Creativity and creative weirdness

S. K. Mangal, in his book of Advanced Educational Psychology (second edition), 2008, came up with a number of scholars with their different opinions of what creativity contains in humans: Bartlett (1958) sees creativity as an “adventurous thinking”. Spearman (1931) says “creativity is the power of the human mind to create new contents” while M. J. Levin (1978), sees creativity as being “the ability to discover new solutions to problems or to produce new ideas, inventions or works of art…a way of viewing the world and interacting with it in a manner different from that of the general population”.

Paplia and Olds (1974) had earlier said that it is the “ability to see problems that no one else may even realize exist, and then to come up with new, unusual and effective solutions”. What are the problems and solutions?

The problems are things needed by man which is yet to get at the time of need: from the ordinary to the extraordinary, the essential to the non-essential, the serious to the mundane. The solutions are products resulting from profound creative thoughts. The process to finding solutions is triggered by inspiration.
However, if inspiration is the primary factor in the production of thoughts and products, their exceptional pondering to weirdness have actually led to higher products of unimaginable phenomenon, innovation and creativeness. The bearers of weird thoughts are largely artists who in their creative immersions have sought to attain impossibilities of occurrences or the possibility of unwinding a rather meaningless structure for a meaningful, useful venture or enterprise or even a common place usage in everyday life.

In the presence of creative weirdness, inspiration is nothing. Creative weirdness is the elevated summit of the ability to marshal profound thoughts and thought patterns which create uncommon pictures of alien entities in human background that lead to the pinnacle of innovativeness. The journey to this summit is not an indulgence of a lower creative enterprise but of a dedicated thinker continually doused in himself while taking off the space of the earth. Upon the location of a fragile frame of a product, he grabs it into the internal chambers of his imaginative recess for appropriation.

A sustained association with artistic production leads the artist to a realm of weirdness which eventually distinguishes his products from another artist. This enterprise of the weird in creativity is the peak of creative engagement that turns off normality into abnormal usefulness.
An artist could begin to wander into the realm of fantasizing that if man walks upright; could we have humans that will walk with their heads down? Or, how could human beings live in a house without roof and still not be exposed to the threatening harsh conditions of the weather? Or how do we make cars using water? It is the imaginative weirdness of a thinker or of a creator that usually leads to these impossibilities becoming possibilities.

The process of imaginative weirdness is always built on an existing product or a phenomenon. So, even if a higher level of inspiration or thought pattern, creative weirdness is a phenomenon of the existing whose quest is to disorder or mutilate an existing product by breaching its well-known protocols and scientific or natural posture and procedure of operation into a new unknown useful caricature.

There are series of hazards associated with this seemingly awkward imaginative process. In a bid to dislodge an existing order to create a new product, injuries could be inflicted on many existing systems that have kept a social group cohesive over the centuries. Many belief systems may face disintegration and collapse. And norms and values of humanity may be endangered thereby plunging it into chaos.
Creatively weird product is perhaps the artist’s vision of what the future will look like after humans on earth. This form of thoughts is more useful in the scientific imaginations that result in scientific solutions which have led to great feats.

Perhaps, it is through creative weirdness that Nnedi Okorafor has been able to create a niche for herself through obsessive fantasy in her art or Crispin Uduobok’s Weekly Trust’s weird stories of those days. It could even be Saddiq Dzukogi’s filcreate arts; a specialized visual patterns and objects that come to him instantaneously using the pen to conjure meaningful images that are not known to him in the first place. Their being meaningful does not mean they are readily useful.