Almost everything is an iteration of something else.
An artist sees another artist’s work and takes something from it. A musician hears a sound and pushes it somewhere slightly different. A designer borrows a layout, a typeface, a colour combination or an idea. Architecture responds to architecture. Fashion circles back on itself. Religions develop from older beliefs, traditions and stories.
Even the things we describe as revolutionary rarely appear from nowhere.
They are iterations.
And perhaps that is simply how human creativity works.
We see something.
We absorb it.
We change it.
We combine it with something else. Then somebody sees what we have made and the process begins again.
There is something quite comforting about that.
But lately I’ve been wondering whether iteration has changed.
Iteration used to have friction
Before the internet, influences travelled relatively slowly.
You might discover an artist through a book. Hear a new band through a friend. Find an unusual magazine in a shop. Visit another country and notice a completely different visual language.
Those influences would get mixed together with where you lived, the people around you, what you could afford, what materials were available and your own ability.
Copying was never perfect.
And perhaps those imperfections were important.
If ten people tried to recreate the same thing, they would probably produce ten slightly different results.
Something would inevitably be lost, misunderstood or changed along the way.
Perhaps that’s actually where originality lives.
Not necessarily in creating something from nothing, but in the distance between the original idea and our imperfect interpretation of it.
The gaps in our knowledge created variation.
Now we can see almost everything, instantly.
And everybody else can see it too.
The algorithmic iteration
Spend a little time on Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest and you can watch iteration happening at enormous speed.
Someone makes something interesting.
It performs well.
Someone else notices.
They make their version.
That performs well too.
Soon there are hundreds.
The same photographic styles. The same interiors. The same graphic design. The same video edits. The same clothes. The same restaurants. The same coffee shops. The same phrases. The same personal brands.
Eventually it becomes difficult to work out where the original idea came from.
Maybe that doesn’t matter.
What interests me more is what happens next.
The platforms learn that we like this thing, so they show us more of this thing.
We see more of it, so we become more familiar with it.
Familiarity becomes preference.
Preference becomes demand.
And demand creates more of the thing.
It is iteration feeding iteration.
Then brands arrive
Of course, brands understand this.
If enough people begin presenting themselves in a particular way, there is an opportunity to sell them the things required to complete the picture.
The right trainers.
The right coffee machine.
The right furniture.
The right car.
The right phone.
The right holiday.
Even the right houseplant.
Products have always been marketed through aspiration, but social media has made the feedback loop extraordinarily efficient.
We don’t just see advertising from brands anymore. We see thousands of people demonstrating the lifestyle surrounding the product.
And because those people are also watching each other, certain lifestyles begin to converge.
The strange part is that something can feel incredibly personal while being shared by millions of people.
This is me.
But where did me come from?
How much did I choose, and how much was gradually presented to me until it felt like a choice?
Is originality even possible?
Perhaps we’ve put too much value on originality.
The idea of creating something completely untouched by previous influence might be impossible.
Every drawing I’ve ever made is influenced by drawings I’ve previously seen. Every website I’ve designed contains decades of established conventions. Every piece of code I’ve written relies on ideas developed by other programmers.
Even rebellion requires something to rebel against.
Punk needed what came before punk.
Modernism needed what came before modernism.
The avant-garde needs a garde.
Trying to completely escape iteration might therefore be pointless.
We would have to somehow forget everything we’ve ever seen.
And even then we’d still have nature.
Patterns, symmetry, repetition, rhythm, growth, decay.
Iteration seems to be everywhere.
Maybe the problem isn’t iteration
Maybe it’s convergence.
Iteration should create branches.
One idea becomes two. Two become four. Four become hundreds of strange variations.
Imagine an idea travelling slowly between people, places and disciplines.
A painter sees something in architecture. A musician sees the painting. A fashion designer hears the music. A graphic designer sees the clothes. Each person takes something different from what came before.
By the time the idea reaches the end of that chain, it might barely resemble where it started.
That’s iteration doing something interesting.
But what happens when everybody sees the same source at roughly the same time?
We don’t necessarily get branches.
We get thousands of people iterating from the same reference point. And increasingly, the platforms distributing those references are measuring the response.
Likes. Views. Shares. Saves. Watch time. Clicks.
Successful iterations are amplified. Unsuccessful ones disappear.
The next person isn’t simply responding to an idea. They’re responding to an idea that has already been tested and ranked.
That changes the process.
Iteration starts becoming optimisation. And optimisation is very different from exploration.
Instead of asking:
What could this become?
we begin asking:
What version of this is most likely to work?
That’s an incredibly useful question in many situations. But I’m not sure it’s always a particularly creative one.
The value of getting it wrong
I’ve become increasingly interested in processes where I don’t completely control the outcome.
Generative art is an obvious example.
You create the rules, but you don’t necessarily create the final image. You might define a grid, a set of colours, a movement system or a mathematical relationship. Then randomness enters the process. Run the same piece again and something changes. Run it a hundred times and occasionally something appears that you wouldn’t have consciously designed.
I find that fascinating.
Because in a strange way, the computer is introducing some of the friction we’ve been removing elsewhere.
The unexpected result becomes part of the creative process. And it doesn’t have to involve code.
It could be paint running somewhere you didn’t expect. A photograph being badly exposed. A material behaving differently from how you imagined. Mishearing a lyric. Picking up the wrong pen.
Some of the most interesting iterations happen because something went wrong.
Perhaps creativity needs a certain amount of information loss.
A gap between the reference and the result.
Deliberately introducing imperfection
Perhaps one way out is to introduce that friction ourselves.
Do something without researching it first. Use the wrong tool.
Work with a material you don’t completely understand.
Listen to music outside the genres recommended to you.
Buy the strange magazine.
Visit somewhere without searching for the ten things you’re supposed to see when you arrive.
Make something and don’t immediately compare it with what other people have made.
Allow randomness into the process. Allow mistakes. Allow bad ideas to survive slightly longer.
Because sometimes the interesting part of iteration is the mutation.
The misunderstood instruction. The accidental mark. The badly remembered reference. The technical limitation. The thing that wasn’t supposed to happen.
Those are often the moments when an iteration stops being a copy and starts becoming something else.
But do we actually want to escape?
There is another possibility.
Perhaps we don’t.
Humans have always copied each other.
It helps us communicate. It creates culture. It allows ideas to spread. It gives us common visual languages, rituals, music, fashions and beliefs.
Iteration is how knowledge survives. If every generation started again from nothing, we’d get nowhere.
So I don’t think iteration itself is something we need to escape.
What might be worth escaping is unconscious iteration. Following because everyone else is following.
Buying because everyone else is buying.
Designing something a certain way because that’s what design currently looks like.
Making something because the algorithm has quietly demonstrated that this is the sort of thing that gets rewarded.
Maybe the important thing is simply to notice when it’s happening.
To occasionally ask:
Where did this idea come from?
Why do I like this?
Would I still make this if nobody else was going to see it?
What happens if I deliberately take it in the wrong direction?
We probably can’t escape iteration.
I’m not convinced we should.
Maybe we just need to put a little friction back into it.
Enough randomness, misunderstanding, curiosity and failure to stop every branch growing in the same direction.
Because perhaps originality isn’t the absence of influence.
Perhaps it’s what happens to an influence on the journey.