Artistic Creativity and Work

I watched this ten-minute video on Art Made in Adversity from the amazing Art Assignment channel an hour ago, and it's given me a lot to think about:

In particular, it has made me see that all the work I've done in my life has been fundamentally about creativity, and I haven't managed to bring that value to my current work, and I need to figure out how to change that.

First things first: I see artistic creativity as the reason to live. Not a specific kind of art, or piece of art, but Art, as a whole, as a human endeavor. I don't know that many people share this view. A lot of people seem to have a view of art as an unnecessary luxury. "People are starving and you're spending money on paintings; people are homeless and we have enormous buildings just to hang paintings in for people to walk through and look at."

But this video makes it clear that art remains a core need and source of meaning and purpose even - maybe especially - in the most trying of times. And then I read a comment on the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moJtX5kZQig...) that really drove the point home. An excerpt of what Sophia Nilsson wrote:

"In the last decade I've lived through years of earthquakes destroying my home town, a mosque terror attack 2 min from my highschool where I had teenage interfaith meetings, been diagnosed with multiple severe chronic, degenerative diseases that have left me at times unable to eat, move or retain my job due to pain, distress and other such things. In the last year alone I've had 4 surgeries, including one where I nearly died after from sepsis, and one after I was hit by a bus on my bicycle…

… the sole constant, unwavering knowledge I have found thru such difficulties is that, no matter what you live thru, the act of creation doesn't lose value, ever. It's immutable, and innate. Discovering such is powerful, and drawing your pain, drawing from your pain--whatsoever that might be--is perhaps the one solid gift that can offer a glimmer in dark days, a peek into the keyhole at the happy room"

I like to say I wasn't artistic as a kid, because I was into science and math, and didn't take up "traditional" art like drawing and sculpting until much later on, but really my entire life has been steeped in art and creativity. I grew up with a wood shop in my basement and parents who taught me how to use every tool I wanted. They also both love cooking, and I grew up with every back issue of Gourmet magazine and Pepin's "La Technique" and the Joy of Cooking. They indulged even my strangest teenage whims, like the time I determined to make a Buche de Noel for a school project or decided to get really good at pastry or wanted to cook a multi-course dinner on a random weeknight. For all that I love and am grateful to my parents for, these things are among the most poignant to me.

Then, at age 16, I went straight into videogames. The videogame industry is constantly in the news for being a swamp of horrible working environments, but even through all that, making games is fundamentally about artistic creativity. If anything, the troubled industry conditions only support that: People do it anyway, especially programmers who know they could make five times the money working in tech. For me and I think for most of the people I've worked with, the creativity is a core part of the reason to stick with it all.

When I left games for Facebook to make Medium, the VR sculpting tool, I struggled quite a lot with the role, and reflected throughout on what exactly it was that sustained me for over five years there. Looking back, today, I realize it was that Medium was itself a creative work, and my connection to it - often very tenuous as I spent my time simply preventing it from being killed - was a source of fulfillment without which even the Facebook money and camaraderie of a team wouldn't have been enough.

At Terraformation, I believe our mission is a critical one: climate change is already causing crop failures, famine, food riots, civil unrest, and wars leading to refugee crises, triggering xenophobia and enabling racism and nationalism to take deeper root in governments everywhere. Already we're guaranteed the crisis will cause enormous, unthinkable suffering for a very long time, and so helping to solve it is a moral imperative.

And yet, a workmanlike approach to reversing climate change still feels like a detour, of sorts. "Well, I guess we can't be all that creative if our species dies out," is sort of my thinking. It feels like I'm a painter, and the power in my studio went out, and nobody's around to fix it, so I have to stop painting for a week to learn electrical wiring and fix it myself. That week, taken in isolation, wouldn't be fulfilling. I'd do it as a means to an end: Getting back to painting. Necessary, but insufficient.

Except reversing climate change isn't a week of work. It'll take years. And I doubt I can "tough it out" without that sense of art and creativity in my work for years on end. And so I'm thinking about how I can bring the same creativity to this job that I've needed so badly in my past ones.

Let me address a response I hear a lot:

"But you're creating things, isn't that the very definition of creativity?"

This bears a bit of clarification. "Creativity" is an overused word, especially here in San Francisco among the tech crowd. Often you hear someone say it, here, and can't shake the sense there's an underlying insecurity or defensiveness to the words. "Coding is creative," they seem to say, "So my fingers dancing across the keyboard coding this mobile app are, when you think about it, basically doing the same thing Michelangelo's did as he chiseled the Pieta." Not everyone, of course, but there's definitely a class of tech employee that seem to need to identify as doing creative work.

When I was working on Spore, we had to name the system that brought the artwork into the game. The winner was our art director Ocean's suggestion, "Peristalsis" - the muscular process your colon uses to expel waste from the body. To wit: you literally perform creative work every time you use the toilet.

I'm not trying to trash-talk anyone's livelihood. Not everyone cares about art, let alone wants it to be their livelihood, and the world needs running water. If anything, I think my life would be easier if I could be content simply solving problems like an engineer is, I think, supposed to. Conversely, even the best artists don't spend their time in a constant state of self-actualized bliss. John Singer Sargent, perhaps the most famous portrait painter of all time, remarked eventually to a friend that he didn't really enjoy painting them because they felt like chores - "Getting paid to make rich people look good," to paraphrase him. At the end of the day, we've all gotta eat.

For me, the distinction lies in the intent. Why are you creating?

I remember visiting one of Ideo's offices, the legendary design firm, years back, and talking to a friend there about what we were trying to create with Medium. We learned about Ideo's process, for which they are famous: It says, start every design project by first defining the problem you're trying to solve. The instant I heard it, before I even knew why, I rankled at the idea. It just felt wrong. She kept trying to help us fit it into that box. "Could you say the problem you're solving with Medium is that it's too hard for a sculptor to visualize their work in two dimensions?"

A telltale sign, to me, of what I'll call artistic creation is that you cannot frame it as "solving a problem", unless that problem is Rilke's: "that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue".

Artistic creation, to me, is something we do because we feel we must, not to solve some exterior problem, but to live fully realized lives. It is therapeutic - "Making wholeness heals the maker," Christopher Alexander says - and it brings into the world a beauty whose value is intrinsic, not based in what it does for somebody else. And in a poetic twist, this exact un-self-conscious quality makes it valuable to others, in that it gives a glimpse of the inner life of another. Adrienne Rich said that love is "a process of refining the truths [we] can tell each other... It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation." I think the work of creating art is the same work of love.

At the core, the reason Medium lived in a state of tension at Facebook is because Facebook's mission, when you distill it down, is to make only products that are each, individually, valuable to every living human on the planet. This forces a sort of lowest-common-denominator priority on things: I once said to the Medium team, "It's easy to be frustrated if you look around and think, other teams are making tap water, and we're making Cabernet. But we can't find comfort in arrogance: Bear in mind that everyone needs tap water, and nobody needs Cabernet."

Of course, to a lifelong vintner, Cabernet might be her art, her form of creativity, and those who love it share an intimacy with her. I believe art, as a whole, is universal, but no one work, or artist, or genre, or medium, appeals to everyone. And so, at its core, Facebook's mission is incompatible with creating art, though there are exceptions to this - small pockets for periods of time - and for years my work was defending one of those little pockets.

I used the water / Cabernet metaphor later in a broader meeting with other Facebook employees from other teams and a long-time employee from elsewhere pulled me aside afterwards and cautioned me: "Don't use that metaphor around here. Framing Facebook as a basic utility like running water is the worst thing we can do, because utilities are heavily regulated and make nearly no profit."

Well, I stand by the metaphor. Public utilities are of course essential but are not sufficient for a well-lived life, as the Art Made in Adversity video makes clear. There must be room for both, or else as a species we might endure, but to endure is not to survive, and certainly not to thrive.

I've realized that, at Terraformation, I've personally let my own mindset slip into the Ideo model: Everything is a problem, and our work is solving them! This mindset doesn't leave room for art. It makes things feel urgent, and important, but it creates a sort of tunnel vision where the best possible outcome is simply that we solved a problem, that we can go on enduring, but never thriving.

These videos moved me, today, and shook me out of that a bit. And now my work is to think: How can I bring a sense of art and creativity to even this pressing work? How can I focus on, yes, priorities and deliverables and metrics, but also on beauty and making things that bring joy and connection and intimacy to all of us?

These are values I took for granted in videogames: They were just the water I swam in. I know our forestry team at Terraformation understands it quite deeply in their own way. But this value is oddly alien to the tech industry, and it cannot be shoehorned in with a few extra metrics, because it is shy and it shrinks away when you creep towards it with tape measures.

I said all this to my friend Robin and she suggested I could help with her garden in Santa Cruz, which got me thinking. We have a strong commitment to open-sourcing our work to benefit all beings. Maybe I can make small projects out of this sort of thing, taking all the industrial irrigation sensors and water flow optimization work and spinning off little side shoots to help communities of home gardeners creating beauty at smaller, intimate scales. Maybe I can finally get around to that herb garden I keep talking about building and tending myself. I need to keep thinking about more ideas, but it is at least a start.

For others who've been in games and now work elsewhere, does this resonate with you? How have you brought a sense of artistic creativity with you where you go?