The pleasure of discovery

HoMyfate3

{this is not a post} In the last creative summer illustration workshop — Experimental Illustration — at Faculty of Engineering of Porto, an workshop by Jeanne Stern, one of the students group have directed and produced a very creative and successful stereo animation based on chromatic occlusion (anaglyph) through which they explored a kind of power-of-thinks and persons that could disappear…

and appear… in one eye, in both eyes, etc., like magic, through a narrative that nicely and meaningful provoked the audience!

But what was revealed to me as truly extraordinary, besides the animation itself, was the answer they gave me when I said, at the end: – very nice use of the chromatic stereo… “well, we discovered that if we put (look through) a red lens we just are not able to see red objects, so we explored that discovery as the main potential to develop the narrative”…

Isn´t that extraordinary? A very fine outcome generated not by knowledge but by ignorance? By the lack of knowing about the principles behind the main phenomena they used as the most motivational energy to give substance to their project?

But is that a problem? Well it depends: if we have to justify our projects at the light of unilateral and vertical traditional knowledge, for sure we must have a suitcase full of knowledge and theoretical framework of reference in order to demonstrate the validity and relevance of the projects themselves. And indeed creativity could be amplified if we have a wide-band literacy.

But observing (and trying to analyze all the event on that context) the pleasure that emanated from the discovery (as it was indeed what happened to them) and the impact it had on the input, process and outcome, I can only conclude that, indeed, even not knowing the possible outcome if they knew all the intricacies of this particular physics, optics and perception phenomena, the lack of knowledge on that specific field was the best that could have happened to them… and to the project.

Horácio {Tomé Marques}