For this week’s assignment, I broke out of my usual routine tackled the final posting first. The artistic and creative nature of it was appealing and it was fun to think about the subject matter as I pulled it together. I played around with lots of different images and while I landed on a set that are “stock” images available for public consumption, I did consider several that might require permission to reprint them under certain circumstances. Reading Richard Koman’s interview of Lawrence Lessig caused me to think differently about my own process and to wonder if what I was doing was contributing to “remix culture.” My collage, while nothing to hang in a museum, was the gathering of creativity based on creativity” to form something new. It is curious to me, as Lessig points out in “Cultures Compared” that there are those people, including attorney Charles Simes, who believe that this type of creativity is worthless. Specifically, he and others believe that engaging in this kind of creative mixing is “ … a fundamental failure of imagination.” (Lessig, 91) My question is how can this be true? Who is to say what is imaginative and what is not when it comes to the artistic process regardless of consumer or economic value?
The answer, in short, to your question is that there is no limit or sort of boundaries that confine who can say what is imaginative for imagination is limitless. Imagination and creativity holds different meanings to different people and no one person can determine how other people view imagination. The collage that you made demonstrates your imagination because you, first, imagined yourself as an artist and transferred those imaginations onto paper and eventually on to the computer screen. As we learned from our assignments this week, imagination and creativity not only has to do with art, but also music and culture. Imagination lies within everything.