Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 119! 14 Vignettes to Keep Your Creativity Going...
Greetings creative-holiday-becomings:
We hoped that you had a wonderful celebration of the winter (or summer) solstice yesterday night. Today the sun rose just a moment earlier and will set a moment later north of the equator.
We suspect this email may have triggered your Out-Of-Office message signaling you’ve unplugged and disconnected from work to be with your holidays, to celebrate your friends and family, and to creative enjoyment of experimenting with food and drink, books and fire that bring us comfort during this time of year. We too are doing the same — Iain in Montreal, Jason in New Jersey.
If you’re still connected to your email, or like us, checking in to ensure your favorite newsletter does not get lost among the plethora of emails that can wait until January, then below we have something different for you:
14 vignettes from 2023’s newsletter articles. These are the stories – wormholes – key examples of creative processes that we’ve used to illuminate a topic that may get buried in the heft of the overall article. These are the bits and pieces that are portals in their own right but may have been lost in the overall focus on the primary subject matter.
We thought it would be fun to surface these vignettes for you - to prompt your creative thoughts which could lead to further reading or experimentation with our work or others, while you have the opportunity to.
Finally, no matter what you celebrate or where you are in the world, we would like to take this moment to thank you for being a part of our creative community this year – it has been wonderful to engage with so many of you directly via workshops, keynotes, retreats, consultations, research and conversations across the globe. It has been equally wonderful to be in dialog with so many of you via Linkedin, and email in regards to our posts, the book and the newsletters. These dialogs have enriched our lives and profoundly shaped our work (for the better!).
Wishing each of you, and your families, a very happy, peaceful, and joyous holiday season.
Sincerely,
Iain and Jason
“How does something come from nothing?” – This key question for creativity is only an impossible paradox if you understand nothing as a pure total void:
It is critical to understand that in passing through zero – through nothing – we are not going into some pure emptiness of the void. Passing through zero – is in fact something much closer to the opposite: fullness. The fullness of possibility. Then why call it zero? Because there is nothing there awaiting discovery – it is the emptyfullness of what could be made and done otherwise. The radically new is only there as a possibility in general. If it was already there as an idea, then it would not be radically new. The new does not exist until it is made. But the possibility is always there haunting each moment.
What does this emptyfullness require of us?
Vol 70 continues this inquiry.
There is quite a bit of hype about Chat GPT as the future of AI. But in regards to creative processes there are far more interesting examples:
What would the emergence of the new look like if it was not placed in the context of ideas, concepts, and the symbols of large statistical engines? What would it look like to work with the world as having a real open and independent agency?
What would creativity look like if it did not begin within an abstract and closed symbol system?
Lets focus on deliberative generative examples — where the researchers deliberately built processes for innovation that refuse human ideation and conceptualization.
There is a great example of this in the research practices of Adrian Thompson, who is a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Evolution at the University of Sussex where he leads a research group focused on: What can evolution do that human designers can’t? – And this is precisely the question that we wish to explore here.
Adrian puts it this way, “Artificial evolution, working by the systematic accumulation of blind variations, can produce designs that boggle the mind…”
Adrian argues that conventional creative methods can, because of their reliance on conceptualization, and abstractions, only work with a highly constrained design space. (And this is perhaps one of the limits of systems like ChatGPT). We do what we know — but could we set up a system to explore the vast space of possibility beyond what we can know, represent and symbolize? Underlying this method is a dynamic systems approach to the spontaneous emergence of novelty that cannot be traced to any one source. (Here is a link to the article where the researcher Adrian Thompson writes up his findings).
One key experiment that he carried out using techniques from evolution was to come up with new electrical circuits that could distinguish differing tones. (It is an example that we first learned about from the insightful book on artificial life, art, emergence and creative processes: Metacreation – a book still totally relevant to these discussions around digitality and radical creativity).
The goal was to develop an unconstrained approach to evolutionary creativity and test it with a simple electronic circuit. To do this blocking was used — to limit the effect of standard key components. This would force the evolutionary exploration into novelty far from standard pathways.
The actual experiment developed a system based on evolutionary principles to breed new electronic circuits to sense tonal differences. Each circuit is actually physically built, tested and scored as to how well it performs a task of discriminating between tones. The “fittest” circuits are physically “mated and mutated to generate the next generation”.
It is a highly iterative method where unintended material capacities of the system (exaptations) emerge in the action of the circuit. This method stands in strong contrast to conventional circuit design which works via software abstractions (where the complex physical behavior of actual parts are reduced to a binary diagram of logical operations (a symbolic representation)). Why does this matter? The abstract ideational methodology of software based research and testing “precludes the nonlinear complexities of feedback loops and the complex dynamics of the physical medium itself.”
This point is critical, matter has open relational possibilities which cannot be pre-specified. This relational radical openness is the ultimate well of qualitative difference.
Here is how Adrian reports on the actual experiment:
“For the first few hundred generations the best circuits simply copied the input to the output combined with various high frequency oscillatory components. By generation 650 progress had been made.”
“The entire experiment took 2-3 weeks, this time was entirely dominated by the five seconds taken to evaluate each individual… If evolution is to be free to exploit all of the components' physical properties then fitness evaluations must take place at the real timescales of the task to be performed…”
As the experiment was well underway things began to get interesting:
“...it is apparent from the oscilloscope photographs that evolution explored beyond the scope of conventional design. For instance the waveforms at generation would seem absurd to an electronics designer of either digital or analogue schools.”
At the end of the experiment, Adrian was confronted by a truly alien circuitry. Here is what the final circuit looked like:
What is really interesting is where and how the novelty emerged. The circuit was carefully examined and it was discovered that most of the components were not connected and removing them had little to no impact on the functioning. But there were unconnected components that could not be removed without impacting the performance (see grey squares in diagram below).
“When the final evolved circuit was examined, it was apparent that it functioned in an entirely unfamiliar way. After initial analysis, only sixteen of the one hundred cells in the programmable array were found to be involved in the circuit, and these units were connected in a tangled network. Further investigation delineated three interlinked feedback loops that appeared to make use of the miniscule timing delays to convert the incoming signals into a simple on/off response.”
The exact mechanisms involved finally defied explanation; the results could not be reproduced in simulation nor could the circuit be probed physically without disturbing its dynamics. Thompson and his colleagues described the circuit as “bizarre, mysterious and unconventional.”
Here we have a clear example of a process of creativity that both refuses and exceeds abstract symbol systems in its direct workings. The system, separate from human control and abstract symbol driven design, generated the novelty via a generative process of tapping into the open nature of material relations. And that this novelty was not something that could be explained or simulated — our go-to techniques of ideational abstraction (it could note be coded). The novelty was an emergent property of the physical system outside and beyond our capacities of predictive ideation. Whitelaw goes on to explain:
“It seems that the design made use of highly specific physical qualities of the chip on which it was evolved. It has also evolved to operate accurately at a particular temperature.”
The physical properties of the substrate and environment that it was taking advantage of were not intentionally designed for any of these purposes (and thus never considered as being conceptually relevant to circuit design previously). These properties were unintended affordances that were co-opted and shaped into relevance by the emerging system via the non-linear process of system causation (the process of exaptation).
For Thompson, his process of innovation continued by researching ways of working to stabilize the emergent and non-fully explainable phenomena.
Vol 71 continues this inquiry.
To do anything well requires a set of practices, techniques, tools, environments and concepts – and to use these well there needs to be a shared understanding of what things mean – a shared language.
This shared language will be far more than words – it will be a shared vocabulary of gestures, embodied states, habits, and practices – but it will also include words.
To do anything new it is even more important to figure out a new language. A new language has as one of its key focuses for the development of novel concepts – concept creation. New words are an expression of the development of new concepts and new approaches.
This work of concept creation might involve coining new words, (such as affordances, assemblages, enaction and exaptation), but most often it involves the work of experimental redefinition. Both of which lead to their own confusions and frustrations. But ultimately the new and the different require a new vocabulary – there is no way around this.
Words are tools, not representations, and as such their definitions are user guides – suggestions for pragmatic use and not the final truth of a term. As new uses arise with new practices new definitions are needed.
For us, recognizing that words have no fixed, proper or final definition is critical. Words are how they are used. And the definitions follow from our everyday creative acts of ongoing innovative meaning making. One of the great joys of being alive is playing with language – making meaning in our lives.
When the first modern dictionary, the Oxford, was being conceptualized there was a very serious debate about what constituted a definition. On one side there were those that believed that only the “proper” definition of legitimate words should be included, and on the other was the belief that all words and all meanings needed to be included in an open and ongoing manner. Wonderfully, the latter won and we have the living glorious entity that it is. For a sense of how wondrous and complex this is, check out the seemingly simple and trivial word: set – which takes up a couple of pages. The main point is – words are what they do, as we do new things in new ways and new concepts arise so will new words and new meanings – it's just us being alive and creative. Give yourself the permission in your engagement with creative processes to invent concepts, and words – it is necessary.
Vol 73 continues this inquiry.
Who invents something? Is this even possible? Would it be better to say that “no one invented this” in response to these kinds of questions?
Why? Here is one of the examples we presented at the conference – the invention of the internet. We chose this primarily because of DARPA’s involvement in the conference where they claimed in an earlier presentation that they had invented the internet. Nothing could be further from the truth. DARPA did play a number of important roles in the development of the internet – but they certainly did not invent it – ultimately no one did (but that's getting ahead of the story).
What DARPA developed (based on international work that emerged in a highly distributed manner) was a closed physically distributed computer network with four nodes. Other similar systems were being developed internationally. For computing this was a challenge but conceptually it was not a radical departure from other communication systems – it was certainly not a new radical and transformative world making event.
If DARPA had then applied the innovation strategies they proposed at the conference (that all the new technologies the Department of Defense does not “pull forward” DARPA would push to commercialize seeking “product-market fit.”) – and had it worked where they achieved product market fit, we would have ended up with a series of closed communication systems being commercialized – interesting products but not anything like the thing we now call the internet.
Yes, “the internet” comes from what DARPA (and others) worked on – but it did not come out of it in any linear fashion. – It is an emergent outcome of a process by which unintended affordances joined with other logics into a rich self-organizing complex ecosystem that came to have its own emergent agency. The emergent “internet” is something genuinely emergent that is irreducible to any one causal relation.
In hindsight we can now see the internet as “obvious” – but it is important to remember that, as something radically novel and emergent, it was ontologically unknowable in advance of its emergence.
Vol 74 continues this inquiry.
Critical to any form of creativity and innovation is difference – and the belief in the possibility of something genuinely new and genuinely different emerging.
But this concept of difference is not about some variation or singular radically new and different thing emerges. That would not be much of a transformative change. What is changing and differing is a whole way of being alive.
And this inherently assumes that there are always other worlds and ways of being alive – that we live in a world of difference – that we live in a world of many worlds.
We believe that meaningful change and innovation begins in acknowledging the multiplicity of worlds and fundamental ways of being alive and puts this into practice in collective ways of worldmaking. For us, this is what is most critical to innovation – that other worlds exist and that other worlds are possible.
Vol 75 continues this inquiry.
The challenge of the new is that we cannot ideate it (as the radically new will always exceed our language, concepts and representations). But, the challenges with creativity do not go away just by embracing doing. While doing – using things – will in theory allow us to go further and potentially discover unintended capacities (novel affordances/exaptations) – using things alone is not enough.
How we use things in our everyday life is so tightly woven into our way of life (enacted) that we live in and of a specifically meaningful environment. Our world – reality – is enacted – brought forth relationally such that it is neither subjective nor objective in any simple sense (both of these options, while easy to grasp, are false). We are worldmaking beings that are fully of our collective worlds.
The real difficulty for creativity is not just the paradoxes and fundamental limits of ideation but two other things: (1) that our most basic acts of sense-making – perceiving – are fully of a way of being such that novelty even when it comes into being (and it is always there) is beyond our standard capacities to sense it in doing. We live in and of a meaningful world – and the new exceeds meaning, utility and purpose. And (2) that the new does not pre-exist its emergence in the act of doing something with something that produces a novel relation (affordance/exaptation).
To “sense” novel affordances requires the development of paradoxical experimental practices – strange forms of embodied using and doing that refuse habits, and known capacities via a process of blocking – and work with and towards what cannot be sensed. And when later, if the novel emergent relations are stabilized, will be sensed – but not yet recognized.
Vol 76 continues this inquiry.
How can a thing – the shoes on our feet be a relation? Are they not solid things – rubber, leather and thread?
Let's go slow and take a favorite example: the innovative exaptation of working with a shoe to open a bottle of wine:
When I have a wine bottle that I need to get the cork out of and there is no corkscrew handy – I have to get creative. And I start playing with the bottle and my work boot to see what they might afford. I am not hoping to unlock (discover) a secret capacity that the shoe designer hid in my boot to open wine bottles.
Rather I am about to enter a journey – an adventure of actively co-creating a process that will push the cork out of the bottle. I am actively asking all parts of the system “what else can they do?” – and what I really mean is “what new actions can we do together in this specific context?”
The first time I enter on this journey, I might have a “hunch” – an experimental starting point – say “the shoe might do something…?”, but I do not know what will happen, exactly where things will go, or why something might work or not.
We – the boot, the bottle, the wine, the cork, myself – and whatever else emerges as necessary – are joining on an adventure of collaboratively making a process emerge in the doing.
After playing with various assemblages perhaps I settle on putting the bottle in the shoe in a standing-up fashion and hitting it against a solid wall and now this combination of my body (arms, hands, skills, etc.), plus the hard but not too hard sole and the encasing leather of the shoe, plus the low friction of glass the type of cork, the air space between wine and cork, the liquid nature of the wine itself, plus the very solid nature of the brick wall – all of this careful stabilized and held in the balance “affords” the opening of the wine bottle (with quite some skill and effort).
Don’t believe us? Here is a video of the process. Now we highly recommend that you try this – the embodied actuality is far more illuminating than our words will ever be – and please share with us your video (only if you wish)!
This can feel like a process of discovery – “we discovered how a shoe can open a bottle of wine!!!” – but nothing could be further from the truth.
The shoe has no hidden wine-opening capacity in it, nor does the wine bottle glass, nor does the wine itself (no wine maker was thinking about how this liquid would assist in opening the bottle!).
Afterall, the shoe did not open the wine bottle – the carefully calibrated system did.
Did the shoe play a very critical aspect? Yes. It was absolutely critical and did play an active role. Was it’s potential to open the bottle always there? If by this you mean did it have a way of holding a bottle and a stiff sole – then yes. But if by this you mean that it literally had some “thing” in it that was there for opening wine bottles then no.
And this is critical – the potential is not in the shoe as much as it is in the relationship (which must be carefully collaboratively made). What the shoe offers is the potential for developing via skillful and experimental work a relationship. And this cannot be called “discovery”.
In the first video we shared this experimental forming and stabilizing of a relationship is hard to see. But if you try opening a bottle of wine this way (which we highly recommend), you will really get a sense of a process of co-emergent tuning and relationship building that is critical.
There is a complex process of invention going on. Not any form of banging will work, nor will any wall work nor any shoe nor any cork – it is about developing a very specific relational dynamic – both the techniques and the material properties of the things matter. You can see this much better in this video – where a number of humorous failures open us up to the process of active engaged attunement (but it is best to try this for yourself).
The affordance of opening a bottle is not in the shoe – but a quality of the specific relationship we invented together in our collaborative adventure. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in a wonderful series of essays defined a “thing” as a form of gathering – an active bringing together of a world. He digs into the history of the word – which in old german (english comes from old german) literally meant a gathering – which one can still see in old place names such as Thingeryi in the far North-East of Iceland – an old gathering place where community decisions were made. Thing – Gathering – An active holding together. What is gathered is what is afforded by the relational dynamics (the Gibsons, who developed the concept of Affordances, were close readers of the Phenomenological philosophical tradition which Heidegger plays an important role in.)
This is something active and experimental – it is only when relations stabilize that we equate a purpose with a thing. It becomes a “chair” or a “wing” or a “corkscrew” or a “shoe”.
Seeing things as active gatherings is a critical shift in how we both understand and creatively engage with things: what are they part of bringing together and in doing so what worlds? What practices are they opening up? What else can they do?
Vol 77 continues this inquiry.
How do you tell things apart when they have seemingly similar properties? It is by their style.
Approaches have distinct styles.
But, style gets a bad rap. It is considered superficial — and that’s supposedly a bad thing – but things can only be superficial if you assume that there really is depth. That deep down there's something more real and more essential. And this is itself something that is assumed in the classical model of reality – with its style to divide everything into the essential and the trivial. But — that’s just one approach – one style.
Style gets at something more broad and general than truth. As Whitehead loved to say “beauty is a wider and more fundamental notion than truth.”
Style is what distinguishes approaches. How do they move or operate? What can become beautiful? What shape do their actions take: what gestures do they make? How do they order the visible: what is their look?
Style is about gestures — primary gestures. Broad gestures that we make without even realizing we do them — like the automatic assumption that we need to dig for essences.
Gestures are habitual unconscious actions: given a certain situation — you just act in a certain manner. Ducking, throwing one's arms up, diving in to save someone drowning, or giving someone the finger, these are all habitual gestures.
For the rest of this article - navigate to Vol 80.
The study of creativity historically focuses on individuals, individuality and it treats creativity as an internal property that an individual could possess.
We are given by name the great inventors and creative individuals – that list of DaVinci, Einstein, Jobs, Picasso… – almost always a list of mainly men and mostly European – but even if we rethink the cannon of “creatives” in ways that are far more diverse – it is always about some individuals and their creative genius.
And by extension creativity is conceptualized as being about how each of us has some unique internal capacity for creativity. This is problematic view of us as beings on many fronts:
The list could go on, and we have written and explored extensively on how we are not this type of individual but rather a type of enactive being – a subject that is inherently intra-subjective, embodied, embedded, extended and enactive (this piece on the problem with mindsets is as good a place as any to begin).
Navigate to Vol 81 for the complete article.
Zombie SystemsThe power of systems is that they pull us back – even when we least expect it.
We know that how we think and act is not something that emerges solely from inside our heads. Our thinking and acting emerges from our bodies, strong cultural habits, institutionalized practices, and carefully constructed environments in emergent and non-linear ways.
This means that changing how we think is never as simple as mentally adopting new ideas. We are part of such a well-developed resilient ecosystem that the concept of “change your mind, and everything will follow” is what we far too often return to in regards to change. This approach is perhaps most clearly exemplified in the mindset movement (here are two good newsletters carefully critiquing the mindset approach: Volume 40, Volume 41). And, it is simply a new version of the god model.
But it is not just in these most obvious habits (“change your thinking and everything will follow”) or models (the mindset movement) that we find this resilient anti-creative ecosystem hanging on. There is a zombie quality to the god model and our long history of stasis plus refusal of change-in-kind – it will certainly not disappear quietly into the night.
Zombie WordsUncovering these anti-creative systems can be challenging – and it is here that looking at our everyday language can help us find how systems are implicitly continuing to work – even after we have shifted our general approach. If you look at many of the word choices we all make in regard to creativity, they involve some implicit form of returning to stasis:
All of these terms involve a turning to something pregiven, or are in relation to something fixed.
This excerpt was extracted from Vol 87
We have gone into the problems of an anthropocentric model of creativity before, but mainly from a pragmatic functional perspective (it neither works nor gives us access to anything like a useful understanding of ourselves or the logic of how novelty emerges).
But, ultimately, we would argue that one cannot separate values, practices, and environments at a generative level – we need to be concerned with developing alternative ethico-aesthetic ontologies.
In part, our practice and our values stem from a careful critical analysis of our model of creation and creativity. Marshall Sahlins sums up this model quite succinctly:
It is “a “heroic model of creation” involving the imposition of form upon inert matter by an autonomous subject, whether god or mortal, who commands the process by pre-established plan or purpose. This scheme of action is a combination of ingrained individualism and a naturalistic materialism. It rests upon two interdependent premise: the preponderance of an individualized intentional agent as the cause of the coming-to-be of beings and things, and the radical difference between the ontological status of the creator and that of what he produces.”
Let's make a list of the implicit concepts that underpin this approach to creativity:
For us, any alternative approach to creativity worthy of such a name has to come to terms with the totality of this list. And this brings us back to this newsletter’s topic: systems and dynamics.
As I am writing this, I am struck by a memory of hearing the poet Robin Blaser – remembering him quoting Ovid so long ago in the hot cramped space of the Kootenay School of Writing:
“Mela mela peto in media res
gathering honey in mid-stream – Ovid”
It struck me then deeply – yes – we are all gathering honey in mid-stream – everything flows. We are in a dynamic universe with emergent islands of semi-stable order. It is a question of dynamic systems…
And this phrase has stuck with me since that night over thirty years ago. Now, I wander into the bedroom, reaching high up on a dusty shelf to pull down The Holy Forest – his collected poems – I am looking for this phrase – but the book opens in its own way:
“Exody,
“Nothing distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal, or the order of the world; we are drifting together towards the noise and the black depths of the universe… Michel
Serres tells us,“
I keep looking for this phrase and poem from Ovid– but other fragments intervene as pages turn
“Thalia . but in a moment, the wind hits and turns
bound for “
enthralled. Later, much later – The Stars are out, I find it in a different book entirely – his collected essays. It is in a beautiful essay on Jack Spicer:
“et e medio flumine mella petat,” and let him seek honey in the middle of a river, turned by Jack in an early poem, which plays on the name of a young man, into “Mela, Mela peto/ In medio flumine”...
Blaser wrote this in 1975, and was not presenting it live as a new essay in the early 1990s. I could not have heard it in the early 1990s. What was I hearing? Where was this coming from?
– how time folds worlds… how dynamics blur and reform…
Somehow “Mela, Mela peto/ In medio flumine” flowed into Mela mela peto in media res:
gathering honey in the midst of things…
And so here we are, perhaps any radical alternative approach to creativity worthy of such a name acts – gathers honey – in relation to this vertiginous active gap between being midstream and mid-event.
Via Vol 104
An atomistic approach assumes that every property of the whole comes from and is dependent upon the essential properties of the most basic components that go on to make up the whole.
What does this look like in a systems context? While we are going to unpack this in more detail as we get into the thick of this newsletter. Here is a clear contemporary example (you need to zoom into the text):
This is a systems diagram that seeks to explain how we come to experience the world around us. First, it is important to notice that the structure of this diagram is atomistic – the whole breaks apart into ever more fundamental constituent components. If we carefully follow these down the diagram reading from the top to get to the base level – what do we find? “Values…that underpin how the system is …organized…”
If systems are dynamic, non-linear, relational, and emergent – how can it be that we can trace down this diagram a linear path to the base level where we find our atomistic source?
For us, this is an exemplary case of how Iceberg models, pyramid models, onion models, and substance models all claim to be systems oriented approaches while still being fundamentally atomistic and radically antithetical to a processual systems ontology.
Vol 105 continues this inquiry.
Ferran Adria, one of the founders of the groundbreaking highly innovative restaurant El Bulli and a key participant in the revolutionary molecular gastronomy approach to cooking, had a wonderful simple definition of creativity: “No copying.”
Basically: understand what has been done – and don’t repeat it – don’t repeat it at any level.
It is a negative definition – it says nothing about what to do or what is possible – only what not to do. It recognizes that if something is radically new one cannot know anything about it in advance – so how could one say anything positive about it? Or claim to know exactly what to do?
It is a definition that uses knowing to refuse what is known. This negativity – this path of the negative for a radically new future – is powerfully generous and demanding rigorous. It asks of us to comport ourselves in such a way that will allow for the genuinely new to come into being. We are asked to style our lives and practices in a manner that makes the new as the new and non-pre-existent a potential. In this the via negativa of creativity is more than just a “belief” that the new is possible.
Vol 108 continues this inquiry.
We face, in this deliberate experimental stance for the sake of newness, a nothingness – what we might mistakenly conceive of as the “void”. But this is not the void of pure emptiness – in the binary sense of “the opposite of fullness”. Rather the act of actively and knowingly refusing or “blocking” the known – opens our practices up to the fullness of a creative universe beyond and within the given. A radical generative otherness that has always been there.
This negativity – this “nothingness” is perhaps closer to the Japanese term “ma” – which can be translated as nothingness – but a more careful translation would render it as a generative emptiness or gap or pause. And it is this “ma” – this “nothingness” of the generative pause that Ferran, or John Cage and his conceptualization silence as anything but silent, and our practice of experimental blocking engage. The comportment to radically pause – to leave space “empty” is to allow it – and not us, to be generative of something new– an “emptyfullness” becoming…
It is also the crows using an intersection, traffic lights and cars as a nut cracking system. It is the radical potentiality of the given when we pause, refuse, and pivot from what something “is” and ask via engaged experimental practices “what else can it do?” –” in what context could this afford something entirely different?”
Here “not knowing” is a very demanding and highly engaged stance – or comportment – that has many important aesthetic, and ethical dimensions (while, it is beyond the scope of this newsletter, these practices of a via negativa – a way of the negative are far closer in resonance to Buddhist traditions than Christian traditions).
Vol 108 continues this inquiry.
Well, that’s our fourteen vignettes and wormholes. Developing practices of active not-knowing are wonderful things to explore in the winter (or summer) holidays. Time finds its own processes as it bends, folds and stretches with our meaners, putterings, and winter walks. Be well, swim with not knowing, and have a wonderful week!
Keep Your difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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