My Journey for Randomness In Order to Create More

With readySketch the idea is to let the randomness of my surroundings guide me intuitively in creating art that moves me. In creation, like you may know, there’s some kind of pleasant feeling of anticipating the finished piece, an accomplishment of my will.

I started with something, there was nothing, and now it’s here where it lives forever for me to look at.

This feeling however is like chasing the dragon. Sometimes by just sitting in front of a piece of paper or my iPad I can’t see what I’m going to make before I make it. There’s no definitive image sticking out in my mind calling me to put it to paper. So I started looking for inspiration, but I wanted my inspiration to come in a unique way.

I couldn’t just look at what other artists are doing and go, “I should just do something similar.”

I needed to find some type of inner voice some artists often mention. The thing about the inner voice though, is that it’s unique only to you. I wrote once in a song that:

“To be like you I gotta be myself, because you’re not like anybody else”

Same Name by Kyle Knoblauch

The “you” in this phrase is referring to artists that I look up to. If you notice, each artist that you like is not like anyone else. So your inner voice, your style, needs to be uniquely you.

I created readySketch to feed this creative itch. I needed my ideas, my words, my images, sounds, favorite quotes, and existential questions to drive my motivation behind my art. I added the 5 minute timer, because in most cases when it comes to creating art, getting to wrapped up in the finer details completely derails me from completing anything. Not all the time though.

There are times where the piece speaks to me more than my other sketches and is almost calling me to give it more attention, to bring it more to life.

So I created readySketch for iOS, I shared it with my friends and my friend Jim mentioned that it resembles David Bowie’s word cut-up method technique for writing songs.

I loved hearing that, since Bowie is one of my favorite artists so I researched that method a bit further and found some interesting videos on YouTube.

You’ll find another one similar to this where David is a bit younger, but in this particular video though he mentioned how a friend created a computer program for him to facilitate his cut-up method. (Which I need to give credit to William S Burroughs for pioneering the method)

So I started looking for this computer program, because it sounds similar to readySketch, and I happened on verbasizer.com. This is what David Bowie was talking about in that interview, and @taoski developed something similar to the original one he used.

It’s brilliant, how it works is you can input type into the 6 columns yourself or load news headlines or Bowie lyrics into it. When you click Verbasize! it rearranges the text loaded into each column into the output area below, leaving you with some interesting things for your mind to draw connections to.

With readySketch, I aim to upgrade it when I feel it needs an upgrade. The iOS app is version 2.0 where I evolved it from just words and phrases, to other categories like, sounds, images, shapes, quotes, questions and users photo albums to derive inspiration. The news headlines was always something I wanted to get to and I might now that I see Bowie and Brian Eno were using them.

I hope you try out verbasizer and readySketch for your next project. Maybe you will draw connections between the randomness like David Bowie did and create excellent songs or in my case, drawings that just speak to you and give you that feeling of capturing that elusive dragon even if just for a moment.