Emerging Futures - Volume 128: Creativity: Building and Working the Field

Good morning persons of the-more-than-actual,

The moon is almost full, the night is cold, and today dawn is coming too quickly. Looking up at the “snow moon," it is noticeably small. This is the moon at its furthest from the earth – a “micro-moon”. Walking the beach at high tide, you will see the pull of gravity less. The dynamic pulsing of more and less, closer and further, the world of dynamic becomings is visible in the morning darkness of the moon above.

Yesterday we were out in western New Jersey walking farm fields still deep in snow. The ground rock-hard. A seemingly desolate landscape with only the tracks of deer, coyotes, and the backhoe in the snow gives one a sense of the ongoing life of the land. We were there to visit with an old friend, Ruth Perretti, who is part of a movement to revive a local regenerative grain economy. Bending down and digging through the deep snow to the frozen solid ground, she uncovered the vibrant, dark green, seemingly delicate shoots of winter wheat already growing. It was quite a revelation to know that the vast fields of deep snow we were crossing held such active life.

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Jason and I are just surfacing from a wonderful (and very intense week) working with our great Austrian colleagues on a green innovation/changemaking workshop. Meeting up with Ruthie was part of this. 

This workshop format is one we deeply love. We can immerse participants in a series of exercises where, in real time, they develop co-emergent networks that give rise to emergent processes and genuinely novel practices. These are carefully choreographed long days where we consider the full ecosystemic flow, embodied dynamics, and environments of the day to give rise to the conditions that would afford more novel outcomes. In the week, there are only two events that are lectures; otherwise, all the activity emerges from and evolves with the dynamics of the collective activities. 

We spent about one third of our time in NYC meeting and visiting projects and people concerned with novel urban ecosystems. Additionally, while in the city, we are deliberately entangling with immersive art projects that radically challenge our lived experience of meaning. The second third is in a workshop type setting, but even this is something we are hacking. In the evening, the room becomes reinvented by everyone as a provisional kitchen, and dinner is collectively improvised. And the final third is out in the rolling hills of northwestern New Jersey, with hills, rivers, fields, and new ecosystem builders. 

While this hands-on work may, on the surface, seem quite distant from what we are discussing at a more theoretical level in this weekly newsletter, for us it is all of the same cloth. This winter, our newsletter has been exploring how to understand, visualize, and engage with the total space in which the new emerges. And in our workshops, we collectively actualize this logic. 

Perhaps the most important point that the two connect is on how we can understand and engage in the full process of creative making. The issue and profound difficulty is that we fixate on certain moments in the distributed ecological process and consider them to be of far greater importance, and in doing so, we don’t simply distort our understanding of the process, but we come to work in and of an illusion. This is the illusion that we and our ideas are at the beginning and core of the process. 

But that illusion is not the only one. Once it is recognized that this is not how innovation works—innovation is far more ecosystemic, dynamic, non-linear and emergent—we are still too fixated on the things that we can see and physically grasp. 

Returning to our egg cooking example from last week. It is not that hard to recognize that the self + the immediate environment of the kitchen + the larger ecosystem of history, habits, and technologies all participate in the cooking of a specific hard boiled egg:

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But, this focus on the tangible and the actual means that we miss the most critical aspect of what emerges in the process: a semi-stable virtual field of possibilities:

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The boiled egg that emerges from the process is simply the instantiation, or actualization, of one space of possibility that the relational dynamics of the emergent processes give rise to. This is not all that was produced when the ecosystem of practices, embodied skills, tools, and dynamic matters came together. This cooking practice + environment (assemblage) did not lead directly to an outcome; rather, they gave rise to a virtual field of possibilities. And to miss this is to close down and erase the full creative space of possibility, multiplicity, qualitative variation, and virtual difference—reducing everything to the tangible outcome. 

We move too fast when we succumb to the illusion of the tangible. Creativity is both virtual (abstract) and tangible:

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The virtual field exists as the emergent propensity of the assemblage. And we need to draw it out via experimentation—what else is possible? As Spinoza always said, “We do not know what a body is capable of.” What else can this assemblage do? – And then, what else can it do? The virtual diagram of a boiled egg:

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… is but one dynamically stable field of possibilities. Now, what happens when you crack the egg and then subject it to all the same processes of boiling it in a pot? Now a new field of related but qualitatively different virtual possibilities (propensities) emerge: a field of egg poaching logics.

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The virtual fields of possibility multiply. These are not in our heads, nor are they in the egg. Nor are they “in” anything. Nor can anyone claim to have invented any of this. But these fields of possibility are very much real. These fields are the emergent outcome—really, the achievement of the relational dynamics of the assemblage (ecosystem). 

We do play a critical role in all of this. As we actively and experimentally attune ourselves to the dynamics of the assemblage, we can explore the virtual space of possibilities that go beyond what we know and can conceptualize. We are not just participating in the making of one singular physical outcome—the cooked egg in this case—but a dynamic, semi-stable emergent virtual field of possibilities. 

This week in our workshop, all our activities, and experiments looped through the processes of developing and stabilizing experimental assemblages such that we could explore and eventually visualize novel virtual fields of co-emergent possibilities. 

And here's the thing: for most of us, we know how to make assemblages, we know how to collaborate with systems and processes, and we understand relational dynamics and emergence, but the sensing of virtual fields of possibility as something real – that is a real challenge. 

At many moments during the week, there were real groans when we told everyone that we would be doing one more experiment and making yet another field diagram. But this process, so unfamiliar to everyone, became a critical takeaway. 

In the classical Daoist literature on military strategy, they talk about how a war is won before it starts. This does not mean that a great general can predict the future or guarantee success. Rather, the goal is to set up the conditions (the assemblage) in advance, such that the field of virtual possibilities contains multiple distinct forms of success, and then coax the situation in real time towards and through these zones in the virtual field towards an actual victory. 

Now this is not a discreet one-time activity; systems are far too dynamic for this. One is responding in real time to changing actual conditions and changing virtual conditions. The field of virtual possibilities is dynamically changing as the actual conditions change.

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And this real time ability to move across the virtual and actual rapidly and responsively to co-emerge with novelty in ongoing ways was the goal of this week. 

Today, we will be picking up, sorting, and cleaning up the hundreds of provisional field diagrams with great fondness and memories of the joy shared by all. 

Till next week,

Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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