I am Not An Artist!
I recently had a extraordinary opportunity to bring the Botjoy project to a very unlikely audience: software engineers and the people that use their products. In short, some very smart and technical people.
This was part an amazing opportunity that the folks at Software AG conjured up. They were holding a user conference in Budapest and invited me to be their “Artist in Residence” for the week long event. My role was to be creative stimulus, using the Bot project to help them feel more vibrant, creative and a bit more human.
What an amazing gig I thought, I am being paid to fly to Hungary to make art with people!!! To my surprise, it was even more fulfilling than I could have imagined.
When participants came across the project, almost to a person they immediate said, “I am not an artist!” Some of them left it at that and quickly moved on to other things. But, the majority made their creative identity declaration and then picked up a pen anyways and made some art, wonderful amazing art!
I was so struck by the surprise and delight that people had in this reminder that they can create wonderful things. The Bots were just an easy entry point for this discovery.
One of my mentors, the improv pioneer Keith Johnstone, observed that our willingness to play and create gets taken from us at early age. We doodle, build mud castles and delight in the things that we create, but then we encounter right and wrong creating. In his book Impro, Johnstone retells a story of a young art student who holds up a wonderful scribble drawing to her teacher. The teacher asks, “what is that?” and the student proudly replies “a tree!” The teacher, almost without thinking says, “That’s not a tree”, and “shows” the student how to draw a “real” tree. Yikes, before this moment the child didn’t know that they could get it wrong. Now they do No wonder so many of us dont identify as creative. We were basically shown that we “are not an artist”.
On the banks of the Danube I had the honor of witnessing people having a small regression back to those childhood moments, finding freedom in creating something new!