Fishing for Ideas
I find it funny how there seems to be moments in life where everything appears to be reinforcing everything else you’re doing — this odd phenomena has increased in frequency for me within the past several months.
Before fall, I was scrambling for ideas —which direction to take my thesis in, a project I anticipated and knew I would be undertaking since my initiation into Interactive Multimedia — what tools and techniques could I highlight, film? sound design? VR? Almost too many options — I honestly had no idea, especially having worked in so many areas and disciplines within the major.
At the same time as this hurried, flustered search for a final project, it seemed every piece of media or advice I ingested wanted me to go about finding this final idea from a completely different perspective. There’s an animated video (unsurprisingly using some philosophies of one of my favorite directors, David Lynch) that helped illustrate this way of thinking and aided in this ongoing search for creativity:
This philosophy of fishing for ideas amazed me — there’s an ocean full of countless ideas, ready to be lured in. You just have to be in the right mindset, and it being a positive one can only help.
And then I caught something.
Quite literally sitting on a beach, days before the commencement of the fall Senior Thesis section, letting ideas flow fluidly — guitar pedals.
I really don’t know what exactly it was that made this idea so appealing right out of the gate — perhaps the fact that up until that point, I never really dabbled with effects pedals so the field felt ripe to my mind. Maybe it was the transdisciplinary aspect — the ability to use my digital fabrication skills to create unique enclosures for interesting circuitry (of which was an entirely untouched area, also intriguing). Or conceivably just the idea of jumping into something so out-of-left-field — so many possible results and outcomes seemed exhilarating.
But I think sticking with this seemingly incongruous (to everything I’d down up to this time) plan came down to one main reason — it’s my final year in an undergraduate setting and who knows when I’ll be able to completely immerse myself in a project of my choosing next. While it can get entirely too overwhelming at some points, I’m so excited I stuck with it.
It’s this immersion into the field of electronics, computing and effects pedals that has stemmed into many more ideas and innovations within my own project. As a book I’m currently reading for a Creative Design course, The Art of Invention by Steven J. Paley, states, a fundamental step in attacking a problem is by developing contiguous expertise in the areas surrounding the idea or problem. Your mind will have nothing to work with without “feeding the brain by accumulating the information that will serve as the building blocks of creativity.”
Whether it’s randomly perusing Youtube, small talk with unknowing role models in the department or the assigned literature in an elective course, life has apparently laid a foundation where I’ve been able to develop an effective way of fishing for the right ideas.
