#ciricaite

MARK COCKRAM LES BICKNELL RICCARDO BOGLIONE MICHELLE BROWN PAUL COLDWELL ALI VAN DAM JANINE HARRINGTON SUSAN JOHANKNECHT SHARON KIVLAND PAULINE LAMONT-FISHER RICHARD PRICE STEVIE RONNIE ERIN K. SCHMIDT ABI THOMAS

Thank you! We are finalising the design.

http://collectiveinvestigations.tumblr.com/book

"If you describe something, it's dead, it's over. I think what we try to do is to do things that can't really be described, that can't be captured" (John Baldessari in Again the Metaphor Problem)

We had an uber-productive day, large part of which was spent working with texts: creating texts, moving texts, editing texts. Among them, was (still is) the one where we had to produce a description of the project for another publication. How easy and how difficult it can  be! We know the concept and we know the ingredient parts of the process. We know the composite parts of the book and the exhibition. We have the workshops planned. We have the readings and the listenings and other sources of research. And then we have the creative process, which often starts in a very orderly manner, before it diverts thorough the unpredictable into the inexplicable. Uh, the creative process...

So how do you write about your own work without reducing it to a set of semantic primitives? How do you translate into words a portrait (of the book) into 300 words maintaining intended fluidity of meaning? Can you?

___________ “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.” Groucho Marx. ____________ The last contributions for the book are dropping in. There is a range of views. Moreover - about 77% of people who agreed to write in are somewhere between superb and outstanding at “thinking outside the box”.   I am astounded by the span of thoughts and vocabulary used. Q1: Is it because those people are thinking their thoughts and not mine that they seem  so much more creatively insightful?

The ability to think in novel and useful ways has been the defining feature of humans. We invented the wheel, which is nothing like any of the mutations and instruments found in nature. We invented the codex so perfect, it had not changed it's fundamental structure for over a thousand years. We invented the electricity and the lightbulb. And then we coined the term "lightbulb moment".

This week's Horizon (still available on BBC iPlayer)) was about the brain and the insight and how all of that works: how without thinking logically and methodically we come up with extraordinary ideas. Insight moments, as it turns out, are fleeting and elusive - no wonder I struggle to capture them! They do not come from nowhere, but they are a result of a chain of events and they require awareness bordering obsession. Each problem has an insight bubbling in the background. It is the right hemisphere, apparently, that is capable to making far reaching connections. Q2. Do people, who are blind in the right eye - so all input information is first streamed to their right hemisphere - make more insightful associations?

In two weeks I am going to the lecture by Professor Vincent Walsh about lightbulb moments. I expect it will be currious and illuminating. ←This sounds like one of those James Bond puns. Very uncreative of me.

 {Egidija}