Petervan’s Music Ride October 2022 > almost 70 songs this time, most new releases, but also some classics > EOL, ENO, Charlotte de Witte, and even some country > play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy!
Cobra Manifesto – Image from Beinecke Digital Collections
As many of you know, I am a big fan of Cobra, the avant-garde art movement established in 1948. The movement only existed for three years, but forever changed the landscape of postwar European art.
What would an avant-garde business movement look like?
How could we scaffold that?
In my Sep 2022 update, I briefly introduced The Scaffold.
Today, I would like to share some more details about The Scaffold
The Scaffold is a brand-new transdisciplinary learning studio for the never-normal.
A Scaffold: a temporary structure to let emerge something new
Transdisciplinary: for each client project, we curate a transdisciplinary tribe of entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, artists, and philosophers to reflect and speculate about your better futures
Learning: this is not learning by teaching, but learning through conversations, acting, and doing
Studio: the keyword here is critique: individual, group, and formal critique
The Never Normal: the ever faster changing environment we operate in. The best metaphor is that of the kayaker in wild water.
Older metaphors like the speedboat (brute force), tacking the sails to the wind (adapting with the destination in focus), and surfing the waves of change (staying before the tsunami of disruption) don’t serve us anymore.
Today you are in the water.
You have to sense faster and better what is, sense faster and better what can become, and take action – right there – in the middle of a system in full motion.
I often hear that we need more data, data is the new oil, and we need powerful AI and Machine Learning to discover patterns in the data, so we can make better and faster decisions.
But data will bring us only so far.
Data tell us something about correlation.
Correlation is not the same as causation.
And also rational cause-and-effect thinking and planning are only part of the story.
The Scaffold is imagination in full play: not knowing all the dots, and having to keep multiple lines of inquiry open at the same time, without coming to a conclusion, ànd feeling comfortable with that.
Orchestrating and activating collective intelligence (both human and non-human intelligence)
WHAT DO WE HAVE?
WHERE ARE WE GOING?
WHY ARE WE GOING THERE?
HOW DO WE GET THERE?
WHAT RULES DO WE FOLLOW?
WHAT IS FORBIDDEN?
HOW DO WE SPEAK TO EACH OTHER?
WHAT WORLD ARE WE PLAYING IN?
WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT?
The Scaffold asks questions related to the narratives that motivate individuals and organizations from the inside. These motivations have nothing to do with marketing from the outside. These motivations share the desire for societal, moral, and aesthetic advancement.
The experiences that we design can be in-person, and others are 100% online or virtual, or a combination thereof. Our experiences are high-touch and highly facilitated. We use world-class facilitators. We apply live scribing, live video editing, and live note-taking. We use technology in support of the content, not to impress nor to create a spectacle. We challenge each other through individual and group critique. We experiment, explore, tinker, and dare to change in flight. We use physical and virtual channels/containers of experimentation & distribution
We believe in the long format. Transdisciplinary impact groups learn by working, doing, and acting together during an extended period of time. This approach increases trust, bonding, candor, the release of real or perceived vulnerabilities, and the discovery of unintended opportunities.
The Scaffold is your PEPA
Play – Experimentation – Participation – Activation
The Scaffold is about dreaming & imagining big with your eyes wide open for reality.
More inspiring quotes are here.
More details at https://petervanstudios.com/the-scaffold/
The Scaffold is made possible through strategic partnerships with https://www.nexxworks.com/ and https://collectivenext.com/
Powered by a coalition of exceptional individuals as advisors for The Scaffold. A unique mix of strategists, futurists, engineers, entrepreneurs, experts in classic and contemporary arts, masters in narrative environments, philosophers, and a licensed architect and VR developer.
We are very curious about how this resonates with you.
Who could be interested in such an offering?
What is great, mediocre, or missing?
Let’s chat
Hope to welcome you soon!
Warmest,
From time to time, I discover an interview, an artist, a dreamer, or another non-conformist take on reality that I find worthwhile transcribing.
I prefer to make such transcripts manually, by listening, pausing, and reflecting. Like drawing by hand.
And also in the resulting text, it is possible to give some sense to that rhythm of reflection.
In this post, a transcript of the conversation with artist/architect Peter Cook on the benefits of drawing by hand, on buildable or non-buildable ideas, on utopia or reality. I started transcribing around 11:15 in this video which also contains beautiful artwork.
Somehow, I would like to grow old like Peter Cook…
In drawing
You can decide upon almost anything
How to make a building that can go from solid to transparent without a window?
From solid
to slightly permeable
and then translucent
More translucent
Completely transparent
And then back again
I don’t think any of the work is utopian
The notion of utopia, the notion of the ideal perfect objective is not in my mind
I think that a lot of these drawings are buildable
they may not be a hundred percent buildable
but they are more buildable
than they’re unbuildable
so what i’m saying is
to answer the question is it utopic
No, it’s not utopian
I even balk at the idea
if it’s huge you see
what happens is
the critical observer will say
Ah! that stuff is utopian
what we do down the road is real
and it delights me to say that
we did build The Kunsthaus in Graz
which could have been one of these drawings
but it’s there
you can go inside
it is still working 20 years down the line
and agreeably
The Kunsthaus in Graz, by Peter Cook
and so then I say
hey hold it
if you say that this stuff is utopian
what about Graz
it’s built
if you can
build Graz
aha you guys
you can build 80% of this stuff
it’s just that you obey by the critics and the
regular people saying it’s utopian
You put it aside
you put it into a kind of
you put it into a pigeon hole that says
oh those sort of architects are utopian
and we architects are normal
the delight I get out of doing some buildings
it’s to say
screw you
it can be built
so then i say
I do not want to be a utopian architect
i’m not interested in utopia
I’m interested in architecture
I’m interested in the drawings
contributing towards
the discussion and language
of architecture
and thank you very much
I wouldn’t mind building some of it
Below are some images of the hand-drawn city landscapes by Peter Cook. From the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Obviously all images are courtesy of the artist.
A lot of Peter Cooke’s work and insights throw me back to my own architecture studies in the 70ies when we were allowed to design buildings that did not have to be buildable.
In the same way, his utopian/reality paradox is central to the ideas I developed as part of The Scaffold, a transdisciplinary learning studio for the Never Normal. The studio gives permission to play with ideas that are not necessarily buildable but that unlock some other kind of less cognitive insight.
Hope you stay on board
Warmest
As usual, an incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks. Handpicked, no robots. Minimalism in curation. Enjoy!
If you can’t get enough of these and want more, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies in REVUE with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan
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