Petervan Studios – Update June 2021 – The Right Balance

Posted on June 12, 2021 by petervan

Here is the latest update on Petervan Studios. The previous update already goes back to November 2020, that’s more than six months ago, and a lot can happen in half a year.

It looks like we are getting out of the COVID woods. At least in Belgium infection and hospitalization numbers are down, and I got my second Pfizer jab on 5 June 2021, so I think I am good to come out of my cave.

Family is good, Astrid does well at school, Mieke loves the garden now that the summer is back, and I continue my art practice and some freelance projects.

What else?

My Art Practice

Due to COVID regulations, 2021 was a terrible year for doing artwork at the academy. I just can’t work with a mask on. I retreated to my own studio at home, but I miss the coaches, and the discipline/routine of going twice a week to the academy in Ghent.

Most of the specialisation courses of the academy were online via Zoom calls, and nothing beats the dynamic of face-to-face contact, and on-the-floor experimentation.

Not sure yet what I will do next year: back to academy or being super disciplined in my daily routine in my home studio.

I shared most of my recent work via my Facebook page, or on this blog under the heading “Sine Parole”. Some “highlights” if I can say that about my own work:

The Bricks Project

The Cow Project

Introduced as a plan in the Nov 2020 update, I got hooked on cows, if that makes sense. Whatever.

Part of an assignment for the academy specialisation class

Exhibitions

Since last update, I visited following art exhibitions:

C-Mine, Tim Walker, Genk, Jan 2021

Z33, Palms, Hasselt, Jan 2021

Be Modern, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels, Jan 2021

Danser Brut, BOZAR, Brussels, Jan 2021

Lynne Cohen, FOMU, Antwerp, Jan 2021

Adrian Ghenie, Tim Van Laer, Antwerp, Jan 2021

Kunstuur, Mechelen, March 2021

Alechinsky and Aboriginals, RMFA, Brussels, April 2021

Silence, Axel Vervoordt, Wijnegem, April 2021

Luc Tuymans and AI, BOZAR, Brussels, April 2021

Superstudio Migrazioni, CIVA, Brussels, April 2021

Inge Decuypere, A Joly Boring Thing To Do, Oudenaarde, April 2021

Vincent Geyskens, M-Museum, Leuven, May 2021

Detail of a Karel Appel’s painting “Liggend Naakt” 1957 – Oil on Canvas

The founders of SuperStudio – Painting in Expo Migrazioni

Vincent Geyskens – in M-Museum – Leuven

Outdoors

We had a lousy winter in Flanders. I did some walks and bike tours, but not as much as I would love to do. Winter lasted till deep in spring with a super cold and rainy month of May. When June started, the sun was back in full force, up to a point where I started already longing for shadow.

Horses

My daughter Astrid loves horses, and that is an understatement. I have become her private taxi driver to/from the stables, and I spend quite some time watching her at the riding school. She needs it very much in this COVID year, and she can really disconnect from school. And on and with the horses, she is in flow. Look at her smile: it makes a father happy too!

Freelance

I am on a new interesting gig for a very respected client. With a small team, we are doing research on what is next-next in financial services, and the research will be followed by several workshops and a private experiential event/tour later in 2021.

This and the previous project in Shenzhen also helped me reflect on different types of workshops: sharing, teaching, mentoring, and inquiry-based workshops, some online, others in real life. I have some concrete ideas on how to bring these to market, together with a supporting team of facilitators, provocateurs, artists, and producers. Contact me privately if interested.

BANI

Already in 2018, Jamais Cascio coined the term BANI. See my post from Aug 2019 and Jamais’ update from April 2020. As mentioned before, I am working with some partners on a virtual multimedia workshop based on this framework, with a specific focus on possible responses to a BANI world. One of our partners got locked in another client project, so we put the project temporarily on hold.

Design Unbound

I am continuing my immersion in the work of Ann Pendleton and her insights in Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World. We have found a way to convey this complex material into a matrix-form, with video vignettes, so that the customer can pick and choose where they enter the learning journey.

To give you a sense of the intensity of this work: I have now weekly calls with Ann Pendleton to go through the scripts that will form the foundation of the video vignettes.

We have put together a team to design and deliver a corporate curriculum on this topic. Stay tuned on the “we” and the “curriculum”.

Pirate TV

I released the first episode of Pirate TV – Art Tribe Edition, with my friend Frank Poncelet from the Art Academy in Ghent

There is a very nice queue of artists who have agreed to be the guest in the subsequent episodes: some painters, video artist, and photographers. Initially, the plan was to have an episode every month as from March 2021 onwards. 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. We are getting there.

There are now two Pirate TV channels in the pipeline: the Art Tribe edition and the Business edition.

Traveling Without Moving project

Travelling without Moving (TWM) is a series of essays documenting my mental and philosophical journey in 2020-2021.

The main outline was published in November 2020, and in the meantime, several episodes have been released. So far, I have posted seven essays:

Silence

Pause

Play

Anxious

Unbound

Foam

(In)appropriate

The next one will be about “Studios”, studios as a proven way of failing and recovering together, a repurposing of the architecture studio practice of practices. Hope you stay on board.

Books

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

Some highlights:

The Stack, by Benjamin Bratton

Crossover, by Cecil Ballmond

Making Art Work, by Patrick McCray

Ways of Seeing, by John Berger

Petervan Rides

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

Here is the latest Ride from May 2021

I suggest you play it in shuffle mode, it enhances the surprise experience.

So, what’s next?

Since I officially retired from corporate life on 1 Dec 2020, I am completely free to do what I want, what gigs I accept, what clients I choose and reject, what I say and what I write. And if nobody cares, that is fine as well, as then I can really do what I want.

This “interesting” work still leaves me enough room and headspace for my art-practice. I wrote a post before on what I consider “interesting”. The keywords are: not done before, risky, and sensemaking through sense-breaking. I feel I have found a good balance and feel happy.

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

The Fintech Next-Next Project

“Interesting” Freelance Work

Continuing my Art Practice

Release some Pirate TV Episodes

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

Warmest,

Travelling without Moving – Inappropriateness

Posted on June 6, 2021 by petervan

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

Intro of that series can be found h ere.

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.

Hope you stay on board.

Warmest,

Travelling without Moving – Unbound

Posted on March 4, 2021 by petervan

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 h ere.

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,

Travelling without Moving – Anxious

Posted on February 3, 2021 by petervan

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

Intro of that series can be found h ere.

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 Play-Post of begin Jan 2021, we continue with “Anxious” in a post-VUCA world.

BANI is what is next after VUCA.

Already in 2018, Jamais Cascio coined the term BANI. See my post from Aug 2019 and Jamais’ update from April 2020.

BANI stands for Brittleness, Anxious, Non-Linear, and Incomprehensible.

Let’s focus on the “A” of BANI.

I suggested that the preferred response to Anxiousness was empathy or agency.

But that felt too open ended.

Empathy with what, and agency in what kind of world?

And was it forward or backward looking?

A possible world or a preferred world?

I went back to the most common definition for anxious:

“being worried about what may happen or have happened”

Like a rabbit caught in the headlights, some people are so frightened or nervous that they do not know what to do. They sometimes remain still because they do not know where the light comes from or which way to go.

Another reaction is to fake that you know what to do, especially if you are in the spotlight for one reason or another. In other words, to bluff yourself out of an anxious situation.

Imagine a workshop where the top executives of a firm are sitting on the first VIP row of a theatre (in COVID-times, it would be a massive Zoom session with all the employees being able to look over the shoulder of their executives).

All the employees are sitting in the rows behind the VIP row to witness how their executives manage a difficult situation, or even more frightening, being able to see inside the heads of those who bluff to know, don’t blink an eye, and confidently steer their troops in the wrong direction, efficiently of course.

Remaining still or bluffing strong are most probably not the wisest responses to anxiety.

A better response would have to do with orientation or some kind of possibility mapping.

I assume many of my readers are familiar with Joseph Voros’ Future Cone.

Great background explanation by Joseph Voros here.

These days, you can buy out-of-the-box possibility mapping workshops from some of the big-4 and many boutique consultancies. Some of them already fully COVID-proof online, with Miro boards of future cones, chatrooms, Clubhouse conversations, Slack and other real-time streams.

But all this online-first coolness can also be distracting. What I am exploring is some kind of new genre, where we also inject artists to resonate with and for the content at a non-cognitive level, not as entertainment, but with an aesthetic that is demonstrative, not just a gimmick overlay.

An aesthetic that has a sense of stillness and serenity that makes the effort and work real, beyond perception and reason, with an anchoring in humanistic relevance.

Without falling for the temptation to add such toolkit to a “Pot-Pourri” of other coolness, as a tapas-bar, a Chinese menu to choose from.

What is missing in the “Pot-Pourri” is a sense of agency, a sense for direction and choice. Choice as in opinion, and direction as in judgment and daring to step forward with preference.

If not, the online-first future cones become a surrogate for analog Post-It-driven brainstorms, just mapping future concepts on the dimensions of possible, plausible, probable, and impossible.

The crux is daring to address the preferrable future. Because that is using the map beyond seeing better what is and what could be. It is using the map for standing for an opinion, a direction, most probably in the space of moral, spiritual, and aesthetical advancement.

That’s of course a more difficult sell.

But for now, let’s summarise, not as a conclusion, but more as a beacon in our developing story that a possible response to anxiousness is possibility mapping with the courage to set direction and preference.

Next time we’ll talk about “Unbound” – Unbound from thingness that is.

Hope you stay on board.

Warmest,

Premiere Petervan’s Pirate TV – Art-Tribe Edition

Posted on November 22, 2020 by petervan

I am excited to announce the launch of one of my new channels: Petervan’s Pirate TV – Art-Tribe Edition

The first episode will premiere on YouTube on 1 Dec 2020 at 09:30am Los Angeles – 12:30pm New York – 6:30pm Brussels – 1:30am Hong Kong (next day)

The YouTube live chat will be open for feedback, critique and encouragements.

I suggest you set the YouTube reminder so you don’t miss the premiere and the live chat.

The video will remain available for viewing after the Premiere event

Pirate TV is a new genre that sits somewhere between a vlogcast, documentary, film, and TV show. In the events ambition cube, this sits in the lower right quadrant for a tribe-connectedness.

Current plan is to have two editions: one more business related (the Biz-Tribe Edition), and one more artistic related (the Art-Tribe Edition).

The Art-Tribe Edition launches on 1 Dec 2020, the Biz-Tribe Edition will launch on 2 Feb 2021.

As I strongly believe that magic happens at the cross-section of artists, scientists, engineers, and business people, I expect that sooner or later the two editions will start to blend.

Art-Tribe Edition is intended as a platform for artists in conversation with Petervan.

The artist-in-residence for this first episode is Frank Poncelet.

Frank Poncelet is an independent Artist/Director/Producer who graduated from “The Academy for Visual Arts” in Ghent in 2017. While he has no intention of pursuing professional animation in the future, he enjoys the process and will continue to make animations and VFX shorts. After his Graduation film “A Night On Gor”. He worked for One year on an Animation Mashup “Bug’s Club” inspired by “Hell’s Club” from Antonio Maria Da Silva AMDSFILMS. In 2017/2018). Frank Also Produced his short sci-fi film “Alpha” in 2019. Currently Frank is working on video art using Neural Style Transfer techniques and on a sequel to “Alpha”.

I hope you will enjoy this first episode. Here is the trailer:

The soundtrack of the trailer is here:

If you are an artist, and you are interested to have your work shared and discussed on this channel, please contact me privately.

Warmest,

Petervan Studios

Artistic Interventions – Interruptions – Provocations

Category Archives: Pirate TV

Petervan Studios – Update June 2021 – The Right Balance

Travelling without Moving – Inappropriateness

Travelling without Moving – Unbound

Travelling without Moving – Anxious

Premiere Petervan’s Pirate TV – Art-Tribe Edition

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