Petervan Studios – Update Nov 2020 – Intervals of Possibility

Posted on October 31, 2020 by petervan

Petervan memories from the 70ies – First artistic performances

It’s almost one year (!) since my previous Dec 2019 update. And what a year it was/still is! I basically stayed home for the whole period and had zero travel since Oct 2019.

I am publishing this on the day Belgium is entering its second Covid-19 lockdown. A forced pause-marathon starting on my 63th birthday on 1 Nov till at least mid-Dec 2020. But I am afraid the effort will have to run until deep into 2021 and I am preparing for it as an “interval of possibility”.

An interval of possibility is a temporal framing to see better what is and what can emerge. There is indeed still so much to read, to learn, to experiment, to play with. So many contexts to be architected. So many interesting people to (re)connect with (at least virtually). So much opportunity for spiritual, moral, and aesthetical advancement! Expect me to be quite generative in the coming weeks and months.

The Artschool Project

The Artschool academy year started again in Sep 2020, and I subscribed for a two-year curriculum labeled “specialization”.

“Professionalization” is probably a better title for what it is: a focus on getting the (art)work done, commitment, and ambition. We’ll learn to discover our own visual language starting from our personal frames and themes with the ambition to develop our own artistic maturity and identity. This is about personal reflection, self- and group-critique, evaluation, and research. About creative identity and creative disposition. And about how to create a portfolio, develop contacts with galleries, presenting your own work, setting up your own expo, etc.

From an artistic medium point of view, my main focus will remain painting on canvas, but I will keep experimenting with other (mainly digital) media.

I shared most of my recent work via my Facebook page, or on this blog under the heading “Sine Parole”. I also started selecting more straightforward subjects, such as vases, landscapes, cows, fruit, and everyday objects. In many cases the obvious and what is in front of you is interesting enough. Here is an example of some apples from our mini orchard:

Petervan Artwork © 2020 – Apples – Acryl on Canvas – 50x50cm

The upcoming Cow project

I have something with cows (pun intended). I met many during my summer bike tours. It feels it is going to become yet another a thematic series, like the prison windows, or the birds, or the boxers.

Petervan Artworks @ 2020 – Cow Project – Digital Try-out

Petervan Artworks @ 2020 – Cow Project – Sketch of the Intervals of Possibility

One option is to create a cow-sign-language and typography, or maybe see how I can get them generated through in-the-cloud AI neural networks.

Via Mario Klingeman (@quasimodo) -AI generated shapes

Exhibitions

Last year, I visited some art exhibitions, including:

There is no Planet B – S.M.A.K., Ghent, Dec 2019
Inge Decuypere – Ronse, Feb 2020
Dali-Magritte – Museum Fine Arts, Brussels, Feb 2020
Love-Hate – ING Gallery, Brussels, Feb 2020
Keith Haring – BOZAR, Brussels, Feb 2020
Van Eyck – Museum Schone Kunsten, Ghent, Feb 2020
Stephan VanFleteren – FOMU, Antwerp, July 2020
Writing Beyong – Axel Vervoordt, Wijnegem, July 2020
Dechamps, Panamarenko and Co – Deweer Gallery, Zwevegem, Oct 2020

There were many more, but due to Covid-19, many musea were closed or had restrictions.

Stephan VanFleteren – FOMU, Antwerp, July 2020

My own exhibition

I ran my first solo (100% virtual) exhibition during summer. Some unexpected fans actually bought some of my works. Thank you: this is very encouraging. For those who don’t know: I also do commissioned work. If interested – in buying or commissions – please send me a private message.

Some vernissage impressions here .

Outdoors

We had a great summer in Flanders. Since the start of the first lockdown on 13 March 2020 we had good to excellent weather till mid-September 2020. Plenty of opportunity for being outdoors, with the occasional bike tour or walk.

Freelance

Covid-19 is not kind to freelancers, especially if you target what some people call the “event industry”. With the exception of a small gig in 2020, I basically got no work since October 2019. Contact me in private if you’d like to hire me for “interesting” work.

BANI

Already in 2018, Jamais Cascio coined the term BANI. See my post from Aug 2019 and Jamais’ update from April 2020. As mentioned before, I am working with some partners on a virtual multimedia workshop based on this framework, with a specific focus on possible responses. We have an amazing cast on-board, and it looks that we’ll be able to make some announcements soon.

Design Unbound

I am blown away and intrigued by the insights in Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World. This is about having agency in a world that is constantly shifting under you. It is so refreshing after all those business-, management-, leadership-, and self-help-books. It has become a healthy addiction: I am basically reading and re-reading and deeply internalizing everything that Ann Pendleton has written in the last couple of years.

We are building a team to design and deliver a corporate curriculum on this topic. Stay tuned on the “we” and the “curriculum”.

Pirate TV

Most online events and conferences suck. I have some ideas on how to be more ambitious. See my earlier post on the ambition cube for virtual events.

I got the chance to do a commission for a client on this concept and we – the client, the team, myself – learned a lot on what works and what not.

There are now two Pirate TV channels in the pipeline: one more business focused and one more “artsy”.

New toys

For Pirate TV, I wanted to become more fluent in video and sound creation. As there was nothing else to do due to Covid-19, I followed some online courses on Ableton Live, Final Cut Pro, and Logic Pro X.

These are such rich software environments. Also, their user interfaces make me think differently: thinking in layers, connections, patterns, and harmonies.

Studio Oxygen project

An idea that has been hanging around since 2018, actually.

People are exhausted. Tired of online meetings. Tired of being locked up in their houses. Tired of all the negative news. People crave for oxygen. People crave for small safe groups where they can share, critique, ideate, play.

With a small on-line collective, we plan to come together regularly online to have slow-paced conversations on a topic/seed that I plant. The seed can be the chapter of a book, an object, a poem, a job well done, or a failing forward.

With a no-frills focus on quality content, we hope these sparks of inspiration will give you “oxygen for the mind”.

Traveling Without Moving project

This will be a series of posts documenting my mental and philosophical journey in 2020.

Some spoiler keywords: silence, pause, play, anxiety, unbound, truth, inappropriateness, genre, and yellow.

Traveling Without Moving (TMW) is also somewhat related to Studio Oxygen and Pirate TV

Books

Check out my GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3085594-peter-auwera

Some highlights:

Design Unbound, by Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown
Junkspace, by Rem Koolhaas
Down to Earth, by Bruno Latour
The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli

Also don’t forget Robert Poynton’s “Do Pause”. Together with Josie Gibson we made 8 podcast episodes, one for each chapter in this book. The last episode is here.

Petervan Rides

Since July 2019, I publish every month a Spotify List with new releases combined with some oldies from the 60ies, 70ies, and beyond. Search for “Petervan Ride” and select “playlists”. Subjective selection of course, as driven only by my personal taste (or lack thereof).

So, what’s next?

I will officially retire from corporate life as from 1 Dec 2020. Not that I plan to stay idle, on the contrary. Within limits, I will stay available for interesting freelance work – I call it “paid play” – and plan to stay very focused on my artwork.

The plan for the coming months is to work/play on (random order):

“Interesting” freelance work
Artwork
Studio Oxygen
Traveling Without Moving
Pickup Time Capsules again

So, that’s it for this edition. If there is something worth reporting, next update is for Apr 2021.

#STAYSAFE

#STAYCONNECTED

Warmest,

Pause with Josie – Episode 8

Posted on September 19, 2020 by petervan

This is episode-8 of the calm conversation with Josie Gibson from The Catalyst Network, inspired by Robert Poynton’s book “Pause – You are not a To-Do list“. The approach is simple: we both read a chapter of the book and highlight three sentences, and mark the words that resonate most. These sentences and words are the triggers for a very slow-paced conversation on whatever comes our way. No tricks, no gimmicks, just a gentle and calm wandering and meandering of minds. As this chapter is the “Afterwords” section of the book, this is also the last episode in the Robert Poynton series. Maybe other calm conversations follow. Who knows?

Here are Josie’s three sentences:

What I couldn’t anticipate were the unplanned pauses that would occur along the way

If anything, rather than delay things, the time-out accelerated them.

Too much pause and nothing gets done.

And here are my three sentences:

Rehearse ideas with different people

Carlo Rovelli’s book, The Order of Time

That long gestation period meant that once I started I was able to get going quickly

We covered a wide range of topics:

Ideas as the starting point, not the end point

Chance

Serendipity

STOP ASKING QUESTIONS

Confidence and permission

Revisiting intentionality

THE APPROXIMATION COLLECTIVE

What is real and what is not?

Implicit judgement

When pause become procrastination

Vs.

When pause becomes heaven (zen/buddha)

It also gave rise to a new t-shirt design:

Pause with Josie – Episode 7

Posted on August 17, 2020 by petervan

This is episode-7 of the calm conversation with Josie Gibson from The Catalyst Network, inspired by Robert Poynton’s book “Pause – You are not a To-Do list“. The approach is simple: we both read chapter-7 of the book and highlight three sentences, and mark the words that resonate most. These sentences and words are the triggers for a very slow-paced conversation on whatever comes our way. No tricks, no gimmicks, just a gentle and calm wandering and meandering of minds.

Chapter-7 is about Time for Pause

Here are Josie’s three sentences:

A longer pause…gives the intelligent unconscious – what Claxton calls the ‘undermind’ – a chance to have a crack at a problem, bringing a more associative, creative quality of thinking to bear.

In any natural system, there is always ‘redundancy’ or ‘requisite variety’ built in; stuff that isn’t useful yet, but could be one dayf relying on just one.

The decision to start properly came in a pause.

And here are my three sentences:

Our fulfilment does not derive from being as efficient as possible

It (pause) gives you the chance to follow your mood, not the schedule

Instead of trying to cram more in, you focus on getting more out

We covered a wide range of topics from redundancy, richness of experiences in a complex world, we are not machines, beautiful change, elegant movements, cybernetics, requisite variety,…

…the “undermind”, leaving space open for sacred moments, commitment, to start doing, at the right time, after the right pause, after reading all the signals.

We also discussed how efficiency kills imagination, and why we should go into the t-shirt business 😉

Pause with Josie – Episode 6

Posted on July 28, 2020 by petervan

This is episode-6 of the calm conversation with Josie Gibson from The Catalyst Network, inspired by Robert Poynton’s book “Pause – You are not a To-Do list“. The approach is simple: we both read chapter-6 of the book and highlight three sentences, and mark the words that resonate most. These sentences and words are the triggers for a very slow-paced conversation on whatever comes our way. No tricks, no gimmicks, just a gentle and calm wandering and meandering of minds.

Chapter-6 is about Tools (of Pause)

Here are Josie’s three sentences:

He uses differently coloured Google calendars where the colours represent how each kind of time feels to him..

It is more powerful if you are able to think about multiple layers, and build a set of practices that weave together the different ‘pace layers’ of your life instead of relying on just one.

Noone has a life so unrelenting that it is impossible to pause.

And here are my three sentences:

‘Exhale time’ is when he is teaching, writing or delivering work for clients. ‘Inhale time’ is when he is reading, studying, walking or spending time with people he just finds interesting

Notice what that experience is. If it was interesting, or useful, or valuable, or thought-provoking, or puzzling, or curious, or fun, or engaging in any way at all, do it some more. If not, try something else.

Instead of trying to manage your time, pay more attention to finding your rhythm

We covered a wide range of topics from responsible imagination, slower time, golden time, smell time, sound time, synesthesia,…

synesthesia

…colors of the months, layers, weaving, fabric, calendar, interstitials, 3D, 4D, rhythm in context, two people dancing the tango, wondering with intent, accountability for creative health, and undefended presence (mentioned in the Coaching Summit 2020 video below).

We even talked about the South-Australian Tjuringa, a Dream Stones, and artist Roman Polanka’s visualization of time.

Pause with Josie – Episode 5

Posted on July 6, 2020 by petervan

This is episode-5 of the calm conversation with Josie Gibson from The Catalyst Network, inspired by Robert Poynton’s book “Pause – You are not a To-Do list“. The approach is simple: we both read chapter-5 of the book and highlight three sentences, and mark the words that resonate most. These sentences and words are the triggers for a very slow-paced conversation on whatever comes our way. No tricks, no gimmicks, just a gentle and calm wandering and meandering of minds.

Chapter-5 is about Culture (of Pause)

https://soundcloud.com/peter-vander-auwera/josie-petervan-poynton-chapter5

Here are Josie’s three sentences:

Older, more measured rhythms continue to exist… and the here and now is appreciated more for itself than as a means to get somewhere else.

They come in order to reconnect to a place that mediates a pause for them. For one, it is a rock by the river Pelayos – quite literally, a touchstone. Where might you find yours?

Burning Man: ‘This is pause as a suspension of the status quo, designed to try things out, not slow them down

And here are my three sentences:

There is no possible way to hurry any of this. Whatever you do, it takes the time it takes. The only hacks around here are made with axes.

They rarely say anything new; talk is not about relaying information, it is a way of seeing others and being with them

If you aren’t able to pause to consider or explore alternatives, it is extremely difficult to change direction

We covered a wide range of topics from scaffolding, “Go-Bush”, touchstones, freedom to be, Shakespeare, Burning Man, suspension (not smashing) of status quo, the calm “Corona Walks” by photographer Stephan Vanfleteren, the need for diverse lenses, and Budha’s beginner’s mind.

Some useful links mentioned in the conversation:

Photographer (and writer) Stephan Vanfleteren “Corona Walks”
“Don’t Skip out on Me” by Richmond Fontaine.

Episode-1 is here. Episode-2 is here. Episode-3 is here. Episode-4 is here.

These are very calm conversations; so best is to take a pause, install yourself in a quiet corner, and enjoy!

Peter & Josie

Moodscape-1 – Clockdust Astronauts

Posted on April 20, 2020 by petervan

Clockdust cover

Cover of Rustin Man's "Clockdust" Album

Let’s try something new here: a “mood-scape”, documenting a personal mood/world using words, visuals, and sound. And inviting you to build new worlds by participating on a 1-1 basis. Although “new” is relative: the term moodscape was initially coined in the seventies, and mixing media can hardly be labeled new or novel. But having a “calm” conversation may sound like an anachronism in these times where time itself is collapsing, where time itself has become exponential.

It started with discovering Rustin Man’s new album “Clockdust”. Rustin Man was in a previous life better known as Paul Webb, the bass player of the band Talk Talk. Check out his about page.

Listen to Night In Evening City

I immediately fell in love with the melancholic, nostalgic, slow pace sound of the album, in my opinion, a perfect soundscape for the disorienting times we live in. There is some sort of homesickness here, knowing deep inside that we have already said goodbye to a golden era, and era that I sometimes refer to as the Bowie-Era.

I added a couple of Clockdust songs to my Spotify March 2020 Ride playlist, and one of the songs happened to sit next to David Bowie’s Lazarus song from his Blackstar album. To make a long story short, I created a sub-set of the playlist, containing the songs that I felt best reflected my March 2020 “Mood”. There is one coming for April as well 😉

I suggest you let it play in the background in shuffle-mode whilst reading this blog post, as I believe it may augment what I am trying to share.

The cover is a picture from Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet), a choreography with costumed actors transformed into geometrical representations of the human body.

ballet black white

Ballet colour

There is also this wonderful video testimony of one of the early performances of that choreography

The video sent me back in time – clockdust time – when I was a 6-year old schoolboy. For the very first time in my life, I stood – proudly – in front of a huge whiteboard in the classroom – it was a blackboard with white chalk – and we were invited by the teacher to properly write the letters of the alphabet with white chalk on this blackboard.

It must have been my early creative juices, but I could not withhold myself drawing big white spirals instead of well-formed a’s and b’s, etc. on that black-black blackboard. Result: punishment and the lesson learned that a classroom is not a place for creativity and imagination.

In vain, the seeds were sown, and spirals, spheres, labyrinths, maps, and foams became – with hindsight – an obsession. I love the endlessness, and the recursiveness of these shapes and forms. Especially double, entangled spirals or labyrinths get me going…

This high-end Balenciaga Summer 2020 production, with music from BFRND, is a perfect timestamp of our times. Grim black coats, at times almost German SS uniform like Arial race,… our sleepwalking into fascism. One thinks The Matrix, hard as stone, sharp as a knife, and greyed out faces. Will we take the Red or Blue pill? Blue for sure is the backdrop for what Balenciaga call “Power Dressing”.

Balenciaga Summer 20 reimagines dressing for work: power dressing, no matter what one does as a job. Looks transform a wearer in the way a uniform can. Unlike their archetypes, though, garments and accessories are made using unconventional processes.

They talk about New Fashion Uniforms, Seamless Tailoring, New Trompe L’oeil, Super Plissé, Pillow Parkas, Fetish Gownsn, and Wearable Ballroom dresses.

Models of various career tracks interpret and play on beauty standards of today, the past, and the future.

Enter Masks, a new book by James Curcio, about Bowie and other artists of artifice. I spotted the book in a guest post by James Curcio on Ribbonfarm’s always excellent blog.

maskhrfinal-82106-290x400

The difference between a king and a beggar, a soldier and a murderer remains in the realm of performance, a kind of farcical mummers trick that we agree to play along with, if often unconsciously.

The bulk of the book is about Bowie’s unique conceptual art, his capability to create new coherent worlds and identities. I miss Bowie.

The post and book also refer to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation, apparently required reading for the actors of The Matrix before filming. According to Wikipedia, Baudrillard is “best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality.”

It cannot be happenstance that I find a reference to Simulacra and Simulation in “Design Unbound”, fantastic two-volume work on “Designing for Emergence in a White Water World”, by John Seely Brown and Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian, a print-only MIT Press publication. Chapter 14 is about “World Building”: “much more than just the setting for a story, word building creates coherent contexts that stories become to inhabit”

This is very much avant-garde, feels a lot like Cobra world-building practices like New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuis.

I feel like I am drifting into a thin timeline, and time is slipping through my fingers like clockdust. A shaken gravity, with no reference framework, unable to make U-turns, and affront reality with an open mind, heart, and will.

I need a new backdrop, a new backstory to make or break sense. I want to liberate myself from the harness of fixed time and space. An opening-up that leads to more vulnerability – and less power dress. With proximity, intimacy, and closeness – like the closeness and blissfulness that is evoked in “Two Sleepy People” in the March 2020 Mini-Ride.

In that sense, the from/to framing of before and after COVID-19 is misleading. I believe we have to start thinking of ourselves as analog/digital assets whose state is updated in real-time ànd asynchronously, our lives continuously evolving through space and time. We are indeed astronauts, in need of coherent world-building and navigating clockdust till eternity.

I have time. You have time. Both clock-time (Chronos) and experienced-time (Kairos). Ping me if you want to continue the conversation. I’d love to hear where your clockdust has settled these days.

petervan-signature

When my future has to catch up with my present

Posted on February 27, 2020 by petervan

The “collapse of time” was an important meme in the Techonomy 2019 session on Super-Evolution, the idea that startups can now harness rapid prototyping and vast pools of data to develop radically new business models quickly and at scale (video here)

Super-Evolution is about creating more – dramatically more – options. Invented by AI, aka non-human logic. (see also Haydn Shaughnessy on the importance of maximizing options and radical adjacencies vs. core competency in innovation)

“Leave behind the myth of the grand plan and create the conditions for optionality and just-in-time strategy.”(Haydn Shaughnessy)

The first time I felt that sensation of collapsing time was when viewing Elon Musk’s Tesla 2019 update. I felt beaten by algorithms. The Tesla is now/then learning from (data) from human behavior and driving like a human, but ultimately will EXCEED their behavior” (at 01:48:15)

There you have it: gradually, but suddenly we have a singularity. Gradually but suddenly, all jobs are doomed. We are not going to stop this with an ethics council or with regulation. The train has left the station, the genie is out of the bottle.

“The fleet wakes up with an over the air update”

PR or product? The same question was asked some months later by Jean-Louis Gassée regarding the Cybertruck launch:

“Elon Musk forces us to be of two minds. On one side, we have Musk the Mountebank; on the other, a Captain of Industry.”

I had the same feeling of time-space collapse and irrelevance when watching this awesome interview with Rahul Sonnad, CEO/Co-Founder of Tesloop, explaining how “Robo-Mobility is a hospitality service” and “Once cars are appliances”

Are we toast? And/or do we need to reboot, reskill, etc if we don’t want to become irrelevant? Venkatesh Rao gives his perspective when reflecting on Inventing Time, and playing on Alan Kay’s “It is easier to invent the future than to predict it” and William Gibson’s “The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.”

“Riding in a Tesla made the electric vehicle future seem utterly inevitable in a way that kinda killed the present for me. Suddenly I could no longer look at gasoline cars the same way. Driving in my own car felt different like I was stuck in the past, waiting for the price of the future to come down to the point where I could afford to live in it. So a Tesla creates the future in the sense of both the Alan Kay and William Gibson quotes. It makes the future real in a deep way that is like making time itself real. And you know this because the feel of the present feels different like you’re heading down a dead-end, a lame-duck future. You’ll have to either abandon it as soon as you can or end up dying with it.”

Around the same time, I was lurking in Simon Ferdinand’s Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity. He could have added the Time of Global Modernity, as he writes about spatial (spheres) and temporal (time collapse) ruptures.

“Often map artworks recapitulate the narratives of rupture (spatial as well as temporal) through which global modernity differentiates itself from inherited pasts and surroundings.”

And;

“Maps have proven integral… to the experience of “time-space compression”

It made me think of Peter Greenaway’s film ‘A walk through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist’ (1978) and “A Walk through a Thousand Plateaus”, an homage to that film.

It is probably a sign of the times that in the preparation of his new book “Agency” also the great William Gibson lost a sense of how weird the world has become, up to the point of the present bypassing his future sci-fi scripts – “His future had to catch up with the present”– and “stubs”: alternative timeline in which technologists (and, more tellingly, hobbyists) of the future are able to meddle.

Hobbyists and meddling, the right words probably for not getting alienated. I would call it “tinkering” by maximizing options that human logic not necessary can spot or generate in time.

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Refik Anadol – Beautiful Speculations and Data Dramatisations

Posted on February 14, 2020 by petervan

This post is a semi-transcript of a fantastic talk “Space in the mind of a machine” by media artist Refik Anadol. My post is not intended as a literal transcript, but rather as a collection of – often poetic – idea clusters of Refik’s talk. None of the ideas are mine, I just tried to condense it and brush some highlights.

The talk was given on 4 December 2019 at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC). The website of SCI-ARC itself is nirvana for all beauty and art lovers out there, and worth spending a virtual visit of a couple of hours.

The talk was transformative for me, in the sense that it made me realize we truly have entered a new reality and a witnessing the dawn of a new area, full of beauty, poetry, and artistic interventions that create alertness and aliveness similar to the 16th-century renaissance.

After a long intro, his talk starts at 2:46

Criticizing the idea of canvas

Dimensional explorations

Augmented structures

“Design is a solution to a problem; art is a question to a problem” – John Maeda

Humans, Machines, and Environments in a symbiotic relationship

Can a building dream?

“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward” – Kierkegaard

The data that we leave behind us

Data “dramatization” vs. Data Visualisation

The invisible space of Wi-Fi, 4G, radio signals, etc.

A poetic exploration of invisible datasets

Data Paintings

At a certain moment, Refik Anadol quotes Philip K. Dick, author of the 1968 science fiction book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, later retitled Blade Runner, and basis for the 1982 initial version of the film.

Electric Sheep

Quote Philip Dick

This inspires Refik Anadol to seed the following insight:

A simulation is that which does not stop when the stories go away

Stories are responsible for our human desire for resolution

But the simulation is only responsible for its own laws and initializing conditions

A simulation has no moral, prejudice of meaning

Like nature it just is

There is some poetry hidden in this abstraction of data

Exploring data sets that have this quality of meditation

The architect as an operating systems designer, a beautiful “speculation”

Quote Blaise

Finding the moment of remembering

Finding the moment of entering a dream state

“Machine Hallucinations”

Collective memories of spaces

To make the invisible visible

Hallucination narrators

Dream narrators

The Selfies of the Earth

Machine Hallucinations

Refik is asking questions that are not just a fancy-fications of a bunch of algorithms

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Spacial Trash and Patrimony

Posted on February 7, 2020 by petervan

Another rabbit hole bringing together some reflections on creativity, demolition, patrimony, and poetic ruination, as so often in this blog inspired by architectural insights and metaphors.

bouwmeester

My attention was triggered by an article in the Jan 11, 2020 weekend edition of De Standaard, a Flemish newspaper. The article was about landscaping, and more specifically “ontharding” (I would literally translate it as “softening”). In this case, softening that what was hardened in the first place. Abandoned and neglected residential and industrial sites, where the soil is still covered by the concrete and rubbish of empty buildings.

It was part of a study supported by the “Vlaamse Bouwmeester”. “Bouwmeester” means “master of building”, “bau-meister”. The term is ill-translated into “Flemish Government Architect” on the official website. The full study can be found here (PDF in Dutch).

The core mission of the Flemish Government Architect is to promote the architectural quality of the built environment. The Flemish Government Architect and his team advise public patrons in the design and realization of buildings, public space, landscape and infrastructure. In addition, the Flemish Government Architect stimulates the development of visions and reflection, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral initiatives. The Flemish Government Architect acts as an advisor to the entire Flemish Government.

In short, the article and the study plea for restoring public space by the demolition of 1/5^th of hardened space/surface in the Flemish landscape by 2050.

I had a flashback to “Cradle to Cradle”, the 2002 book that alerted me for the first time to a possible vision of sustainable production and architecture. The idea at that time was that reducing waste was just not good enough, and to be sustainable we needed to add value back into the system. As an evolution, the article about the softening of landscape goes one step further: from reducing waste to creating open space by the demolition of vacancy.

“Sloop geeft blijk van falen” – “Demolition evidences failure”

It was happenstance that I was reading around the same time Dan Hill’s 2015 book “Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary”. I will come back to this book in subsequent posts.

Dan Hill was/is looking for (open) spaces as well, quoting ex-FC Barcelona football player and current Al-Sadd (Quatar) football team coach Xavi Hernández:

“Think quickly, look for spaces. That’s what I do: look for spaces. All day. I’m always looking. All day, all day. Here? No. There? No. People who haven’t played don’t always realise how hard that is. Space, space, space. It’s like being on the PlayStation. I think ‘shit, the defender’s here, play it there’. I see the space and pass. That’s what I do.”

Already more than 20 years ago, architect Cedric Price was arguing for demolish-able buildings with open re-usable spaces.

fun palace

Cedric Price’s Fun Palace – inspiration for Centre Pompidou in Paris

OK – I confess – as from that moment I went down the rabbit hole and saw demolition and abandoned architecture everywhere. Like in this recent Guardian article, arguing the case for fully demountable buildings.

“We have to think of buildings as material depots,” says Thomas Rau , a Dutch architect who has been working to develop a public database of materials in existing buildings and their potential for reuse… He has developed the concept of “material passports”, a digital record of the specific characteristics and value of every material in a construction project, thereby enabling the different parts to be recovered, recycled and reused.

But there is also something poetic about abandonment, up to the point where we could consider keeping these ruins and equipping them with sensors to listen to patrimony.

In his beautifully reflective post “Instrumental Revelation and the Architecture of Abandoned Physics Experiments”, Geoff Manough introduces the concept of “poetic ruination.

Like menhirs, these abandoned seismic sensors could now just stand there, silent in the landscape, awaiting a future photographer such as Grigoryants to capture their poetic ruination.

Lebbeus Woods was inspiration to Geoff Manough and London-based architects Smout Allen for the project L.A. Recalculated:

Woods depicts an entire city designed and built as an inhabitable scientific tool. Everywhere there are “oscilloscopes, refractors, seismometers, interferometers, and other, as yet unknown instruments, measuring light, movement, force, change.” Woods describes how “tools for extending perceptivity to all scales of nature are built spontaneously, playfully, experimentally, continuously modified in home laboratories, in laboratories that are homes.”

Instead of wasting their lives tweeting about celebrity deaths, residents construct and model their own bespoke experiments, exploring seismology, astronomy, electricity, even light itself.

seismic sensors

Seismic Counterweights
From L.A. Recalculated by Smout Allen and BLDGBLOG

Like architects think about (industrial) sites listening through sensors to seismic undercurrents, I started wondering whether we could not use this metaphor to reflect about our organizational structures; structures not only as hierarchical structures but the more encompassing set of system rules and patterns of an organization – I referred to it before as organizational patrimony.

How can we listen to and signal about the pulse of this organizational patrimony? How can we be aware of it, appreciate it, respect it, and build upon it in our rebellious acts of creative destruction?

I imagine a cohort of humans – like a colony of ants – having 24/7 sensors and laboratories everywhere in organizations; in every office, cubicle, meeting room, coffee corner, etc. And I don’t mean robotic sterile sensors feeding AI models. I mean real humans, measuring, documenting and signaling patrimonial changes in the structure of corporate structure, so they can send early warnings of experiments that have become useless and therefore have to be ruinated, or – in the worst-case – signal cases of patrimonial breakdown and demolition. In search of the material depot and passport of our organizations.

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The Search for Meaninglessness

Posted on December 17, 2019 by petervan

Byrne

Byrne, left, and fellow members of the 12-person, gray-suited cast.
Photo Credit: Bryan Derballa for The New York Times

It was Robert Fritz who pointed me at the meaninglessness of glorifying terms like “deep”, “meaningful”, “sustainable”, etc. especially in combination with corporate common blahs like “innovation”, “disruption”, “ecosystem”, and “change”

Simon

Simon Wardley's Common Blahs

Just try it: meaningful change, deep change, sustainable learning organization, etc. Utterly nonsense. But what if we would embrace another form of nonsense, another form of meaninglessness? Another form of plainness, elegance, pure joy from form?

It was this article about David Byrne’s Utopia Tour in the NYT, that lead me into the wormhole of Dada poetry, and later into the other art movement Cobra and its related Cobra Manifesto (Cobra is for a subsequent post).

“I thought plain but elegant suits would unify us and help reveal us as a tribe, a community,”

What was that song with the nonsense lyrics?The lyrics for “I Zimbra” were derived from “Gadji beri bimba,” a 1916 phonetic poem by Hugo Ball, the German author-poet and co-founder of Dada. More than a half-century after Ball strove to stop making sense, he got a writing credit for the opening track on the Talking Heads album “Fear of Music.”

Gadji beri bimba clandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandride
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

Bim blassa galassasa zimbrabim
Blassa glallassasa zimbrabim

A bim beri glassala grandrid
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

Gadji…

And then I found this in Peter Sloterdijk’s book “The Aesthetic Imperative”:

I éja

Alo

Myu

Ssírio

Ssa

Schuá

Ará

Niíja

Stuáz

Brorr

Schjatt

Ui ai laéla – oía ssísialu

To trésa trésa trésa mischnumi

Ia lon schtazúmato

Ango laína la

Lu liálo lu léiula

Lu léja léja hioleíolu

A túalo mýo

Myo túalo

My ángo Ina

Ango gádse la

Schia séngu ína

Séngu ína la

My ángo séngu

Séngu ángola

Mengádse

Séngu

Iná

Leíola

Kbaó

Sagór

Kadó

Kadó? Cadeau? Maybe it’s a matter of learning to be better at the art of accepting presents or pure gifts. The text above is the last ‘movement’ of the Ango laïna by Rudolf Blümner, a kind of phonetic cantata for two voices from the year 1921. Blümner described it as an ‘absolute poem’. The Ango laïna demonstrates what poetry can be after it is emancipated from the vocabulary, grammar, rhetoric, and phonetics of the German language.

It made me think about what makes me happy and unhappy. Unhappiness caused by dullness, not making the most of it, chatter, irrelevance, not being in the moment, Being distracted from what you are supposed to be, to do,…

This is not about boredom. I can be perfectly happy in full boredom. I can be perfectly happy in full silence. I can be perfectly happy in full nothingness

Happiness is about being in the perfect “bubble” or “sphere” of belonging and relevance. This is beyond Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is getting closer to Nitin Nohria’s four drivers of motivation (see also my 2011 post on Lipstick on Pigs):

The drive to acquire,
The drive to defend,
The drive to bond, and
The drive to learn

Without stress, fatigue, and unhappiness. These happen when:

You cannot decide the pace of viewing (credit to my art teacher Fiorella Stinders)
You cannot decide the pace of creating (credit to Geert Lovink)

Happiness, in essence, is about not being withheld. Withheld by tempo. Withheld by form. Withheld by meaning.

This form of meaningless joy is what attracts me to the Dada movement.

In my next post, we’ll get into the Cobra movement, and why their ideas of playfulness are relevant in today’s thinking about society.

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Petervan Studios

Artistic Interventions – Interruptions – Provocations

Category Archives: Books

Petervan Studios – Update Nov 2020 – Intervals of Possibility

Pause with Josie – Episode 8

Pause with Josie – Episode 7

Pause with Josie – Episode 6

Pause with Josie – Episode 5

Moodscape-1 – Clockdust Astronauts

When my future has to catch up with my present

Refik Anadol – Beautiful Speculations and Data Dramatisations

Spacial Trash and Patrimony

The Search for Meaninglessness

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