Creative Thought Space |
Ahmed Nagy | Cairo, Egypt | www.ahmednagy.net
Artist, Founder/Director of Space for Contemporary Art & Cultural Development
Artist, Founder/Director of Space for Contemporary Art & Cultural Development

What do you think being creative means?
Simply it is based on anything to open the mind to new ideas and ways of thinking; asking and addressing questions about Who, What, Where, When, Why, How; setting up a frame of topic that guides a process and determines its focus; and continuously questions, with things like: What if this was like that? When will this not be true? Where would this look out of place? After this it is about specifically using a sense or a feeling, depending on the first impression, to define exactly what is important and what is not important according to the main frame of the topic, as opposed to the personal sense or feeling as it is already personal because it has come from you. For me, the writing out of ideas becomes very important at this stage as it helps me see the invisible, which leads to the final stage, making the invisible tangible by filtering the ideas down into movement to physically create the idea.
In some ways, being creative is the perfection in technique plus something else, as defined by the American actor Roger Robinson, and that means that creativity is always looking for “perfection”. This perfection is sometimes achieved by the death of the imagination, that is, the creator must know the difference between the imagined and the conceived. For example: “yesterday I touched the sky” is imagined, because there is no thing tangibly called the sky limits. Imagination based on feelings on the other hand as in “yesterday I saw a black sky”, is conceived because dense clouds are based on fact. So these two words are counter to each other, and I think that real creativity lies here, between the difference, between the sense and the feeling, the understanding and realizing, the connotation and denotation. If an artwork is dealing with a denotation (i.e. the word’s actual meaning e.g. a rose’s denotative meaning is a ‘red flower’), it is working on the surface of the subject. But if one understands the connotation (i.e. thing associated with a word e.g. a rose’s connotative meaning can be ‘love, Valentine’s’, etc), I think the start point of the artwork and the artistic process will find a way to each other and easily translate into a final work of art, because it is based on deeper understanding and not on weak whims.
This leads me to ask, “How important is imagination in the creative process? How can we not be romantic? And is romance required or not?” I think creativity is not able to be a mere personal expression because art creation is not just a naïve expression of what the artist feels as feelings differ from person to person, and it may just be an expression based on whim, not from evidence. So to me creativity is the production of an infinite subjective series i.e. ideas, concepts, thoughts or mental processes; through the finite means of a material subtraction i.e. the artist him/herself; and produces a new infinite content, a new vision of a thing that is the embodiment of the intangible i.e. the art product itself, which in turn contains or reproduces the infinite subjective.
Creativity is producing a new meaning of a thing by means of precise and finite summarization. It is also the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone, and because the truth is separate from loving or hating the thing, the truth and creativity are inseparable. I mean, both of them are based on deep studies. From this point forward I think that artistic creation should introduce a new universality, against the universality of totalization, not to express a static sensible expression or the self or the community, but because it is necessary for artistic creation to propose to us, to humanity in general, a new sort of universality.
How do you include creativity in your life?
I think with creativity, it is not a choice of right or wrong, it just is. As a result, creative thinking opens up an outlook to the idea that anything is possible and there is no right way to do something. This means a creator automatically sees the world differently and hence life and art are inseparable. For me, the life in both my day-to-day living and my art practice are one thing that serves as a detection of something that does not exist yet. Without creativity, the number of attempts to achieve this may last forever, and the number of times it is accessed will be almost zero. I have built my life and work around the commitment to intercultural dialogue and it is this conviction and belief in the importance of public discussion that prescribes my position. So when I define myself I just prefer to call myself “an artist” without any kind of companion characterization, because the concept/idea dictates me to use different methods in order to achieve it - it is a concept, not just for art, but also for life.
What are your thoughts on how your life has influenced your creative imagination, and how your creative imagination has influenced your life?
Life and creativity are two elements in one circuit, always trying to start from a new point for me, like listening to narratives, the movement of people around me, hearing dialectical nature discussions, taking the opinion of not relevant, making comparisons, reading events from different and multiple contexts. Many things like this are the main references of my artistic practice, and of course this has influenced my life. For example, when I was working on “The Holy Zero” 2010 (a multimedia installation, one channel video - recorded broadcast of satellite channel TV), I tried to analyse the interactive performance between the “scene of contemporary competition channels” as a productive social behaviour and "the scene of contemporary science" as a technology production and new scientific mechanism. The final production output of my theses was “in access to the molecule, that component of the article is the same access to the mind and that component of the behaviour”. It is something that came from social behaviour and went into art. It is an infinite circuit of multiple processes.
In another project “Two Taia3” 2009 (a two channel video installation), where I collaborated with Mahmoud Hallwy (“Taia” in Arabic means “Foldable” in English), the translation of universal consumption was a main theme of the project and of course came from the town Cairo. The project dealt with images and contradictory formulations that appear through the media and how the community acquires this diversity of behavioural patterns and converts it to be their basic identity. The project is based on the gained consumption culture from different types of media, which become the basic elements that build the identity of the community, and are often different, multiple, variable, non-specific, contradictory and vehicle elements. We can clearly define these actions as “construction processes” - building solid templates, difficult to easily penetrate, built from the process of broadcasting and direct export for the vast amount of concepts, images and ideologies that are seemingly simple. The process of “Two Taia3” was based on the phrase: “The transferred language called the source and the translated language called the target”.
What, if any, exercises do you do to get into a creative mode?
Observation, watching and analytical-criticism thinking are the best exercises for me. Generally, observation is an important part of learning how to do things. It assists us to communicate even better with things, it improves an individual’s skills of decisionmaking, and it also gives us the opportunity to see problems and opportunities before others occur. This is actually a great tool we can make use of that leads and manages. The criticism on the other hand brings me closer to the criterion. And with regard to analysis, it is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of it. It supports the idea, with suggestions better taken and analyzed cool-headedly.
How important do you think creativity is in life?
The interaction or the interchanges between life and creativity are always in sustained movement, I mean, it’s an infinite cycle between the two. Life is the essence of creativity and life without creativity would have no progress. What a dull, soulless, barren existence it would be. It would be forever repeating life and the same pattern everywhere, while there would be zero imagination.
There is another example of creativity’s importance. Denotations come from “behaviour”, a lead component of mass culture. However, connotations are “hidden components” within the mass culture itself, which is where my interests lie because connotations per se are created when someone means something else, something that might initially be hidden and are therefore subjective, personal, even poetic interpretations. As culture is the “totality” of mental and material wealth through humanity’s history, it is the product of people’s practice and creation. Any race in the world has its own culture and connotations. Denotation serves as the window to manifest the content of its own culture, but one must be free to leave the surface of the denotation to go deeply through the connotations in order to easily and truthfully find the connection between things. Likewise, culture, attached to language is very important to me because the art practice for me is something without domination where I can be free of what I literally see and read into a deeper context, which gives me the possibility to create new possibilities that don’t exist yet. This also relates to other inputs such as the political field, and detecting further things that do not yet exist.
The nature of creativity always holds more than we think. Our relationship between self and thing is formed from “perception”. Formally, the act of perceiving may require the involvement of old meanings to create new meanings. When the mind grasps the thing freely - understanding it or not understanding it, or understanding it according to or through the context of endless abstract or concrete topics - when the mind actually grasps it, and regardless of the extent of which it does, it is only subject to the specific requirements inherent in the nature of perception.
Simply it is based on anything to open the mind to new ideas and ways of thinking; asking and addressing questions about Who, What, Where, When, Why, How; setting up a frame of topic that guides a process and determines its focus; and continuously questions, with things like: What if this was like that? When will this not be true? Where would this look out of place? After this it is about specifically using a sense or a feeling, depending on the first impression, to define exactly what is important and what is not important according to the main frame of the topic, as opposed to the personal sense or feeling as it is already personal because it has come from you. For me, the writing out of ideas becomes very important at this stage as it helps me see the invisible, which leads to the final stage, making the invisible tangible by filtering the ideas down into movement to physically create the idea.
In some ways, being creative is the perfection in technique plus something else, as defined by the American actor Roger Robinson, and that means that creativity is always looking for “perfection”. This perfection is sometimes achieved by the death of the imagination, that is, the creator must know the difference between the imagined and the conceived. For example: “yesterday I touched the sky” is imagined, because there is no thing tangibly called the sky limits. Imagination based on feelings on the other hand as in “yesterday I saw a black sky”, is conceived because dense clouds are based on fact. So these two words are counter to each other, and I think that real creativity lies here, between the difference, between the sense and the feeling, the understanding and realizing, the connotation and denotation. If an artwork is dealing with a denotation (i.e. the word’s actual meaning e.g. a rose’s denotative meaning is a ‘red flower’), it is working on the surface of the subject. But if one understands the connotation (i.e. thing associated with a word e.g. a rose’s connotative meaning can be ‘love, Valentine’s’, etc), I think the start point of the artwork and the artistic process will find a way to each other and easily translate into a final work of art, because it is based on deeper understanding and not on weak whims.
This leads me to ask, “How important is imagination in the creative process? How can we not be romantic? And is romance required or not?” I think creativity is not able to be a mere personal expression because art creation is not just a naïve expression of what the artist feels as feelings differ from person to person, and it may just be an expression based on whim, not from evidence. So to me creativity is the production of an infinite subjective series i.e. ideas, concepts, thoughts or mental processes; through the finite means of a material subtraction i.e. the artist him/herself; and produces a new infinite content, a new vision of a thing that is the embodiment of the intangible i.e. the art product itself, which in turn contains or reproduces the infinite subjective.
Creativity is producing a new meaning of a thing by means of precise and finite summarization. It is also the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone, and because the truth is separate from loving or hating the thing, the truth and creativity are inseparable. I mean, both of them are based on deep studies. From this point forward I think that artistic creation should introduce a new universality, against the universality of totalization, not to express a static sensible expression or the self or the community, but because it is necessary for artistic creation to propose to us, to humanity in general, a new sort of universality.
How do you include creativity in your life?
I think with creativity, it is not a choice of right or wrong, it just is. As a result, creative thinking opens up an outlook to the idea that anything is possible and there is no right way to do something. This means a creator automatically sees the world differently and hence life and art are inseparable. For me, the life in both my day-to-day living and my art practice are one thing that serves as a detection of something that does not exist yet. Without creativity, the number of attempts to achieve this may last forever, and the number of times it is accessed will be almost zero. I have built my life and work around the commitment to intercultural dialogue and it is this conviction and belief in the importance of public discussion that prescribes my position. So when I define myself I just prefer to call myself “an artist” without any kind of companion characterization, because the concept/idea dictates me to use different methods in order to achieve it - it is a concept, not just for art, but also for life.
What are your thoughts on how your life has influenced your creative imagination, and how your creative imagination has influenced your life?
Life and creativity are two elements in one circuit, always trying to start from a new point for me, like listening to narratives, the movement of people around me, hearing dialectical nature discussions, taking the opinion of not relevant, making comparisons, reading events from different and multiple contexts. Many things like this are the main references of my artistic practice, and of course this has influenced my life. For example, when I was working on “The Holy Zero” 2010 (a multimedia installation, one channel video - recorded broadcast of satellite channel TV), I tried to analyse the interactive performance between the “scene of contemporary competition channels” as a productive social behaviour and "the scene of contemporary science" as a technology production and new scientific mechanism. The final production output of my theses was “in access to the molecule, that component of the article is the same access to the mind and that component of the behaviour”. It is something that came from social behaviour and went into art. It is an infinite circuit of multiple processes.
In another project “Two Taia3” 2009 (a two channel video installation), where I collaborated with Mahmoud Hallwy (“Taia” in Arabic means “Foldable” in English), the translation of universal consumption was a main theme of the project and of course came from the town Cairo. The project dealt with images and contradictory formulations that appear through the media and how the community acquires this diversity of behavioural patterns and converts it to be their basic identity. The project is based on the gained consumption culture from different types of media, which become the basic elements that build the identity of the community, and are often different, multiple, variable, non-specific, contradictory and vehicle elements. We can clearly define these actions as “construction processes” - building solid templates, difficult to easily penetrate, built from the process of broadcasting and direct export for the vast amount of concepts, images and ideologies that are seemingly simple. The process of “Two Taia3” was based on the phrase: “The transferred language called the source and the translated language called the target”.
What, if any, exercises do you do to get into a creative mode?
Observation, watching and analytical-criticism thinking are the best exercises for me. Generally, observation is an important part of learning how to do things. It assists us to communicate even better with things, it improves an individual’s skills of decisionmaking, and it also gives us the opportunity to see problems and opportunities before others occur. This is actually a great tool we can make use of that leads and manages. The criticism on the other hand brings me closer to the criterion. And with regard to analysis, it is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of it. It supports the idea, with suggestions better taken and analyzed cool-headedly.
How important do you think creativity is in life?
The interaction or the interchanges between life and creativity are always in sustained movement, I mean, it’s an infinite cycle between the two. Life is the essence of creativity and life without creativity would have no progress. What a dull, soulless, barren existence it would be. It would be forever repeating life and the same pattern everywhere, while there would be zero imagination.
There is another example of creativity’s importance. Denotations come from “behaviour”, a lead component of mass culture. However, connotations are “hidden components” within the mass culture itself, which is where my interests lie because connotations per se are created when someone means something else, something that might initially be hidden and are therefore subjective, personal, even poetic interpretations. As culture is the “totality” of mental and material wealth through humanity’s history, it is the product of people’s practice and creation. Any race in the world has its own culture and connotations. Denotation serves as the window to manifest the content of its own culture, but one must be free to leave the surface of the denotation to go deeply through the connotations in order to easily and truthfully find the connection between things. Likewise, culture, attached to language is very important to me because the art practice for me is something without domination where I can be free of what I literally see and read into a deeper context, which gives me the possibility to create new possibilities that don’t exist yet. This also relates to other inputs such as the political field, and detecting further things that do not yet exist.
The nature of creativity always holds more than we think. Our relationship between self and thing is formed from “perception”. Formally, the act of perceiving may require the involvement of old meanings to create new meanings. When the mind grasps the thing freely - understanding it or not understanding it, or understanding it according to or through the context of endless abstract or concrete topics - when the mind actually grasps it, and regardless of the extent of which it does, it is only subject to the specific requirements inherent in the nature of perception.