“Interactive Media is about what you put into it.” -some guy
I can’t remember which exact “some guy” told me this, but I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s incredibly easy for me to match the criteria for most interactive media assignments, but what if I was told to focus on the creative process instead?
Now I wasn’t completely sure what I might learn from Professor Aaron when I sat down on my first day of class. “Creating? Yeah pretty sure I know how to do that” is what I would’ve said if I was narrow-minded, but I kept open-minded and read all the given material (very rare for me to do) and took everything thrown at me seriously.
When Professor Aaron first told the class to focus on the creative process without worrying about making the final product high quality, it was like an input error that caused my system to malfunction. Making high quality stuff and showing it was the most entertaining part to me. However, I realized through our various readings and many making projects that what I actually care about is sharing the creative process that entertained me.
I’ve come to discover that as long as I’m entertained by what I’m doing, things just turn out magically well anyway! I’m not going to say “oh my jeebies this class reminded me of how much I love making things” because making things is literally my career choice, but this class did facilitate me to have dedicated assignments where the result doesn’t matter. The classroom gave me a space to just design various funky things like mazes or browser game UIs. As I strived to have fun during the process and reflected on our readings, I felt my creative potential increase. The upgrade wasn’t a significant margin because a lot of the readings, especially Art & Fear and Flow, introduced many things I was already consciously aware about from other sources (that likely got it from these books), but I’ve greatly embraced the seemingly counterintuitive value of setting restrictions of creativity to actually ideate better. That’s one of my favorite takeaways from the class.
But beyond the classroom was another thing I frequently asked myself: whether being in Berlin made a difference in this J-Term class. Afterall, Professor Aaron is an IM professor at NYUAD and I wasn’t exposed to many non-NYUAD students outside of the orientation. So, why was this J-Term chapter of my Summer set in Berlin?
Was it the guests that visited us? I think obviously these guests were specifically chosen because we’re in Berlin but that felt like too straightforward and unsatisfying of an answer for me.
So then I asked whether there was something in general that I could only acquire here in Berlin? To answer that question, I used a little bit of lateral thinking we learned in class and asked myself the same question for Abu Dhabi. Sure, there are courses or opportunities I could only find in NYU Abu Dhabi or even NYU New York, but was that really it? Was the answer still something so shallow and unromantic?
Well, the conclusion I’d like to believe was that Berlin as a whole is significant. Berlin isn’t just the roasted pork knuckle I get at Maximillian’s, it isn’t just the guests that have visited our classroom, and it certainly isn’t just the change of ceiling I look at when I wake up in the morning. I’ve listened to a vulgar German bartender tell me how he feels about minorities in his country before letting me pay for my beer. I’ve taken photographs of all the beautiful streets but also all the plain ones. I’ve bought skateboard parts from all over the city to get a glimpse of the skater culture.
Everything here was a learning experience, from the weird to the funky.
This is especially important to me as an artist, designer, and storywriter because my passion is to depict things. If I can’t experience these things first hand then I’d never be able to depict things meaningfully and tastefully.
Berlin will have an impact on my work, just as any other place I’ve lived. Even though my Google Calendar tells me class is from 1:30pm to 4:30pm, that’s just the time I sit in Professor Aaron’s classroom. Every (waking) moment here in the city of Berlin is class for me.