An app that promises to boost your creativity through art practices
A creative duo of Aleksei Ivanovsky and Andrei Keske are launching a new app – w1d1, that has a very specific and at the same time very abstract promise – to make you more creative.
Based somewhere in between London, Moscow and Tbilisi, the team is trying to create an environment, that would help you make creative acts – the main currency of the app. The creators of the app have worked extensively together, and, as they say, saw how transformative the creative activities can be with their own eyes.
The central idea is very simple – you get one task a day, the task challenges your creative skills, rather then actual skills of drawing or photography, and you do it in a group so as to see how other people react the the same challenge.
In a faraway Estonian camp for teenagers, they did exactly what they are trying to replicate in the mobile environment – give a person a daily creative task, and a team of like minded people to do it with. «I saw how a shy teenager, that was mumbling something about how she’s not cut of for this and how uncreative and uninteresting she is, was transformed in a matter of weeks into a self confident artistic being, who has shot a dozen short films, put up a theatre play and made a contemporary art installation» – says Andrei – «That is exactly the process we tried to replicate in our app – to make you feel empowered by creating»
Both coming from Russia, and having had an extensive career together, they treat the very act of creating an app as an art project. «The whole process is very poetic – says Aleksei, – we come up with new ideas daily and go around in circles building upon each others’ concept, the shared history allows us to do it almost without saying a word. This weird blend of technical and design skill that we both possess and multiply in each other is probably the main driving force behind the app, without that we would be just making another boring social network, but it feels that we can achieve something much more artistic with this one.»
Actually the two have pulled off just that some time ago – they shook up the russian media landscape with the revolutionary w-o-s.ru project, that became the most experimental media platform ever to exist in russian internet. Having closed in 2015, it still has a surprising influence how the field of russian new media looks.
Already a year into the process of building the app, Aleksei found the very same concept behind it in the works of Russian literary scholar Viktor Shklovsky – an important underground figure of early XX century.
Shkovsky writes in his early book “Art as technique” : ”Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and no tas they are known.
The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important…”
“When I read that, I was astonished it felt like there’s this powerful connection between centuries, that the idea at the base of the app, that we need art to help us defamiliarize our lives for us, to make the colors more vivid and emotions more noticeable is not my random quirk of mind, but a very grounded centuries old idea, we are just trying to mold it into a new form, this time – an app.”