A Creative Swarm


I’m working up a theoretical model of vernacular creativity in digital culture, so…

Every culture proliferates along its margins. Irruptions take place that are called “creations” in relation to stagnancies. Bubbling out of swamps and bogs, a thousand flashes at once scintillate and are extinguished all over the surface of a society. In the official imaginary, they are noted only as exceptions or marginal events. An ideology of property isolates the “author,” the “creator,” and the “work”. In reality, creation is a disseminated proliferation. It swarms and throbs. A polymorphous carnival infiltrates everywhere, a celebration both in the streets and in the homes for those who are unblinded by the aristocratic and museological model of durable production.

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A typewriter, some paper, and a little leisure: this little world would, for example, circumscribe the site in which art can be born. But housing, clothing, housework, cooking, and an infinite number of rural, urban, family, or amical activities…are also the ground on which creation everywhere blossoms. Daily life is scattered with marvels, a froth on the long rhythms of language and history that is as dazzling as that of writers and artists. (Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural, pp.139-42)