Creativity near its best
So we took a volunteer week 2 weeks ago and volunteered at the Creative Places and Spaces (ArtScape) conference, I’m a little bit late in sharing my experience but hopefully the video I’m sharing will makes up for my tardiness. It was an interesting experience for me in that I’ve never been to a ‘real’ conference like that before and I’ve certainly never volunteered at one either.
The volunteering aspect was actually kind of secondary to the rest of the experience though I think because my responsibilities always fell during times when there were no speakers, so for me that was very fortunate. This obviously allowed me to observe the conference as an attendee for the most part which I really enjoyed. There were 3 speakers that I thought I would share some thoughts about.
The first is Richard Florida. I have never seen a picture of Florida before and frankly he’s a lot younger than I expected. He talked about local governing, changing education to be a more modern and relevant medium and the importance of intelligent collaboration and competition. It was a good talk but I think that’s what I was expecting, so I wasn’t blown away.
The second speaker of note was Spencer Tunick, who among being arrested countless times has been able to organize 18,000 people to pose naked for him in a public place at one time (see the link above – and yes these are all real pictures, nothing photoshopped). The man is clearly dedicated to his art, but then again it looks like a blast, so who wouldn’t be. What I couldn’t wrap my head around is how he found so many people in one place to get naked for a picture. The amount of community building behind this is nothing short of amazing.
Finally was probably the one of the best talks I think I have ever heard in person or on TV or even on TED. Sir Ken Robinson absolutely captivated the crowd through a lot of laughter and even more wickedly intelligent insight and delivery. He spoke on many different topics and one of the more interesting ones to us is that our current education systems kill creativity. There are many takeaways from Sir Ken’s talk. Firstly is that you will never be creative if you let fear keep you from being wrong. You must overcome your fear and allow yourself to fail. Second he gave great insight into the nature and thought process of taking things for granted. Here he describes an interesting correlation between common sense and creativity and how your ability to ask “why” about your surroundings changes your ability to be creative. There are many other great tidbits within his hour long speech and is certainly worth watching.
So with no further hesitation, here is a very poor quality video of the speech (sorry for the quality), but it’s worth watching.