I’ve used the Orange advert, I am Everyone, a number of times to suggest to students that who we are, our identity, is a complex, fluid, amalgam of what comes into our senses and what we do with it. Of course, those senses and the brain that processes them has a heritage. Our genetic predispositions influence the processing of the senses but importantly, our uniqueness comes from the mix and remix of all those elements into a complex, changing self.

An interesting parallel to this notion is the idea that creativity is also an amalgam – a mix and remix of everyone and everything that passes through, by, and past us, consciously and unconsciously as we go about our lives. It’s an idea that is manifested in a book that I’ve just been reading, Newspaper Blackout by Austin Kleon. It’s a curious collection of poems created by blacking our (redacting) words from newspaper articles. The words that are left constitute curious, touching, clever and sometimes profound ‘found’ pieces: poetry.

Kleon, as he discusses in his introduction, is sitting on the shoulders of numerous artists who have produced work using found objects and/or the work of others. Although very different to Reality Hunger, David Shields’ rant against fiction, it shares its celebration of plagiarism as a creative tool. Kleon refers to The Ectasy of Influence, something of a remix anthem among artists following this path, as a major influence. He’s clearly also a fan of Kirby Ferguson’s Everything is a Remix (part 3).
At the Economist’s Human Potential Summit he outlined his ‘philosophy’ in a talk entitled ‘Steal Like an Artist’. In it he says:

We can pick our teachers and we can pick our friends and we can pick the books we read and the music we listen to and the movies we see, etcetera. You are a mashup of what you let into your life.

Now there’s an echo of the Orange advert – maybe that’s where he got it from: who knows. What is becoming increasingly evident though is that our understanding of creativity, its aggregated, networked, combined, and collaged character, is emerging in practice. It’s the ways in which artists are increasingly working in a digital networked landscape and their reflections on doing so which is shifting our (more theoretical) understandings of the creative act. Again, interestingly, Kleon’s book grew out of a blog on which he published his work. After building a solid following he decided to (or was he scouted?) publish in plain ‘ole book form.

Here’s his talk in full.