iterating
“Creation is iteration”, Adam Savage says. “Your job as a creator is to take as many wrong turns as possible”. To fail, and fuck up, and fall forward. To pick yourself up and to do it all over, with a sure and steady rhythm.
Iteration isn’t monotony. It isn’t a matter of refinement or an effort towards perfecting things. It’s a method of inquiry. A procedural searching. A conscious re-considering. It’s thinking with your hands. It’s praying with your feet. To see again what you have seen already, but differently.
To iterate is to return with variation. Every pass carries a residue. A history. The traces of doubt, and insight, and wonder. New questions, adjustments, and possibilities. Each instantiation is a whole new catalyst. The sure footing in familiar territory that gives way to terrains of exploration and discovery.
It is an exercise in attention and humility. Everything you make stands upon the shoulders of the work that came before it and whispers to the work that is forthcoming. It means admitting that our understanding is always-only provisional.
No matter what happens, no matter the way things shift, or how dramatic the change is, nothing is ever broken, lost, ruined, wasted, or conclusive. Each iteration teaches us something the previous revisions couldn’t. We discover the instability within our own ways of seeing. It collapses our certainty. Shows us that the work is never final. It never stops speaking. Whenever and wherever the work seems fixed and finished is where you’ll find it opening.
May the things you return to arrive with revelation.
May repetition come to you with patient mystery.
May every slow iteration show you more than what haste could ever see.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
***special thanks again to Susanne Helmert for the photogram fragment used in “entry rather than ending”
P.S. I added a new print to my shop. It’s available as a 5”x7”, 8”x10”, or 11”x14”. You can find it here.
I second all of this ! Thanks for putting it in plain sight (:
Not to brag, but most people I meet say I'm very iterating. They say something like that anyway...