An Interview with Ze Frank

The Show's Ze Frank talks about unsolvable problems, "brain surfing," pain management, and how creative pursuits change perception.

Ze Frank

Photo credit: Scott Beale / laughingsquid.com.

Are there any techniques that you use in your creative process that help you generate new ideas?

Self-awareness is one of the big keys. If you read a lot of the psychology literature on creativity, one of the only real, solid correlations with being able to shift your creative output is the belief that you can change it. So for me — I think I picked this up in a Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi book — I’ve spent a long time just trying to figure out the kind of cycles that I go through, trying to pay attention to the different kinds of states that I find myself in.

There are times when I feel like I’m craving what I call unsolvable problems, and I have the kind of energy you need to move forward into uncharted territory and brave that side of things. And then there are other times when that seems like the most difficult chore in the world. So I’ve also gotten pretty comfortable knowing when I need to pick up solvable problems. Programming definitely fills that void for me. Also illustrating, doing little illustrations, things like that. This is a long-winded way of saying that I think I’ve got a range of techniques that feed into how I’m feeling at that particular moment.

Do you have any day-to-day habits you rely on?

I make something every day — I think that’s really the only habit that I’ve fallen into over the last few years. No matter what, I make something. This last year with The Show has been kind of convenient because it’s given me structure to play against. Before that, with the zefrank.com project, there was less structure and it was a lot more difficult. The Show narrowed the focus and made it a little bit easier because I know exactly what I have to work on each day. That aside, there’s this thing I try to do that I call “brain surfing.” Do you know the technique “morphological synthesis”?

I don’t.

There’s a really beautiful book by James L. Adams called Conceptual Blockbusting. It’s a book that was written in the ’70s on creativity. The idea is, you just start with a concept that’s immediate to you. I mean “immediate” in that you have some kind of direct emotional connection to it in that moment. And it can be as simple as a word. Maybe somebody pissed you off in line, or you’re worried that your toe is broken. And you just start with that and begin to associate things with it. It’s not really free association, so it’s not just anything that comes to mind. But you tell little stories to yourself that move you away from that initial concept.

So if it’s your toe being broken, you start thinking to yourself, well, what would happen if something else was broken and you tried to drive a car? Then you move away from that and you think about the worst car race ever. Now you’ve moved into a demolition derby. And you just sort of work in circles. At different points you stop and relate wherever you are back to the original concept. And just play. Sometimes I write these things down on paper, and sometimes I just sit there and do them in my head. But for me, it’s a nice little play zone where you can find very weird and silly things.

…a lot of people are focusing on the content that’s being produced right now. And I think it’s the wrong thing to look at. It’s actually the pursuit and the perception change that I think a lot of people are experiencing about the world — that’s the thing to focus on and the thing to celebrate.

I can see where that process shows up in the way The Show is structured.

The Show is a pretty neat case study for that sometimes. It’s like a continuing series of Sudoku puzzles. It doesn’t get any easier, in the same way that if you get a whole big book of Sudoku puzzles, each one presents a new challenge. There are a lot of gaping holes. But you get better at understanding the strategies by which you can solve them. Anyone that plays Sudoku knows you can never just look at them and in one glance see all the numbers. You use a strategy to get the first number, and then you use another strategy to get the second number.

Let’s say I’m sick and I want to talk about sickness. There was one [episode] a while back — I think it was called the “IC EC” (the “Illness Communication Exaggeration Curve”). And that came out of feeling sick — that’s all I felt. [laughter] That’s all that was close to me at that moment. And I felt like I really wanted to communicate that to the viewers. And I sat with that for a second and I was like, well, why do I want to communicate it to viewers? What good does that do me? And I started thinking about why we communicate illness. And it sort of solved itself one step at a time.

Bio

In 2001, Ze Frank achieved net notoriety when a birthday party invitation entitled “How to Dance Properly” became an early viral video. This spark led to zefrank.com, home of a host of projects, including interactive flash toys, animations, essays, videos, and a wide variety of collaborative ventures. Over fifty million people have visited zefrank.com to date. From March 17, 2006 to March 17, 2007, he wrote, produced, and starred in The Show with zefrank, a wildly creative online daily video program.

Frank’s an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons School of Design, and SUNY Purchase. As a speaker at events like the TED conference, PopTech, and Flash Forward, he covers topics ranging from the new creativity to contagious media to airplane-cabin safety cards.{carriage return}

Ze Frank on the Web: zefrank.com, The Show with zefrank

Has there been anything you’ve learned while making The Show that really surprised you?

I’d say that the challenge would be to find things that didn’t surprise me. One is just the process itself. I use a fairly improvisational process so I don’t write these shows. Once in a blue moon I’ll write a show if I’m so busy that I can’t go through this process. I think maybe two shows total were written. So that’s been surprising — just how long it takes to create these things line by line. And it’s been really surprising what it feels like to live on the edge of sort of an anxiety curve — this feeling of being lost, worrying all the time that you have run out of ideas. Most shows begin with a level of fear that I’m going to make something really bad.

The other thing is the relationship to the audience. The Show has really evolved organically, and two things have come out of that. One is that the audience has brought so much mythology and context to The Show. And second, it’s been surprising how much more difficult it gets when you have to pay respect to that context. As The Show progresses forward, everything that I do is held up in that light. It’s bizarre. In the beginning I could do things that were surprising in some way, but at this point, anything that I do has a reference somewhere else in The Show.

Does it become increasingly hard to get to that creative part of your brain, when you’re concerned about people being satisfied with continuity issues and such?

It’s not so much about continuity even. And I wouldn’t call it just a blanket worry about satisfying people’s expectations. It’s just that meaning is inserted into things in very peculiar ways. It gives you a much richer palette to play off of because you can reference things and riff on things. Even if very few people get it, you’ve got a lot of resistance there to play with. Boundaries are great to have anyways, creatively.

But the walls sort of convolute in on themselves, and you get some weird strange vibrations happening. And on the other hand, yeah, it can become a real challenge once in a while to just block that stuff out and slam forward with something.

I was curious if you were this creatively productive when you were younger, or if there was there was some event or series of realizations that really ramped things up for you?

I always drew a lot. Drawing was a very personal thing for me, which continued in high school. I was heavily heavily into art, and I applied to art schools. I drew actively until I was twenty-eight or so. That’s a very nonverbal creativity, but I think that’s where I first got hooked on losing myself in particular things and probably first understood the real pain that’s associated with starting things and also finishing them.

In the course that I taught at NYU we did critical studies of how different types of people talk about creativity — artists, psychologists, philosophers, business people. And artists — if you look at Twyla Tharp or at Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, a lot of artists really talk about pain management, just this constant struggle. And I think that that’s where I learned some of those rules firsthand — the psychological part.

From the drawing?

Not only drawing but also self-identifying as a person who draws, entering competitions, things like that.

Are there any other insights you’d like to share with folks about the secret to living a creatively productive life?

You know, I really think that people have to come into this in their own way. For me, this notion of “creativity” is sort of a blank word. It doesn’t really mean much. And the more you look into it and look at how different people explore it, you realize that it’s a word that has many, many different definitions.

The thing that I focus in on is being interested and realizing that anything that you approach has almost a fractal pattern. Anything. If it’s yarn for knitting, you realize that if you have any interest , there’s more information there than would last you a year, to get into and understand and play around with, not to mention all the tactile qualities of yarn and what it feels like when you stretch it across something or ball it up. So that’s how I look at this — having the energy to stay interested and the energy to spark interest in things.

With The Show project, I’ve also been thinking a lot about this culture of authorship that we’re entering into. You’ve got so many people that are making things now, whether it’s emails or instant messages or uploading images to Flickr, making movies, creating audio on cheap prosumer technology. What’s really interesting to me is that, as anyone knows who’s gone into a creative discipline, the second that you start doing those things, the world around you changes. If you draw, you start seeing the edges of things, and you start seeing the deformities of their shape when you move around them. When you start playing guitar, you start noticing notes in all the music you play, and in fact, the music that you listen to never sounds the same from that point on. I think that a lot of people are focusing on the content that’s being produced right now. And I think it’s the wrong thing to look at. It’s actually the pursuit and the perception change that I think a lot of people are experiencing about the world — that’s the thing to focus on and the thing to celebrate.

19 comments on “An Interview with Ze Frank

  1. One of the things I’ve liked about these interviews—and this was one of my favorites so far—is how they sort of deflate ‘creativity’ as a concept, or at least reclaim it from all that corporate jargon about ‘thinking outside the box,’ freeing your inner self, etc. “Boundaries are great to have anyways, creatively.” I loved that. It helps with my own tendency to think of ‘the creative’ as this “Calgon, take me away” kind of zone where you’re above the world of checkbooks, tune-ups and rush hour commutes. The structure of a show and the pressures of an audience (which aren’t so unlike the structures and pressures in our everyday lives) seem central to what Ze Frank does, and I like at the end how he turns the focus back on the world: it’s not so much the ‘content’ you produce, but the “pursuit and perception change” that’s at the core of being creative. You’re a great interviewer, Cecil—these questions really bring up the gold.

  2. this here’s a rich interview–thank you ze, and cecil. i particularly liked hearing about the play between solvable and unsolvable problems–recognizing when you need to move from one to the other, and it also reminds me of the exhausted mathematician taking a breather, only then to envision the proof.
    and the perception change you describe at the end of the interview–great observation.

  3. I agree with e. and rodney k. You have sought out such, interesting, thoughtful, and honest interview subjects. Thank you!

  4. I second that–or “fourth” that. A provocative interview! The concept of art and creativity as a sort of “pain management” really resonated with me. There’s a constant struggle to stay on track while battling the perversions and unpredicatability of day-to-day life when working toward a writing/painting/musical goal. I’m noticing more and more that people who really live as fulltime artists–people who really finish artistic projects and put them out there–talk about creativity in a different way from the person who plans to do something creative at some point when they “have time,” like spending a delightful afternoon baking cupcakes. Now I’m just rambling–anyway, I loved the interview. Just for the record, I love cupcakes too.

  5. I liked what Ze had to say not about creativity but about creating. I think the tendency to think of creativity as a zone you have to fall into is a common one, and misplaced. If people worried less about being creative and worked harder at creating, we’d probably all enjoy a greater level of creativity.
    Great series of interviews.

  6. the creativity = “world around you changes” message resonated. learning guitar at 40 is having that effect. frank’s comment illustrates the underlying value of art and creative pursuits. great interview.

  7. I also appreciate the way Ze looks at stimuli across all platforms — what it means, how it feels (literally and figuratively), what can be done with it. This kind of holistic worldview is very uncommon, and undoubtedly manifested itself in the success of The Show. People respond big to stimuli that affects them on multiple levels, and Ze translated that to video.
    (Agreed — great interview.)

  8. When I discovered Flash Fiction a few years ago, I thought it was the perfect format for the web. Warren Ellis just noted “It’s a packeted medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go.”.
    ZeFrank took this one step further, taking short burst of rich media to the web, sort of a cross between the TV News programs no one has the time to watch and the TV commercials I can’t walk by without stopping. Add personality and some zany antics, and you get short bursts of insight made sticky by the face of a friend.
    Having an outlet and an audience for being creative is a great catalyst for creativity itself. I think at some level we all crave attention, and positive attention can bring out the best in some of us. I wonder how many people were caught up in the halo effect of Ze’s creativity, and what will come of that?
    Thanks for getting us inside Ze’s head to see how it works, this sort of insight is rare and invaluable.

  9. great stuff

  10. Conceptual Blockbusting – the Adams book Ze mentions, is described in a similar way in a text called “Lateral Thinking” By Ed DeBono.
    Great INterview!

  11. Thanks to Ze and all of those inspirational artists who create because they must. Who loves the little duckies in the pond? We do.

  12. Thank you, Ze!
    I’m a musician and I noticed that my creative power increased tremendously since a started Yogic Flying. It somehow takes you out of the grip of the already existing compositions and I also noticed more bubbling bliss whilst touching the keys. It must be the influence of that silent source of Transcendental Consciousness within , which is the basis of music, isn’t it?
    Jan

  13. Even i was affected! I even bought an essay paper on it.This essay service helped me to get rid of unneccessary job.

  14. Thanks to Ze and all of those inspirational artists who create because they must. Who loves the little duckies in the pond? We do.

  15. Thanks to Ze and all artists who create.You are the best!

  16. When I discovered Flash Fiction a few years ago, I thought it was the perfect format for the web. Warren Ellis just noted “It’s a packeted medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go.”.
    ZeFrank took this one step further, taking short burst of rich media to the web, sort of a cross between the TV News programs no one has the time to watch and the TV commercials I can’t walk by without stopping. Add personality and some zany antics, and you get short bursts of insight made sticky by the face of a friend.
    Having an outlet and an audience for being creative is a great catalyst for creativity itself. I think at some level we all crave attention, and positive attention can bring out the best in some of us. I wonder how many people were caught up in the halo effect of Ze’s creativity, and what will come of that?
    Thanks for getting us inside Ze’s head to see how it works, this sort of insight is rare and invaluable.

  17. Self-awareness is one of the big keys!
    This is an awesome tip. Thanks for sharing this, Ze Frank
    William Facebook Emoticons

  18. Awesome stuff!

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