As the final week of classes comes to a close, I wasn’t sure how to wrap up three months of work in any sort of a satisfactory way. While some sort of best of or end of year list might seem apt, the format is already exhausted by end of the year and end of the decade list. It feels like an attempt to collectively post rationalize the last 10 years, and sort everything into neat buckets and orderly rankings, forgetting the in-between moments that stiched everything together.
Instead, I’ve been thinking about the quality and nature of the projects that we designed this semester. At times, it feels like we are designing with training wheels on, maybe not as high fidelity, complex, or “real” as I may have hoped or expected. Perhaps that’s ok…
I recently came across a clip of Bill Evans explaining the creative process and self-teaching, that has stuck with me.
In it, he says
“They tend to approximate the product, rather than attacking it in a realistic, true way, at any elementary level – regardless of how elementary – but it must be entirely true, and entirely real, and entirely accurate. They would rather approximate the entire problem, than to take a small part of it and be real and true about it.
-Bill Evans, The Universal Mind of Bill Evans
You must be satisfied to be very clear, and very real, and to be very analytical at any level. You can’t take the whole thing; and to approximate the whole thing in a vague way, gives one a feeling that they…more or less touched the thing, but in this way you lead yourself more or less toward confusion.”
Until next year, I think this is the sentiment I want to end on. The work I made may not have been complicated, professional, or intricate, but it was “true.” I hope to continue creating “true” work throughout the duration of this program.
Peace out ’til 2020.
