Creative Thought Space |
Tyson Yunkaporta | Melbourne, Australia | www.ikslab.deakin.edu.au/
Thinker, maker, researcher, poet, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab
What do you think being creative means?
Being creative is about making and sharing meaning, in how you interact with the boundaries of your relationships and entanglements with law, institutions, communities, lands and cultures. You create embodied objects and texts to facilitate shared meaning, located in the relational spaces in between entities.
How do you include creativity in your life?
It is simply the production, re-production and transmission of culture, bound by protocols informed by relational context. You work from the conventions of a discipline, replicating those and embellishing on them within the set patterns but weaving your unique experience and knowledge throughout.
What are your thoughts on how your life has influenced your creative imagination, and how your creative imagination has influenced your life?
The struggle between my desire as a male for distinction and exceptionalism through boundary violation, seeded from global media and Hollywood in particular, and my groundedness in culture, land and kin obligations/protocols that have very strict boundaries, has been an enormously generative space of tension in my work. If I do whatever I might imagine, without limits, then the result is absolute rubbish. If I merely reproduce traditional forms, the result is unremarkable. But there is no such thing as imagination, only forms and signals that already exist within a pluriversal creation that is timeless. Nothing is new, and what arts you find in creation through relational increase cannot be created or co-created by a you. Creativity and imagination are abstractions that frame individualistic and competitive worldviews and markets, and they don't really exist.
What, if any, exercises do you do to get into a creative mode?
I always start with the Lore of the places and themes emerging from a context, then follow the paths of human and non-human kin who signal the symbioses and flows of change along those paths. I translate the collective sense-making that follows into symbolic codes that are layered for levels of interpretation accessible to others depending on their depth of knowledge, relation and experience.
How important do you think creativity is in life?
Creation is all life. Meaning-making in good relation is what we do as a custodial species, a behaviour and role we perform in our biological niche. This has been called creativity or art so that it can be categorised as labour in service of a system that destroys creation through the tinkering of supply and demand loops. In healthy systems, expression of meaning in complexity is something everybody is involved in rather than an exclusive activity for elite specialists.
Being creative is about making and sharing meaning, in how you interact with the boundaries of your relationships and entanglements with law, institutions, communities, lands and cultures. You create embodied objects and texts to facilitate shared meaning, located in the relational spaces in between entities.
How do you include creativity in your life?
It is simply the production, re-production and transmission of culture, bound by protocols informed by relational context. You work from the conventions of a discipline, replicating those and embellishing on them within the set patterns but weaving your unique experience and knowledge throughout.
What are your thoughts on how your life has influenced your creative imagination, and how your creative imagination has influenced your life?
The struggle between my desire as a male for distinction and exceptionalism through boundary violation, seeded from global media and Hollywood in particular, and my groundedness in culture, land and kin obligations/protocols that have very strict boundaries, has been an enormously generative space of tension in my work. If I do whatever I might imagine, without limits, then the result is absolute rubbish. If I merely reproduce traditional forms, the result is unremarkable. But there is no such thing as imagination, only forms and signals that already exist within a pluriversal creation that is timeless. Nothing is new, and what arts you find in creation through relational increase cannot be created or co-created by a you. Creativity and imagination are abstractions that frame individualistic and competitive worldviews and markets, and they don't really exist.
What, if any, exercises do you do to get into a creative mode?
I always start with the Lore of the places and themes emerging from a context, then follow the paths of human and non-human kin who signal the symbioses and flows of change along those paths. I translate the collective sense-making that follows into symbolic codes that are layered for levels of interpretation accessible to others depending on their depth of knowledge, relation and experience.
How important do you think creativity is in life?
Creation is all life. Meaning-making in good relation is what we do as a custodial species, a behaviour and role we perform in our biological niche. This has been called creativity or art so that it can be categorised as labour in service of a system that destroys creation through the tinkering of supply and demand loops. In healthy systems, expression of meaning in complexity is something everybody is involved in rather than an exclusive activity for elite specialists.