Category Archives: Design thinking

The Orphic Experience: We are all Argonauts again

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In my post about Dub-Techno artist Adrian Sherwood, I referred to the book “Dub Techno – The Orphic Experience of Sound” by Bahadırhan Koçer to describe my sound experiments with dub.

As promised in that post, the most compelling part of the book appears in its opening chapters, where he introduces “The Orphic Experience.”

The short summary is in the video below, from 0:59 to 2:23. The latter part of the video is about the three key elements of dub-techno: spontaneous repetition, atmosphere, and embracing noise.

TL;DR: The orphic experience uses music to alter perception, evoke deep emotions, and influence the listener’s state of mind. It creates a unique space and time for introspection and reflection.

Let me unpack this in stages: first the “orphic” aspect, then the “experience” element, and finally a synthesis.

Orphic

The “orphic” part originates from Orpheus, a character in the ancient Greek poem Argonautica, dating back to the 3rd century BC. The Argonauts are travellers on the boat Argo and are on a quest for the golden fleece. Somewhere along the route, sirens are trying to seduce the boatsmen. Still, Orpheus – a talented singer/musician on the boat – can shield the boatsmen from the Sirens’ temptations through his celestial, beautiful songs and voice. In other words, he was a noise canceller avant la lettre.

Some salient quotes from Bahadırhan Koçer:

The orphic experience, therefore, refers to the transformative way sound and media technologies can be used to control one’s sonic environment, creating a personalized auditory space that shields individuals from the overwhelming stimuli of modern life.

It is conceivable to argue that the nature of this transformation lies fundamentally in a shift from communal to individual listening.

The protected space needed for “sensory and emotional self-care”

In this sense, orphic experience can be seen as a way of escaping from the demands of the real world and constructing a self-contained, artificial reality.

By carefully curating their auditory environment and creating a personalized soundtrack to their lives, the individual can signal their taste and distinction to others, and distinguish themselves from those who do not possess the same level of cultural capital.

The “orphic” concerns the creation of a protected, isolated space in which the rules constraining clear thought can be suspended.

Experience

The second part is about “experience”. The words “Narrative” and “Experience” have become catch-all words. Washed-out. Weak. And they all suggest a passive audience.

Also here, a David Claerbout quote is appropriate:

“I think the recent proliferation of black boxes for film and video-art is not just a practical solution to a problem of sound and light interference, but also reflects an incapability to coexist. This can become apparent in large group exhibitions, where media installations appear strong when they are shown by themselves in a small or large dark space, but they easily collapse when shown in a social space where people move about and interact. The black box is a social phenomenon, for me it is a problem.” Ulrichs, David, ‘David Claerbout. Q/A, in: Modern Painters, May 2011, pp. 64-66

“Designed Conspiracy” would be better to describe what I have in mind. With an active audience. Or even better, where there is no stage hosting the expert speaker and no passive audience just leaning back in chairs, incapable of truly internalising knowledge.

I imagine us inside a 360° immersive room: a six-metre-high LED screen, full 360 Dolby Atmos sound, LiDAR tracking, and high-definition cameras—paired with exceptional content and facilitation. A complete experience in a box, ready to tour and deploy anywhere in the world. Am I exaggerating? Maybe not. I’ve just met someone who is building exactly this.

Synthesis

Obviously, I am using all of the above as a metaphor to try to explain what I do with my artistic interventions, provocations, and interruptions. These qualities inform my work/play. Whether that is soundscapes, installations, performances, or group expeditions.

Now that we have our protected, isolated space and a designed conspiracy, it is time to play the music. Music is the content. Content is the music.

Experiencing our music – individually or as part of a group – can feel like a trip, a trance, like digital psychedelics.

The music/content is presented in the right space, with the appropriate emotional and psychological atmosphere—the backdrop, if you will—inviting and sustaining safety, interest, curiosity, awe, and growth.

The rhythm is softer, slower, quieter vs. harder, faster, louder.

We embrace – and even design – flaws and imperfections, spontaneous repetition, and noise, inviting the participants to connect with being human, and to internalise the content at an embodied level of sensory experience.

We design with fifty shades of sophistication: avant-garde activism shaped by counterculture, driven by intention and direction. We build a relational infrastructure capable of holding shared ambitions, carrying a map as a symbol of movement, of becoming. These are maps that make meaning—shifting the question from the adolescent “Where are we going?” to the more deliberate “What direction do we want?”

We are all Argonauts again. We are experiens-explorers. We want to create the right spaces and conditions for debating the new rules and the associated structures of reality, then acting them out as if those rules were in place. As explorers, we want to play with new rules to dream, new rules to hope, but also – not to sound too cheesy or utopian – new rules to suffer and cope with what is evil and sin. In that sense, we become all part of a shared conspiracy.

We are not in the business of homo sapiens, ludens, or faber, but in the business of homo experiens.

With thanks to my co-conspirators Josie and Andreea, for challenging me over and over again

5 books to help you understand (and profit from) global trends

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The time that we could organise our companies without acting too much on global evolutions lies long behind us. Leaders understand more than ever that tackling world challenges not only creates a better context for all of us to live in but also presents fantastic business opportunities. It’s why am thrilled to be one of the curators of nexxworks’ Mission NXT program, designed to help leaders turn global trends into opportunities.

For those who are truly passionate about fostering this type of outside in vision, here are five (zero bullshit) books that fundamentally changed and formed my thinking in the matter over the years.

Benjamin Bratton – The Revenge of the Real (2021)

The pandemic showed us that we are completely unprepared to cope with our current deeply entangled world. According to Bratton, we need a “positive biopolitics” and an AI-based instrumentation of the world. He offers a refreshing way of thinking about sensors which is quite different from the worn out song about the surveillance state.

Ann Pendleton Jullian and John Seely Brown – Design Unbound (2018)

Read this if you want to understand how you can design for emergence in the Never Normal. You’ll need your full attention (it’s not a ‘light reading’ project), but in return you’ll receive two volumes of unique and well researched insights to help you better see what is and what can become. This is truly one of the most important business books I ever read.

Bruno Latour – Down to Earth (2018)

Latour calls for a third way in climate politics which is left nor right: a path between libertarian globalism, and leftist localism. One that is anchored in planet earth. Read this if you want to get to know one of the most important philosophers of the 21st century.

Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones – LabStudio (2017)

Sabin and Lloyd Jones tackle the concept of the research design laboratory in which funded research and trans-disciplinary participants achieve radical advances in science, design, and applied architectural practice. The book demonstrates new approaches to more traditional design studio and hypothesis-led research that are complementary, iterative, experimental, and reciprocal.

Christopher Alexander – The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems (2012)

This real life story of American architect Christopher Alexander designing and building the Eishin university campus in Japan serves as an analogy for the battle between two fundamentally different ways of shaping our world. One system places emphasis beauty, on subtleties, on finesse, on the structure of adaptation that makes each tiny part fit into the larger context. The other system is concerned with efficiency, with money, power and control, stressing the more gross aspects of size, speed, and profit. This second, “business-as-usual” system is incapable of enabling the emotional, whole-making side of human life, according to Alexander, who then goes on to present a new architecture.

Warmest,

This post was originally posted on the nexxworks company blog, on the occasion of Mission NXT, which I help curate

Traveling without moving – Studios

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This post is part of a series of essays bundled under “Traveling without moving”.

Intro of that series can be found here.

Petervan Pictures © 2021 – Travelling Without Moving

After the Inappropriate post of begin June 2021 we continue with “Studios”, a way of collaborating together as a practice of practices.

In my previous life (2009-2016), I architected several immersive learning experiences for SWIFT’s annual conference Sibos. It was called Innotribe @ Sibos. Already then, I was convinced that learning should be more than the transfer of knowledge by a speaker on a stage (or in a Zoom window) talking to a passive audience. I wanted to resonate with the audience at a level beyond the pure cognitive. I wanted the experts to talk with the audience in immersive settings. We got quiet far in that ambition during the 2016 edition, where physical and mental space formed a coherent and harmonious backdrop and context for several creative learning sessions.

Innotribe human-artistic space 2016

In 2016, I sensed there was an untapped potential for building cognitive and non-cognitive equity by integrating artists into the mix. Not as entertainment, but in support of the content by creating a multidisciplinary mix of left and right brain dispositions. “A bridge too far” was the harsh judgement. I took a one-year sabbatical, never went back, and started Petervan’s Studios.

I now had plenty of room to experiment with real and virtual paint, sound- and video-production tools, animation, collaboration with artists, etc. And was invited as a lead experience designer for a couple of high-touch leadership experiences.

The plural “S” and the end of Petervan StudioS was inspired by Nelly Ben Hayoun StudioS, a weird mix of interrogations and provocations using different studio disciplines from writing, to painting, through video and soundscape, film productions, theatre, drama, experiences, etc. Multiple studios under one – albeit often virtual – roof.

With Petervan StudioS, my ambition is to design and architect creative interventions, interruptions, and provocations. Formats can be curations, events, group experiences, expeditions,  immersions, exhibitions, analog and digital artwork and productions, performances, writings, poems, blogs, installations, soundscapes, recordings, documentaries, and time capsules.

Studios are more than a glorified term for artworks, workshops, or events.

A studio is a practice of practices.

This is a good moment to consider FOUR (+1) STUDIOS (PDF), Ann Pendleton-Jullian’s take on StudioS, a 254-page long articulation and inquiry of the subject.

“Written from the perspective of an architect, these papers talk about design and design thinking, the social environment of practice of the studio, and how the architectural design studio and its methodologies have evolved over time to respond to evolving social environments and practices”

What follows is my personal interpretation of Ann’s insights, based on extensive reading and studying of her writings and transcribing many of her video vignettes.

Four (+1) Studios is about applying the principles, work methods and ethics of an architecture studio to the domain of system and organizational design.

Studios are where the practice takes place and where a practice of practices is forged and then evolves in a space. 

A practice is a way of doing. It usually has a very strong task component, but critically it has to do with being embodied in a context. 

Future Plans 1970-2020 – Luc Delue and T.O.P. Office – De Singel, Antwerp

The learning of a practice involves becoming a member of a community of practice. Think of guilds in the Middle Ages.

But it is more than a community of specialized skills or artisans.

For example, if you consider the handling of a pipette in a lab, and you want to work with a Petri dish low and behold, each lab may train their folks to hold their pipette in a certain way, the way you hold that pipette influences the visual that’s never been recorded. 

In other words, the community of practice develops his own signaling, that create the community and amplify kind of tacit communication in very powerful ways that makes that community a practice.

The studio combines different practices. An architecture studio is multi-disciplinary: a combination of aesthetic, ethical, engineering, scientific, societal, political, philosophical, and anthropological skills. A combination of material, societal, and mental ecologies. In the end, architecture is about designing spaces for messy human beings to grow and develop at their best.

We can architect buildings, spaces, things. But we can also architect contexts, less tangible artifacts that let a project emerge and evolve into preferred and desired futures.

There are five key aspects of studio, which make it unique from other teaching and learning environments. 

The studio is initiated by and formulated around problems, yet it is not specifically about solving problems. 

It is profoundly social in nature and structured. 

It is a highly critical and discursive environment using critiques – not criticism 

It’s deeply synthetic in nature in contrast to teaching and learning environments that operate as compartmentalized, a specialized knowledge basis. 

and five, it operates through the integration of knowledge with skills.

Design studio and the student apprentice’s journey (courtesy Ann Pendleton-Jullian)

Studios are a proven way of failing and recovering together, a repurposing of the architecture studio practice of practices.

There are three kinds of studios.

The teaching studios, where you’re trying to teach something. It is about the didactic transfer of knowledge.

The mentoring studios, where you now are giving a project and helping a student move through that project.

The inquiry-based or research studios; these can be real-world projects, and real world, richly networked experiences.

Illustration courtesy Ann Pendleton-Jullian

Combining these different types of studios has become a key component of my client work in 2019-2021.

For one client we developed a leadership studio around the topic of ambiguity. For another client, we are creating an online expedition based on conversation moments and thinking experiences, using different types of “Guides”. Some guides have a more didactical role of transferring knowledge (teaching studios), other guides have an enabling/mentoring role (mentoring studios), and yet other participants inject new ways of thinking about the future, other than scenario planning (inquiry based studios).

Other clients ask us to design learning experiments: multiple parallel lines of inquiry, keeping multiple options open, resisting the urge to come to quick resolutions, and building up cognitive equity, together. These online sessions are designed as facilitated studios: a proven way of failing and recovering together, as an embodied learning.

Doing projects like these require my 100% focus and attention.

They require me too deeply immersive myself in the client’s problem and project space.

I am human, and my quality attention is scarce, not unlimited, and I need pauses for reflection and recalibration.

It is why I only can accept one such project per year.

Because I want to keep the balance and attention right.

Next time in Travelling Without Moving, we’ll talk about “Genres”, a set of different practices to weave content and engagement into video learning experiences.

Hope you stay on board.

Warmest,

Travelling without Moving – Foam

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This post is part of a series of essays bundled under “Travelling without moving”.

Intro of that series can be found here.

After the Unbound-post of begin March 2021, we continue with “Foam”, a way of looking at and reflecting about the world as suggested by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk.

I will not even attempt at claiming to understand Sloterdijk and/or to summarize his magnus opus trilogy “Spheres, Bubbles and Foam”.

I just want to share some tangential thoughts that “bubbled-up” when reading about it.

See also my 2019 post “The Foamy Explosion of Everything” and this good introduction by Charlie Hueneman

Foam is organic as in relating to or derived from living matter.

As opposed to inorganic.

Organic/Inorganic is similar but still different than the Analog/Digital or Kairos/Chronos.

It is tangential to human/non-human.

“In geometry, a tangent is a straight line that touches a curve at a single point. So we say that someone who starts talking about one thing and gets sidetracked has gone off on a tangent. The new subject is tangential to the first subject—it touches it and moves off in a different direction.(Merriam Webster)”

By Pigetrational – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6333986

Consider the curved line as the outer shell of the foam bubble, its membrane.

What the tangent is doing is snapping to the grid.

Foaming is about snapping without a grid.

Freewheeling and unpredictable.

Uncomfortable if a grid is the only thing you know, but full of potential and dispositions if you let the foam emerge.

Foam as “unsnapped from the grid”

Foam has no direction.

Following foam is like driving a road that is not road, emerging continuously.

Foam is about relations.

Between people.

Foam-mates

From general relativity to relativity of relations.

The quality of the relation depends on the viewpoint.

The quality depends on the dispositions and emergent potentials of relations

Foam is an emergence of dispositions and potentials

For a life of play is no genuine human life;

But is it really?

We now have affluence and surplus, for the first time in human history.

Hueneman

Constant’s New Babylon or the Biosphere 2 project come to mind.

You are part of multiple spheres: the bigger ones like “world”, or “earth”, or “continent”, or the smaller “bubbles” like “province”, or “institution”, or “corporation”, and the smaller foam bubbles, as “communities” of influence, attraction, care, intimacy and attention.

It is a fragmentation, but one with soft borders/membranes.

Not splintered like broken glass, but organic and lubricous and smooth like the soap bubbles in the hot tub.

And the assemblage of all this is dynamic, changing and interacting all the time, like a complex adaptive system.

In her 2021 Tech Report, Amy Webb identified more that 100 new signals.

A fragmentation of signals.

A fragmentation of everything, entangled like foam.

Abundance.

Wealth has come to us like a thief in the night

Sloterdijk

How would one design for and in such a system?

Designing space and context for 1000 flowers to blossom, for 1000 bubbles to co-exist…

I have a hunch that Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown may have some suggestions in Design Unbound.

Or check-out “Medium Design” by Keller Easterling, who writes about dispositions of interdependent objects and spaces; or should I say “spheres”?

“Disposition is a latent agency or immanent potential—a property or propensity within a context that unfolds over time and in the absence of a reifying event or an executive mental order.” Keller Easterling

Dispositions and propensities are becoming part of roaring 20’ies thinking.

So are spheres, bubbles and foam.

Because we are hungry for new communities of intimacy and connection.

Next time we’ll talk about “Inappropriateness”, as a badge-of-honor that is.

Hope you stay on board.

Warmest,

Travelling without Moving – Unbound

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Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects Studio – Photo by Peter Arnold 1998

This post is part of a series of essays bundled under “Travelling without moving”.

Intro of that series can be found here.

The plan/ambition with this series: to share where I have been the last year, what I learned, where I am going, and what is required.

The broader quest is to discover what is required to enable real change.

After the Anxious-post of begin Feb 2021, we continue with “Unbound”. Unbound from thingness that is.

Unbound comes from “Design Unbound”, part of the title of the book (actually two volumes) written by Ann Pendleton-Jullian (APJ) and John Seely Brown (JSB) and published in 2018.

The full title is “Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World”.

I am blown away and intrigued by the insights: 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. I have been haunted by this book. Ann and John put a spell on me.

This book is a game-changer. I highly recommend it.

After a first read/scan of the two volumes, and after a kind introduction by Jerry Michalski and John Hagel, I had my first (online) conversation with Ann and John on 27 May 2021. I wanted to explore a partnership for building a workshop on BANI and work with Ann and John on the response to Anxious, which was related to having agency on a world that is in constant change.

Ann initially very politely declined, but I insisted, and since then we have worked and are still working together on some NDA projects. We now have several calls per month.

How naïve I was at that time. I thought I understood, but Ann very kindly let me discover my own mind-bugs. She also pointed out my reductionist thinking around BANI. She also let me discover other resources and deep-dives to let me internalize what this was all about. The last couple of months have been a humbling experience.

I will not even attempt at summarizing the book.

I just would like to spend some time on the “Unbound” aspect of the title.

The initial title of the book, I learned, was “Architecture Unbound”.

Ann is a practicing architect.

You may discover that she co-designed the house of Carl Sagan. He hired Atelier Jullian and Pendleton, whose principal, Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente, had been a student of Le Corbusier.

The architects designed a new, separate residence for Sagan in Cayuga Heights, and prepared an extensive, two-stage redesign plan for the tomb to turn it into a study for him and his wife.

Carl Sagan house – Cayuga Heights – Picture Durston Saylor in OfHouses

In the book, Ann is applying the practice of an architecture studio to other things than buildings.

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects Studio

In the video above, you see how architects work together as a family. Where working and failing together – almost as a practice of group-vulnerability – thrives on experimenting and rigorous critique.

Ann describes similar practices of architecture studios and applies them to unboundedness.

Unbound from buildings.

Unbound from things.

The architect as a context designer.

The role of critique in an architecture studio.

The role of Game Play and Game Design

We’ll look into some of these aspects in some subsequent posts in this Travelling without Moving series.

If you want a quick intro (two times 90 minutes) to the work of APJ and JSB, here are two video-vignettes that Ann and John recorded for the IFTF Foresight Talk Series

The main points covered in these two videos are: white water world, pragmatic imagination, from Newton to Darwin to Ecologies, Design for Emergence, Systems of Action, and World Building.

But there is so much more in the book, and the material is so rich, so nuanced, so dense, that I very much invite you to read it, not once, but twice, ever three times.

This is just pure-gold material for anybody who is active in corporate innovation initiatives.

It helps you reset and forget and go way beyond your tactical thinking about startup bootcamps, corporate venture funds, MVPs, Lean, Agile, platforms, ecosystems, and other blah.

You don’t need a head of innovation.

You don’t need an innovation team.

You need a squad that is trained to design for emergence and to tackle wicked problems.

This is about seeing the world differently – a world in constant change – and about seeing the dispositions of the system and designing the contexts for emergence and agency in these complex systems.

Together with Ann, I am working with Hamilton Ray from Collective Next and Amber Case on a Pirate TV episode on Design Unbound.

We plan to release the video before summer. We aim to condense the key insights of the book into a 45 min, a sort of non-commercial trailer for a learning journey that is being put together. The video will be provocative enough to stand on its own as a coherent learning opportunity.

Next time we’ll talk about “Foam”, a way of looking at and reflecting about the world as suggested by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk.

Hope you stay on board.

Warmest,

Moodscape-1 – Clockdust Astronauts

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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 moods

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.

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The End of Experience

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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.

petervan-signature

Petervan Studios – August 2019 Update

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15SCI-APOLLOKITSCH5-superJumbo

For those interested, here is an overview of what happened in the last couple of months, some new insights, and some updated plans. I often hesitate to publish these snapshot-updates, because 1) they are snapshots only and don’t connect you with the day-by-day journey, 2) plans change over time, and 3) I always wonder who would be interested in this at all. Maybe it’s a way to give some counterweight to some form of imposter behavior.

The Artschool Project

Compared to the previous period, my production of paintings was relatively low. I continued my birds-project, and painted/sketched probably hundreds of birds, in small and big format. I internalized the shape of the bird in a way that it almost becomes a calligraphic artifact

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Petervan Artwork © 2019 - Birds - Acryl on Canvas - about 40x60cm

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Petervan Artwork © 2019 - Birds - Acryl on Canvas - 120x100cm

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Petervan Artwork © 2019 - Birds - Marker on Post-It - 7,5x7,5cm

Next is to make a big work of 720 calligraphic birds, on a grid of 24×30 boxes of 5x5cm

And just came across this video

https://vimeo.com/349507946

With this great still of what else I could do with birds:

birds in video

Other paintings and sketches include “Fox-on-the-Run”, “Doorway”, “Interior”, and “No Title”, all Acryl on Canvas – Format 50x50cm

Fox2 cropped V1Doorway croppedInterieur V2 croppedSticks on Water painted cropped

The academy year ended in June, and for the 4th year students, this meant showcasing your work to an external jury. I got some juicy comments but passed.

The last year, I also followed the course “Art and Culture” by Fiorella Stinders, whose enthusiasm is contagious. I will make a separate post on this, but suffice to say here that we had to apply what we learned about seeing and understanding art to 3 pieces of art: two selected by the teacher (I picked Ali’s Boat below), and one self-selected artwork that you had seen in real life.

Artschool will start again on Sep 2019, and I will start my 5th year painting. This year, I will combine it with Digital Visual Arts. They call it a “cross-over”.

Time Capsules Project

The Time Capsules Project (see my previous update) is a bit on hold. We (my cousin and I) had some good interview with possible candidates. We got a very interesting intro to an art collector living in a castle in the Austrian Alps.

Schloss

We have a draft proposal ready, but we first want to have at least a prototype of our Beyoncé project, before further engaging with this Austrian patron.

Delicacies

I decided to change the format of Delicacies somewhat. Instead of the weekly deluge, I see an irregular, unpredictable, incoherent, unfocused set of mind-sparks that got me thinking. I gather them as I go, and once every month (maybe every two, three months), I condense the harvest in maximum 5-10 Delicacies. Also a bit back to the joy of discovery and awe, away from the pressure to pump out a too bulky newsletter every week. Hope you find the same joy in reading as I did in discovering.

delicacies

Check-out the new format here.

Blogs

Blog rhythm was slow. That’s an understatement. However, I queued up a huge list of reflections. I will try to post them in short blogs, 1-2 per month.

Mixes

More playing. This time playing around with DJ Pro for Mac. I finally discovered how to mix audio and video. With hindsight, I could as well have done this in iMovie or Adobe Premiere, without the luxury of tempo-synching.

DJ Pro

Petervan Mix of Robyn and Lil' Louis

I am considering the idea of sharing on a regular basis some of my mixes. The working title for this project is “Petervan’s Rides”.

Visual Collisions

For a client project, I started collecting a number of “visual collisions”. Most of these are videos, a minority are pictures. These visual collisions are intended to de-frame an audience before introducing something new.

Currently, the list includes almost 200 video snippets. Here is an example snippet:

Books

I have been reading quite a lot. Some books on design such as “Design Unbound Volume 1 & 2”, and “Speculative Everything”.

I also liked a lot David Weinberger’s “Everyday Chaos”, James Bridle’s “New Dark Age”, Paul Mason’s “Clear Bright Future”, and the fantastic memoirs of Marina Abramovic “Walk Through Walls”.

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The absolute #1 recommendation is Ian Cheng’s “Emissary’s Guide to Worlding”. The quote that drove me crazy was:

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

You can find a link to all the books I am reading in my Goodreads.

Exhibitions

I visited some art exhibitions: The SMAK Anniversary in Ghent (still running till end Sep 2019, and Wim Delvoye in Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels (just closed end of July 2019)

Wim Delvoye - Embossed Maserati
Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels

 

 

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Korakrit Arunanondchai Letters to Chantri #1 - SMAK Ghent
2014 video and digital projection (colour, sound), mixed media

My own exhibition

Since I started academy some years ago, I produced something like 500 drawings, paintings, sketches, soundscapes, and video experiments. Many of you have asked whether I even thought of setting up an exhibition of my own work. Well, guess what? That’s exactly what is going to happen begin June 2020 (exact dates to be announced). The challenge will be to make a selection of what to showcase. I have secured a wonderful location somewhere deep into the Flemish Ardennes.

Outdoors

Great summer so far, with a couple of solid heat waves. Getting a nice tan, as maintaining the garden and biking keep me busy. I have about 150 meters of hedges (x2 both sides), so by the time you get to the end, you can start again ;-)? And biking tours are semi-regular small distances (20-40 km) at a very-very low speed.

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Astrid ignoring Flying Arrow Warning in Tillegembos - Brugge

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Tour De France - Belgian Surrealistic Chocolate Advertisement

The Tour de France 2019 was also close by. A romantic impression of the passage in East-Flanders.

Freelance

Begin 2019, I started doing some freelance gigs.

  • I do some work for Futurist Gerd Leonhard. Mainly some research, blogging and podcasting. See also my announcement here. In June, we did a gig together in Bucharest, where I acted as Gerd’s assistant for interacting with the audience.

If you look carefully, you see me somewhere in the back. Good to see some friends there as well (shout out to Ioana and Innes!).

  • Some event content curation: some clients ask me to help them with selecting speakers and content for their events
  • I am also involved in a special project for a client, who asked me help creating a truly immersive leadership offsite, think of an Innotribe@Sibos 2016, but then created as a private high-touch retreat/offsite. The client allows me to go deep, to take the time needed to let structure and concepts emerge, like a piece of fruit needs time to mature into something well-developed and juicy. I am starting to label this sort of work “Artistic interventions, interruptions, and provocations”.

All the above helped me getting sharper on what I really want.

Reflections

Retirement is coming closer. If all goes well, I will retire on 1 May 2020. What will I do with all that free time? I wrote about “The Perfect Day” in my post “Freed from Desire”

But Ursula K Le Quin challenged me in her book “No Time to Spare”

ursula

“Life out of the rat race, but still in the comfort zone, can give the chance to be in the moment, and bring real peace of mind.”

It feels I already made the great switch in 2018 when I left corporate life and started doing the things I really love doing in and with my life, following what inspires me: art and reflection. You can already witness the shift in the articles I queued up for Delicacies. With that background, a good summary of what I do could be:

I create artistic interventions, interruptions, and provocations that lead to higher states of alertness and aliveness. Formats can be analog and digital artwork, installations, performances, writings, poems, soundscapes, recordings, and time capsules.

Petervan Studios

This strange mix of formats – or “containers” as Ian Cheng calls them in “Emissary’s…”  results in different practices or studios (plural). That’s why I am starting to brand my collective work as “Petervan Studios”. I switch from the easel to the audio mixing panel, to digital drawing panels, Adobe Premiere, iMovie, Ableton Live and Ableton Push. I now also installed an architect drawing table and chair (found them for FREE on a second hand website), additional lavalier microphones for better audio quality in videos, and some extra tripods for stable imagery.

Looking at the mess, it’s time I commission some studio renovation works: it will include some fresh paint, some better lightning, a huge whiteboard for brainstorming, a quality projection screen, and a shower.

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Petervan Studios - The place starts looking very messy now

I also discovered an interesting piece of software called “Descript”, a tool for automated transcripts, and simultaneous editing of text, audio, and video: amazing.

 

So, what’s next?

The plan for Aug – Oct 2019 is to work on:

  • Finalize and deliver the immersive Leadership Off-site
  • Doing some more cool stuff with Gerd
  • Paint, Paint, Paint
  • Private community test V1 of “Time Capsules”
  • Studio renovation
  • Take some time off in November

So, that’s it for this edition. If there is something worth reporting, next update is for Oct-Nov 2019.

Warmest,

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Design used to be about sensitivity, beauty, and taste

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As part of my search for a new job, I was introduced to an organisation focusing on using design-led engagements to support innovation and understanding customer needs (needs, not problems, see my previous post on the tyranny of the problem solver)

Clouds above the sea

Lyonel Feininger - Clouds above the sea - 1923 - Oil on Canvas

Steve Jobs used to say “it doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

So, in preparation for the job interview, and to know what to tell the recruiter what to do, I started diving a bit into design-thinking and design-led engagement.

I believe that these approaches are great to create high quality information flows, but that something else is needed than noise-free rapid information transfer.

My good friend and ex-Innotriber Nektarios Liolios kindly pointed out to me during a recent chat that “noise free is not the same as conflict free”.

  • We indeed do need conflict, tension, etc to create flow, movement, change, advancement.
  • But we do need to get rid of the noisy primary motivations of prestige, status, tic-for-tac reciprocity, etc .

I think the key element missing in existing design-led engagements is (great) aesthetics.

As I said some time ago: there should be some ambition of advancement in aesthetics, morality, and spirituality.

I that context I found this great article about aesthetics:

Design used to be about sensitivity, beauty, and taste

The key performance indicator for design has changed from beauty to profit. Measuring design has transformed a handicraft into an engineering job. 

Google, Facebook, and Amazon are optimizing their products for us, as they are optimizing our minds, bodies and our kids for their profit. Humans are slowly adapting to that labyrinth, becoming lab rats of an omniscient industry that adapts to our needs as it is adapting us to theirs.

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Petervan Artwork ©2018 - Hand drawn labyrinth

Many labyrinths are “meandering”. We need similar meandering in design-led engagements.

We need to bolt-on something upfront that unites, aligns, encourages, and motivates teams at a level beyond the cognitive.

I think I know how to do that.

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The tyranny of the problem solver

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still life Song Han

Still life by Song Han

The trigger for this post was an article on the nexxworks site about right & wrong in corporate innovation. The first paragraph focuses on the need to obsess on solving a customer problem. My friend and ex-colleague Kevin commented via LinkedIn:

“Fantastic article! I’ve been banging on for years about starting with the problem, that people care about but this is so much more articulate than me.”

We started a quick exchange on LinkedIn:

linkedin with kevin

The nexxworks article is about much more than problem solving, but problem-solving is what I will be focusing on in this pamphlet/manifesto for creating what you want. As that is where I am coming from.

Not being problem focused seems almost a blasphemy these days. But we don’t realise we have been mis-framed for decades to be problem solvers and solutionists (“there is an app for that”).

It already happens in start-up pitches to start with. Start-ups are coached to pitch in a standard way. It goes back to Guy Kawasaki’s 10 slides to pitch: start with the problem, what is the solution, the team, the business model, etc, etc.

There are the Maddlibs to perfect your one-sentence-pitch. There even are Maddlibs to generate your strategy statement, based on a collection of blah-words (Thx to @swardley).

containers

Everything is “modelled” and vocabulary is standardised: we need MVP’s, lean start-ups, scale-ups, etc. It’s cool, but you then have to explain this new vocabulary to the rest of your troops.

Everything is “role-modelled”. And we get inspired by always the same use cases: Haier, Semco, Apple, Amazon, Uber, etc. We don’t seem to realise that these are exceptions. Only exceptions make the news. The exceptional is normalised, check out hyper-normalisation of Adam Curtis, albeit in another context.

“In the film, Curtis argues that since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex “real world” and built a simple “fake world” that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians.”

Everything is based on a Silicon Valley solutionist style, a reactive/responsive orientation, something our MBA’s and entre/intra-preneurs and leaders/managers have been trained for at nauseum: define the problem, articulate the solution, make a plan to execute, execute the plan with rigor, and be effective and efficient in doing so.

It may be a style semantic. Ex-Trump-PR-guy Sarramuci said: “you may dislike his (Trump’s) style, but he is very effective.” But one can be very effective at doing the wrong thing. One can be very effective at being a problem solver.

I think it’s more than about style. We have become so politically correct. To please everybody, we say things like “It’s probably a bit of both”. That way, confusion about the real intention creeps in. I say we must be opinionated, and we must be judgemental, we must choose sides.

taleb skin

We say those politically correct things because we don’t have skin in the game. Read Nicholas Taleb’s latest on that subject. For that reason Taleb hates consultants, professors at high schools, some managers and executives, and by extension heads/consultants of innovation. They can say whatever they want, it has no consequences, at least not for their existence or that of the organisation they represent.

I recently heard Nektarios Liolios from Startupbootcamp venting his frustrations on stage, as all the innovation efforts of the last decade have apparently not changed much, or at least not shipped anything substantial. They even start bypassing heads of innovation and innovation teams in general, as they are more and more seen as barriers between customers and the business units. They want to solve real business problems.

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Innovation Powerhouse Philips Eindhoven – Architect Janne van Berlo
A renovation respecting the building's patrimonial structure.

But I am afraid that a focus on real business problems won’t help. The only way to enable real change and lasting innovation is changing the structure of an organisation.

Structure is about more than reporting lines and P&L units. Structure is about the coherence of narrative, motives, and governance.

  • The narrative is about purpose, about patrimony (tacit knowledge), “just-do-it” kind of mantra, action oriented. A narrative is rallying the troops to play the game in a certain way, in a certain context. In war, the game is to win. In business, I would hope it’s about more than winning a finite game, and there is some sense of moral, aesthetical and spiritual advancement, an infinite game across generations.
  • Motives are about why we are doing this. There are primary/primal motives like prestige, promotion, reciprocity and tic-for-tac rewards/punishments. Once you add moral, aesthetical, and spiritual advancement, you are driven by second level motivations that have to do with care, tradition, craftsmanship, beauty, proportion, etc. In that sense, I believe that problem solving is a primal motivation. A more advanced intention of creating something great is a second level motivation. So the question should not be “what problem are you trying to solve?” but “what do you truly want to create?” If not, “solving problems” becomes a doctrine, just like “customer first” is a doctrine, or “FNAO”, or “Lean” or “Agile”. Applied across the board without thinking whether it makes sense. Being effective at doing the wrong thing.
  • Governance is about how you organise and coordinate high quality flows to play the game in context. This is what real leadership is about. In that sense, innovation is a discipline. And there is nothing wrong with discipline. All great things/products/artworks have been a result of discipline. It is about “getting things done”. Jan Chipchase has an awesome fieldbook and practice for revealing – usually in plain sight – real customer needs. He articulates these needs as “desires on getting things done”. “Getting things done” is something quite different than “solving a problem”.

Artists don’t solve problems. Neither do real innovators. Did the iPhone start with solving a problem? Did Amazon ? Did Facebook? I don’t think so. They started with what they wanted to be, and what they wanted to create. They started with structure, if anywhere at all. But not with the problem.

A customer is IMO not looking for a problem to be solved. A customer is looking for a superior experience.

With that perspective, one could ask “Can organisations change?” to make that happen?  Or “Can people change?” and the more critical question, “Why would people change?”

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Sheep in boxes - drone photograph by Dean Lewins

The answer again is structure. Change the structure, and change will not be hard, it will be natural.

That’s why the whole idea of the dual approach (separation castle/sandbox, or core/innovation) is flawed. It is the wrong structure.

The preferred structure would probably more resemble a Khasbah or Souks, an open city plan with many innovation cells/areas with maximum transparency for all, so that everybody is inspired and motivated to join those projects too. And “brutal force” (see below).

It’s a paradox of course. Already in 2002, Storey & Salaman said in their Theories about Process of Innovation:

“paradox is at the heart of innovation. The pressing need for survival in the short term requires efficient exploration of current competencies and requires ‘coherence, coordination and stability’; whereas exploration / innovation requires the discovery and development of new competencies and this requires the loosening and replacement of these erstwhile virtues”

Problem-solving is like design thinking: it is fundamentally conservative and preserving the status quo.

“Rational-experimental problem solving begins with a presumption that the search for a solution starts by relying on existing data about the problem. Design thinking, in a slight divergence from the original model, suggests instead that the designer herself should generate information about the problem, by drawing on her experience of the people who will be affected by the design through the empathetic connection that she forges with them”

Remains the question: can it be done in a big or conservative organisation? Yes, of course. And it is done through what I would call the “brutal force attack”. It is the only thing I have seen working in a bigger organisation to actually SHIP innovation into the market and seeing it picked-up by a substantial part of the target customer base.

The brutal force attack requires two things:

  • A visionary that is able to articulate in a compelling way what he/she wants to create (and it does NOT start with the problem to be solved). Often this person is somewhat hidden in the fabric/structure of the organisation
  • A CxO, usually a CEO with metaphorical balls who will do whatever it takes to make the vision happen. With skin-in-the-game. Even against some part of his/her executive team and/or against part of the Board. His/her position may be at risk. He/she is committed like a pig. (For an omelet with bacon, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed)

You then build a team to make this happen. A squad of the best of best in your company. And the project lead has a direct red telephone line to the CEO to call in case somebody puts barriers or antibodies to make the vision happen. Usually, it suffices just to threaten to pick up the red phone…

It can be as simple as that: just do it. Just build and ship what you want to create.

If you want to have some romanticised innovation story to go with it, sure, go ahead and organise start-up competitions, create innovation labs, bootcamps, accelerate, incubate, and make a lot of noise and corporate communication about it. Just be aware they are a lot of fun, give a lot of exposure, prestige, and status, but are not needed.

That’s why my mantra is “To inspire other people to dream”. To dream and imagine what they truly want to create.

Like in this Nike promo:

Don’t ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if they’re crazy enough.

Don’t buy the tyranny of the problem solver. Don’t settle to be a problem solver.

Create what you really want.

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