The Creative and the Technical:
In high school, I made the unconventional choice of studying the sciences with art. This nurtured my natural inclination for mathematics and science, and introduced me to traditional rendering skills with different media. In India, pure science and engineering are considered ‘professional’ streams while art and design are generally looked down upon. I was often asked how art would benefit me as a science student and vice-versa, triggering my desire to explore the convergence of the two fields.
The first step towards this proved to be my undergraduate program in Visual Arts. With a foundation in art history and key skills like painting, illustration and photography, I understood the divide between art and design, and how one impacts the other. Specialising in design proved to be an obvious choice because of my immediate love for typography and my understanding of how successful design is determined by function.
While I could express myself creatively during my undergraduate study, I missed the analytical side of science and math. Even pursuing scientific electives offered by other departments did not really allow me to integrate them into my practice. This changed when I discovered the versatile medium of paper. Following simple logic, craft and precision, paper mechanics felt like the ideal balance between the left and right brain.
One of my projects, Work-osmosis, illustrates the lack of work-life balance leading to stress by fusing art and science. The animation shows ‘work’ seeping into, and sucking the life out of ‘life’. Using hand-painted typography, I dipped the sheets in water to organically spread the ink. I ironically used chromatography, a chemical splitting technique, to show the lack of divide between work and life. (You can view this in motion at https://youtu.be/opY_3XXYIWU)
Framework as Lens:
I also have numerous other interests that keep building over the years like colour, food, nature, travel, puzzles, etc. that directly inform my work. I have been actively trying to balance this dynamic and position my work within multiple domains – primarily art, design and science. This is one of the reasons MFADT is the perfect ‘playing ground’ for me to explore these intersections and discover new ones as I slowly establish my creative practice.
The Krebs Cycle of Creativity outlined in Age of Entanglement (Oxman 2016), has given me great insight into which direction I’d like to orient my work in the future. Using an established visual framework as the foundation to map and assess my past work and experiences provides for fruitful, essential reflection and introspection.
Additionally, the text makes me question whether this framework has to necessarily be a circle divided into sectors. With more domains, will the number of sectors increase? Assuming we all come from different backgrounds, it would be interesting to see how different and unique our individual frameworks look.
I’ve always pictured my creative practice lying within a Venn diagram, using logic and overlaps to mentally position projects within either a universal, intersection or union set (Edwards, 2004, 3). However, I would represent the various parts of a research project like unordered media tetrads (McLuhan, 2017, 14), and my schedule or routine using a pyramidal structure, like a 5-tier health impact pyramid (Freiden, 2004). Different aspects of my personal life such as school, assignments, cooking, connecting with family, etc. would appear on different tiers, with school and assignments occupying the base since all other activities revolve around this schedule.
Points of View in Creativity | Analytical Frameworks
Works Cited
Edwards, Anthony William Fairbank. Cogwheels of the Mind: The Story of Venn Diagrams. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Frieden, Thomas R. “A Framework for Public Health Action: The Health Impact Pyramid.” American Journal of Public Health. American Public Health Association, April 2010. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2836340/.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan. New York: OR Books, 2017.
Oxman, Neri. “Age of Entanglement · Journal of Design and Science.” Journal of Design and Science, January 13, 2016. https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ageofentanglement/release/1.