"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
- Pablo Picasso.

Pablo Picasso created paintings, sculptures, prints, and ceramics and is famous for his pioneering work in cubism. During his 75 year career, he continued his creative output at a prolific pace and with a vital energy more equivalent to today's accelerated technological and cultural changes, than to his own comtempory culture.

As a 'sculptor-painter', Picasso observed: "Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on a painting."

Topic:
IMAGINATION AND CREATIVE GROWTH
The process of inventing reasons and meanings to explain things about the world.

Psychologists and physiologists have discovered that words and images are particular impulses which originate in separate parts of the brain. The left hemisphere generates words; the right generates images. If I ask you to describe the breakfast you ate this morning, you will probably experience both visual and verbal thought. You might see the food in your mind and then select and organize the words needed to describe that picture. Brain activity influences personality. The left-brain is the seat of logic and linear organization; of structural certainties - lists, outlines and scientific proof; of sensing the order of time. The right-brain is intuitive rather than mathematical in influencing judgment, recognizes the parts of a thing as an integrated whole (gestalt), yet is divorced from knowing time. Visual impulses move through consciousness as images, impressions, and sensations like dream experience. Visual thinking is our ability to imagine. The right-brained person might be accused of being a dreamer - lost in "imagination".

The word "imagination" is often associated with young children. We find it cute that children have such vivid "imaginations" when they play, pretend and invent.

As adults we lose interest in imaginal thinking. Robert Fulghum, a former (part-time) Unitarian minister and author of the book Everything I Wanted to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, once visited a kindergarten class and asked, "Can any of you draw?" Every child raised their arms emphatically. "Can any of you dance, sing, act?" For each question every child could do all of those things, and wanted to demonstrate with an impromptu audition. Then he visited a college classroom and asked the same questions. No one could or would admit to drawing, dancing, singing or acting. Picasso observed that "all children paint like geniuses". Then asked, "What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability?"

If we examine the word imagination we see that it has "image" in it. An image is a mental picture. It also has "imagine" in it. To imagine is to create mental pictures, to see with eyes closed. We all imagine in common ways everyday, in remembering - "did I turn the stove off?"- , daydreaming - what will I say at the next committee meeting?"... Through imagination we project our feelings and expectations onto objects in our environment, like Van Gogh’s painting of a chair or Leonardo’s notebook descriptions of seeing dragons in the clouds and faces in the cracks of sidewalks.

We create analogies and metaphors to connect with things outside of ourselves, as in the classical myths where the forces of nature are personified into gods and goddesses, and with the inner aspects of human personality, as the characters of fairy tales - giants, witches, trolls, fairy godmothers, princes and frogs.

Through art, personal analogies and metaphors are shared through the visual language of the imagination.

This is clear in the Haiku:

- Jack Kerouac’s haikus (Spring,1958-Blues and Haikus):
The tree looks like a dog/ barking at heaven.
In my medicine cabinet/the winter fly/ has died, of old age.

- or from Basho the 17th century inventor of Japanese Haiku:
Bright moon: strolling around the pond all night long.

- Kobayashi Issa: (early19th century)
Under my house an inchworm, measuring the joists.

Imagination is the source of fantasies - daydreams, the visionary’s ability to create unseen worlds and discover unknown routes to familiar places. We seem to have an instinct for inventing images to identify the intangible forces of our lives. With the ability to visualize, to see through our mind’s eye, we project our hopes and plans for the future, and the identity of who we are and how we connect to the world around us. The images we create determine the reality of personal existence. We become what we imagine.

John Lennon asked us to :
Imagine all the people, living life in peace... no countries, ... no religions, ... no possessions, ... no need for greed or hunger, ... Imagine all the people sharing all the world...
- John Lennon, Imagine

We use imagination in remembering, daydreaming/fantasizing, empathizing, dreaming, and seeing.

It provides the atmosphere in which the arts can breathe.

It provides images which suggest answers to the hard questions: What am I? Why am I living? What is real...

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Research activities by buster & friends’ d’da include the following projects:
io 0.0.1 beta
Automatic Morricone Machine
Church of Sonology
...all of which include tongue-in-cheek experiments with A.I. (Artifact Intelligence),
granular synthesis, vocoders, pseudo-random number generators, iteration, recursion and loudspeakers.
NOTE: Software component of io written in HMSL.



Download, install and Jam with the Multiplayer version of Webdrum 2 from TransJam.com.

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