Category Archives: Worldviews

What is worth measuring?

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In my latest post, I introduced you to the work of NOOR, who is creating a new sport. I suggested that her work could open up a much broader inquiry: How do we create a new way of becoming?

With that background, I would like to dive a little deeper into other aspects of her research and explore how a new way of becoming raises the question of what is worth measuring.

NOOR’s research

Her work is based on five theoretical pillars:

  • Pillar I: Achievement Motivation and the Competition State
  • Pillar II: Gendered Body Comportment and Relational Embodiment
  • Pillar III: Kinetic Awareness versus Functional Alienation
  • Pillar IV: The Language of the Body as Resistance
  • Pillar V: Institutional Power and Tacit Knowing

If we zoom in on Pillar II, we see that high-performance sports such as Women’s Artistic Gymnastics demand a highly disciplined environment. This “limited intentionality” is not merely psychological; it is materially and institutionally produced through regulations that physicalize discipline. By restricting a neckline to “half of the sternum” or a leg cut to the “hip bone,” these regulations physically delimit the female athlete’s bodily presence, prescribing not only how her body may appear but also the spatiality of its movement and reach.

Contrastingly, the “new embodiment” argues for relationality. Instead of an isolated, disciplined body performing for an external score, NOOR envisions a body that exists in relation to its community and its own internal state.

The measurable body is reduced to a numerical sequence, a “data point” in a governed script, and a series of technical skills to be deducted by a jury. By contrast, NOOR’s thesis suggests a “Lived Body”, a “Lived Experience”: the body uses its own language, prioritizes the “desire to understand,” and embraces the vulnerability of a “broken rule” as a moment of liberation.

Under Pillar III, she challenges the reduction of bodies in elite sport to quantifiable units—fragments of movement extracted, coded, and rendered legible for judicial consumption. Here, the focus is on the static state: the Coded Body. The official Code of Points (COP) is by the WAG (Women’s Artistic Gymnastics). The COP transforms the routine into an “extinction of the moment”: what is experienced as continuous, kinetic movement is captured as a series of discrete, measurable outcomes. Skills are stripped of their temporal and embodied flow, translated instead into numerical sequences that can be evaluated, compared, and scored.

NOOR’s Running Score” is an ontology of becoming . It is an “evolving total” that refuses the finality of the judge’s verdict. This shift is punctuated by the project’s use of generative logic to replace judicial logic with a methodological script that documents the continuity of experience rather than the error of the result.

All this made me reflect on what is worth measuring. Spoiler: Instead of measuring the being, I suggest we find a way to measure the becoming. Let me build up the context for this proposition. And to manage your expectations: there is no answer. It is an invitation for debate and conversation.

Homo Ludens

In Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, a game (or play) is defined as “a voluntary, absorbing activity carried out within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to freely accepted rules, and attended by a feeling of tension, joy, and a consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ordinary life.”

Huizinga argues that civilization does not come from play; rather, culture arises in and as play. He demonstrates that foundational elements of society—such as law, warfare, poetry, philosophy, and art—developed out of ancient ritual contests and rule-bound social play long before they became institutionalized

Huizinga’s “magic circle” describes the physical or psychological space where a game takes place and where the rules of the real world are temporarily suspended. Within this circle, a new set of rules, meanings, and logic applies that holds no weight in ordinary life. 

In modern game design, the magic circle represents the psychological barrier where a player enters a state of immersion. Inside this boundary, the virtual world feels real, and the stakes matter to the player.

Game or play is a way of becoming

Finite/Infinite Games

In Finite/Infinite Games, philosopher James P. Carse explores the idea that all human interactions and behaviors can be viewed through the lens of two distinct types of “games.” 

Carse introduces his thesis in the very first line of the book: “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

FeatureFinite GamesInfinite Games
Primary GoalTo win (which ends the game)To keep playing and prevent the game from ending
BoundariesFixed temporal, spatial, and numerical limitsBoundless; open and expanding
RulesFixed and agreed-upon; changing them breaks the gameDynamic and evolving; changed precisely to keep the play alive
PlayersKnown, select participants with clear opponentsEver-changing roster; open to anyone
ExamplesSports, politics, war, getting a degree, corporate promotionsCulture, love, a career, learning, nature, life itself

NOOR’s new sports are infinite games.

Process Philosophy

Philosopher Whitehead is considered the godfather of Process Philosophy. Instead of a philosophy of being, he proposed a philosophy of becoming.

“Developed in his seminal 1929 book Process and Reality, this ontology argues that “becoming” is more fundamental than “being”—meaning the universe is a web of energetic, experiential events rather than a collection of passive, physical matter.”

In his presentations on the four elements of the experiential design framework for immersive storytelling, Kent Bye draws an explicit connection to process philosophy. The slide below maps the foundational metaphysical scaffolding of a paradigm shift inspired by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, contrasting traditional Substance Philosophy—centered on permanent, static “being”—with Process Philosophy—centered on dynamic, interconnected “becoming.”

It is precisely this shift, from being to becoming, that provides the philosophical foundation for NOOR’s work.

The slide is based on the work of process philosopher and theologian Dr. Andrew M. Davis, specifically serving as a visual graphic for his book Whitehead’s Universe: A Prismatic Introduction (published by Orbis Books). 

Protocol Art

In NOOR’s work, the artist becomes a protocol designer, creating the conditions for others to instantiate endless variations of the work. 

The Protocol is like the recipe, the stage, the score, the spec, the scripts, the primitives. The Instantiation is like the dish, the mixed outcome, the expression, the combinations of primitives. In that sense, Protocol Art is about delegating the instantiation. The artist becomes the composer. See also my 2019 post on “who is the composer?”

Which leads to another question: who is the instantiator? It can be craftsmen, it can be the audience, it can be machines, it can be Agents. In a sense, this is not new; already in the 17th century, Rubens was running his studio: the master has pupils working in his style, working with his protocols of mixing paint, making brushstrokes in certain ways, etc

Protocol Art expands this practice and gives attention to aspects like “Pattern Integrity”, “Style” of instantiation, etc. Christopher Alexander, anybody?

Agentworld and Superdark Factory

What if we also start delegating the work of the protocol composer, the architect of the experience? You would get something that resembles The Superdark Factory or the Agentworld of Antikythera.

In Superdark Factory (dark or superdark as in illegable, not-understandable), the Antikythera authors argue that the historical evolution of software engineering has reached a critical inflection point where conventional, human-governed software pipelines—characterised by manual oversight, explicit logic specification, and step-by-step human verification—impose severe structural bottlenecks on throughput, operational speed, and systemic capability. 

Achieving a true step-change in productivity demands surrendering the requirement for direct human supervision within operational feedback loops, delegating both execution and architectural decision-making directly to computational machinery.

The Superdark Factory represents the limit case of this transition: an extreme, self-directed, recursively self-optimising software ecosystem. Operating as an autonomous abstract machine, the Superdark Factory independently formulates its own ambitions, designs and constructs the machinery required to pursue them, and continuously restructures and refines its own operations—without human intervention within its feedback loops.

Rather than merely executing static instructions, the Superdark Factory automates production at the level of determining what is worth producing, continuously generating new internal versions of itself to satisfy ambient imperatives. It is a “versioning regime that measures what the factory does rather than what it is”

In the Superdark Factory, we let the machine decide what is worth building.

What is worth measuring?

The world is in flux. Always has been. Maybe faster now than in the past, maybe at a different clock speed, incomprehensible and illegible for humans.

How can we measure flux? How can we measure becoming? How can we measure flow? How can we measure computation-in-action? Do we measure pattern integrity? Style? Direction (in many senses: backward/forward, progressive/regressive, moral/amoral, etc.)? Who sets the norms? Tech companies? A new kind of institution? 

What do we consider as “valuable”? Should value be based on Western individuality? Or on communities/commons principles like Ubuntu or Hunhu? This AEON article was an eye-opener for me. Instead of focusing on trustworthy infrastructures, wouldn’t it be wiser to strive for value-worthy experiences, based on the social/cultural “needs” of humans? Values such as identity, reputation, community, and now maybe also values such as becoming, pattern integrity, and everything on the right side of the Whitehead/Davis slide?

There is no definitive answer. This post is an invitation to debate and conversation. But I find myself excited by the possibility of moving beyond the measurement of the static—the “being”—towards something that captures the dynamic, emergent quality of “becoming.”

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

Inspiration – Peter Cook – Utopian or Real?

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From time to time, I discover an interview, an artist, a dreamer, or another non-conformist take on reality that I find worthwhile transcribing. 

I prefer to make such transcripts manually, by listening, pausing, and reflecting. Like drawing by hand. 

And also in the resulting text, it is possible to give some sense to that rhythm of reflection. 

In this post, a transcript of the conversation with artist/architect Peter Cook on the benefits of drawing by hand, on buildable or non-buildable ideas, on utopia or reality. I started transcribing around 11:15 in this video which also contains beautiful artwork. 

Somehow, I would like to grow old like Peter Cook…

In drawing

You can decide upon almost anything

How to make a building that can go from solid to transparent without a window?

From solid 

to slightly permeable 

and then translucent 

More translucent

Completely transparent

And then back again

I don’t think any of the work is utopian

The notion of utopia, the notion of the ideal perfect objective is not in my mind

I think that a lot of these drawings are buildable

they may not be a hundred percent buildable 

but they are more buildable

than they’re unbuildable

so what i’m saying is

to answer the question is it utopic 

No, it’s not utopian 

I even balk at the idea

if it’s huge you see

what happens is

the critical observer will say 

Ah! that stuff is utopian

what we do down the road is real

and it delights me to say that

we did build The Kunsthaus in Graz

which could have been one of these drawings

but it’s there 

you can go inside 

it is still working 20 years down the line

and agreeably 

The Kunsthaus in Graz, by Peter Cook

and so then I say 

hey hold it

if you say that this stuff is utopian

what about Graz  

it’s built

if you can

build Graz 

aha you guys

you can build 80% of this stuff 

it’s just that you obey by the critics and the

regular people saying it’s utopian 

You put it aside 

you put it into a kind of

you put it into a pigeon hole that says

oh those sort of architects are utopian

and we architects are normal

the delight I get out of doing some buildings 

it’s to say

screw you 

it can be built

so then i say

I do not want to be a utopian architect

i’m not interested in utopia 

I’m interested in architecture 

I’m interested in the drawings 

contributing towards 

the discussion and language 

of architecture 

and thank you very much 

I wouldn’t mind building some of it

Below are some images of the hand-drawn city landscapes by Peter Cook. From the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. 

Obviously all images are courtesy of the artist. 

A lot of Peter Cooke’s work and insights throw me back to my own architecture studies in the 70ies when we were allowed to design buildings that did not have to be buildable.

In the same way, his utopian/reality paradox is central to the ideas I developed as part of The Scaffold, a transdisciplinary learning studio for the Never Normal. The studio gives permission to play with ideas that are not necessarily buildable but that unlock some other kind of less cognitive insight.

Hope you stay on board

Warmest

Inspiration: Berlinde De Bruyckere

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I was one of the twenty lucky ones to be invited to an exclusive studio visit of Belgian and internationally renowned top-artist Berlinde De Bruyckere.  She represented Belgium in the 55th Venice Biennale. The studio visit was organized by the Flemish Art Magazine HART.

Still from MO.CO interview video, Berlinde preparing with grace “to Zurbaran”, from 2015

“Born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1964, where she currently lives and works, Berlinde De Bruyckere was deeply influenced by the Flemish Renaissance painting. Drawing on the legacy of great European masters, religious iconography, as well as on ancient mythology and traditional culture, her work rests upon the dialectics experienced between images of current affairs and the breath of universal and timeless parables. By experimenting with malleable materials, like wax, fabric, or animal skin, Berlinde De Bruyckere built a unique body of work, simultaneously identifiable and moving, at times also unsettling, that translates into the flesh of sculptures the paradox of ‘sublime weakness’ posited by Lao-Tzu. Working both as a painter and a sculptor, her hybrid forms with human, animal, and plant features, bear an envelope, a diaphanous skin, or a bark under which quiver very dainty veins, a sap that ceaselessly flows and witnesses the hope contained in the miracle of each life.” (Quote from the MO.CO website)”

School corridor – Studio Berlinde De Bruycker – Picture by Petervan

Her studio is based in an old refurbished school building in the working-class neighborhood “Muide” in the port area in the north of the Belgian city of Ghent. This is also the area where she was raised: her father ran a butcher’s shop 100 meters from the school. Over the years, she and her husband transformed the classrooms into different art studios. 

I managed my expectations for the visit upfront. Maybe at best, we would meet the artist during the welcome, and maybe the visit would only last one hour. 

Welcome to Berlinde De Bruyckere studio – Picture by Petervan

Great was my surprise that Berlinde was there from start to finish, including during the lunch afterward. She was very approachable and hungry for questions about her work and her practice. During lunch, Berlinde was sitting in front of me, and I felt like we had an interesting conversation about her and my art practice. 

The setting was quite exclusive: we could see work (in progress) that she was creating for her big upcoming exhibition in June 2022 in Montpellier, France. 

That exhibition is live now and runs till 2 October 2022. Here is the home page of the exhibition in MO.CO (Montpellier Contemporain) website. 

Detail TRE ARCANGELI, 2022 – Berlinde De Bruyckere – Picture by Petervan

During the group conversations around the TRE ARCANGELI, there was a sentence/question that touched me:

WELK BEELD KAN JE TROOSTEN?

WHAT IMAGE CAN COMFORT YOU? 

TRE ARCANGELI, 2022 – Berlinde De Bruyckere – Picture by Petervan

Also, the conversation about working with a team was full of insights that for sure are also applicable to corporate teams. In this particular case: how do you empathically communicate failure to the team, and decide as a group that the work done does not fit the concept and that we have to start from scratch again?

I will come back later in another post about the meaning or “concept”, about conceptual art, conceptual business, and conceptual curation.

Having this opportunity to be in direct and close contact with a professional artist is super inspiring, and it influences my own work and practice in the following ways:

Focus: no distractions, silence, solitude

Professionalism: time for reflection, and discipline of doing the work, every day

Attitude: the combination of integrity, modesty, subduedness, stillness, respect

The value of a concept

To go as far as one wants

Making a group that is forced together

Showing its scars and wounds

The blanket is a metaphor for our failing society

Still from MO.CO interview video

When you leave the show and you feel that the themes are tough, it’s not easy to find words that express what you, as a spectator, felt about the show. 

But you should leave with a feeling of hope

I will come back in September on this feeling of hope, or rather our longing and yearning for hope and excitement.

Warmly,

Parallel Grooves

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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,

Petervan Studios – Update Feb 2022 – The Scaffold

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Here is the latest update on Petervan Studios. The previous update already goes back to June 2021.

The family is good. Somehow, we managed not to get infected by the virus. We all got boostered and respected safety measures to the max. Most of my time, I spent home in my studio and only came out for some grocery shopping, some visits to art exhibitions, and delivering the taxi service to my daughter’s school and horse stables. Zero travel since October 2019, but I cannot say I miss it.

At this moment, it looks like we are getting out of the woods of the 5th Covid wave, and measures in Belgium are getting relaxed. Partying is allowed again as of 18 Feb 2022.

More importantly: my father is still alive and kicking, and he celebrated his 90th birthday in Sep 2022!

What else?

The Bricks Project

For those who remember, this is my “zen” project. Drawing bricks in silence. Many bricks. 8,255 Bricks at the time of writing this post:

Exhibitions

Since the last update, I visited the following art exhibitions:

Luc Deleu, De Singel, Antwerp, Aug 2021

Drawing Art, BOZAR, Brussels, Sep 2021

ING Laughing Art, ING Gallery, Brussels, Sep 2021

David Hockney, BOZAR, Brussels, Oct 2021

Masculinities, FOMU, Antwerp, Nov 2021

Re-Collect, FOMU, Antwerp, Nov 2021

Rinus Van de Velde, Tim Van Laer Gallery, Antwerp, Nov 2021

Train Modernity, KMSK, Brussels, Nov 2021

Fabrice Samyn, KMSK, Brussels, Nov 2021

Pop-Art, SMAK, Ghent, Feb 2022

Chaos, Alex Vervoordt, Wijnegem, Feb 2022

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Zeno X, Antwerp, Feb 2022

David Claerbout – The Close, Brugge, Feb 2022

Luc Deleu inspired by Buckminster Fuller

Detail of painting by Rinus Van de Velde – 2021

Hippie Elias (Self portret) by Etienne Elias – 1970

Fabrice Samyn – Detail from Eve&Adam – 2018

Still from The Close – David Claerbout – 2022

Outdoors

Weather did not treat us well. My recollection is one of all shades of grey and lots of rain from August 2021 till Feb 2022. Only the beginning of Sep 2021 was decent. But I have some nice winter fog pictures from my strolls and bicycle rides:

Horses

Astrid made a lot of progress in horse-riding. She won the 2nd price at a local dressage competition, and she also enjoys jumping a lot.

Talking about Astrid, in Dec 2021 she celebrated her 16th birthday. Where has the time gone?

Traveling Without Moving project

Travelling without Moving (TWM) is a series of essays documenting my mental and philosophical journey in 2020-2022.

The main outline was published in November 2020, and in the meantime, several episodes have been released. Since the last Petervan Studios update, I published one more essay on “Studios”.

There are a couple more in the pipeline, but I have a hunch that these will morph into The Scaffold project (see later in this post).

Books

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

Some highlights

Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine by Geoff Manaugh, Nicola Twilley

Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall

Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action by J.F. Martel

Lichamen by Peter Verhelst

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).

Here is the latest Ride from Feb 2022, still being populated as we publish this post.

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

My Art Practice

I did not produce much artwork. I was very focused on a work-project that required all my attention and focus. I shared most of my recent art 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:

Petervan Artworks © 2022 – Digital scribble on iPad

Petervan Artworks © 2022 – Digital scribble on iPad

Professionalisation of Petervan Studios Art Practice

As from March 2022, I will focus on the professionalization of my art practice. I have hired a coach to help me with that. We are working with a digital archiving platform with an API that is steering the show & tell of my analogue and digital artworks. There will also be an integration with a shopping environment, and an online VR exhibition environment. There is also a brand-new website for Petervan Studios in the making. This new online environment will also become the home for a new project, working title “The Scaffold”, see below

Freelance Projects

I have been deeply involved and committed as architect and head of design of an 100% on-line learning expedition running from Sep 2021 till Feb 2022. We just landed the closing session. We still want to produce a “scrapbook” that documents the journey by end Feb 2022. The experience came in two chapters. The first chapter was a technology refresh on digital identity, infrastructure, VR, Robotics, Web3, and UX. The second chapter was about developing a practice of innovation for wicked problems, and how to design for emergence in complex adaptive systems.

I had the chance to collaborate with professional facilitation and innovation partners, and a collective of “guides” – some really smart people – that helped us shape and deliver the content.

The Scaffold

The learning expedition mentioned above had a great impact on me and the way I look at “events”. I believe I am onto something that may be the start of a new “genre” of learning studios. And I have started talking and pitching to potential partners and investors. Here is the high-level pitch:

The Scaffold is a 100% online learning studio for creating new knowledge based on the passion of the explorer. 

The Scaffold can be seen as a form of Pop-Up school and/or an experimentation-based learning playground.

The Scaffold is planned as a three-year research cycle, with cohorts joining an online virtual playground for six-month intensive high-impact expeditions where together with the faculty they will create new knowledge in collaboration. 

The curriculum of the expeditions is composed of several interventions, interruptions, and provocations anchored in the reality of a client’s project. The project serves as a vehicle to trigger new and imaginative thinking. 

The Scaffold is a “scaffold” for something much bigger, something that could lead to a movement and foundation for better futures.

More about that later, probably in the second half of 2022. I hope to have a first client cohort signed-up by then.

So, in summary, what’s next?

The plan for the coming months is to work/play on:

Professionalizing my art practice

Pitch and realize my project “The Scaffold”

So, that’s it for this edition. If there is something worth reporting, next update is for Sep 2022.

Warmest,

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

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 – Play

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White birds playing on air with food (via Reddit)

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

Intro of that series can be found here.

The plan/ambition with this series: to share where I have been in 2020, 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 Pause-Post of end Nov 2020, we continue with “Play”.

“I’d like to do nothing for some time

be free

flying and gliding

like birds in the sky

left, right, up, down, up, down,…

defying centrifugal forces

unlimited by time, space, distance, force

like free painting

with myself as the paintbrush

and the sky as canvas

4-dimensional

playful like the birds,

showing little tricks,

challenge and pursue

but not limited

by any form of danger”

@petervan

It is a poem I wrote in 2012 laying at a pool at the Paradores Hotel in La Palma (Canary Islands), watching the birds playing in the blue sky…

This is the sort of play I would like to write about today.

This is the sort of play written about by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens in 1938

I believe I already mentioned Homo Ludens in my post about a New Babylon

Huizinga believes play is of all times, and not limited to humans.

Animals play also.

A lot.

It is not “play” as in “game”.

Game – at least finite games – hints at some underlying sense for competition.

This is play without competition.

Play just for the pleasure of play.

Like birds in the sky,

cows in the pasture,

dogs on the beach,

humans teasing each other…

The core message of Huizinga is that play drives culture.

That the disposition of a culture is already embedded in the play preceding it.

By this we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture has the play-character, that it proceeds in the shape and the mood of play (Huizinga)

Play is irrational.

Play is a voluntary activity.

Play has a tendency to be beautiful. It may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form, which animates play in all its aspects. The words we use to denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with which we try to describe the effects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc.

Play casts a spell over us; it is “enchanting”, “captivating”. It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.

The child plays in complete—we can well say, in sacred—earnest.

But it plays and knows that it plays.

Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life”.

We do not play for wages, we work for them

@Huizinga

The last one resonates well with my current state of being. For me, and especially since my retirement from corporate life on 1 Dec 2020, “work” has become “paid play”, although most of the work in 2020 was “unpaid play”.

But it is play.

In 2017, in my series “Trends for human advancement”, I strongly believed that structure is driving everything, and landed on the phrase:

“Structure drives flow drives behaviour drives culture drives change”

With the insights of Huizinga, I would complement it as follows:

“Play drives structure drives flow drives behaviour drives culture drives change”

So, to be able to change, we first need to re-learn to play.

“There is a third function, however, applicable to both human and animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making—namely, playing.”

@Huizinga

This brings me to the insights of John Seely Brown in “A New Culture of Learning”, who quotes Huizinga extensively

I rediscovered John Seely Brown (JSB) when reading “Design Unbound” that he wrote together with Ann Pendleton-Jullian. Much (!) more about that book and Ann’s work and how it changed and formed my thinking in 2020 and ongoing.

Visual/Insight by JSB

JSB talks about a “21st Century Augmented Imagination”, with a better balance between Homo Sapien, Homo Faber, and Homo Ludens

Play, questioning, and—perhaps most important—imagination lie at the very heart of arc-of-life learning

In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it

Play fuses the two elements of learning that we have been talking about: the information network and the petri dish (or bounded environment of experimentation). That fusion is what we call the new culture of learning

@JSB

Later in this series, we’ll also talk extensively about the concept of “Studios”, leveraging the practice of practices that is architecture (again, as so well documented by Ann Pendleton-Jullian in “Four Studios (+1)”)

The key point here that play and critique are indispensable tools and skills  for collective learning when integrating game play and game design in the scaffolding of the disposition of imagination.

Next time we’ll talk about “Anxious” one of the states of a post-VUCA world. And what a possible response to that anxiety can be.

From there – in subsequent posts – we’ll leave the road of reductionism and will enter a space where we will mix more abstraction and holistic thinking.

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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