austinkleon:

Kirby Ferguson returns to his series on creativity, originality, and copyright, Everything Is A Remix, with an episode on Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  If you haven’t watched the original series, do that first: I was working on the early beginnings of Steal Like An Artist before the first episode of Everything Is A Remix dropped, but it immediately became an influence. When I was writing Steal, I sort of used EIAR as a jumping off point—if we know that everything is a remix, how should we sort of set up our lives and our practices? Steal was my attempt to answer that. (Kirby and I had an hour-long conversation at SXSW 2012 you can listen to here.) My favorite part of the original series was this illustration, which laid out what Kirby thinks are the 3 basic elements of creativity: Kirby sees them as individual tools that you can use in remixing — his critique of TFA is that it was a little too heavy on copying, not enough transforming and combining.  (It’s been most helpful to me personally when I think of copy/transform/combine as a more linear process in creating: copying is how you learn and assemble your artistic alphabet or vocabulary, combining is when you start to stick your influences together, and transforming is when you stick the right influences together and the seams of your Frankenstein monster disappear and you wind up with a whole new monster entirely.) An appendix to Kirby’s latest installment has some fun examples from the book The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Of copying: And combining: But the most interesting part of the new episode to me is this new chart, which suggests that there is a kind of commercial/artistic sweet spot between the familiar and the novel: Filed under: steal like an artist