Any sensible manifesto will have some barriers and guidelines to help define it. This applies doubly for creative pursuits. Constraints make for better creativity, even artificial or arbitrary ones. Jack White put it best recently in an interview with Pitchfork Media:
“In general, opportunity tends to kill creativity. I think people don’t realize that. A painter goes into an art supplies store and sees all these different colours and supplies and thinks, “Oh, goody! This is going to make me a better painter.” Of course it’s not. It’s just going to make it harder to decide what not to use and what not to do. That’s what happens with a group of 20-year-old kids who walk into a studio with ProTools and a computer and they can record 400 tracks if they want to. Maybe now with the state of the music industry they’ll start spending less on albums and people will go back to reality. They should put up a plaque in every studio that says, “The Beatles recorded Revolver and Sgt. Pepper on four tracks.” That’ll clear everyone’s head.”
The following are some general guidelines Omnibucket recognizes as important to respect.
• The collision of great art and great stories expands the imagination, and evokes a deeper and more meaningful connection to both the art and the story.
• Collaboration brings out the best in creators.
• Any work must stand up to the benchmark of design and quality that the mainstream is used to. There are plenty of DIY underground places out there doing great work, but if we want to shift the thought and tastes and sensibilities of the mainstream public, then our bit of inspiration must stand up with the best that they’re used to.
• You must spread the word. Simple as that. This only works if the people involved help spread the word.
• Why should children get all the fun of pictures in their storybooks? They shouldn’t, so don’t worry about breaking some traditional boundaries that have been in place for a while but aren’t useful.
• When appropriate, utilize constraints within the creative process, real or arbitrary. It makes for better work generally.
• Multimedia is only going to gain strength, rightfully so. Multimedia takes advantage of the different powers of our different senses - most obviously images, words, and sounds - to provoke imagination, understanding, and emotion in different ways. Music has very strong power to emotionally charge. A picture is worth a thousand words. But words are what inspire man to great or terrible deeds. Each has its strength. How do you, for example, imbibe mere words with the emotional power of music? How do you teach someone who doesn’t want to learn? These are just a few of the questions in the back of our minds. Language itself isn’t a sense. It requires a second level of decoding which is why there’s a disconnection between the perception and the emotive response. You don’t have to think because music points at the first-level association, while words have to be understood first. So, words, by their nature are a 2nd level symbol. Which means to carry the same emotive weight, they have to bypass the decoding somehow and point directly to the sense. But if they point to an idea, not a sense, thinking is necessary which means there’s a difference between feeling and understanding. If your heart is invested, if your chemical response is strong enough, then you’re not thinking…which is why music’s power is to inspire by feeling, but is less efficient at inspiring thought. If that’s the case, then what hope is then for either one? If words point to ideas and music points at feelings, what can point at the sense that the words are built from and capture both the idea and the inspiration? Multimedia is the answer…because you can tell the same idea in multiple ways, not necessarily at the same time, thus capitalizing on the capabilities of each.