Consciousness – Petervan Studios

Apple just upgraded the illusion

Picture by Apple

The initial title of this post was “Let’s upgrade the illusion”, but that’s what Apple just did with the announcement of the Vision Pro. And I mean that in the positive sense, not as a criticism.

The quote “Let’s upgrade the illusion” comes from a keynote by Deepak Chopra during the December 2022 retreat of Nishith Desai Associates (NDA), a leading Legal & Tax Consulting company from India, with offices worldwide. It is in itself interesting to see a Legal & Tax Consulting company exclusively focused on new technologies like AI, XR, Nano, Bio, etc.

The event was hosted in NDA’s gorgeous campus “The Imaginarium”, a true infrastructure for imagination, pitched by the CEO as a “private infrastructure for the public good”. How cool is that?

But back to that keynote titled “The nature of reality, what is real?” – We jump in after 2 min:

Deepak kicks off by stating that everything is real if you are truly immersed in it: whatever you experience is an illusion. If everything is an illusion anyway, let’s then upgrade the illusion. To do so, says Deepak, ideas have to manifest. Therefore we need imagination.

Imagination is about EVERY experience, all senses, not only visual, Deepak goes on. And then he really got me when he explained:

“That what imagineS is consciousness, awareness, soul. That what imagineS has no form, no location in time or space, no boundary, and therefore is infinite. That what is imagineD has form, has location.”

This opens a field of possibilities, or better, a field of what can be imagined.

I agree with Peter Hinssen when he says that the Vision Pro is not an iPhone moment but an Apple LISA moment:

“I don’t agree with those who say that the Apple Vision Pro launch is a new iPhone moment. I believe it’s an Apple Lisa moment. The Apple Lisa was a true milestone in the history of personal computing. Just like the Lisa, the Apple Vision Pro is a technological marvel that is too expensive (for now) to join the mainstream but is setting completely new standards for the industry.”

Back to Deepak. In a second talk at the same event about “The Future of Wellbeing”, he kindly notices that scientists measure experiences, and artists have experiences. That scientists identify with Quanta, and artists with Qualia. “Qualia is a unit of experience”.

What if we would measure the success of the Vision Pro on its potential to dramatically increase our units of experience, expanding our notions and understandings of what is real.

This reminds me of David Chalmers’ book “REALITY+”, a philosophical masterpiece that basically states that any good illusion is indistinguishable from real.

Let’s mix this with the insights of another philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh in his new book “Digital Technologies, Temporality, and the Politics of Co-Existence”, a mouthful, I know. Prof. Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh is a full Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Philosophy of Department of the University of Vienna.

In this book, Coeckelbergh makes a plea for process philosophy:

“Process philosophy shows a way out of what is today seen as overly deterministic thinking about technology and time, and clears the road for thinking about digital technologies and digital selves not as objects but as processes and becoming“

He also introduces the concepts of embodied technologies and “technoperformances.”

Performances emphasize the role of humans and the social but also bodily and kinetic character of our (co-)existence with digital technologies… As I have proposed in Moved by Machines and related work, the term performance can be used to conceptualize our dealings with technologies, including digital technologies. As we use digital technologies and are involved in technoperformances, we move and are choreographed, we act and are directed. To conceptualize the important role technologies and media play, we can say that we do not only use technologies in order to move, but that technologies also move us and direct us. The medium is not only the message but also the performance.

This brings me to the excellent interview of Kent Bye with Andreea Ion Cojocura during SXSW 2023 titled “Defining Process-Relational Architecture with Andreea Ion CojoCaru: Spatial Design as a Participatory Improv Performance”

Andreea passionately talks about the potential of XR to instigate and discover emergent behaviours, about rubbery environments in continuous change, putting change at the heart of everything. And also about performance, like in art performance, a live creative process that takes you on an embodied, visceral journey with direct interaction with public. A process relational approach: me and the building (the environment) going dancing for a while. Love that – dancing with your spacial environment: where the end result is less important than the process, the experience itself.

Ken Bye has btw very deep thoughts about the impact of AR/VR/XR on presence, immersive storytelling, and experiential design. Watch his May 2022 Brussels talk on YouTube here. I encourage you to watch the whole thing, it will reset your assumptions about virtual reality.

The core of his talk is about this quadrant, looking at AR/VR/XR in terms of four types of presences.

One could also say the four types of “illusions” of what is real and what creates and influences your learnings and behaviors.

Let”s get out of this rabbit hole with Andreea in her recent LinkedIn post:

“Apple DID debut a killer app. It’s embodied interaction *done well*. It doesn’t matter how simple it is. Experiencing space smoothlessly react to you in any form is exhilarating, addictive magic. The killer app is spatial UX as its own content. The novelty resides at the neural level, where a tiny delay or flicker makes a world of difference in how information is processed, and when and how the feeling of magic and awe is released.”

Besides the fact that the Vision Pro and anything related to it is just a gorgeous piece of technological perfection – “you can lick it” would Steve Jobs say – it deeply integrates spacial vision and embodied experience. That’s why I belief Apple just upgraded the illusion.

Update: I added a link to @BrettKing’s The Futurist Podcast on the Apple Vision Pro with @missmetaverse @Scobleizer, and @BrianRoemmele . This Podcast gives you a really good sense of the revolutionary aspects of the Apple Vision Pro. Enjoy!

Warmest

That’s it, I am leaving the real world

I always felt restricted by the real world. But now, I’ve found my true calling in the virtual world of New New Babylon.

As I explore this world, I’m constantly amazed by the endless possibilities it offers. The colors are vibrant, the sounds are unique, and the technology is incredible. It’s a place where artists and experimentalists like myself can pursue our passions without any restrictions.

I made the life-changing decision to leave the real world behind and make a living as an artist and experimentalist in New New Babylon. I sold everything I had, bought the necessary equipment, and dived headfirst into this new world.

At first, it wasn’t easy. I struggled to make ends meet and had to work long hours to create my art and experiment with new techniques. But I’m determined to make it work, and I collaborate with other artists to create some of the most stunning works of art that New New Babylon has ever seen.

As my reputation grows, so does my income. I’m able to live a comfortable life in the virtual world, and I feel more fulfilled than I ever have in the real world. I know that this is where I truly belong.

But even with my success, I never forget my roots. I miss my family and friends, but I know that I could never go back to the real world. New New Babylon is my home now, and I’m content creating and experimenting in this vibrant world.

Years will pass, and I hope that my art will become more and more famous. I want to become a household name in New New Babylon and inspire a new generation of artists and experimentalists. I’m happy and content, knowing that I’ve made the right decision.

In the end, I realize that sometimes, the things we need the most are not in the world around us, but within us. I’ve found my true calling in the virtual world, and I know that I’ll spend the rest of my life creating and experimenting, surrounded by the vibrant colors and unique sounds of New New Babylon.

Warmest

Created by ChatGPT on 1 April 2023

Inspiration – Peter Cook – Utopian or Real?

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

Pause with Josie – Episode 7

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 😉

The End of Experience

EX-perience is “out”, IN-tervention is “in”

When I talk about “experience”, I mean:

The new hype of artistic “experiences” at art exhibits
“Experiences” at events
The “experience” of driving a car
The “experience” in whatever, like tasting chocolate, as promoted in advertisements

It is almost always about “entertainment”, easy/easier/more convenient consumption, not forcing you to learn a new (or old/existing) language.

CycleGAN - December 22nd 2019 at 3.16.22 PM

Petervan Artwork © 2020 – Canvas through CycleGAN cloud AI model

When I talk about “intervention”, I mean:

Provoking
Asking questions
Challenging assumptions
Planting speculations
Through visceral (sensorial) triggers
Creating better “resonances”
Playing your harmonics, like harmonics in music
Hearing the real-real sound (like in Neil Young Archives)

Formats can be analog and digital artwork, performances, events, retreats, writings, poems, blogs, installations, exhibitions, immersions, soundscapes, recordings, documentaries, time capsules, AI warps, and fairy tales 😉

Interventions help us rediscover what is real, what resonates, what makes us go into frequency, what moves us, etc. And all this with a direction, with an intention: to enable spiritual, moral and aesthetical advancement at systems’ scale.

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New Babylon – New Frisco – New Cobra – New city to play

During my visit to SFMOMA on 15 Nov 2019, I was standing on the terrace of the 7^th Floor looking North-East into Natoma Street, and wondering what the curved-walled building on the left was about.

SFMOMA

I did not pay much attention until I was reminded of this view in this article about floating utopias in The New-Yorker of 11 Dec 2019. Below is a view from the other side, probably taken from the Providian Financial rooftop on Beale Street, looking South-West. At the far end, you may recognize the SFMOMA building. The building in the front is Salesforce Park, a lush rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows.

Salesforce Park

Salesforce Park.Photograph by Karl Mondon / The Mercury News / Getty

The article in The New-Yorker is about the utopian, surveilled and orchestrated architecture in the middle of the astonishing inequality of homeless people in all the other streets of San Francisco:

Taxpayer-funded, corporately branded, suspended above the homeless, the park is an irresistible metaphor for the city’s socioeconomic tensions. It also feels like a bid, or a prayer, for a certain vision of its future.

Salesforce Park as a model for the rest of San Francisco—vertical, expansive, ecologically minded, expensive, sponsored, and surveilled.

“I feel totally orchestrated,” Cranz said, placing her hand on the railing separating us from the plant life. “I’m acutely aware of how managed everything is.”

Shuttle Constant

Two days later, I bumped on-line into the magical world of the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuis and especially his Magnus opus “New Babylon”, another utopia, a city designed to respond to Homo Ludens’ need for playing, for adventure, and for mobility.

In New Babylon there are no single houses

The whole city is one immense covered collective house

A house with countless rooms, halls and corridors,

In which one can roam for days or weeks,

But where one can also find

Small spaces for privacy

New Babylon is a labyrinth

Inexhaustible in its variations

A palace with a thousand rooms

timeline art

Constant was one of the founders of Cobra, an avant-garde art movement established on 8 Nov 1948. The movement only existed for three years, but forever changed the landscape of postwar European art. Cobra was perhaps the last avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. Constant was the author and co-signee of the initial COBRA Manifesto “La Cause était entendue” – “The Case was Settled”.

Les représentants belges, danois et hollandais à la conférence du Centre Internatiopnal de Documentation sur l’Art d’Avant-Garde à Paris jugent que celle-ci n’a mené à rien.

La résolution qui a été votée à la séance de cloture ne fait qu’exprimer le manque total d’un accord suffisant pour justifier le fait même de la réunion.

Nous voyons comme le seul chemin pour continuer l’activité internationale une collaboration organique expérimentale qui évite toute théorie stérile et dogmatique.

Aussi décidons-nous de ne plus assister aux conférences dont le programme et l’atmosphère ne sont pas favorable à un développement de notre travail.

Nous avons pu constater, nous, que nos façons de vivre, de travailler, de sentir étaient communes ; nous nous entendons sur le plan pratique et nous refusons de nous embrigader dans une unité théorique artificielle. Nous travaillons ensemble, nous travaillerons ensemble.

C’est dans un esprit d’efficacité que nous ajoutons à nos expériences nationales une expérience dialectique entre nos groupes. Si, actuellement, nous ne voyons pas ailleurs qu’entre nous d’activité internationale, nous faisons appel cependant aux artistes de n’importe quel pays qui puissent travailler – qui puissent travailler dans notre sens.

Paris, le 8 novembre 48.

Cobra Manifesto page-1

Cobra Manifesto - Image from Beinecke Digital Collections

After reading “Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element in Culture” by Johan Huizinga, Constant develops the idea for a futuristic city. He develops this idea by drawing maps, writing texts, building constructions, and models.

Constant worked for almost 20 years on New Babylon (1959-1974). Today, there is a foundation to preserve and promote the art collection and intellectual legacy of the artist.

From Wikipedia:

The goal was the creating of alternative life experiences, called ‘situations’

Perched above ground, Constant’s megastructures would literally leave the bourgeois metropolis below and would be populated by homo ludens–man at play.

In the New Babylon, the bourgeois shackles of work, family life, and civic responsibility would be discarded. The post-revolutionary individual would wander from one leisure environment to another in search of new sensations. Beholden to no one, he would sleep, eat, recreate, and procreate where and when he wanted. Self-fulfillment and self-satisfaction were Constant’s social goals. Deductive reasoning, goal-oriented production, the construction and betterment of a political community–all these were eschewed.

It is obvious that a person free to use his time for the whole of his life, free to go where he wants, when he wants, cannot make the greatest use of his freedom in a world ruled by the clock and the imperative of a fixed abode. As a way of life Homo Ludens will demand, firstly, that he responds to his need for playing, for adventure, for mobility, as well as all the conditions that facilitate the free creation of his own life.

Some of the constructs in Constant’s vision reminded me of the sketches and models of Buckminster Fuller’s Dimaxyon House of 30 years earlier).

Dymaxion House

Buckminster Fuller, Dimaxyon House, Chicago, USA, 1927

Constant passes away in Utrecht on August 1st, 2005, at home with his wife Trudy van der Horst. He is buried at Zorgvlied in Amstelveen on August 6th. On his grave:

In art freedom manifests itself in its highest form.
The creative imagination.
Art creates an image of the world that didn’t exist before.
No. More than that.
An image that was unthinkable before.

I’d love to see a 21st-century version of Cobra, a collective of artists, thinkers, creators, tinkerers, and experimentalists, leading into a movement of fresh thinking. Not necessarily and exclusively an art-movement, but an all-encompassing societal-movement, with more time and air and oxygen for our children to play, where they naturally can grow into what they are best at, with a renewed freshness and renaissance, a new corporate and societal spring, celebrating the power of imagination and creativity, as a response to our dull political landscape of non-zero games.

A new New Babylon, a new city to play, a new avant-garde propelling us into the highest forms of freedom.

petervan-signature

Imagining worlds you believe in

As mentioned in my August 2019 update, I am helping a client with an immersive leadership offsite. I am starting to label this sort of work “Artistic interventions, interruptions, and provocations that lead to higher states of alertness and aliveness.”

15-properties-leitner-1024x768

Coincidently, Sarah Perry just posted her swan song essay on “Meaning as Ambiguity”, referring to the work of Christopher Alexander (one of my all-time heroes) and coiner of “The Quality Without a Name” and “The Fifteen Geometric Properties of Wholeness” from Chapter-22 of his fantastic book “The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth”

Back to meaning and ambiguity. In the design of this off-site, we confront the participants with increasing levels of ambiguity in the BANI world. In their responses, we expect the participants to progress from learning into problem-solving into “Worlding”. See also my post on “The Tyranny of the Problem Solver”.

I first came across the term “Worlding” in the book “Emissary’s Guide to Worlding” by Artist Ian Cheng http://iancheng.com/.

It is one of those books where one makes annotations on every page, a big eye-opener and page-turner. Highly recommended.

Worlding is about imagining a future world you can believe in.

Some inspirational quotes from Ian Cheng’s book:

A World is a future you can believe in: One that promises to survive its creator, and continue generating drama.

A World is a future you can believe in by promising to become an infinite game

A World evokes a place.

A World has borders.

A World has laws.

A World has values.

A World has a language.

A World can grow.

A World can collapse.

A World has mythic figures.

A World has visitors.

A World has members who live in it.

A World looks arbitrary to a person outside of it.

A World satisfies both the selfish and collective interests of its members.

A World grants magic powers, especially the power to filter what matters to it.

A World gives permission to live differently than the wild outside.

A World creates an agreement about what is relevant.

A World counts certain actions inside it as meaningful.

A World undergoes reformations and disruptions.

A World incentivizes its members to keep it alive.

A World is a container for stories of itself.

A World expresses itself in many forms, but is always something more.

For us humans, life is filled with the familiar contests of finite games: Deadlines. Deals. Rankings. Dating. Elections. Sports. College. War. Poker. Lotteries.

When our finite games are won and done, what is strange is that we don’t exit back into base Reality. We wake up in a field of infinite games that perpetually mediate our contact with base Reality.

We choose to live in these infinite games because they give us leverage, structure, and meaning over a base Reality that is indifferent to our physical or psychological health.

We have many names for these infinite games: Families, Institutions, Religions, Nations, Subcultures, Cultures, Social Realities

Let’s call them WORLDS

When a World can “survive its creator,” that means it has achieved sufficient stability to regulate and safeguard its potentiality without authorial intervention.

This is a World’s requirement for Autonomy.

When a World can “continue generating drama,” a World is sufficiently interesting for people to care about and want to explore.

This is a World’s requirement for Aliveness.

When a World is keeping its promise, it continues to be a future you can believe in

All the credits for the quotes above go of course to Ian Cheng. Great book.

Hope you enjoy it too!

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Neglected sensitivities

I just started reading the briefing for the 2019 exam Art & Culture of the Art Academy in Ghent.

The briefing is so well written – it almost feels like poetry – and it touches some deeper qualities/sensitivities in myself. Qualities/sensitivities that I have neglected for much too long and will keep neglecting as long as I work.

I long for stillness, disconnectedness, alertness, and expression. The keywords are rest and space to breath.

The idea of craftsmanship and the mastery of a technique is becoming more and more seducing. The seduction of exclusive, un-watered noise-free focus.

What is the core of “me”, that part that always stayed the same since I was born? How does that core feel? Soft? Aggressive? Sensitive? Sensual? Seductive? Reflective? Liberated?

(Almost) nobody gives a shit about me and my work and that is at the same time very liberating: it means I can do what I want. I can create what I want. I can create what wants to be created.

Sticks on Water painted cropped

Petervan Artwork © 2019 - No Title - Acryl on Canvas - 50x50cm

What is your signature?

A relatively short essay on what may capture your identity: about titles, maps, codes and signatures.

What’s your title ?

Your title is what is on your business card. It is what you put in the about us section of your website, or in the profile information of your social media. But how much of that is made up?

Darth Vader business card

That title is more a promotional thing. The good side of things. In that sense somewhat related to fakeness, or to rationality as defined by Nicholas Taleb in his latest book “Skin in the Game”.

Crafting your title is a form of ego design optimisation. In many cases that optimisation only makes sense in context of the organisation you work for. Titles also somewhat assume you do work, you do have a job. No job, no title.

Those titles are also ephemeral. You change titles as you change jobs.

But they are fairly meaningless. You will learn that people are only interested in what you can give them access to (money, investment, contacts, brain picking, etc). You risk becoming nobody without your corporate title and business card.

What is your map?

A better way to think about your identity – or “onlyness” as coined by Nilofer Merchant – is to think about your identity map.

Richard Martin already did the homework on this topic, especially when highlighting the Map of Days (HD PDF) by Grayson Perry.



Fragment from A Map of Days by Grayson Perry

“In the Map, Perry presents his complex personality and plural identity in the form of a walled city. Streets, buildings and other locales represent personal traits and behaviours, indicating a self-exploration that embraces both the positive and the negative, that poses questions, as well as providing answers, binding together truth and fiction.

At the centre of Perry’s map is a labyrinthine garden, in which a figure walks, off-centre, pursuing ‘a sense of self’.

I am getting somewhat obsessed by labyrinths and mazes these days. Some fans also refer to my labyrinths as brains or intestines 😉 If I could fabric 3D labyrinths that fit into a skull, that would be a good metaphor for the complexity of identity as well.

Labyrinth on landscape cropped

Petervan Artwork 2018 - Digital composition - Labyrinth on landscape

What’s your code ?

Some people refer to “code”.

Code is very similar to patrimony, very close to narrative, very close to structure.

Some refer to code as to formula. Others – like Christopher Alexander in the Timeless Way of Building – talk about “pattern languages”. The code of a house, of a building so to speak.

There is also “code” in fashion.

BTW: the Balenciaga show has a fantastic soundtrack. You can fine it here.

But the danger is around the corner: that the code becomes a gimmick, nothing more than a formula, getting formulaic, turning into meaningless clichés, and ultimately loosing spontaneity and becoming irrelevant.

What’s your signature?

I believe “signature” is a richer concept. There is no face anymore, no title, but there is a signature, your unique way of creating, executing and communicating.

There is a recognition that you are part of, influenced by a bigger set of interactions and community. Like Celine Schillinger did on her latest website. She labeled that page “Together”, a list of partners in crime.

In painting, artists and critics refer to somebody’s “signature”. They don’t talk about the handwritten signature on the bottom of the painting.

In the past, painters put their signature on the painting when done. These days this is not-done. That handwritten signature becomes a disturbance, distorts the coherence of the image. The signature distorts the signature of the image.

No, they talk about “touch”, “writing style”, and “symbolic script”. In dance one refers to the “choreographer’s writing”,…

What is the signature of your work? When you architect something, will your audience immediately recognise it as yours? Not because it resembles like a copy-cat of previous work, previous collections, but because it carries your unique signature?

And how does your signature reflect your sense for ethical, aesthetical, and spiritual advancement?

robert motherwell the voyage

Robert Motherwell – The Voyage – 1949

New American Painting Calalogue2

In the beautiful 1959 “The New American Painting” catalogue (PDF) of MOMA, Robert Motherwell said on page 56:

“I believe that painters’ judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context …

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

Without ethical consciousness, the audience is only sensual, one of aesthetes.

When are you more than a decorator? When do you touch your audience beyond the cognitive, sensual and aesthetical? When do you resonate at an ethical and almost non-conscious level? What is your signature?

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Get out of your prison cell!

magritte behind bars

Magritte behind bars – Digital Mix - © Petervan Artwork 2018

On 12 Sep 2018, I will do a live performance at the Finnovista Summit in Mexico-City. The theme of this year’s event is “Listen, Learn, Lead” and the title of my performance is “Get out of your prison cell! – An artistic reflection on listening, learning, and leading”

UPDATE: here is a link to the slide-deck I used during the performance: https://www.slideshare.net/thepierre/finnosummit-mexico-2018-petervan

Manoeuvring through this theme, I have prepared a new performance, recuperating some older material, but also with new elements from my artwork series “Prison Window” and other metaphors capturing more recent reflections and insights. From a stage-crafting perspective, I use a multi-media approach, including props on stage, a live camera feed, some vestimentary attributes like hats and masks and drums, and a lightning script for the light technician.

This post is however NOT about the stage experience, which is rather artistic with self-created visuals, soundscapes and poems, hopefully resonating beyond the cognitive. This post is about the underlying thoughts, messages and insights. Preparing a talk, a blog, or a presentation forces you to get your ideas together and structured. And as usual, by refining and experimenting, I sort of stumbled upon most of these insights.

Otto Scharmer meets Simon Wardley

As many of you know, I am a fan of Otto Scharmer’s work on Theory-U and the accompanying ideas in his book “Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies”.

otto clean

Key image from Leading from the Emerging Future – Otto Scharmer

In essence, Otto Sharmer’s model is about increasing the levels of quality of attention in attending, conversing, organizing and coordinating. It is about getting better at these along higher levels of consciousness. For example, attending at the 3.0 Stakeholder Level is of a higher quality than attending at the 1.0 Habitual Level.

That’s a mouthful, and although we don’t have time here to go into any depth into Theory-U (read the book), it is about letting emerge your future state from being your true self.

I combined this with the insights of Simon Wardley, who – if we discount several thousand years of military history – I would label as the godfather of situational awareness and the accompanying situational awareness maps.

wardley tweet

He labels them as “topographical intelligence in business”. Simon positions his work in the “observing position and movement” part of John Boyd’s OODA model

Wardley circle

Sun Tsu meets John Boyd – courtesy Simon Wardley

Except for Magritte-behind-bars, none of these visuals are used during my performance, but my metaphorical narrative on stage is in essence about getting better. But getting better at what? And along which dimensions? In what direction?

It is about letting emerge a better way of listening, learning and leading.
It is about letting emerge a better way of observing, game-play, deciding.
It is about letting emerge a better way of attending, conversing, organizing and coordinating

Let me guide you through this forest.

Listening

“If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky”

Raul Gutierrez, Poet

Listening is usually about hearing sound, spoken words, music. In my performance, I expand listening to observing in general. Observing sound, time, location, movement, structure, memory, and patrimony.

listen

Listening is about observing and attending. Getting better at that is making progress along the levels of quality of attention. Open willed listening is better than habitual listening.

Learning

“Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t”

Jordan Peterson

Learning is usually associated with studying, going to a course or training, follow a workshop. It is usually associated with downloading or acquiring new information, knowledge.

In my performance I share the ladder of learning, from innocent to mentor to expert to… God! I talk about learning in the wild, natural emerging apprenticeship, and evolution with/without skin in the game. John Hagel refers to some of this as “scalable learning and tacit knowledge.”

“Tacit knowledge trumps explicit knowledge. The latter can be articulated and written down and it usually takes time before it can be expressed clearly and coherently to others. Tacit knowledge is within our heads and we have a hard time even expressing it to ourselves, much less to anyone else. Because tacit knowledge is generally newer knowledge, emerging from new experiences that we’ve encountered, it’s often the most valuable knowledge, providing us with insight into how to act in a rapidly evolving environment. Tacit knowledge becomes accessible through shared practice”

Ise Shinto

Ise Shinto shrine in Japan

In my performance, I metaphorically refer to the Ise Shinto shrine in Japan, which is rebuilt every 20 years for around 1,300 years as a way to preserve process knowledge aka tacit knowledge.

learn

Learning is about game-play and conversing. Getting better at that is making progress along the levels of quality of attention. Learning through doing in the flow is better than learning through downloading information.

Leading

“The first job of a leader is to learn. Only then can a leader do their second and third jobs — care and love ”

Umair Haque

Leading is usually associated with leaders and followers. I wrote a post about “The End of Leadership” long time ago.

In my performance, I focus on different types of archetypes of change agents, and the evolution from the forbidden, through the rebellion into creation. I talk about the coherence of narrative, motives, and governance. All addressed in previous posts on this blog.

lead

What is new is that I could now map “leading” to the “organising & coordinating” columns of Otto Scharmer’s model or to the “leadership” quadrant in Simon Wardley’s circle.

Leading is about deciding, organizing and coordinating coherence of narrative, motives and governance. Getting better at that is making progress along the levels of quality of attention. Leading in awareness-based-collective-action is better than leading in command-and-control.

Personal reflection

During my performance, I am inviting the audience for a moment of personal reflection after each chapter, with the explicit instruction that they will NOT be asked to report back.

This is about personalized learning, letting humans internalize with attention for privacy and intimacy. Learning as a personal secret.

“All our choices are among life stories that end with our individual deaths.”

Venkatesh Rao

Every reflection moment also challenges the audience in taking personal leadership for stepping out of the prison cell, hopefully in a series of choices among life stories. Every choice is a choice between inside or outside of the prison cell.

So, please, get out of your prison cell!

Warm regards,

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