{"id":11008,"date":"2015-12-17T20:31:44","date_gmt":"2015-12-17T20:31:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/what-star-wars-minus-star-wars-says-about\/"},"modified":"2015-12-17T20:31:44","modified_gmt":"2015-12-17T20:31:44","slug":"what-star-wars-minus-star-wars-says-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/what-star-wars-minus-star-wars-says-about\/","title":{"rendered":"What “Star Wars Minus Star Wars” says about creativity"},"content":{"rendered":"

mostlysignssomeportents<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Rob beat me to the blog<\/a> this morning with a post about Star Wars Minus Star Wars,<\/a> a stupendous video in which Kyle Kallgren retells the entire story of the first Star Wars movie with footage that either inspired George Lucas or was inspired by him after the movie\u2019s release.<\/p>\n

As with Kirby Ferguson\u2019s 2011 \u201cEverything is a Remix\u201d video<\/a> about Star Wars, the point of Kallgren\u2019s work isn\u2019t to deride Lucas\u2019s material for its lack of originality: it\u2019s to move \u201coriginality\u201d where it belongs, as the ability to combine things in ways that they haven\u2019t been combined before, while filing off the serial numbers so as to hide your sources.<\/p>\n

As Dali said, \u201cBad artists copy; good artists steal.\u201d (He stole that line from someone else, of course).<\/p>\n

This was the punchline of my novel Pirate Cinema<\/a>. The difference between good work and bad work isn\u2019t whether it\u2019s derivative: it\u2019s where it\u2019s derived from, and how. This was the message of Bruce Sterling\u2019s 1991 GDC keynote<\/a>, which convinced me to drop out of university and become a software developer:<\/p>\n

\n

Don\u2019t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don\u2019t read Shakespeare. Read Webster\u2019s revenge plays. Don\u2019t read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he\u2019s off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don\u2019t read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn\u2019t come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you\u2019re here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.<\/p>\n

And when it comes to studying art, well, study it, but study it to your own purposes. If you\u2019re obsessively weird enough to be a good weird artist, you generally face a basic problem. The basic problem with weird art is not the height of the ceiling above it, it\u2019s the pitfalls under its feet. The worst problem is the blundering, the solecisms, the naivete of the poorly socialized, the rotten spots that you skid over because you\u2019re too freaked out and not paying proper attention. You may not need much characterization in computer entertainment. Delineating character may not be the point of your work. That\u2019s no excuse for making lame characters that are actively bad. You may not need a strong, supple, thoroughly worked-out storyline. That doesn\u2019t mean that you can get away with a stupid plot made of chickenwire and spit. Get a full repertoire of tools. Just make sure you use those tools to the proper end. Aim for the heights of professionalism. Just make sure you\u2019re a professional *game designer.*<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is why I love Richard Kadrey\u2019s Sandman Slim books<\/a>: there are lots of people writing urban fantasy, but not many of them have Kadrey\u2019s facility with original texts of obscure daemonological lore. He\u2019s not serving up the thrice-brewed tea of HP Lovecraft: he\u2019s gone back to the well for some OG High Weird, with a \u201cK\u201d.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Kyle Kallgren\u2019s video is important, even in a world where we have \u201cEverything is a Remix.\u201d The latter only talks about Lucas\u2019s influences, while the former shows you all the ways in which Lucas has gone on to influence new films. The commons isn\u2019t a thing that was made in the past, when everyone was coming up with the plumbing that we run through the art of the present: all that art we\u2019re making today isalso plumbing for the art that will come tomorrow.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

http:\/\/boingboing.net\/2015\/12\/17\/what-star-wars-minus-star-wa.html<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

mostlysignssomeportents: Rob beat me to the blog this morning with a post about Star Wars Minus Star Wars, a stupendous video in which Kyle Kallgren retells the entire story of the first Star Wars movie with footage that either inspired George Lucas or was inspired by him after the movie\u2019s release. As with Kirby Ferguson\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-2Ry","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11008\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}