Dig Infinity !!

Fellow LightPusher from Portland, Jay Longfellow recently posted on AO about drawing games of the Surrealists, and it sparked up some thoughts on games and Creativity that, oddly enough I'd not really written about here on the FG Blog yet? Here's the awesome DeepSea Palm Fish Jay created, the bit on Infinity that he spurred, along with this semesters brilliant student contribution!!

"Whether it's a reliance on Serendipity, or drive to stay Creative no matter the cost, or stubborn pig-ignorance to avoid things done the "normal" way, I've always been fascinated with game "rules", breaking them, building them anew, breaking them again.. What's become apparent in the last couple years, after publishing a drawing game of my own, is the simplicity amongst complexity.. Like Jay said, "creativity within the constraints of the game’s rules".. Simplifying the Infinite, makes the "rules" of any game, make sense to me? When I graduated school, I was left with no rules, no more assignments.. I could do Anything.. Yet, that Anything shortly became daunting, and since no professional work was coming in at the time, (life-long struggle in fact) there was a need to have something external to me, to drive content.. So that I could create more effectively within boundaries of the Infinite.. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.. So, I started to play with my first couple creative games.. Like the Surrealist's games utilized free association, and the ever expanding, collaborative visual device to drive the works' content, we played with games in school as well.. Mine was a fairly complex free association word game created after seeing a performance of John Zorn's COBRA, wherein teams of musicians battle with complex musical variables to perform one off compositions.. Genius, I thought.. This could be done visually, in a very similar way.. My game was also influenced by, Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, which was used by the Talking Heads, and later became a sort of Hitchhiker's Guide or Magic 8 ball to Eno for awhile.. Musicians, Poets, Writers, Illustrators, Physicists, Sea-side Sand Castlers.. We all create in different materials and techniques, but most of us are awestruck by the Infinite in a way that we want to capture it in our Content. I love to talk about Creativity and the Brain, the reasons why we monkeys perceive the way we do, and how to work inside that Science.. Games are perfectly suited to both subjects, so forgive me the rant.. "

Here's the wicked creation one of my students contributed to the Fantasy Genesis docket this year.  Molly is a wonderfully skilled illustration major, that has some brilliant animation and cartooning chops as well..  I believe it was an Attacking Rodent Gator, but look at all of that movement!!  Great job as per usual Molly, and a scaly new addition to the FG mythology !!

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