Category Archives: Zeitgeist

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.”

Inspiration – Even more David Claerbout

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Studio David Claerbout just published the video of a lecture at The Cloud Collection, Nanjing on the occasion of the opening “Flow of Time. David Claerbout and Zhou Tao” exhibition.

At 17:50, he explains how he made the Woodcarver and the Forest. Prompting ChatGPT to create a script and images, then filming what ChatGPT suggested, and then giving it back to ChatGPT and asking whether it recognises itself.

I took the rough auto-generated YouTube transcript of this talk, and prompted ChatGPT as follows: “take this transcript, delete the time markers, delete the uhm’s, and put it together in readable sentences”, and this is what it came up with (highlights by Petervan)

+++ by ChatGPT

Thank you for coming. When the invitation arrived to make a double exhibition with the work of Zhou Tao, we were of course very curious. It was clear that there was a real reason we were invited to exhibit together, but there was also a lot of mystery because I didn’t know his work very well, and I had not yet realized the intrinsic relationship to time in his work. It was only by coming here a few days ago that it started to sink in—what the subtle relationships between the two of us might be.

First of all, I would like to thank the Cloud Collection for bringing us together. We obviously have very different ways of working, which you can see in the works. For Joe, being in a location, being physically in a place with his camera as his partner, is crucial. In my practice, we spend a long time and work with many people, sometimes for at least a year. If I look around at the pieces in this exhibition, I think the shortest production time is one full year. Other works took two or three years. Our record, if I remember well, is sixteen years—sixteen years of thinking back and forth about how to do something until we finally finished a production.

What we do have in common is that we like to use the duration of the film as the acting force—not so much the actors, not so much the motives, but the simple fact of being in front of a situation. This approach to film is relatively recent and has to do with the availability of digital time. I call it digital time because it is no longer expensive time; it’s virtual time of which we can gather a lot. For our generation, duration is no longer exclusive, expensive, or spectacular, but something broad and long.

When I came here two days ago and saw the combination with the work of Tao, it made me question myself: is it really necessary that I work so long on a single image? The airplane is a single motive. The birdcage is a single motive. These works revolve around very simple motives. I have to admit that whenever I work on one film, I am actually thinking about two films. This is one of the reasons I keep my motives simple: because I try to work with two identities.

For example, the film behind you, The Wood Carver, has the identity of a meditative work that calms you down, but also another identity that is almost the complete opposite. I’ve always been fascinated by what happens when you let go of narrative film—when you let go of talkies, psychological realism, and story, and instead go with time, with duration, with the flicker of the images. Could I make a very minimalist film where I use the least possible narrative and still generate narrative inside the heads of the visitors?

As you walk around, you’ll notice there are few sounds—no soundtracks, only what I call “witness sounds”: bird songs, nature, wind, footsteps. It wasn’t always like this. I made films with soundtracks, musical scores, conversations between actors. But my focus was always on the background, and more and more the birds became a symbol for that background—giving the film back to the witnesses rather than the actors. In cinema we often speak about foreground and background, like in painting. I realized I have a preference for what is behind—for what is far away, not in the foreground.

One of my very first films, made in 2003, is a 14-hour film where three actors perform a short 12-minute scene repeatedly for a full day, until they start making errors or falling apart. Only then do you slowly begin to see that the film is really about the light, the changes of light, and not about the narrative in the foreground. I am very much an advocate of the cinema of the witness, not the cinema of the actor.

A word also on ecology: I avoid entering specific subject matter, but I cannot help noticing that we spend a lot of time in front of screens and very little in nature. This makes me think about the relationship we have with technology. On one hand, I love technology—I’m a technological buff, and whenever something new appears, I try to catch up with it. But at the same time, my works are not about technology. They are about light and shadow, about composition, about the slow pace of time. Again, there are two tracks.

Any cinematographer knows that the moving image is a technological construction—25 frames per second. It is a prison of time; you cannot escape it. So why would artists choose to work in this prison in order to liberate time? To find alternatives for thinking about the flow of time, as Suzu beautifully mentioned in his text.

Let me elaborate on the black-and-white film behind the wall, titled Aircraft Final Assembly Line. Like many of my films, it is based on an image or an idea I found somewhere—an archive image, something with no particular message. I found a black-and-white photograph of this aircraft. It was originally painted in black matte aluminum. I was fascinated by the enormous wooden hall in Chicago where it was constructed—a space that no longer exists. This polished aluminum aircraft stood there, brand new in the past, yet I look at it now from the future, as a witness. I know the aircraft is probably destroyed by now. The work became about the dialectic between materials: polished aluminum, rough wood, concrete floor, improvised-looking scaffolding—yet airplanes themselves are not improvised. They must be perfect. Airplanes are like perfect arrows of time: they promise the future.

This is typical of how I work: I don’t invent; I let myself be inspired by archive images, almost orphaned images from the past.

When we move mentally to Bird Cage, the film with the explosion, this was a follow-up to a pandemic-era film, Wildfire. I continued with the motive of the explosion because it is the perfect index of a moment—after an explosion, nothing is ever the same. I was fascinated by the idea of remaining inside that moment of change for a long time, looking at all the pieces of the world flying apart, but in a peaceful way. Again, a paradox between destructive and meditative energies.

In the middle of this are two birds that appear twice—once inside the explosion, at the last fraction of their lives, and again later, alive and peaceful in a garden. I hesitated for a long time to use this imagery because it is almost ridiculous—two birds in an explosion, like a crucifix of birds. But I kept it because I was fascinated by the elliptical camera movement. If you look closely, there is no cut: the camera moves from the explosion back to a normal, sunlit garden, with the same two birds sitting together, almost as if they are trying to tell you something. Ten minutes later, the same ellipse brings you back to the explosion, frozen in time—an “immobile explosion,” a contradiction in itself.

I like to work within a single mental space, not jumping between spaces but taking the viewer on a minimalist journey through one situation.

The confetti piece around the corner, the double screen, was made from 2016 to 2018. It corresponds to a series I’ve done for about 15 years: dozens or hundreds of digitally constructed photographs combined into a slideshow. A conventional parade of images, except that it’s about the absence of sound. In the film, a little boy is screaming, but you hear nothing. His scream becomes internalized. The scene is exaggerated—a Black boy surrounded by white adults. I was warned against using it because it might appear divisive. But I said yes, that tension is exactly what we need in order to reach something more universal. The real fascination for me was the internalized scream, and the way spending time with the work might let the viewer internalize it too. It is as close as I can get to a painting with an action attached to it.

Finally, behind us is the latest work we made, just finished for this exhibition: The Wood Carver in the Forest. The subtitle is “A ruthless deforestation machine disguised as a meditative film.” Again, it has two identities. Most spectators will identify with the relaxation—the small sounds, the details of oil, wood, knives, carving, micro-movements outside any big narrative.

We designed this work using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is one big confabulation machine; it always gives you an answer, even when it has no clue. We wrote the storyboard with it, then requested illustrations, and used those as the basis for a cinematographic team. We worked for a year to reproduce what AI had suggested.

It came up with scenes like the one by the window: a person staring at nature but actually staring at something artificial—as if looking at a screen. In the images, if you look carefully, the “trees” outside are actually vertically stacked television screens. We prompted an image of the garden and it produced about ninety trees. Using its own calculation, it estimated it would take thirteen years for the protagonist to turn those trees into wooden objects. From those “thirteen years,” we selected three days—one early, one mid-process, one at the end—and produced only those.

In the end, it becomes a loop: AI proposes something, we produce it, then return it to AI like an alien creature and ask, “Do you recognize yourself?” About 5–7% of the imagery is completely fake—AI reprocessing its own outputs.

The idea of the work is that someone else—not me—could complete those thirteen years of destruction. My job was to create images with two simultaneous identities, properly schizophrenic: destructive and generative at the same time.

I think I will stop here. Thank you.

+++ end ChatGPT

Petervan’s Delicacies – 14 Dec 2023

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Delicacies is back! It is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks that I came across on the internet. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. There is no fixed frequency for Delicacies: when there is enough material, I hit the publish button. That can be after a week, of after 3 months. No pressure, literally. Enjoy!

Here, on my blog, I only share a couple of links. Sort of a teaser. 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 on Substack with loads of videos and visual sparks. Subscribe on the Substack Welcome Page.

Petervan Delicacies started as a Revue publication beging 2015. Revue was shut down end 2022 as part of Twitter’s larger feature overhaul since Elon Musk’s acquisition. By that time the counter was at 164 Delicacies issues. 

Apple just upgraded the illusion

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Picture by Apple

The initial title of this post was “Let’s upgrade the illusion”, but that’s what Apple just did with the announcement of the Vision Pro. And I mean that in the positive sense, not as a criticism.

The quote “Let’s upgrade the illusion” comes from a keynote by Deepak Chopra during the December 2022 retreat of Nishith Desai Associates (NDA), a leading Legal & Tax Consulting company from India, with offices worldwide. It is in itself interesting to see a Legal & Tax Consulting company exclusively focused on new technologies like AI, XR, Nano, Bio, etc.

The event was hosted in NDA’s gorgeous campus “The Imaginarium”, a true infrastructure for imagination, pitched by the CEO as a “private infrastructure for the public good”. How cool is that?

But back to that keynote titled “The nature of reality, what is real?” – We jump in after 2 min:

Deepak kicks off by stating that everything is real if you are truly immersed in it: whatever you experience is an illusion. If everything is an illusion anyway, let’s then upgrade the illusion. To do so, says Deepak, ideas have to manifest. Therefore we need imagination. 

Imagination is about EVERY experience, all senses, not only visual, Deepak goes on. And then he really got me when he explained: 

“That what imagineS is consciousness, awareness, soul. That what imagineS has no form, no location in time or space, no boundary, and therefore is infinite. That what is imagineD has form, has location.”

This opens a field of possibilities, or better, a field of what can be imagined. 

I agree with Peter Hinssen when he says that the Vision Pro is not an iPhone moment but an Apple LISA moment:

“I don’t agree with those who say that the Apple Vision Pro launch is a new iPhone moment. I believe it’s an Apple Lisa moment. The Apple Lisa was a true milestone in the history of personal computing. Just like the Lisa, the Apple Vision Pro is a technological marvel that is too expensive (for now) to join the mainstream but is setting completely new standards for the industry.”

Back to Deepak. In a second talk at the same event about “The Future of Wellbeing”, he kindly notices that scientists measure experiences, and artists have experiences. That scientists identify with Quanta, and artists with Qualia. “Qualia is a unit of experience”. 

What if we would measure the success of the Vision Pro on its potential to dramatically increase our units of experience, expanding our notions and understandings of what is real.

This reminds me of David Chalmers’ book “REALITY+”, a philosophical masterpiece that basically states that any good illusion is indistinguishable from real. 

Let’s mix this with the insights of another philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh in his new book “Digital Technologies, Temporality, and the Politics of Co-Existence”, a mouthful, I know. Prof. Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh is a full Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Philosophy of Department of the University of Vienna.

In this book, Coeckelbergh makes a plea for process philosophy: 

“Process philosophy shows a way out of what is today seen as overly deterministic thinking about technology and time, and clears the road for thinking about digital technologies and digital selves not as objects but as processes and becoming“

He also introduces the concepts of embodied technologies and “technoperformances.”

Performances emphasize the role of humans and the social but also bodily and kinetic character of our (co-)existence with digital technologies… As I have proposed in Moved by Machines and related work, the term performance can be used to conceptualize our dealings with technologies, including digital technologies. As we use digital technologies and are involved in technoperformances, we move and are choreographed, we act and are directed. To conceptualize the important role technologies and media play, we can say that we do not only use technologies in order to move, but that technologies also move us and direct us. The medium is not only the message but also the performance.  

This brings me to the excellent interview of Kent Bye with Andreea Ion Cojocura during SXSW 2023 titled “Defining Process-Relational Architecture with Andreea Ion CojoCaru: Spatial Design as a Participatory Improv Performance”

Andreea passionately talks about the potential of XR to instigate and discover emergent behaviours, about rubbery environments in continuous change, putting change at the heart of everything. And also about performance, like in art performance, a live creative process that takes you on an embodied, visceral journey with direct interaction with public. A process relational approach: me and the building (the environment) going dancing for a while. Love that – dancing with your spacial environment: where the end result is less important than the process, the experience itself. 

Ken Bye has btw very deep thoughts about the impact of AR/VR/XR on presence, immersive storytelling, and experiential design. Watch his May 2022 Brussels talk on YouTube here. I encourage you to watch the whole thing, it will reset your assumptions about virtual reality.

The core of his talk is about this quadrant, looking at AR/VR/XR in terms of four types of presences.

One could also say the four types of “illusions” of what is real and what creates and influences your learnings and behaviors.

Let”s get out of this rabbit hole with Andreea in her recent LinkedIn post:

“Apple DID debut a killer app. It’s embodied interaction *done well*. It doesn’t matter how simple it is. Experiencing space smoothlessly react to you in any form is exhilarating, addictive magic. The killer app is spatial UX as its own content. The novelty resides at the neural level, where a tiny delay or flicker makes a world of difference in how information is processed, and when and how the feeling of magic and awe is released.”

Besides the fact that the Vision Pro and anything related to it is just a gorgeous piece of technological perfection – “you can lick it” would Steve Jobs say – it deeply integrates spacial vision and embodied experience. That’s why I belief Apple just upgraded the illusion.

Update: I added a link to @BrettKing’s The Futurist Podcast on the Apple Vision Pro with @missmetaverse @Scobleizer, and @BrianRoemmele . This Podcast gives you a really good sense of the revolutionary aspects of the Apple Vision Pro. Enjoy!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2CIMCktz8EnYEwdBxeaTot?si=4066aff16aa34a3a

Warmest

Petervan’s Delicacies – 20 Nov 2022

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As usual, an incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks. Handpicked, no robots. Minimalism in curation. Enjoy!

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 with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan

Petervan’s Delicacies – 6 Oct 2021

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delicacies

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!

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

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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When my future has to catch up with my present

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The “collapse of time” was an important meme in the Techonomy 2019 session on Super-Evolution, the idea that startups can now harness rapid prototyping and vast pools of data to develop radically new business models quickly and at scale (video here)

Techonomy

Super-Evolution is about creating more – dramatically more – options. Invented by AI, aka non-human logic. (see also Haydn Shaughnessy on the importance of maximizing options and radical adjacencies vs. core competency in innovation)

“Leave behind the myth of the grand plan and create the conditions for optionality and just-in-time strategy.”(Haydn Shaughnessy)

The first time I felt that sensation of collapsing time was when viewing Elon Musk’s Tesla 2019 update. I felt beaten by algorithms. The Tesla is now/then learning from (data) from human behavior and driving like a human, but ultimately will EXCEED their behavior” (at 01:48:15)

There you have it: gradually, but suddenly we have a singularity. Gradually but suddenly, all jobs are doomed. We are not going to stop this with an ethics council or with regulation. The train has left the station, the genie is out of the bottle.

“The fleet wakes up with an over the air update”

PR or product? The same question was asked some months later by Jean-Louis Gassée regarding the Cybertruck launch:

“Elon Musk forces us to be of two minds. On one side, we have Musk the Mountebank; on the other, a Captain of Industry.”

I had the same feeling of time-space collapse and irrelevance when watching this awesome interview with Rahul Sonnad, CEO/Co-Founder of Tesloop, explaining how “Robo-Mobility is a hospitality service” and “Once cars are appliances”

Are we toast? And/or do we need to reboot, reskill, etc if we don’t want to become irrelevant? Venkatesh Rao gives his perspective when reflecting on Inventing Time, and playing on Alan Kay’s “It is easier to invent the future than to predict it” and William Gibson’s “The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.”

“Riding in a Tesla made the electric vehicle future seem utterly inevitable in a way that kinda killed the present for me. Suddenly I could no longer look at gasoline cars the same way. Driving in my own car felt different like I was stuck in the past, waiting for the price of the future to come down to the point where I could afford to live in it. So a Tesla creates the future in the sense of both the Alan Kay and William Gibson quotes. It makes the future real in a deep way that is like making time itself real. And you know this because the feel of the present feels different like you’re heading down a dead-end, a lame-duck future. You’ll have to either abandon it as soon as you can or end up dying with it.”

Maps book

Around the same time, I was lurking in Simon Ferdinand’s Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity. He could have added the Time of Global Modernity, as he writes about spatial (spheres) and temporal (time collapse) ruptures.

“Often map artworks recapitulate the narratives of rupture (spatial as well as temporal) through which global modernity differentiates itself from inherited pasts and surroundings.”

And;

“Maps have proven integral… to the experience of “time-space compression”

Greenaway

It made me think of Peter Greenaway’s film ‘A walk through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist’ (1978) and “A Walk through a Thousand Plateaus”, an homage to that film.

It is probably a sign of the times that in the preparation of his new book “Agency” also the great William Gibson lost a sense of how weird the world has become, up to the point of the present bypassing his future sci-fi scripts – “His future had to catch up with the present”– and “stubs”: alternative timeline in which technologists (and, more tellingly, hobbyists) of the future are able to meddle.

Agency

Hobbyists and meddling, the right words probably for not getting alienated. I would call it “tinkering” by maximizing options that human logic not necessary can spot or generate in time.

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Spacial Trash and Patrimony

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Another rabbit hole bringing together some reflections on creativity, demolition, patrimony, and poetic ruination, as so often in this blog inspired by architectural insights and metaphors.

bouwmeester

My attention was triggered by an article in the Jan 11, 2020 weekend edition of De Standaard, a Flemish newspaper. The article was about landscaping, and more specifically “ontharding” (I would literally translate it as “softening”). In this case, softening that what was hardened in the first place. Abandoned and neglected residential and industrial sites, where the soil is still covered by the concrete and rubbish of empty buildings.

It was part of a study supported by the “Vlaamse Bouwmeester”. “Bouwmeester” means “master of building”, “bau-meister”. The term is ill-translated into “Flemish Government Architect” on the official website. The full study can be found here (PDF in Dutch).

The core mission of the Flemish Government Architect is to promote the architectural quality of the built environment. The Flemish Government Architect and his team advise public patrons in the design and realization of buildings, public space, landscape and infrastructure. In addition, the Flemish Government Architect stimulates the development of visions and reflection, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral initiatives. The Flemish Government Architect acts as an advisor to the entire Flemish Government.

In short, the article and the study plea for restoring public space by the demolition of 1/5th of hardened space/surface in the Flemish landscape by 2050.

I had a flashback to “Cradle to Cradle”, the 2002 book that alerted me for the first time to a possible vision of sustainable production and architecture. The idea at that time was that reducing waste was just not good enough, and to be sustainable we needed to add value back into the system. As an evolution, the article about the softening of landscape goes one step further: from reducing waste to creating open space by the demolition of vacancy.

“Sloop geeft blijk van falen” – “Demolition evidences failure”

It was happenstance that I was reading around the same time Dan Hill’s 2015 book “Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary”. I will come back to this book in subsequent posts.

Dan Hill was/is looking for (open) spaces as well, quoting ex-FC Barcelona football player and current Al-Sadd (Quatar) football team coach Xavi Hernández:

 “Think quickly, look for spaces. That’s what I do: look for spaces. All day. I’m always looking. All day, all day. Here? No. There? No. People who haven’t played don’t always realise how hard that is. Space, space, space. It’s like being on the PlayStation. I think ‘shit, the defender’s here, play it there’. I see the space and pass. That’s what I do.”

Already more than 20 years ago, architect Cedric Price was arguing for demolish-able buildings with open re-usable spaces.

fun palace

Cedric Price’s Fun Palace – inspiration for Centre Pompidou in Paris

OK – I confess – as from that moment I went down the rabbit hole and saw demolition and abandoned architecture everywhere. Like in this recent Guardian article, arguing the case for fully demountable buildings.

“We have to think of buildings as material depots,” says Thomas Rau , a Dutch architect who has been working to develop a public database of materials in existing buildings and their potential for reuse… He has developed the concept of “material passports”, a digital record of the specific characteristics and value of every material in a construction project, thereby enabling the different parts to be recovered, recycled and reused.

But there is also something poetic about abandonment, up to the point where we could consider keeping these ruins and equipping them with sensors to listen to patrimony.

In his beautifully reflective post “Instrumental Revelation and the Architecture of Abandoned Physics Experiments”, Geoff Manough introduces the concept of “poetic ruination.

Like menhirs, these abandoned seismic sensors could now just stand there, silent in the landscape, awaiting a future photographer such as Grigoryants to capture their poetic ruination.

Lebbeus Woods was inspiration to Geoff Manough and London-based architects Smout Allen for the project L.A. Recalculated:

Woods depicts an entire city designed and built as an inhabitable scientific tool. Everywhere there are “oscilloscopes, refractors, seismometers, interferometers, and other, as yet unknown instruments, measuring light, movement, force, change.” Woods describes how “tools for extending perceptivity to all scales of nature are built spontaneously, playfully, experimentally, continuously modified in home laboratories, in laboratories that are homes.”

Instead of wasting their lives tweeting about celebrity deaths, residents construct and model their own bespoke experiments, exploring seismology, astronomy, electricity, even light itself.

seismic sensors

Seismic Counterweights
From L.A. Recalculated by Smout Allen and BLDGBLOG

Like architects think about (industrial) sites listening through sensors to seismic undercurrents, I started wondering whether we could not use this metaphor to reflect about our organizational structures; structures not only as hierarchical structures but the more encompassing set of system rules and patterns of an organization – I referred to it before as organizational patrimony.

How can we listen to and signal about the pulse of this organizational patrimony? How can we be aware of it, appreciate it, respect it, and build upon it in our rebellious acts of creative destruction?

I imagine a cohort of humans – like a colony of ants – having 24/7 sensors and laboratories everywhere in organizations; in every office, cubicle, meeting room, coffee corner, etc. And I don’t mean robotic sterile sensors feeding AI models. I mean real humans, measuring, documenting and signaling patrimonial changes in the structure of corporate structure, so they can send early warnings of experiments that have become useless and therefore have to be ruinated, or – in the worst-case – signal cases of patrimonial breakdown and demolition. In search of the material depot and passport of our organizations.

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New Babylon – New Frisco – New Cobra – New city to play

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During my visit to SFMOMA on 15 Nov 2019, I was standing on the terrace of the 7th Floor looking North-East into Natoma Street, and wondering what the curved-walled building on the left was about.

SFMOMA

I did not pay much attention until I was reminded of this view in this article about floating utopias in The New-Yorker of 11 Dec 2019. Below is a view from the other side, probably taken from the Providian Financial rooftop on Beale Street, looking South-West. At the far end, you may recognize the SFMOMA building. The building in the front is Salesforce Park, a lush rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows.

Salesforce Park

Salesforce Park.Photograph by Karl Mondon / The Mercury News / Getty

The article in The New-Yorker is about the utopian, surveilled and orchestrated architecture in the middle of the astonishing inequality of homeless people in all the other streets of San Francisco:

Taxpayer-funded, corporately branded, suspended above the homeless, the park is an irresistible metaphor for the city’s socioeconomic tensions. It also feels like a bid, or a prayer, for a certain vision of its future.

Salesforce Park as a model for the rest of San Francisco—vertical, expansive, ecologically minded, expensive, sponsored, and surveilled.

“I feel totally orchestrated,” Cranz said, placing her hand on the railing separating us from the plant life. “I’m acutely aware of how managed everything is.”

Shuttle Constant

Two days later, I bumped on-line into the magical world of the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuis and especially his Magnus opus “New Babylon”, another utopia, a city designed to respond to Homo Ludens’ need for playing, for adventure, and for mobility.

 

In New Babylon there are no single houses

The whole city is one immense covered collective house

A house with countless rooms, halls and corridors,

In which one can roam for days or weeks,

But where one can also find

Small spaces for privacy

New Babylon is a labyrinth

Inexhaustible in its variations

A palace with a thousand rooms

timeline art

Constant was one of the founders of Cobra, an avant-garde art movement established on 8 Nov 1948. The movement only existed for three years, but forever changed the landscape of postwar European art. Cobra was perhaps the last avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. Constant was the author and co-signee of the initial COBRA Manifesto “La Cause était entendue” – “The Case was Settled”.

Les représentants belges, danois et hollandais à la conférence du Centre Internatiopnal de Documentation sur l’Art d’Avant-Garde à Paris jugent que celle-ci n’a mené à rien.

La résolution qui a été votée à la séance de cloture ne fait qu’exprimer le manque total d’un accord suffisant pour justifier le fait même de la réunion.

Nous voyons comme le seul chemin pour continuer l’activité internationale une collaboration organique expérimentale qui évite toute théorie stérile et dogmatique.

Aussi décidons-nous de ne plus assister aux conférences dont le programme et l’atmosphère ne sont pas favorable à un développement de notre travail.

Nous avons pu constater, nous, que nos façons de vivre, de travailler, de sentir étaient communes ; nous nous entendons sur le plan pratique et nous refusons de nous embrigader dans une unité théorique artificielle. Nous travaillons ensemble, nous travaillerons ensemble.

C’est dans un esprit d’efficacité que nous ajoutons à nos expériences nationales une expérience dialectique entre nos groupes. Si, actuellement, nous ne voyons pas ailleurs qu’entre nous d’activité internationale, nous faisons appel cependant aux artistes de n’importe quel pays qui puissent travailler – qui puissent travailler dans notre sens.

Paris, le 8 novembre 48.

Cobra Manifesto page-1

Cobra Manifesto - Image from Beinecke Digital Collections

After reading “Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element in Culture” by Johan Huizinga, Constant develops the idea for a futuristic city. He develops this idea by drawing maps, writing texts, building constructions, and models.

Homo Ludens

Constant worked for almost 20 years on New Babylon (1959-1974). Today, there is a foundation to preserve and promote the art collection and intellectual legacy of the artist.

From Wikipedia:

The goal was the creating of alternative life experiences, called ‘situations’

Perched above ground, Constant’s megastructures would literally leave the bourgeois metropolis below and would be populated by homo ludens–man at play.

In the New Babylon, the bourgeois shackles of work, family life, and civic responsibility would be discarded. The post-revolutionary individual would wander from one leisure environment to another in search of new sensations. Beholden to no one, he would sleep, eat, recreate, and procreate where and when he wanted. Self-fulfillment and self-satisfaction were Constant’s social goals. Deductive reasoning, goal-oriented production, the construction and betterment of a political community–all these were eschewed.

It is obvious that a person free to use his time for the whole of his life, free to go where he wants, when he wants, cannot make the greatest use of his freedom in a world ruled by the clock and the imperative of a fixed abode. As a way of life Homo Ludens will demand, firstly, that he responds to his need for playing, for adventure, for mobility, as well as all the conditions that facilitate the free creation of his own life.

Some of the constructs in Constant’s vision reminded me of the sketches and models of Buckminster Fuller’s Dimaxyon House of 30 years earlier).

Dymaxion House

Buckminster Fuller, Dimaxyon House, Chicago, USA, 1927

Constant passes away in Utrecht on August 1st, 2005, at home with his wife Trudy van der Horst. He is buried at Zorgvlied in Amstelveen on August 6th. On his grave:

In art freedom manifests itself in its highest form.
The creative imagination.
Art creates an image of the world that didn’t exist before.
No. More than that.
An image that was unthinkable before.

I’d love to see a 21st-century version of Cobra, a collective of artists, thinkers, creators, tinkerers, and experimentalists, leading into a movement of fresh thinking. Not necessarily and exclusively an art-movement, but an all-encompassing societal-movement, with more time and air and oxygen for our children to play, where they naturally can grow into what they are best at, with a renewed freshness and renaissance, a new corporate and societal spring, celebrating the power of imagination and creativity, as a response to our dull political landscape of non-zero games.

A new New Babylon, a new city to play, a new avant-garde propelling us into the highest forms of freedom.

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