls of our apartment.
In addition to our creations as a duo, Alex and I have hosted 2 or 3 collage events in our apartment. We gather as much diverse material as possible, set up a couple tables, and invite everyone to come socialize and collaborate. We encourage even our science major friends to forget about perfection and instead to enjoy the process of the creation. Most of the work from those events have no single creator, but rather a collection of 10 or 20 peoples combined expression; a community collage if you will.
Alex and I
Bring Back Boredom.
Bring Back Boredom.
Hank’s Passion Project
Problem: People turn to the phone and other screens to combat boredom.
Solution: Defeat boredom with creation.
Inspiration:
Enough of the smartphone. Enough with the instagram reels. We are all getting exponentially stupider as a human race. We no longer have control of what separates us from every other beast of the Earth; our consciousness. We have been enslaved by screens and an insatiable hunger for entertainment and content. God forbid you wake-up in the morning and have an original thought.
How many prolific historical thinkers are out in the world today? Thinkers on the scale of Aristotle, Newton, Darwin, MLK, etc. Thinkers that changed the world because they had a moment to collect their thoughts. King spent months in jail with nothing to do but think and write; he had a moment to think prolifically. Newton and Darwin had the blessing of living before the screen absorbed every spare moment of our lives. Newton wouldn’t have been sitting under an apple tree if he could have been watching reels in his bed. The point I am getting at is that I think everyone needs a moment to be bored, everyone needs to spend more time with introspection. Boredom fuels creativity, and creativity changes the world. Bring back boredom.
