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Upon reflecting on an ardent conversation I had with a friend a couple of weeks back, I have begun a new project. Being the creative and ruminating individual that I am, I graduated this year from university with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with honours. I've always been cognitively and internally aware of how I work as an artist and my intent is always primarily to pitch a message of some kind to an educated audience. Therefore, no decisions I make during the production process are ever arbitrary, from the first stages of conception, the theorists' work I engage with right down to the artists significant to my own practice and the medium I use. Every decision, whether consciously aware of it or not, is made for a specific reason.
Now, that being said, I am not always using hard-nosed rigourous rationality to arrive at my decisions. Often I decide intuitively on things, yet it's still a decision with a kind of 'force' or 'weight' behind it, if you will. Getting back to the conversation I had, my friend pointed out that of all the other artists he had met prior to meeting me, none of them could describe in any rigorous detail exactly how they came up with their ideas for their artistic endeavors in the first place. "I just...do" or "I don't know....I just happened to think of it" are some typical responses from creatives for how they explain where their insights come from. The crux of our conversation came down to asking this question: Is it possible to come up with a rigorous formula or recipe for producing a meritorious idea? - My initial response was no, despite the fact that I knew a signification process was taking place internally in myself every time I came up with an idea and made decisions regarding artistic practice. "It's not that no particular way of reaching an idea was present", I thought, "but how am I supposed to figure out in precise detail what is going when such a process of signification occurs?" - That's when I remembered studying (although barely scratching the surface) semiotic theory and Bartesian notions of the formation of ideology in art school. If Barthes can explain how ideologies (he calls them 'myths') form and Saussure and Pierce can explain how the elements of signs come together, then I must be able to apply such thought to how I get to particular idea!
Of course much more research will be needed to even attempt this besides the Bartesian and classical theory of semiotics, but that now acts as a springboard for me to launch this project off of.
I would appreciate any input or thoughts any of you may have, whether positive, negative or neutral, but please keep it constructive :)