there is no better book about human creativity

Douglas Fowler, S.J. Perelman. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983, p. 83—

Continuing an ancient and honorable line of speculation into the nature of humor, Arthur Koestler has theorized [in The Act of Creation] that human laughter may be a sort of alternative satisfaction of “biological drives,” a substitute for “killing and copulating,” for planting antipersonnel bombs. The aggression implied in laughter—and laughter almost always involves ridicule, bringing low—is “sublimated, often unconscious,” but the mechanism of laughter surely involves a psychic effort to reduce or even imaginatively destroy its objects; and we can agree that a good part of the comic phenomenon might be understood as brutality without consequence.

•••

I discovered The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler’s classic book on science, art and humor, as a college freshman in 1965. It had been published the year before. At nearly 500 pages, it is not an easy read. Or, it might be better to say that the text, as one moves through it, is immensely pleasurable, stirring and insightful. That is especially true of Part One. In Part Two, as Koestler cautions, the wording thickens somewhat and the content grows more technical. But you must not be put off by this. 

Over the years, I have owned six or seven copies of this book, and yet I have never read the entire text in sequence, page by page from beginning to end. I don’t think it works best for that. But most likely I’ve read every word, in session lengths and sequences that seemed appropriate at the time. Even today, I still go back to it, because its concepts are so illuminating, and the writing is so perfectly phrased. I have learned immeasurably, I don’t deny, from other educational opportunities, and from other published sources, but I continue to be convinced that, at a critical point in my life, Koestler’s book provided a “big picture” framework for those.  

The entire book is now available free online. If the book seems somewhat daunting, you might first read an essay I wrote in 1998. More recently, I produced a short video talk on the subject, which is also free online. Near the end of the video, I recall an incident that took place in my classroom, back in 1968, when I was a 7-12 art teacher in a public school. In subsequent years, as a university professor (and as a grapher design and writer) I made frequent use of Koestler's approach to innovation—and I still use it to this day.

the frustrations of small mistakes in video talks

Making online videos is apparently always a challenge. From my experience, the results are always uneven, largely because there are always mistakes. Some months ago, for example, I made what is presumably the best of my eighteen video talks—or at least the most popular one. The title is Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version, and currently (although I do not promote it by pleading for viewers to “like and subscribe”) on the average it is being watched by someone, somewhere in the world, day and night, about once per hour. As good as it is, I still wince in response to its errors.

One that always bothers me is a scene in which I provide an example of the simultaneous contrast of color, in which a single color appears to be two noticeably different colors, when placed in different settings. The still shot reproduced above is the slide that I intended to use. It is a persuasive example of simultaneous contrast, because the field of background gray (behind the name Bing Crosby) conspicuously appears to be two distinctively different grays. This is the image I should have used, and everything would have been perfectly fine. Unfortunately, as I was editing the final version, I slightly adjusted the overall color balance—with the result that the contrast effect is far too subtle in the film.