Pale Blue Dot
Where there is nothing, nothing will remain. Yet, add the smallest elements together and they begin to react. Creativity does not happen in a vacuum. As such, the simplest benign items, can spark catalytic ideas and directions.
Creative Process
A creative process often comes in fits and starts and sometimes runs off in a completely unexpected direction. When we began Pale Blue Dot, our upcoming public art project for downtown Boise, the final concept direction was birthed from a series of amorphous conceptual underpinning, which were solidified by a common office item, gifting us it’s shape.
Human Commonality
Our R&D Director Dan Beyer reached across our conference table, grabbed a roll of tape and used it as a stencil to draw a circle on his piece of paper. I should say this wasn’t completely random happenstance, he was in a creative mind-frame and was looking for inspiration from something, anything.
He Thought
Commonality and cooperation was the conceptual starting point for the work, but how do you show that? The universal sign for that would definitely be a circle. As he stared at the circle, he began to think. About our planet, a little pale dot floating in nothingness. He thought about humanity and finally about the circle itself. From nothingness comes a whole world of beings, and resources and possibilities. It’s all we have. It’s everything we have in common and it’s the only place we can be. It’s where we come together, whether we like it or not, we are all here, by random occurrence or because something larger than us picked up a roll of tape. Either way, we are here, out of the nothingness.
So What Does It Mean?
It means we can’t create when there is nothing, but we can create out of something seeming to be nothing. We are constantly influenced by that which surrounds us, and our experiences. Subconsciously or consciously, our brains draw connections like colliding particles, creating something entirely new. It is new precisely because it is made of elements that we didn’t even know could possibly go together or coexist.
