work is hidden behind walls: the air ducts, pipes, electrical wiring, support beams and so on. The Pompidou Center in Paris turns that architectural mold inside out. The functional and structural elements are displayed on the outer facade, for the world to see. When the design is exhibited on the surface rather than concealed, the creativity is overt.
Overt creativity exposes the wires and ducts of invention; it enables us to see the internal mental processes that make innovation possible.
Across diverse cultures, the most bountiful sources of overt creativity are found in the arts. Because the arts are intended to be exhibited, they are the open-source software of innovation. Take Christian Marclay’s installation The Clock: in this twenty-four-hour-long video montage, each minute of the day is represented by scenes from movies in which that exact time appears on screen. At precisely 2:18 p.m., Denzel Washington is glancing at a clock that reads 2:18 in the thriller The Taking of Pelham 123. Over the course of the installation’s twenty-four-hour cycle, thousands of clips from films such as Body Heat, Moonraker, The Godfather, A Nightmare on Elm Street and High Noon are screened, incorporating a dizzying array of timepieces – including pocket watches, wristwatches, alarm clocks, punch clocks, grandfather clocks, and clock towers – in analog and digital, in black-and-white and color.17
What Marclay is doing is not dissimilar from the YouTube engineers: he splices existing footage into short clips and stitches them together. But while the engineers’ creativity remains hidden, Marclay enables us to observe the bones of the creative process. We can see that he has broken and blended films to make his timepiece of movies. In contrast to the YouTube engineers, he puts his dicing on display.
For tens of thousands of years, the arts have been a constant in human culture, giving us an abundance of overt creativity. In the same way that a brain scan enables us to see the brain at work, the arts allow us to study the anatomy of the creative process. So how can putting the arts and sciences side by side enable us to better understand the birth of new ideas? What does free-verse poetry have to do with the invention of DNA sequencing and digital music? How is the Sphinx related to self-repairing cement? What does hip-hop music show us about Google Translate?
For answers, we now turn to each of the three Bs.
CHAPTER 3
BENDING
In the early 1890s, the French artist Claude Monet rented a room across from Rouen Cathedral. Over the course of two years, he painted more than thirty views of the cathedral’s front entrance. Monet’s visual perspective never changed: he painted the facade over and over from the same angle. Yet in spite of this fixed scene, no two paintings were alike. Instead, Monet showed the cathedral in different lights. In one, the noon sun gave its facade a bleached pallor; in another, dusk illuminated it with red and orange hues. In representing a prototype in constantly new ways, Monet was making use of the first creative tool: bending.
Like Monet, Katsushika Hokusai took a visual icon – Japan’s Mount Fuji – and created thirty-six woodblock prints, depicting it in different seasons, from different distances, and in different visual styles.
Throughout history, cultures have been bending the human form in different ways.
Mayan
Japanese
Ghanaian sculptures
And they’ve equally manipulated the forms of animals.
Chinese
Cypriot
Greek horses
Bending happens not only in the open, but also out of sight. Consider cardiology. Hearts are prone to fail, so researchers have long harbored a dream: in the same way that they build artificial bones and limbs, could they build an artificial heart? The answer, as first proven in 1982, was yes. William DeVries installed an artificial heart in retired dentist Barney Clark, who lived for another four months and died with the heart still pumping. It was a resounding success for bionics.
But there was a problem. Pumps require an enormous amount of energy, and their moving parts are quickly subject to wear and tear. Fitting the machinery inside the chest of a person was a challenge. In 2004, doctors Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier came up with a novel solution. Although Mother Nature only has the tools to pump blood around the body, there’s nothing to say that has to be the single solution. Cohn and Frazier wondered: what if one could use a continuous flow? Like water circulating in a fountain, could blood get oxygenated as it passed through a chamber, and flow right back out?
In 2010, United States Vice President Dick Cheney was outfitted with a continuous flow heart, and he has been alive but pulseless ever since. A pulse is simply the byproduct of the heart’s pumping, but it’s not a necessity. Cohn and Frazier invented a new type of heart by taking nature’s prototype and putting it on the workbench.
Bending can remodel a source in many ways. Take size. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Shuttlecocks on the front lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art are inflated to the size of teepees.
For the 2016 summer Olympics, the artist JR installed a giant sculpture of high jumper Ali Mohd Younes Idriss atop a building in Rio de Janeiro.
What can expand can also contract. Confined to a hotel room as a refugee during the Second World War, sculptor Alberto Giacometti went small, creating a series of tiny human figurines.
Alberto Giacometti’s Piazza
