Would you shape your creativity with data?

This week I struck an exciting conversation with one of my friends, who is an experienced content marketing manager in an agency.

She said she is running a side project that organising local artists and creatives to gather them in one online space, as they are struggling to let their works to get public. Once they are in the public eyes or being used for commercial reasons, the artists are also struggling to have their works legally protected. The main reason is that the artists don't have anyone represent them and they all used to work solely on their own. Sometimes they would accept the fact that their IP got stolen and can't do anything about it.

"Why would that be the case then? Why wouldn't they work with agencies ?" I asked

She said: " Duh, do you want agencies to have data validation on every work you created? use research to back up your arts? "

" But that's the trend, isn't it?" We do it all the time!

On my way home, I started to wonder how much do we embrace data to shape our work? Is there really an intersection of art and science? We are now saying a lot that DATA is in our DNA. It is so powerful that we use it to predict future behaviour. And analyse real-time feedback. To improve functional performance and to build customised products.

But not to the eyes of the creatives, I guess the resistance comes from the sense of losing the freedom to create, to let your thoughts run freely.

How do you define creativity? Is it about doing aesthetically pleasing works? Is it about expressing your personal feelings? Is it about conveying your political views?

or

Is it in the sense of using the data creatively to provide a service, meeting the needs of our society or even tell stories with data to educate people? Would we lose the sense of freedom?

I have no definite answer to these questions, and I guess creativity and inspiration are personal, data give it a meaningful story.