Creating Without Demanding a Result

When I work with sound or photography, what matters to me is what happens while I am doing it. The state I am in, what I am reaching towards, where my attention goes. My intentions belong to that moment too, even when I cannot yet give them a clear form.

I think of the finished work as footprints in the sand. They remain after someone has passed. They bear a relationship to the movement, but the walking itself was a fuller experience than the marks can hold.

The footprints matter. Still, leaving footprints cannot be the purpose of walking.

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What Happens While We Create

A recording gives us something we can return to. A photograph makes an image available beyond the moment in which it was made. I value this possibility: something of an experience can reach another person, somewhere else, at another time.

Yet when I call the finished object “the result,” I sometimes feel that the word leaves too much out. It gives a visible boundary to something whose most important part may have happened before there was anything to show.

Hours spent with sound belong to my life whether or not a recording survives them. Their value does not have to wait for a finished piece to confirm it. What I attended to, what I was trying to do, how I inhabited those hours—all of this has already happened.

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The Question of Craft

This is where craftsmanship matters to me. There is a distance between an inward state and the form I can give it. Working with a medium means learning how to cross that distance more precisely.

How closely can a sound carry what I am trying to express? How faithfully can an image embody a way of seeing?

The result matters here because it allows me to consider what I have actually managed to convey. I can care about its precision, return to it, change it. Perhaps this is part of the meaning of art for me: giving an inner experience a material form through which it can be shared.

But even a work that feels right cannot contain the whole experience of making it. To treat it as the complete outcome feels like an illusion.

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Letting the Footprints Follow

To release the demand for a result entirely would feel, to me, like a kind of perfection. I can see the direction in that thought without claiming to have arrived there.

It would still leave room for intention, effort and careful work. What would fall away is the need for the finished object to justify the time spent creating it.

I want to give my attention to the act itself, including the care with which something takes shape. A work may remain, and I may choose to share it. Its life beyond that moment has value too.

The footprints can tell us something about the walk. The reason to walk is there with each step.