the dissociation of creation from its execution, or the continuous flow of culture towards a universal truth, or the meaning of life, or nothing at all

An exploration of an idea, definitely not a statement, maybe just a random thought. This came to me after using Polypaths, an artwork by Aluan Wang, a generative system where one can indicate a set of rules for the system to play out its encoded artistry onto them. Let me just spit this thought out in a chaotic manner (much better than polishing the thought - truer to the way it has formed within me, most likely closer to whichever it wants to express than if I try and make a proper article that flows and has a clear point - we need to communicate more mental chaos and let our differing lives fill in the voids). So here's what I've written at once, with no edits.

A generative system is a tool that someone creates. Then anyone can use the generative system to create things. Specially if there is some kind of interaction. Same with generative AI: a system that creates. One may tweak further the process, adding themselves more into the act of creation. A painter who paints very well is executing a creation. An idea that takes shape as the creation takes place. An idea that might have been called into existence before the act of painting, or an idea that emerges from the act of painting.

But creation is separate from the execution of the act of creation.

The artwork itself - a sculpture, a painting, an interactive work, a performance - has an existence of its own in latent space - in the space of all the possible things that can be done or created - before it is executed into existence. All the possible words are created the moment we define an alphabet. If we add syntactic rules, we further narrow the space of possible words, but all of them are already there. Same with sounds, hues, materials, elements of everything you may think about.

We have traditionally had artists execute the creation - sometimes having thought before about an idea, sometimes creating out of immediate intuition. But with the advent of digital layers of abstraction between the idea and the finalised object or item (the result of the execution of the act of creating), we can understand better that the performer of the act of creation is not necessarily the same who creates the artwork originally (the idea), or even that the idea may preexist.

Taking part in the act of creation as a third party (that is, not the artist, or the team of the artist, and not being the thing being created either), on its execution, be it by way of an interactive artwork or by using creative tools, has tremendous power in those who take part. No matter how small the contribution is (maybe just press a button to say "i want to see more of this"), the fact that something comes to be because you have summoned its existence is very powerful and might have family ties with the meaning of life. Maybe the meaning of life is to preserve life, not just the biological existence we are given at birth (some human, some monkeys, some bees, some flowers), but to preserve the culture around life, the culture that emerges from life (or should we say the culture that different life forms discover?).

Thinking along these lines, it might be that even the act of consuming a culture artifact (reading a book, attending a performance, watching a movie), that is, not taking part in the act of creating something but in the celebration of the existence of culture, is already a step in the same direction. It's acknowledging that culture exists, that we as a species or collection of species have been able to discover this bit of culture. Maybe that very fact is encoded within the cultural artifact itself, and bringing it to life through experimenting it waters that idea and it blossoms, if only sometimes briefly.

I always tend to believe that music, theatre, performative art have this beautiful quality of it existing only in moving time. A painting exists mostly the same right now and right after half a second. A sculpture, a book. However, it is through the appreciation of these artworks (time based or not) that they become alive, that their message is heard, that the encoded ideas of us discovering this bit of the total cognitive space of the universe become resonant again. In this sense, time plays this role again: our appreciation of a painting or a scultpure only happens in time. We stare at them, we explore them, we feel, we think: things that happen in time.

Maybe the act of creating and the act of experiencing a creation sit with the same spectrum, closer than we think. Maybe, as other entities take over the acts of creating, we can still contribute to the heightening of our existence by experimenting the creations, no matter where they come from, and take our time to let them change us. It's like listening to an eternal source of truth and wisdom, like returning to the source, like living a circular existence: this all preexisted us, and as we discover it and let ourselves be touched by it, we return to it to start a new cycle.

What do I know? I just know that I now nothing. But thinking about this brings joy. Maybe that's all there is.