i try very very hard to make the creative things i do based on feeling and gut and “automatism”. i try to think about— when I’m creating something, like some music or i’m editing a film, or i’m painting a picture, or writing a blog post, or whatever… when i’m doing something like that, i try very hard to stop all my thinking and to act “automatically” based purely on feeling. this is something called surrealist automatism and it helps you to be more REAL (surreal) and UNFILTERED and VULNERABLE.
from the exhibition, Surrealism Beyond Borders:
In 1947 the literary world of Aleppo, Syria, saw the publication of a slim volume, Suryāl (Surreal), and with it the emergence of a dynamic cadre of poets and artists who embraced the technique of automatism, or unconscious creation. As poet Urkhan Muyassar explained, the group sought to free the “mysterious moments” of human creativity from a “superimposed” reasoning in order to get to repressed thoughts, or “what lies behind reality.”
Surrealist automatism represents—much like the harnessing of dreams—a way to unleash the mind and challenge the rationalism of the modern world. Unconscious creation, like doodling, has been a catalyst for an array of artists as they worked in related directions of improvisation and gestural abstraction. As seen in the examples here by André Masson and Joan Miró, it can capture the unguarded process of thought, bypassing the selectiveness and control of the conscious mind. Delicate compositions by Hans Arp and César Moro invite the hand of chance into production. Automatism has welcomed many inventive practices beyond line drawing, including Asger Jorn’s use of painters’ tools to scratch away the surface of a work and Oscar Domínguez’s surprise compositions made through decalcomania, a technique in which two painted surfaces are pressed together and then pulled apart.
Sometimes people ask me or wonder about the “theory” behind the music I make. I’m telling you the music theory behind it now: The music theory behind my music is Surrealist Automatism. by learning this theory, you too can make airhorn music like me. Not anything else, not some intellectual theory about reality but the inner outer nonsense theory of dreams. This is the truth. I tell you this because I am trying to help you (“you” being the people who were asking about it).
There are many ways to theorise about the world we live in. Our modernist world wants and tries to explain and understand everything, leaving nothing left as unexplained wonder.
It’s really hard to do surrealist automatism. It’s a very advanced theory / technique. You have to practise it really hard for a long time. It’s tricky and scary to let go because that’s what you really need to do to achieve it: You need to let go.
Because… funnily enough… young children have no problem doing surrealist automatism at all. They don’t know any better so they have no trouble acting on gut and making bad code / bad art straight from the heart, not the brain. As we grow, we learn all the wrong lessons: We learn to hide our automatic selves: We learn to take pride in understanding and knowing what we’re doing instead of taking pride in sitting in uncertainty / confusion / on the edge.
As an adult, I find it really hard to do surrealist automatism: It’s something I need to take / do very intentionally, and I do certain … “mitigations”.. let’s say.. to try to help me do it. For example, I try hard to not read any documentation at all for the live coding languages I use. I learn only by watching other people and trying things myself. I also do not learn ANY music theory or maths related to the music I make. This means that my understanding is based on how things sound or feel rather than the rational truth of what’s going on. It helps me focus on automatic intuitive feeling.
Unfortunately, it’s really really really hard to avoid being explained things by reply guys. If I ever state that I don’t understand something, or if I accidentally use a piece of ‘advanced’ (in their eyes) music theory, they’ll jump in and demonstrate to everyone how clever they are by explaining the theory. This happens even if I specifically ask for someone not to explain something to me. This is not a single isolated incident. This is not a single person I’m talking about here (There are probably ~5 people reading this right now thinking I’m talking directly at them but i am NOT: this is an extremely common experience for me: it happens from all angles).
And once I know the theory behind something then… *poof* … the magic / surrealism / feeling is gone: I start to think of things in terms of applying the rational theory instead of how it automatically bubbles up through my fingers, and my art gets colder. I mean.. hopefully I will be— my aspiration is to get so good at surrealist automatism that I can get away with doing it even if i know the rational theory behind something. but for now I’m still learning so instead I mitigate this risk by trying to talk as little as possible about what I understand / don’t understand, which is a shame. I used to share more about what I don’t understand, to demonstrate to newcomers that you don’t need to learn the rational theory behind things to use them and stuff: the barrier to entry is lower than you might think: you too can make art with you’re feelings: come on in: you can do it! … But I had to stop.
In fact, there are a couple of things that I really like to use when I perform strudel, and I 1000% do not know or understand what they do, but I feel what they do and that’s why I love using them so much. I fear the inevitable day when this luxury is lost: When some reply guy comes swooping in to tell me how [—] really works and what [—] really [—] and [—]
In the meantime, as pastagang says
forget everything you know
back to the [—]