I think there are easily discernible patterns to how people turn ideas into things. I recently thought about what that pattern looks like for me.

The protoidea: a brief mention, a flash really. The protoidea imprints itself onto my mind for a much longer time than any idea or a thought. Then it’s gone. Very few protoideas are recorded; I am getting better at it although it is not clear what benefit such recording has. The development of something executable is still subject to serendipity or a complex set of mechanisms we call inspiration, or both.

The protoidea becomes reincarnated as an intense idea or a set of thoughts, some time later, but not much later. This, I think, is a critical moment, one that turns the protoidea into something that can have merit, can be acted upon, expanded upon, and made tangible. There seems to be no recipe or pattern to this stage of idea generation.

The deterministic stage is fairly drawn out; first, the timid beginnings which are usually followed by a spurt of productivity which dies its untimely death. After a long pause, the work resumes; more painfully and inertly, but with persistence, the work gains momentum and there is nothing in the world that can stop it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 19:22 and is filed under art, retrospective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.