Creators and thinkers are always looking for new ways to approach a project or creative challenge. Inspired by the Oblique Strategies cards of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt and the performance-based “events” of George Brecht’s artist’s book Water Yam, students in this fall’s new Pratt Integrative Course Games, Glitches, and Creativity developed A Deck of Cards Always Will, a pack of cards featuring prompts that are meant to promote creativity and foster new avenues of exploration and inquiry.
In a world that is rapidly changing, students need to be able to address unpredictable and complex challenges that require experimentation and adjustments from different—and sometimes competing—directions. Throughout the course, taught by Pratt Visiting Instructor Luke Degnan, undergraduate students from a range of disciplines examined different concepts and technologies and how they affect creativity in practice, including through games, visual art, and writing.
How can technology impact creativity? What happens when we amplify mistakes and missteps? Using questions like these as a springboard, the class experimented with making work that is disrupted, enhanced, glitched, or obfuscated by technology, and explored concepts and tools ranging from augmented realities and chatbots to nonlinear narrative and writing for video games. The students built on what they learned and applied it to other assignments, including using the cards from A Deck of Cards Always Will as a creative impetus for work on projects later in the semester.
Explore the online edition of the cards and see how they might expand your creative process.
Image: A Deck of Cards Always Will. Cards by students Dingfan Cao, Anthony Cavieles, Jairo Gomez, Wan Hua Hsieh, Dean Liaw, Ashley Liu, Marcus Nicolois, Samantha Redman, Kiana Senke, Rachel Shanley, Nelson Wirstrom, and Menghan Xiao