Breaking the Rules of Play

Image by chrismetcalfTV on Flickr

I’ve been working with The Artist’s Way for a few years now and recently completed a fourth round (I think). It took me a while to bring myself to read it (because I’m not an artist, just a writer), and then a few rounds to really take in its lessons.

The concept I’ve struggled most with has been the artist’s date. I’m an excellent student, and when given homework, I do it meticulously. I’ve been out at the train station with a camera (terrifying, I think, the platform officers who converged on me thinking I would jump). I’ve been walking into bookstores that call me and buying pretty notebooks. I’ve been collecting magazines and making collages in my sketchbook. That one, actually, has been the one I struggled with the least. I found not having to come up with the images myself, but just picking out things I like and arranging them on the page liberating. I don’t count that as creating, but I put some new music on and tear through the magazines (usually the Tate magazine and a bunch of promotional stuff that arrive unsolicited to our house).

The other day, I had Bishop Briggs’s new album on, and I was tearing through my latest batch of magazines. Once I depleted them and stuck all the images on my sketchbook pages, I returned to my computer. I actually was having fun and didn’t want the artist date to end. And I had this random idea that I would look through data sets. I ferreted around and thought about data and the stories it can tell.

While training as a researcher, one of my favourite things was trolling through the data. You’re not supposed to do it, and I would only do it after I had finished the analyses I was supposed to be doing on the data so as not to tamper with these analyses. But then, once the analyses were completed and we had the results of our experiment, I would go back to the data set and just play with it. I loved finding random connections (this is why you’re not supposed to troll through data: if you do, you’ll find something). Sometimes, these connections would spark a new story in my head, which might be grounds for a new experiment. Sometimes, I would then return to older data sets and ferret around in those to see if these connections are consistent.

But, I thought to myself as Bishop Briggs was playing and I looked at time usage datasets, I’m not a scientist anymore. I’m an artist now. What does this strange attraction to data mean? Well, what does it mean other than confirmation of me being a geek? It threw me off for a while because, you see, I had a false dichotomy in my head: art and science cannot converge.

Of course, this was never the case. Science is one of the more creative fields out there. Even if there are strict rules to our methods, the data means nothing if it doesn’t tell a story. I learned this while presenting posters at conferences, writing academic journal papers and working on my PhD thesis. Plus, to come up with new theories and experiments, scientists need to think outside the box, try a bunch of things and fail, and keep going. It’s remarkably parallel to the artist’s process, just with different materials.

Another false dichotomy I’ve struggled to dismantle lately is the distinction between work and play. I’ve been trying to let that go and finding myself surprisingly resistant. It turns out I believe that work should be hard, dull, challenging: that I should suffer through it. But reading, thinking, and writing are all my favourite things to do. I can do this all day and come out of my office rejuvenated. What am I doing wrong?

The understanding that my materials as a writer are time and mind space shifted my outlook on artist’s dates. Before, I was going through the motions. I was finding artist dates I thought I should have: going to museums, lying on the grass, watching the clouds go by, making collages. All are nice, by the way, and have their place. But what I never considered an artist date is going down rabbit holes of curiosity: ferreting around datasets, researching Greek mythology, reading a history book. All of these, I thought, were work. And an artist’s date is supposed to be play.

What I’ve come to understand about myself is that these are the things I play with. Does it make me a geek? Absolutely. Does it mean I can’t play around in datasets and call it an artist date? Watch me.