Bergson and creative process

Imagination (def).

1. The act of imagining.
2. The mental consideration of acts or events not yet in existence.

I've been reading Henri Bergson lately. Bergson was a major philosopher and professor at the College de France at the start of the 20th century. He had a theory of 'creative evolution' and 'virtual multiplicities', debated Einstein on relativity and influenced everyone from Picasso to Sartre. Legend has it that when he spoke at Columbia University in New York, there was a traffic jam on Broadway - the first in history.

The thing I like about Bergson is his line on creative thinking. Creative thinking, for Bergson, is a mix of intuition, imagination, and vital impulse. We think creatively through processes of creative evolution. The creative experience is an experience of 'duration' -- we find ourselves suspended in a virtual multiplicity, a network of tasks and challenges, dealing with a project in all its aspects (sound familiar?). Bergson claims that, for the most part, 'we have acquired the useful habit of substituting for true duration an homogeneous and independent Time'. But to understand something (such as a project), we must stop thinking about it as an extended task occupying a certain chunk of Time, and enter into it to know how it persists and endures, its patterns of duration.

Bergson's philosophy is interesting for the light that it shines on the project we are working on together, 'Coalition of the Willing'.

What if we saw 'Coalition of the Willing' as a virtual multiplicity? What if it were not just a sequence of bold statements on the politics of global warming, nor even a series of sequences, brilliantly crafted and rendered by artists and studios from about the world, composed to make an inspiring point about the possibilities for open collaboration today? What if, together, the sequences formed a network of intensities or experiences, each triggering its own set of resonances, buzzing and combining with the others to create strange and unforeseen effects? It is a film that we're working on, but it is more than a film. Ideally, it should be an experience that lingers, that is more than the sum of its parts. As the animation progresses, I'm looking forward to stringing sequences together and getting feel for the resonances and tensions that the juxtaposition of images and ideas throws up.

I think we're nearing a threshold of 'creative evolution' on the film. We're about to see it morph into another beast entirely.

Simon realized before I did that it was vital to the concept of this film that the film itself express the artistic and collaborative processes that have gone into it. The film should exemplify and express, to the extent possible, the 'open source' ideal that is expressed in the polemic. Looking back, I am certain that the ethos with which we approached this film is a vital part of the ontology, or reality, of the project. I think in future posts I'd like to reflect on the ethos of this project, and in particular what I have learned from Simon about open collaboration.