PLAZA Yes/No
Seeding Creativity
2021

Insight (Abstract)

People early in their creative endeavors often have difficulty getting “started,” feeling intimidated by blank canvases and lack of technical proficiency. On the other hand, growing and seasoned creators alike require new methods of stimulation, whether it is to overcome creative blocks, to hone their craft, or to place themselves in spaces to discover something new.  Lastly, “creativity” in the public digital stage further complicates curiosity by equating any publicly displayed work as indicative of personal identity.  

What kind of prompts can be presented to people that are easy to start, understand, and engage with, all while providing scalable technical challenge and “just enough” creative flexibility (or constraints)?

“Walking as a research practice is about consciously deciding how to put that instrument [the body] into motion within an environment, and which types of data to sense, sift, and as similate. It is about the visceral exchanges between a sensing body in motion and the bodies of knowledge sequestered in the phenomena that make up a site of research. Whether the engagement is with pixels and memes, rocks, insects, birds, instruments, mud, other researchers, memories, clouds, microbes, shop signs, roasting coffee particles, emergency vehicle sirens, pages, or rat – walking allows a researcher to surface new layers of understanding about a physical, digital, or social environment, and sometimes about themselves.” ^1
1 Gommes, Lynn, ed. Walking as Research Practice. WARP conference. Roma Publications. Amsterdam. September 2022.  

Guy Debord’s 1956 “Theory of the Dérive” publicy proposed an idea already in practice by members of the Letterist (Situationist) International - the idea passing through and interactiing with urban terrains as a study of emotion and behavior, or psychogeography. The practice involved, for example, walking as a kind of praxis for “fighting” against the boredom and oppression of capital structures. Related to this notion of creative work, however, theis idea of dérive offers a methodology where personal identity and performative stress are deemphasized, and curiosity and an openness to the “new” becomes available.  By recentering the person on their own human experience - their emotion, thoughts, and inclinations - through subjecting oneself to a specific set of activities and constraints (eg. walking), there is a possibility for the person to be reset, emptied of preconceived stressors and placed into a posture of curiosity and creativity.

Debord and WARP’s theories both hinge on a common precept — finding the easiest, most accessible port of entry: walking.  In other words, the key dimension here is prompting the person to engage without the kind of commitment that leads to decision fatigue and therefore stress. Given this, what if the port of entry question to ask was merely, “how are you?” Because there is no wrong mood at a given mood, all moods are therefore great and acceptable. The playing field is now leveled - being stuck is equally valuable to feeling super productive.  Based on a mood, the subsequent path can be a series of simple binary (yes-no) prompts. For example, if a person feels pensive, their are zoned into a “meditative” territory, in which they will be asked a series of potential “walking” activities that relate to meditation and reflection. Each activity is further constrained into short, predictable time periods (5 minutes or less).  While such a decision tree may not be comprehensive of the human experience, it allows for just enough space for an individual to retain a sense of agency and spark curiosity without it ascribing too much significance to the activity itself.

B-Tree



Single and Multiplayer

One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups' impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes, and in any case it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the dérive fragmenting into several simultaneous dérives. The practice of such subdivision is in fact of great interest, but the difficulties it entails have so far prevented it from being organized on a sufficient scale.
Guy Debord, Theory of Dérive, 1959

Just as a walking activity can be experienced singularly or communally, the proposed activities can also be single or multiplayer. In both cases, participation may be active or passive in nature. In other words, participatory activites may be a anonymous and detached in nature (eg. curating a series of images together, anonymously and asynchronously) or dynamically involved (eg. intentionally creating something together). Further, single and multiplayer instances may be asynchronous or synchronous. Group sizing is another area of exploration - what are optimal sizes of groups to encourage low stress, but fruitful, exploration?

Community Created

Even within a limited set of categories, a rule set can be deployed that offers an infinite number of possible low-stress activities:

Rule / Option	Example	Parameter(s)
Prompt with Yes-No	"See anything red?"	Avoid personal preference. Instead of "Do you like bananas," phrase as "Have a banana?"
Offer a Context	"You Cold (38°F)" "Listening to Frank Ocean?" "Near the pandas (@zoo)?" "Is it 7:30p?"	Many contextual options are available: Location, Time, Weather, Music, et al.
Use a Creative Tool	"Lean or rotate camera to match line" "Capture with A6"	Leverage device or app features: Gyroscope, VSCO Presets, et al.
Offer an Activity	Tap left/right to next image Swipe up to Collect Take a photo Site back and watch (on autoplay)	Collect, Capture, Browse, Listen, Watch
Set Size limit	Only 100 items or entries at a time	Suggest “full” conditions: LIFO, Expiration, et al.

Further, there is opportunity for agency to be given to the community to self-generate activities for public or private participation. The door is open for use of AI as well to facilitate in activity creation, or auto-generate in of itself. In otherwords, the creation of activities is not unsimilar to prompt engineering; and the communal nature is analagous to the filter vernacular of platforms like TikTok.  

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