On Doing

I have borrowed the name of this post from the most fantastic of Peter Greenaway films.

According to Mr. Greenaway, Creation “is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surround us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of stratagems which in the end prove completely incapable of staying off chaos”.

I’ve been working in the past days on a new course for University, where iI will try to relate casting, computer programming, patterns, pieces and instructions into the same lot as “Process prior to form”. In this line, I’ve been trying to do some programming, drawing, by instance, in the 80’s famous LOGO language. First, copying from reality, then, intending to create directly from it. The idea is to give some 10 or so small excercises to students, where to realize what comes from where, and the possibilities of every paradigm and their combinations.

The shocking idea, that doesn’t leave me alone, after all this effort, might be pretty ofensive to some: numbers and mathematics are a great way to simulate and represent the world, but are completely useless as a way of creating. As a creative device, Math can only create more Math.