the timeless question—from where does creativity flow?

the soul? from one’s personality? does creativity result from inspiration, or is it a synonym for inspiration? can it be forced?

in ancient times, creativity was very straightforward. what do you do for a living?

“i’m a poet by profession” or “i earn my living as a sculptor” or “i’m a world-renowned painter” or “i’m a writer”…

in this day and age, creativity has gone electronic, and not only that, it’s begun to hybridize itself more than ever before.

“i’m working on multi-color lasers to be used at raves and outdoor parties” or “i’ve created a virtual avatar-based community that adjusts to converstational tones” or “i’ve put together an interactive music kiosk so that folks from around the world can compose music in unison”

to me, for better or for worse, this translates to just more forms of writers’ block. i devote entire weekends to my creative projects — almost always, with no tangible results. i’ve got all sorts of toys, all sorts of media.

much of it revolved around music. a few of my recent projects:

compose some tracks, using my korg electribe er-1 and ea-1, combined with my pc/midi studio setup (cubase & cakewalk). i dabble, i’m familiar with the equipment — i jam, but haven’t laid down tracks yet.

become a superstar dj. i’ve played around with turntables—i can beatmatch fairly well, but am still working on the mix… before becoming a superstar dj, i need to become a superstar selector.

spongefuel is a project in the works with a few of my flash buddies. eventually it will be a 3- or 4-person playspace for our flash experiments. this is something i’ve enjoyed working on, and am hoping our creations will see the light of day real soon.

my latest endeavor has been to fully digitize my cd collection into mp3s. this is taking much longer than i had hoped, becuase some of my older cds produce static when ripped at higher speeds. the goal is to have one central, organized, online repository of my music… accessible from anywhere (my bedroom, my kitchen, my office, my pda, my internet café) by anyone (myself, my friends, anonymous strangers) to do a variety of things (play music, play playlists, give music, take music). this will probably be accomplished by using a flash 5 interface on the front-end (to handle playlist creation and song playing) — ming and/or swift-mp3 in the middle-end (to handle the mp3/swf conversion & streaming) — mysql and php4 on the backend (to organize the mp3 database). it’s still not clear whether i’ll need to interface with cddb or parse id3 tags.

now if i can just get over this “writer’s block” ã

is this it? is evijhserf the only creative outlet of mine that will survive?