Creation Through Distraction

Creation Through Distraction is a time-based art piece involving a busy public location in which I sit and write, three hours each day for one week. My goal is to confront and utilize the distractions around me—while also trying to block them out—in order to write an essay about the experience. My hope is that this experimentation with my own writing process will yield insights into how and why we create. CTD is also intended as an examination of the boundaries between art and art criticism, focus and distraction, performance and product.

For me, CTD is an attempt on some level to confront and make peace with the tension I constantly feel as a writer—between the isolation of the writer’s experience and the need to connect in order to create. (I'm also aware that CTD may eventually become somebody else’s distraction.) It's a twist on the idea of creation through destruction, playing instead with our sense of time as a commodity we never have enough of, and the feeling that distraction has become central to our way of life. The idea is to generate circumstances that bring these daily struggles into relief, so I can learn from them and write about what I find.

Most fundamentally, I want to make my writing process a collective experience—to see if that’s even possible—because no one writes in a void anyway. CTD additionally touches on, and somewhat upturns, the conventional relationship between art and article. As an art critic, my creative act is to react to the art; although it’s in conversation with the art, it is considered to be utterly separate from the art. Yet art itself is always reacting, in some way, to something. This piece is, for me, both a revolt against and a deeper inquiry into that separation. Also, as a performance, it inverts the conventional relationship between writing and performance in traditional theater. Instead of the written words coming first, and then being shared through the performance, here the performance precedes the presentation of the words, and is their subject.

What will I write? I'm curious to find out.