On Adaptive Creativity

Inspired by conversations we’ve been having with our community and its adaptive creativity, we’re taking stock of what cultural production means in the midst of the pandemic. The rise in creative activities – from baking to painting – is showing us that the creation of something, whether tangible or virtual, is quickly becoming a balm for the isolated moment. As we all adapt to the times, what we’re finding alluring is not the end result, but the process and the resourcefulness that goes into creating new work for a new normal.

We’re seeing the emergence of a few creative threads that demonstrate the ways in which the creative landscape is adapting in quarantine. Read on for our roundup.

The Adaptive Creativity Practice

With social distancing as the new cultural norm, the structures around portraiture and photography have shifted. Brands and magazines are increasingly turning to Zoom and FaceTime to create campaign imagery, from Jacquemus to Vogue Italia to Zara. But the majority of screenshot photography shows the end result, with conventional cropping and editing. The screenshot portraits of Clifford Prince King take a different approach.

In the Los Angeles-based photographer’s video chat portraits, King instead presents still lifes, with his laptop as a crucial compositional element of the scene. Rather than focusing on just a figure, King highlights the new spaces of virtual intimacy, from the ruffled sheets of a bed to a kitchen table with fruit scattered on the surface. King himself is visible in a few shots, turning the frames not just into portraits of others, but portraits of collaborative creative work.

The Adaptive Platform

As we continue to view the world through screens, be they laptops, televisions or our phones, we’re reaching a point of content fatigue. We’re spoiled for choice across streaming sites, social media apps, and wholly new platforms, with more and more content produced each day. Apt for our current cultural moment and coinciding with the rise in 90s and 00s nostalgia, LocallyGrown.tv has instead brought back channel surfing.

The platform, founded by Jamil Baldwin and Tyler Bernard, has the lo-fi feel of public access programming and contains curated streams set to a specific schedule. Unlike the autonomy of clicking in and out of movies or shows on other platforms, the streams on Locally Grown move along without interruption – it’s left to you to engage with the work. Locally Grown also functions as a video archive of Black cultural ephemera, from documentaries about the infamous Freaknik festival of Atlanta to poetry readings from Maya Angelou. The site allows you to add reminders to your calendar for upcoming programming, bringing back the element of ‘can’t miss this’ that’s fallen to the wayside the past few years. Or – you can just leave it on in the background, confident that the curated streams will offer up something poignant.

Several weeks into quarantine, the live streamed music festival has become the mainstay for musical performances. From smaller home studios to produced vignettes, artists’ homes have transformed into stages. And whilst the intimacy of watching Lady Gaga perform from her home piano is unparalleled, we’re missing the sense of artist-fan interaction that comes with live shows.

But increasingly, musicians have taken to their fans to produce new types of performances. Wheatus reimagined their classic ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ for the quarantine age with Quaranteenage Dirtbag, asking fans to submit videos of themselves performing the song. Similarly, musicians are crowdsourcing content for music videos, from Charli XCX’s “Forever” to the pandemic perreo of Nino Augustine’s “Meneito”. These new forms of performance are not only acknowledgments of what’s happening around us, but function as time capsules, capturing the collaborative nature of the time. Through them, we’re not only given access to the intimate spaces of artists but the intimate spaces of fans, creating a wholly new performance experience.