OTHER VOICES
PARTICIPATING STUDENTS · PAST & PRESENT
Artist · Environmentalist
Co-founder of The Church · Arts & Creativity Center
Co-director of Sag Harbor Cinema Board
I've chosen my work because I've loved the outside world. I love the things outside of myself. I love what isn't immediate to me. And I love projecting onto that as a way of kind of trying to reach the distance between my inner self and the vastness. To try to do that in a way that makes other people feel inspired by it, not be chided for not taking care of it. It's not something that I intend to be a message per se. I'd rather people look at the natural world and see the heartbreaking beauty of it and sense its fragility and its impermanence and their own impermanence and fragility and then have a response to that rather than say, you know, you have to act, you have to do something. I would hope that would inspire action rather than to cudgel them with a directive.
Award-winning Cinematographer of At Eternity’s Gate starring Willem Dafoe
The Theory of Everything starring Eddie Redmayne · The Scent of Green Papaya · Minamata
Artist Painter · Director
If you want to do your art well, you need to have some pleasure. If talking is not a pleasure, it's horrible. And when filming on a set is a bad experience, it's one of the worst things in life. As a cinematographer, if you can't make what you do personal to you, there is no soul. You need to make it personal. I certainly like a handheld camera, It's a bit like playing a saxophone. It's like the pace of walking or how I stop or I decide to go closer to the actor or to take more distance is so free. No one is telling me to go one step forward or one step back. I have to decide on the spot. So there certainly a freedom like a painter with a brush. It's nice because you have even the vibrations, your rhythms, the actor's rhythms. It's this dance.
Sculptor · Environmentalist · Creator of Underwater Museums
The sculptures get claimed and almost owned by the sea. And the textures that form the patterns, all things that could never be reproduced by human hands. And it's entirely unpredictable in many cases. I go to some of the "museums" expect to see this type of colonization or this type of growth, and it's nothing like how I've seen it envisaged it. It's completely different. Other times something has been made at its home, and there's an octopus that's built a house around it, or there's a school of fish that have nestled within the formations. There have been many, many different surprises along the way. I first started in the West Indies on an island called Grenada, which has a tropical reef system. And I expected the works to be sort of colonized. And I knew hard corals took a very long time to get established, to build their calcium skeletons, but actually, they were colonized within days. We saw white little calcareous worms, pink coraline algae, and green algae literally appeared sort of overnight.
INTERNATIONAL VOICES
What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world are we leaving the next generation?
One Wish for the Future is a series of podcasts where students come together to discuss their wishes for the future and what we can do to achieve those dreams. Co-hosted by Johns Hopkins student Yujin Lee and The Creative Process founder Mia Funk, One Wish takes a practical approach of listening to students and learning from our notable interviewees across the arts and sciences. The goal is that together, one generation inspiring another, we can collectively explore ways to work towards a better tomorrow.
LIBRARIANS & EDUCATORS
Director UNESCO World Book Capital 2018-2019·CEO, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center 2010-2016 · Founding member of Future Library · Veria Central Public Library 1988-2012 · Director of Greek Operations, Heritage Management Organization
Jack B. King University Librarian
Today I believe libraries are more important than ever - not just because of the collections we steward but because of our people. Our campus and community libraries should not just celebrate knowledge but also serve as a forum where we can engage in sometimes difficult conversations about topics and issues that will make our world a better place for all.
So that idea of what the drawings tell us about the artist is another thing that's constantly interesting to me. You, maybe more so than a finished painting, get a sense of what problems an artist is trying to work out along the way. What ideas he has and rejects sometimes tell you an awful lot about the choices made in the final work. I like that insight into the creative process that you get from studying drawings.
Director
For years I have been working in contact with old books…the feeling of complete satisfaction for the opportunity to travel back in time every day and interact with the authors and readers who left their mark on our manuscripts or printed records, and then to return to the present and learn from the experts who visit us today, increasingly through wireless connections.
University Librarian
An information literate society (not just university students) enables a society that is aware, a society that is seeking solutions to problems, a society that focuses on learning new ideas and ultimately a society that can actively contribute to a better world.
Director of the Amherst College Library
A good librarian is supposed to be interested in everything -- our curiosity is one of our greatest assets, and I love the ability to dive into different topics without having to chose a speciality. More importantly, I get to help people find what they need, so there's a real sense of accomplishment.
Library Media Specialist South Plainfield Middle School
I became a librarian because I wanted to help people and later focused on children and teens. Librarians help people to find and evaluate information, which is becoming a more and more vital skill in today's complicated society.
Director of Library Services at Musicians Institute Library
I've been in and out of libraries since I was a kid. My local public library (LAPL Westwood) was a space of refuge where I could be myself, explore the world, and learn without limits.
Library Director at Western Piedmont Community College
I grew up going to my local library and have always found them to be magical places.
ONE WISH FOR THE FUTURE
LIBRARIES &
THE IMPORTANCE OF READING
Hello, my name is Amanda-Jane Ciletti. I am the new Associate Podcast Producer & Interviewer from the University of South Carolina. I am a Senior studying Visual Communications. I have a love for photography, film, reading and writing. I can’t wait to learn and grow with The Creative Process!
The traveling exhibitions are augmented by projection elements (a variety of interviews, stories, poems, artworks, essays, creative insights, short films and dance) by contributors from over 70 countries, alongside documentation of art and educational initiatives The Creative Process is involved in. Below is a brief selection.
In memoriam John Berger and his groundbreaking work Ways of Seeing, we are introducing a new visual arts section to the projection elements of The Creative Process exhibition traveling to leading universities. We are inviting notable artists, curators, writers, and participating universities to suggest artworks which they feel are in conversation with certain culturally significant words. Click here to suggest artists for this initiative or find out more.
IN CONVERSATION
I have been trying over the past twenty years to balance the serious and disturbing information I absorb at my job about human suffering, the earth's failing environment, and the atrocities of unnecessary wars, in a way that allows me to also, sometimes, feel joy.
I think what is going on now is we are being forced to recognize that this paradigmatic Western civilization, what we are part of, that we have been indoctrinated with, has fundamental flaws. And the most fundamental flaw is this automatic assumption that everything coming from the West always came from the West, had no other origins, whereas it’s almost the opposite.
The English way of saying, well, you meet a new person and what was he like? "What was he like?" is a very strange thing to say. It's saying: don't tell me how he was. Tell me what he resembles. Isn't that weird? It says: tell me a story.
PURE IMAGINATION PROGRAM for YOUNG ARTISTS
OUR VOICES, OUR STORIES, OUR LIVES
"IMAGINATION is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore,
the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity,
it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared." –J.K. ROWLING