The Art of Creating with Your HANDS and Using Your MINDS

I'm starting back to things with this post. Might be lame or it might not be. But I think at an important time as this one, when AI is quickly taking over and doing just about everything for us, I think it's important to remember how we got here. To create, to build, to think, to get dirty, all have led us to this point. Because we have thought with our hands in the past, we are now able to have AI, yet at what cost?

For this short and sweet one, I want to talk about creating things. From sewing and stitching, to baking and cooking, to even science experiments, all of these are things that AI can't take away from us if we want to maintain the authenticity and beauty of human creation.

With that in mind, I want to keep this post as authentic as possible. Forgive my roundabout train of repetitiveness, misspellings, and grammar issues. I want to keep this post as REAL as possible without the help from any robot just to prove that I still can :)

Just to Start Us Off

My mind has gone straight to the Renaissance when the creative world took a massive leap to progression. While the Dark Ages led us to an era of beauty, it is still marked as a huge accomplishment and most important times in history.

Humanism

This idea that man is the center of his universe and we should celebrate human achievements of literature, education, arts, and sciences (History.com). This is the point in society when we begin that forward thinking, appreciating some of the smaller things in our lives that make our experience on earth more enjoyable. From this time, starting first in Italy and spreading rapidly elsewhere, we got Leonardo Di Vinci with the Mona Lisa (among many pieces), Galileo, an astronomer, physicist, and engineer who worked with telescopes and was able to describe freaking Jupiter, Dante, the famous poet, William Shakespeare, etc. I mean this list goes ON. I'm gonna let this be a fundamental quote here:

"...[A]rtists like da Vinci incorporated scientific principles, such as anatomy, into their work, so they could recreate the human body with extraordinary precision... Scientific discoveries led to major shifts in thinking: Galileo and Descartes presented a new view of astronomy and mathematics, while Copernicus proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system."

Renaissance art was defined by realism and naturalism. Artists strived to depict people and objects in its truest sense. Where did THAT go? Sure, it is fun to ask AI to make my dog look like he's doing work at a desk, and maybe see different Halloween costumes on him, but none of that's real. When did our laziness to try new things and figure it out on our own get in the way of creating and critical thinking?

I also think that while it's hard to be alive in a time where everything is terribly expensive, housing is a crisis, and everyone my age seems to be getting engaged or traveling to another continent to run a marathon, we are leaving behind some really beautiful things that don't require big milestone checks. Something as simple as cooking a successful meal should feel like a great accomplishment, or painting a flower pot for your special garden should feel like a stepping stone, not something that isn't "productive" or taking away from our ultimate goal. We need stepping stones and not leaping to boulders cause we aren't all Alex Honnold. Creating and trying something new IS productive, even if you don't realize it. It's a slow process to being great.

POV me trying to accomplish anything in this day and age (This is Alex Honnold for those who don't know how crazy cool this man is)

Sophie's Big Boom

Yes that's me and my personal discovery on how I'm learning to be creative again. Most everything already seems invented or discovered, but that doesn't mean we can't relearn something from our past and try again.

I learned to knit in the second grade from a wonderful woman named Robin Smith. She had us practice knitting all the time during class, showing us how we can use our hands to create and build something. My little brain at the time was just happy to be fidgeting with ANYTHING since I certainly didn't want to pay much attention elsewhere. I specifically remember one sunny day, all her students crowded in the reading corner on the carpet, and watching this woman knit and read us a book at the same time. Not some picture book, but something like Magic Treehouse, I don't really remember that part, but I DO remember her not even looking at what her hands were doing and thinking that was the coolest thing ever to see someone multitask like that. She taught us to make little hats and beanies of all shapes and sizes and add pompom balls to the tops of that hats, but also showed us that our creations needed to be shared. All hats we made in that year went to people in need. And how wonderful that felt to have given something back, even at that age.

Right now, I'm currently learning how to sew. I got an awesome new gig doing custom bridal and alterations and they trusted this random girl with little to no sewing skills to come in and be open minded to learning. I won't lie, it's frustrating to be so bad at something so late in life because now my brain is bigger and my overthinking is worse. But taking the time to learn a skill where I can use my hands for something good feels amazing. One month in and I can confidently do some hand sewing on things I never even thought would be important, especially making it perfect for someone else. Cutting lace off a fancy wedding dress, sewing buttons back onto the back of a dress, all things that seem so small, yet create one important picture for someone else. I can now say I feel like I have seen the underside of wedding dresses more than I ever thought I would, but gosh it feels good to know that some art forms can't die without the helping hands of real people to fix it.

My mind always goes to those old Victorian thimbles you see in museums and it's super cool to still be using one and sewing like they once were!

Our Kitchen Confidential King

Anthony Bourdain, in my mind, is known as one of our best and most well loved cooks ever. I'm not involved with the world of cooking really at all so when I picked up his book Kitchen Confidential and started watching his show, it was easy to see why he was so liked. What he was doing was traveling to all these places and trying the most obscure restaurants with random people he met on his trip. He made friends, he ate good, and was honest about it all. That's why he had so many followers. He inspired those to want to learn to cook, to try to create something and don't be a bitch and heat up an old pizza. Make it yourself! See the world and try new foods that people created, new foods that are important to a specific culture that you've never seen, and go explore.

For the Movie Buffs

I am NOT a movie buff, so when I say that Christopher Nolan or the guy that wrote Backrooms are some of the most talked about filmmakers and directors today that I know about, that's saying something. I can give my meager two cents on this film thing so here we go.

It's aggravating, especially for those pursuing a life in film, to see people ask AI to make their stuff. People all over, are putting prompts into AI and asking it to create a short film for them. And weirdly, it's getting traction. That's..... stupid. Nobody actually did anything in that process except use fingers and a keyboard. Hell, anyone could do that.

So why would you want to do something that everyone can do?

Creating films has been a

lovely art form for several years now. With cameras developing as much as they have, we are lucky to say that we can see such amazing high quality films today. Even movies back in the day were still great because they didn't know what we would have today and it's even more fun to look back on these older movies and see all the silly FX they had, or the terrible script writing, but at least some great minds put their heads together and created something as a team. There was a lot of hard work put into making these stories. It was never meant to be this easy and lazy.

This movie came to my mind for some reason. While not that old, Die Hard is an awesome movie that takes PLACE during Christmas (but shouldn't be counted as a Christmas film), was produced in 1988. The clothes are perfect for the time, the story is awesome and thrilling, and they used what they had with the props and sound effects and whatnot. It's a really cool concept that so many types of people can love. Brains were mashed together to create wardrobes, plot twists, and more. Same idea goes for older space movies like StarTrek. It's hilarious seeing some of the costuming they used and how cheesy it might seem, but it was created by people for people and is still very well loved today.

You could argue even further back with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I had to watch this film in an Italian film class. The director was some Italian man that made this movie about the wild west. While Clint Eastwood was distractingly handsome, there was a lot of significant moments in this movie. It had far bigger impact than anyone expected and is still talked about today. The director, born far from the America and the west, just wanted to make a movie because the wild west certainly sounds cool doesn't it?

Archaeology

Now here is something that AI actually cannot do. It could tell us every single thing about fossils, but it certainly can't find them and dig them out for us. At least I really hope it never does...

I'm going to attach this link of some really cool dinosaur fossils that have been found over the course of 200 years. Dinosaurs are billions of years old and yet they are still being found. People are traveling all oiver the world and using massive machines and even tiny brushes to discover our past. I woudl LOVE to do that!

I also just discovered this website, Archaeology Magazine,that keeps everyone updated on their latest discoveries. They unearth some really interesting things from Ancient Egypt to Mediveal coins, to Roman marble slabs that were supposidly struck by lightening, giving us another theory as to Roman beliefs and culture (you should read this article it was really short but fascinating information).

Anyway. The list goes on and I promised short.

Here's a headnod to all the poets, theatre freaks, space lovers, crochet folks, designers, pottery people, science nerds, math lovers, and more

I say all this in hopes that you are inspired to want to try and create something. It can be simple or super difficult, either way it's something new so don't expect to be a prodigy.

My dearest friends Layla just told me she started needle point! HOW AWESOME AND SO OLD LADY!!!! Just being able to use our brains and our hands to MAKE something is a huge accomplishment. Needless to say, I am aware that I type this on a computer that is technically a mini robot. I wish I could type on a typewriter and share this with everyone instead, but hey, baby steps.

Try to use AI less please.

Thanks for humoring me,

Sophie