The Case for Off-line Creative: Conclusion

The last post in this week's series written by Christina Crook.

One can conclude that the best way to treat the Internet is like an exacto knife. Take it out of the toolbox, get the job done, then tuck it away for next time.

While for many the Web is a substantive source of inspiration, Karen, Paul, Valerie and Samantha agree that before you approach the keyboard it’s important to have a task in mind.

It’s better to get lost in the making than lost in the web.

Jean Arp wrote: “Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation…tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.”  

Each time we access the Internet we are offered a shot of adrenaline: a like! a share! a purchase! Our egos are bolstered, our nervous energy absorbed.

But ideas come from wide open spaces. Face-to-face conversations, extended hours lost in a project, sketches in our source books, all over deep bowls of espresso and gulps of really good wine.

Cultivating an off-line existence is fundamental to our life-long development as artists.

Look outside. The world has outlived the web. Its this great wide world, and your imagination, whose possibilities are truly endless.

Christina Crook is a magazine writer partial to snail mail, typewriters and traveling on foot. Her articles on culture, technology and religion have appeared in UPPERCASE, Geez and the Literary Review of Canada. This January she stepped off-line for 31 days, chronicling the journey with a type-written letter a day. Her Letters from a Luddite project was featured on CBC’s Spark and is now a book available at Blurb.com.