Origin of Ideas

Rough Draft for Final Paper (ART 315)

When we look at art, are we looking at something considered to be original in our minds, or merely an abstraction of a pre-existing idea. If you pick any object that has never been painted before and render it out by yourself, is this original just because the exact thing has never been created before, or is it simply a copy of somebody else’s idea of a simple still life.

When we look at the Mona Lisa, for a common example, we can google image search it and find many copies and variations rendered by other artists. It is a fact that none of these are original, when you take into consideration that the idea and composition was taken, if not stolen, from the “original”. Where things start to get complicated, is when you think about the Mona Lisa and wether or not THAT was original, because some could see it as un-original, as it is a simple portrait of a woman. There have been many portraits of many different women, so isn’t this just a new woman with the pre-existing idea of painting a portrait in mind? I don’t have the exact answer but I speculate that all ideas have ancestry behind them leading back to one simple thing; impulsive decision making. What I mean by this is that when we choose to do any one thing in life, we are choosing on the basis of instinct and impulse. Wether it’s love or greed that drives this instinct, it’s within our humanly nature to make such decisions. I think that Leonardo Da Vinci may have had an instinctively programmed nature in himself to just paint and create things. Another question, could be wether or not these things were original creative thinking.

Some of his war machines seemed to be un-like anything we’ve ever seen before, as if created completely out of thin air. But we know that everything has to come about through inspiration and things we already know or have seen before. A great example for this is some of his flying machines, which came from the inspiration of birds. Everybody has seen a bird, assuming they’ve been outside, so who is to say somebody wouldn’t later have the same brilliant ideas as Da Vinci to create human powered flight? My point is that in our observable universe, we can gather data and then create “new” ideas based on this data. The data we gather may be new to us at the time, but once we combine it into art or other ideas, have we truly created something original, or merely a combination of something that has existed long before our time?

Of course, I’m not trying to negatively take any stabs towards some of humanities greatest achievements, but merely attempting to make sense of what it could take to create something original, that nobody has ever seen before.

Consider the new company and taxi-service UBER, and think about how the founder may have came up with the idea. He took the convenience factor of NYC taxi services and pretty much wanted that to be universally accessible. He did just that, which has turned into a successful business, which is great… but is this original? Won’t all things become more convenient? Isn;t this bound to happen to everything eventually? This same convenience factor could be applied to many things and start many new companies and ideas. But convenience has always been a thing.

Kenneth Testa (Art 315)

Now consider the birth of a child, and his welcoming into the world beyond the womb. Is this original creation of a new man or woman? Maybe it’s the complex mising of two genetic sets of data, which create a certain combinational pattern of new DNA for the newborn. But when we look at this ancestrey idea, who’s genes were first, and who was the first human and what did their genes look like? How was the first human created if no humans existed before him/her? We can of course look into evolution, but then where is the true start of life? This can go so very deep into the history of the universe that you wonder how anything really ever existed at all. What was the first ever “thing” or “object” that started it all? Was god the creator of the known uvniverse, and was he the spirit that crafted original thoughts in our brains, giving us the incredible capability to convieve “original” thought?

Now that you see where I could go with this, do you begin to question if any of your ideas were really originals, and if maybe they were inspired by somebody elses ideas, which were of course inspired by previously existing ones themselves. It’s a giant cycling of ideas from one human to another, and everything we create in life, every decision we make,… is really just a combination of pre-made things that have existed before us. Everything we know may just be a copy or alteration of something before it.

To go back to a more simple idea, lets look at prototyping, and creating a “new” product. When companies begin to design and produce new things, they usually go through cycles and variations of them, until the perfect result is achieved. For example, the supercar company Konneigsag, makes some of the fastest land cars in the world. Every day they improve their designs and learn new variations of certain body parts and engine parts to achive a better result than the last time. But when you think about their process, you realize that all they are doing is taking one idea, and changing it, and then taking that changed idea and changing it again. It’s the process of adding or subtracting to refine the perfect result. So is this original, and was their first supercar the true start of it all, the “original” copy? No. The reason why this is not true is because cars had already existed before this, and all of the details that are a part of a car are just altered in such a way that what’s produced is conveyed as original.