Picture generated by DALL-E

It all started with Vankatesh Rao’s “Future Tables” post last week, with the subtitle “We don’t want future visions, we want future tables”. Venkat introduced the concept of “temporal potential groove”.

I added the following comment to his post:

“I enjoyed this one very much. You have written so much about time that my feedback may sound trivial. Anyway. I felt attracted to “temporal potential groove”. It made me think about grooves in vinyl records. About remastering to improve the dynamics of output. Music in general as a scheme of bars, tempo, etc. About the grid and snapping to the grid in music and other software. Also about furrows on land, and riverbeds. And how we could learn to unsnap from the grid, groove, riverbed, etc to find new paths that are not defined by the “table”.”

I wrote about unsnapping from grids before. 

Image credits: Microscopic Things/Youtube

Just a couple of days later, I had my monthly catch-up call with Josie Gibson, and we started a lovely conversation about vinyl records. 

Yes, for those who remember, vinyl records “sound” different. It is an analog sound. It has a warmer, more human touch to it. We are so used to listening to compressed, streamed, digital music that listening to really high quality sound/music is an experience that many of us don’t have any real experience with. Neil Young wrote a whole book about it and the lack of HD sound was the reason for him starting the Neil Young Archives. 

But besides the sound quality, there is also quite a difference in the experience of consuming music.

Sometimes, the pickup stylus jumped out of the groove, jumping to an unexpected part of the song or even the album. There was some sort of enjoyable unpredictability. 

You were also supposed to listen to the whole album (or at least one “side” of the vinyl disc) in one non-interrupted session. 

Also, we lost the patience to wait, to be comfortable with the in-betweens, the no-groove areas between the songs.

There was at some time the notion of a “concept album”, where all the songs of the album belong to a coherent concept/narrative, instead of a compilation or sequence of greatest hits or unrelated “singles” 

As we discussed, we made parallels to the way I curate learning experiences, where the value is in the coherence of the narrative and associated speakers, and not just a list of individuals taking the stage for their standard pre-canned talk. My ambition is to take people out of the groove, to discover parallel worlds and options. 

Josie coined the term “Parallel Grooves”, obviously T-shirt material! I should seriously consider hiring Josie as my copywriter 😉

Mock-up T-Shirt with image from DALL-E

The vinyl groove is one metaphor. 

We could also consider the riverbed: by putting obstacles in the riverbed, we can change the flow of the water, we can divert the flow.

Or waterfalls. Josie spoke about “the language of waterfalls” and what happens when you put a big rock at the top of the waterfall and how the language of the waterfall changes.

Image generated by DALL-E

Serendipity is my companion these days, and as I was writing this post, I bumped into this image of Cameron Falls in Alberta, Canada:

Cameron Falls in Alberta, Canada has crystal clear water on normal days, but when abnormally heavy rainfall hits the region, a phenomenon happens. Sediments called agrolites are released into the water and make the river look pink or red when light hits it. Seen on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/auckee 

Or the metaphor of furrows in a field. 

Here is my uncle Hubert plowing a fresh field with his tractor. Ask him how difficult it is to steer the tractor out of the furrow.

But what if he could plow not only the land but also a river or a waterfall or all of them? You would get a very nice metaphorical representation of my idea of curation.

Image generated by DALL-E

People think they are in the groove, but they aren’t. Or they don’t know what else exists out of the groove.

“They don’t know what they need, but they know what they yearn for”

(another copy by Josie)

What seems more interesting to me is to surf that yearning and go to a place in a different dimension you don’t even know existed.

“You were looking for “X” and but I let you discover “Y”

(Josie)

Parallel Grooves in other words.

Guess what? 

Parallel Grooves will be part of “Studio Interventions”, one of the three studios I am launching after the summer together with a brand new Petervan Studios website

Stay tuned

Warmest,