The Why Are You Creative? project is an exploration into the many facets of creativity: artistic, intellectual, philosophical, political, and scientific. The archive consists of over 1,000 framed artwork and artifacts as well as over 1,000 filmed conversations with creative people from the various creative disciplines responding to the question: Why Are You Creative?

Directors like Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, David Lynch, and Wim Wenders, musicians like David Bowie, Björk, and Bono, writers like Günter Grass and Michel Houellebecq, artists such as Marina Abramovic, Jeff Koons, David Hockney, and Damien Hirst, fashion designers like Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier, actresses like Angelina Jolie and Isabella Rossellini, actors like Willem Dafoe, John Cleese, and Sean Penn, politicians like Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Mikhail Gorbachev, scientists like Stephen Hawking, architects like Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry, philosophers like Slavoj Zizek, as well as amazing human beings such as Nelson Mandela and his Holiness the Dalai Lama have joined Vaske on his creative quest. All in all, over 50 Nobel Prize laureates and Oscar winners have become a part of the project. 

Hermann Vaske held conversations with them about what drives them to bring their ideas from the abstract to the material - God, sex, money, fear, compulsion, childhood, or the wish to leave a stain on the wall. He questions their motives and their creative stimuli, asking all those who bring something into being that didn’t previously exist: Why Are You Creative?

The question guided Vaske on to an odyssey on which he met some of the most influential people of the late 20th and early 21st century. They became navigators on his journey into the terra incognita of inspiration while he dived ever deeper into the multiverse of creativity.