As usual, an incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks. Handpicked, no robots. Minimalism in curation. There is a shitload of new stuff this month. I tried to be extra disciplined and clean out the obvious, and what you’ve probably already seen elsewhere. Spread the word. Enjoy!
About the tragedy of the commons and the human capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight
If you can’t get enough of these and want more, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies in REVUE. Also in this edition with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan
After the Foam-post of begin April 2021, we continue with “Inappropriateness”, an ambiguous feedback from a client on a rejected project.
In her post “The Change Refusal” https://weneedsocial.com/blog/2021/4/8/the-change-refusal, Céline Schillinger describes the weird situations where she submitted an idea, it was accepted, and then… was not given the permission, the support, or the means to carry it forward.
I had a similar experience not so long ago.
With a small team, we were contracted for a corporate experiment with Pirate-TV, a novel crossover video production.
Depending on whose point of view, it went well to not-so-well.
The production team was and still is super-proud of and committed to the deliverable. But at the very end of the project, the client believed our work was “inappropriate” and banned us from replay.
My good friend Peter Hinssen (Founding Partner of nexxworks) warned me early in the project “Boy, you are in for some fights if you want to pull this one off!”. I shrugged; I had crossed many other bridges over troubled water before.
The project started promising. The client accepted our proposal and briefing to do something radically different. Different in content, mixing, rhythm, visual collision and poetry, that sort of thing. Different, but relevant. Relevant to the ambiguity and uncertainty of the white-water world we are drowning in.
Not a Zoom style webinar with a speaker and a slide deck, or worse, a “fireside-chat” of two boring executives and a CNBC style of journalist, 2 meters apart from each other in white leather seats in front of a green screen that is then filled in with some fake backdrop to look cool.
So off we went. Everything went quite smooth. Too smooth in hindsight.
There was one hick-up in the process. A senior director who did not understand “why the heck we were doing this” almost stopped us. We scheduled a meeting to explain and understand her feedback. “All right, I get it now, make sure you integrate my feedback and questions, but without mentioning my name”, she said.
We incorporated the feedback and answered the questions. We delivered what we believed was a professional end-product, 100% in line with the brief.
But at the very last minute another senior person in the client’s organization intervened from the top, we got banned, and that was end of story.
The explanation? The work was considered “completely inappropriate”.
A request from our side to have a conversation was not honored.
Was it the format that felt too heretic to the executive leadership? Was it something else? We can only guess.
And what does that mean “inappropriate”?
As I was writing this post, I bumped into a presentation about contextual integrity. The talk was in the context of privacy, but I liked the breakdown to be very “appropriate” for my argument.
I believe the rejection had indeed to do with contextual integrities not being well aligned.
If inappropriateness is the opposite of appropriateness, then that would mean that inappropriateness is about not conforming, not meeting the expectations. That the result is illegitimate, not worth defending, morally not justifiable.
So, in other words, we did not conform. Thank God! What a compliment! The brief was to be radically different, no?
We requested if we could release the production under our own brand, “appropriately” edited not to reveal the name and the business of the client. But unfortunately, the client decided we were not allowed to re-use the raw footage. Hour and hours, days and days of brainstorming, recording, editing, soundscaping, video production down the drain.
No worries. We’ll be back. We decided to re-do the whole bloody thing on our own budget, our own tastes, our own reclaimed freedom.
Since then, we have redacted the scripts for the new recordings, did extra research on the content material, and developed a virtual mosaic leaving the audience the choice where the enter the show, and how to complete the narrative journey. It will be the first episode of Pirate TV – Business Edition.
When will it be ready? Shall we say in a couple of weeks? Working with artists and original content authors, I have learned to be patient and more careful in setting expectations on the when and what of the final deliverable, although the pressure of a deadline sometimes – but only sometimes – helps to get to a high-quality experience.
Looking back at Celine’s themes for dealing with rejected work, I believe we went through the full loop. Asking to understand and reframe together with the first senior director, getting banned, avoided, and then picking up the pieces and creating the context for success in our upcoming re-do of the project on our own terms and conditions.
Courtesy Céline Schillinger
As creators, we must take risks, break sense, practice free play imagination.
Sometimes, we must be on the err side of things to know how it tastes.
In that sense, this experience was very rewarding.
Being banned even felt a bit heretic, and almost a badge of honour.
Next time in Travelling Without Moving, we’ll talk about “Studios”, as a proven way of failing and recovering together, a repurposing of the architecture studio practice of practices.
This month’s collection of new releases, spiced up with some oldies. There were some awesome new releases this month. Try it out. Play in shuffle mode to improve the surprise experience. Enjoy!
Gerd Leonhard and friends just launched the Fork In The Road Project. This is a call for global action on 4 existential topics. Consider joining and signing the manifesto. First live online event on May, 13.
If you can’t get enough of these and want more than 5 articles, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies in REVUE. Also in this edition with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan
If you can’t get enough of these and want more than 5 articles, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies in REVUE. Also in this edition with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan
This month’s collection of new releases, spiced up with some oldies. Quite like this list. Try it out. Play in shuffle mode to improve the surprise experience. Enjoy!
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered by accident a way to get myself in a zen-state of total peace and relaxation. Not that I feel super hectic or nervous, or something like that. Not that I need it. Not that I was in search for it. I just stumbled upon it and I really liked it.
It is the very simple – highly repetitive – practice of drawing many many little bricks, black ink on white paper. I am doing this when I am completely alone in my studio, with some repetitive music in the background (see later), and the sound of a ticking clock.
The only other things I hear/notice is the sound of the pen softly scratching the paper, the sound of my breath, a motorcycle or car or plane passing by in a soft distance, a door opening/closing somewhere in the house, sometimes a dog barking, or a dove crying.
“As in Zen, the trick is to become one with the activity, to engage in it fully, to see and appreciate all details–be it hiking in the woods, penning an essay, or tightening the chain on a motorcycle.”
It made me think about the repetive art of Roman Opalka who spent a big part of his life drawing numbers from one to infinity.
Roman Opalka by Lothar Wolleh – Sep 2002
But I don’t talk nor record my words while drawing my bricks. I am silent. And listen to repetitive soundscapes. I was looking for some “non-intrusive music”, music without meaning, music without noise, something that did not distract from the content (aka the bricks), but was rather amplifying it. I tried several ambients from Brian Eno, or songs from Robert Frip’s Music for Quiet Moments series and many more.
Until I discovered this AI-auto-generated music library by @alex_bainter.
The “song” that I have used most so far is called “Lullaby”.
Ann Pendleton-Jullian pointed me in the direction of Lu Qing’s work. Ly Qing is the spouse of Ai Weiwei, but she is always in background, not looking for press attention. When browsing her work, I stumbled upon this repetitive work, acrylic blocks on a silk roll of about 20 meters long and 83 cm wide.
This ink painting on a bolt of silk is partially unrolled and drapes over a table. Small dark-grey squares in acrylic paint almost fill the fabric and create a grid. Departing from her early abstract oil paintings, beginning in 2000, Lu Qing has painted on a twenty-five-metre bolt of silk that she buys each year. Small geometric shapes are painstakingly painted on the fabric over the course of the year. Regardless of how much of the cloth is painted, Lu considers the painting complete at the end of the year and begins with a new bolt the next year. The varying shades of dark grey in the work indicate changes in Lu’s emotional state and in the pressure she exerted, and also recall the different shades of black in traditional Chinese painting. The work is a meditative practice in which the process is valued over the end product, and it functions as an abstract record of emotion and time. (from https://collections.mplus.org.hk/en/objects/untitled-2012687)
I ran to my attic, found a roll of cheap white paper of 1 meter wide and 5 meter long, and started drawing. What you see in the video above are the first 5,000 bricks of a “long” work.
Josie Gibson from The Catalyst Network pointed out that my work was multilayered, with the layers being Peace, Mind Wandering, Kairos, Repetitive work, Musical memory anchors.
In my opinion, it also has layers of different types of attention.
Attention to the drawing itself: getting the pattern right, working without no or a minimum of grid/supporting lines, drawing “perfect” bricks, made in one line-flow, for each of them.
Attention to the mind-wandering: making small (at times only mental) notes, reflections about a project, my daughter, my spouse etc.
It’s useless, I know. But it brings me in contact with an unexplored part of myself. It brings me in a Zen state, a state of deep calm and happiness. I am literately and metaphorically losing my time, my-self. Or am I re-finding my-self?
Doing something. Doing the work. Getting lost. In time and space that is. Being one with my practice: it is more important than end product.
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.
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)”
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.
As usual, an incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks. Handpicked, no robots. Minimalism in curation. I was surprised how only after three weeks how much there was already in the queu for this edition of Delicacies. Not only the quantity but also the quality and the articles that challenge conventional thinking. Loads of interesting video material as well. Enjoy!
VR training app for B. Braun Group, we aimed to give the player the feeling that they are part of a larger simulation. The many interactions happen inside a virtual hospital that mimics the logic of a real surgical ward and that users can explore freely. By the great Andreea Ion Cojocaru @andreeavr
If you can’t get enough of these and want more than 5 articles, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies in REVUE. Also in this edition with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan
If you can’t get enough of these and want more than 5 articles, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies in REVUE. Also in this edition with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan
Petervan Studios 