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A fundamental task in the creative process is one that paradoxically feels very "uncreative." To engage with and move towards the new, one needs to first understand what is not new—we need to understand the given. The famous experimental chef Ferran Adria defined creativity beautifully and succinctly: "creativity,” he said, “is not copying.”
But to not copy, one first needs to know what exists and to know it across many levels. This is one of the tasks of Disclosure. To differ, to innovate—to not copy—we need to ask: What are the underlying logics of the situation we find ourselves in?
We have to “know” to refuse the known. But what is it that we need to know to block to move us toward doing-thinking differently? Is it never enough to know and block the explicit features, the primary use of something, or its general form. Everything explicit relies on a vast set of unspoken, tacit assumptions and structures—an apparatus. So, to return to the question of “how might it be to think or act differently”? We need to go beyond what can be explicitly stated or known to enactively disclose and block a way of being alive. In short, disclosure needs to uncover the implicit and the tacit. We need to go beyond disclosing and blocking the obvious and what can be put into clear concepts.
Here we can follow the ontological turn in anthropology: what we are disclosing and potentially blocking is a “world” for the sake of exploring the potentiality that “other worlds are possible.”
And in disclosing a world, we need to focus our disclosure equally on tools, practices, concepts, and environments. We need to start with understanding how things make us—and this will be something that cannot be put fully into words—what we disclose and block as part of a creative practice will need to be things, environments, practices, and concepts.
But the task of disclosure in creative practices does not end with disclosing existent underlying logics. Disclosure importantly also involves a quite distinct task: disclosing unintended oddnesses in existent things that might offer a place to begin to experiment towards the qualitatively new. This form of disclosure—the disclosing of the novel and unintended—is a very different and very engaged experimental task. It is not something that can be done via ideation or conceptual analysis. It requires active forms of disruptive making; what else can it do? What are unintended affordances that might offer a starting point for Deviation?
Disclosure is, in all of its logics, a highly engaged and experimental activity. To understand is to create, and equally to “discover” the unintended is to create.
Too often creativity is fully associated with one or another state of being: the flow state, intuition, in the moment, for example. This profound reification and radical narrowing of creativity misses how it involves a complete ecology of practices, tasks, tools, and environments. And unfortunately, in all of the emphasis on flow—the tasks of Disclosure can seem the most foreign to creative practices—when they are in fact so critical.
We have to “know” to refuse the known. But what is it that we need to know to block to move us toward doing-thinking differently? Is it never enough to know and block the explicit features, the primary use of something, or its general form. Everything explicit relies on a vast set of unspoken, tacit assumptions and structures– an apparatus. So, to return to the question of “how might it be to think or act differently”? We need to go beyond what can be explicitly stated or known to enactively disclose and block a way of being alive. In short, disclosure needs to uncover the implicit and the tacit. we need to go beyond disclosing and blocking the obvious and what can be put into clear concepts.
Here we can follow the ontological turn in anthropology: what we are disclosing and potentially blocking is a “world” for the sake of exploring the potentiality that “other worlds are possible”.
And in disclosing a world – we need to focus our disclosure equally on tools, practices, concepts, and environments. We need to start with understanding how things make us, – and this will be something that cannot be put fully into words – what we disclose and block as part of a creative practice will need to be things, environments, practices, and concepts.
