I’ll admit, when I first dove into this piece, it was almost felt as if I was wandering through a dark swamp looking for some hidden treasure. Initially, I had to take a few minutes to reread each passage in order to fully understand what it was saying. But I knew that there was a gemstone’s value in it, so I went on.
In the beginning, Rand stresses the importance of boundaries– restrictions. Before I’d even read further, I’d asked myself, “Why would I restrain that creativity and freedom I have?” Coincidentally, then he went on to explain why: inherent meaning. There’s a balancing act between how free and expressive the piece is, and how practical and meaningful the piece is.
If you add too much freedom, and there’s no true point to it. I’m a bit of a libertarian, so I recoiled to that notion at first. But when I thought about my own work or even the past projects of this class, I then realized that it wasn’t such a big and bad concept. If you play around too much, with no criteria to work with, it’s extremely easy to get lost or come up with something that misses the mark. However, on the inverse, adding too much restraint, too much practicality, is… well, boring. It’s not fun to work with anymore. The solution is uniform. This notion of balance really clicked when I looked back on our past projects– if the class material includes Rand’s philosophy, surely the class practices what it preaches?
As it turns out, it does.
The past projects are exceptional examples of this. The black squares– trying to create an attractive piece with only four black squares to work with. Or maybe our work with the fonts and letters, for the exact same reason. That was the mental click that had me understanding it. Just reading it without seeing it applied would have meant nothing, but, having looked back on our projects that have used such a philosophy, I found myself with a nice little “aha moment”, as now I know what it actually looks like in practice.
