Creative doldrums an Illusion

I could have had a house and land for all I’ve given away to the mooches.

Ellison echoes the inner-mind chatter I’ve had for decades. The only thing I have gotten for exposure is a sunburn.

If you truly understand consumer/viewer psychology and behavior you know the value of exposure rarely even makes it to the unconscious mind of the viewer. The conscious associations with your work are almost purely incidental. As a creative, if you don’t understand the audience, you are not communicating, you are advertising. I run my DVR on still for 20 minuets before I watch TV so I can edit out the commercials that only insult the story in which I am hopefully immersed. I don’t advertise, or, expose. I create.

As creative’s however, we do have a resource for survival in a jungle of predators that crawl, sneak and pounce for only their own gains.

Creativity, and hopefully creative awareness.

Thinking ourselves out of the bag is what we do. The challenge is, when the medium changes, we can take advantage by engaging our creative abilities. I refuse to follow the fences to the sheering and slaughtering yards. Rather, I would look for alternate paths to lands that support all our lives.

Marketing is telling people what they should drink. Consumerism is the laced Kool-aid that has been drunk, laced with the thoughts that we will never, ever, have enough.

I’ve seen brilliant works that could change the world for the better, killed for only refusing to succumb to the machines drone, “Without advertising, we cant afford to broadcast/publish”. That’s crap. People will pay for quality entertainment, knowledge and information.

So now we suffer for such empty subjective awareness (or lack therein). Now the machine is broken, the premise gutted. Our good works however are still there. Waiting for a blank canvas, screen, audio speaker, and as viable as day one.
Without our works the paper is blank, the screens are empty, and the sound is the clock in the room, ticking away the potentials for growing our knowledge. Aren’t we not actually an evolving species?

Somehow we have been convinced we are secondary to the process, when in fact we represent and demonstrate the reason for it all. We have been tamed by the machine, and we starve because the machine only says there is no market, no resource, so, no audience.

We make markets. Creative awareness is the building tool for our future. No one turns this off. We might only believe we can’t afford to use it. More crap. It’s always available and packs its own energy.

It is time we use it to build a new paradigm. But on substance, quality and the gifts of great ideas we as creative’s are midwifes to.

And, amateurs welcome. Because we know on a level playing field the best players always rise to the top. We just need loose the bookies that only obscure a clear view of the field.

Millions of years ago, it was the artist-shaman that painted our hopes and dreams as real on the walls of the caves with fish blood , mineral, vegetable colors and stains. The successful hunt could be seen in pictograph and paintings before the hunters left the cave.

Visualization is powerful reality building material. It is our job to paint that future, and loose the parasites that for all their value, only slowed us down and diverted our compass, unfortunately landing us in this seemingly hopeless port.

We need to take up our tools and gifts and fix the medium, if in fact it “…is the message”. (McLuhan)
The better message being, “we can do it, do it right, and do it better, and with real meaning.”

Don’t feed the Sheep.
Feed the imagination.