As human beings, we need to create. Something inside us rebels against boredom, finding a way to colour the world with less chaos. Imagination is the ability to create beautiful lies inside your mind. Creativity is the act of implementing your imagination into something tangible. It is the ability to develop anything even if it defies every natural law. We explore this weapon in all forms of art.
Some people believe that everything has already been created. If that is true, then it means that our imagination is not limitless. If everyone has an individual universe of infinite creative outcomes, then how has everything been created? Does it mean that we have a singular shared world of possibilities?
What limits our imagination?
We are born with some pre-planned factors. Our parents decide on our existence. Their personality will be a substantial factor to establish our own. The education they give us, the moral teachings, the freedom they build, the decisions they make for us, will mould our imagination. Our social status will determine if we can waste our time with creativity.
Language is a deciding factor for our creative growth. Language limits our minds. The fact that we don’t have words for everything and the culture underneath every tongue limits our process of thought.
Then we start school. Nowadays, as we grow up, we are taught to shut down our creativity so we can focus on logic. All these factors will determine our reality, the way we see the world. They may also create specific barriers around our imagination; however, does this mean it is limitless or just less elastic? Can we think of something entirely outside our logic, or are we tied?
Are the ideas passed on by society a factor against our imagination?
We learn from society. Laws determine our living. Established social rules regulate our being. Information defines our core. All these factors may control our will, our way of thinking, our capacity to see beyond, but it isn´t permanent. We can end these barriers, train our elasticity.
The easy access to vast amounts of information brought by technology has made us insecure. As we feed our mind obsessively with these endless resources, we become convinced that we are just repeating the cycle, recycling art.
Would others want something they can’t understand?
If you create something based on nothing in existence, would people reject your art? Art is not designed to be fully understood yet as human beings, we are drawn to things we can relate to. Even the most made-up world has common characteristics with ours. Is validation the limitation of imagination? Or to create something extraordinary, do we need to do so based on existing ideas? Research allows us to create. By using pre-existing ideas, we can achieve greatness. That does not make our imagination is less powerful. The act of using knowledge is not copying, it is recycling into a masterpiece. The best art is created after absorbing all types of information, assimilating, twisting or turning it in a different order and creating.
