Week 1: Combinatorial Storytelling

I think many of you are here to experiment with ways to unleash your creativity in this online space while still keeping a foothold in the beautiful and inspiring human, real and grounded, messy and surprising modes of storytelling and the making of “storyworlds.” And how the listener, spectator or reader leaves the story to continue their own ongoing lives.

One of the key ideas that has been a huge part of my own media practice is what Maria Popova calls “Combinatorial Creativity.”

Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity
By Maria Popova

I think there is enough rich, inspiring possibilities in this combinatorial essay to keep all of us busy thinking and working and experimenting for a long time to come.

“…And that is the idea that creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations.”

… The idea that in order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.”

 “…I like to think of it this way: We take information, from it synthesize insight, which in turn germinates ideas.”

This is one of the key frames I would offer you to consider as we work together this term and work with the architecture of the internet and participatory media.

Many of you echo this idea in your posts this week:

 “…We live at a time when we have a rare opportunity to make up the rules, because they haven’t been invented yet.  To set the standards and the norms and the honorable way of doing things.  And this, I believe, is our responsibility as publishers and curators and consumers of information. Again, it comes down to choice: The normative models we choose today will shape how much our culture will value this form of creative labor tomorrow.”

 

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2 comments to Week 1: Combinatorial Storytelling

  • natalieb@uoregon.edu

    Yes, we are making up the rules, because we are living in a “critical age,” as Comte apparently would call it, according to Siegel’s “Burying the Hatchet” article. It is very exciting, and scary. I feel excited by the opportunities, and daunted by the amount of interdisciplinary knowledge often required.

  • Grace

    “Creativity is the original open-source code.” I think that’s a very apt way for putting it in this age we’re living in. We’re always standing on the shoulders of giants when we create. Now, the question is whether we’ll be content to just ride on those shoulders and create derivatively or we use them to survey the lay of the land and launch us to someplace higher or at least, different.

    The whole concept of it personally excites me because I’ve always believed that even as we call ourselves specialists in one field or another, in our case specialists in writing and communicating, being really good at what we do doesn’t only involve immersing ourselves in what’s happening in our immediate field. The word “interdisciplinary” doesn’t always have a good connotation but I’d like to lay it on the table, minus its association with “dabbling” and being a dilettante. I think that what helps us to make that leap of innovation, artistic or otherwise, is that unique simmering-together of our various life experiences.

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