User:Tommi/SI28

This is a WIP page

Reflecting on the meaning of creativity from/through/with machines, especially for language manipulation.

I focused on Metathinking, Metaness, and going beyond tools.

On Creativity

What does it mean to be “creative” in the era of mass content creation? At the beginning of Uncreative Writing: Managing language in the digital age, Kenneth Goldsmith paraphrases Douglas Huebler, writing:

The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.

How can we be sure that whatever we are writing or generating has not been conceived by someone else, somewhere in the world, sometime in history? If we cannot, how important and how determining is it for us that the outcome of our creativity is something unique or unprecedented? Let’s assume that there is no other similar thing about what we are “producing” anywhere else in the Universe. Can we say this idea is ours, and ours alone? How can we prove that a creative outcome, no matter how special, has not been indirectly co-created by the virtually infinite inputs that sparked our inspiration, or the building blocks of knowledge that we required to formulate an opinion?

Goldsmith’s provocation about true authorship questions the very core of the definition of creativity. Let’s take Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The genius of Albert Einstein is not in the invention itself, but rather in the ability of combining, “marrying” previously disentangled theories.

Thursday 8 January 2026

Happiness and fulfillment

Being aware that probably all one could have ever think of has been already written, portrayed, or performed somewhere is a venomous limitation to the spark of inventiveness and creativity.

What is the value I can add? If I cannot read, watch, or experience paramount representations and variations of what I am feeling, of what I am thinking about, does it have any sense for me to just spit it out?

Meta

There is a unique beauty in everything that is meta. Thinking about thinking, machines that relate to other machines, writing about writing, and infinite combinations of intricate relationships and rabbit holes. Beyond this Special Issue, XPUB itself embodies the concept of metaness in the most wonderful way, flirting with the risk of being self-referential, but always fostering meaningful, compelling stimuli and inspiration.
Entry by: Tommi
Song: Gli occhi del cuore – Elio e le Storie Tese, from Boris’ soundtrack.

The concept of Meta has nothing to do with the company that adopted this term as its name, butchering its gorgeous and interesting meaning.

This entry was initially written for the Special Issue 28’s Glossary, yet it continued to come back during Tommi’s research and practice, and they are interested in diving deeper 👀

The Metathinking Metamachine

Since the very moment I started XPUB, I have been (over)thinking, possibly obsessing, about the making of Pöuli, and of the (currently very incomplete) website for the Special Issue 28. Wholly absorbed by my tooling hyperfocus, I lost track of time. All collective conversations passed through me. Before I could realize it, people were forming groups and started working on their project for the main event at Ubik.

So Tommi, what are you going to do?
Ehm… … … … …
 …I will build The Metathinking Metamachine!

I genuinely had no idea about what that meant. In my head, I could not picture anything beyond the face of Niklas Luhmann, the inventor of the prodigious Zettelkasten system.

The intention was to address the theme of the 28^th special issue in relation to my own obsessions:

• A Metamachine: a machine about machines, a software made to solve problems, and interact with, other software.
• Metathinking: the process of thinking about thinking, better explained in the linked article.

At that point, conceptualizing, preparing, and enacting anything that would actually do something useful, or produce a meaningful outcome was unfeasible and idealistic. So what then?

Thanks to Manetta’s and Marloes’ guidance and suggestions, I decided to base everything on irony and satire.

I was kindly allowed to light some tiny candles during the performance, to enhance the ironic spiritual factor.

The one thing I was sure of was that I intended on focusing on a pseudo-spiritual and grotesque setting. I based all the performance on a spiritual seance to connect with the Gods of Tooling. Furthermore, while sharing my anxiety and my doubts about the performance with Martina and Claudio, I got to the conclusion that the whole performance should have been fun: I got very excited of performing some sort of nerd stand-up comedy.

Albeit the path leading to the performance has been extremely stressful because I was terribly confused and overwhelmed by the novelty of my first Special Issue and its many inputs, I am incredibly proud of it, for a series of reasons.

• It was my first performance. I never realised that I would actually define myself as an artist and this performance marked a watershed moment in my self-identification as one. Actually, the way I comfortably call myself is pseudo-artist.
• Even though I learned it the hard way, I deeply understood the collaborative nature of XPUB. I have been doing many projects with others, but I did not commit to any collective project to develop with others. I found out that I must actively pursue an intertwining of practices with my fellow students.