Artistic Thinking: Week 13 - Play Assignment

Granimator is an app for the iPad that allows the user to create wallpapers for their iPad and iPhone. By manipulating stamp-like elements in the artists packs the user can create a variety of compositions. The background to this blog was originally created in Granimator.

Screen Shot of Styles Palette

The following are some of the images created during my play with a few of the new Granimator packs. I gave myself 1 minute to create an image using the app, then created 5 images per pack, had 6 new packs to explore, and made a total of 30 images. I was exploring the play concept of quantity to learn to work spontaneously without editing. Here is a link to a page showing all 30 experiments: http://bunniesthatquack.blogspot.com/p/granimator.html

Reflection: I decided to work with quantity as it has been described as a way to boost creativity and play by Hugh MacLeod in the first of my creativity books "Ignore Everybody" and by Tim Brown when describing the "30 Circles Test" in this week's TEDtalk video. Tim Brown describes working in quantity as having the mindset to just go for it, even when the results don't seem that different from each other. To work quickly, without allowing for opportunities to self-edit, allows ideas to flow into each other. I found myself building off compositional ideas and approaches to work flows that I was discovering as I played with the program. I even found a randomize button in the styles palette that allowed for less "set-up" time and contributed to a better flow of ideas between canvases. Having to think in terms of quantity let me work freely to discover, explore, and purposefully apply new ideas as I moved from canvas to fresh canvas. I think working in quantity would be a good way to quickly explore the possibilities of a software program. For example, Adobe Premiere (the non-linear editor we use in the AV courses) has many video effects. I could easily see students take a handful of clips and start exploring the available video effects to discover their possibilities. In our Hetland text, Beth Balliro describes the importance of this kind of exploration by saying that, "If I had more time, I would have them learn entirely from the materials. And let them learn, and then fail... It's not about perfection and dominating [the] material, but it's about letting [the] material do what it will" (p. 75). While she is describing large projects, in my classroom practice I think software exploration could be broken into smaller chunks that can be explore in single class periods.