#combinatorial creativity

Experimenting with mixed species flooring (beech and jatoba)… But why?!?!

Mixed Species Flooring Experiment: character beech and jatoba, a.k.a. Brazilian cherry (Photo: R.P. Murphy) Repurposing Rosslyn’s icehouse is an ambitious project within a diminutive space. On the one hand, it’s an historic rehabilitation of an obsolescent utility building into a home office/studio with lifestyle perks like a hot tub and firepit. It’s also an experiment in adaptive reuse:…

If you can bear with me for a moment or three I’ll get to that. But first, by way of preamble, I’d like you to flashback with me…

Since its first wobbly steps this esoteric adventure has offered a sort of “midlife inside out” perspective. A lyric look under the hood of middle age. For newcomers, the early vision was an introspective look at the transition from my 30s to my 40s. Too early for a midlife crisis, you say? Perhaps.

So I decided that it wasn’t a midlife crisis. But it was a time of anxiety and reckoning and resolutions. It was a time that prompted me to really assess what was important to me, and why it was important to me. It was a time to realign my lifestyle with my values and ambitions. It was a time to accept that I needed to change in some important ways. And it was a time that didn’t come and go as quickly as I had anticipated. As quickly as I had hoped.

I started documenting my process at 40×41.com during my 39th year, chronicling the ominous advance of my 40th birthday. A defined the end game as 41. Get this midlife meditative makeover done!

But my 41st came and went without delivering the clarity and closure I longed for. So I kept at it.

I revised and adapted some of my visual and verbal poems from the blog into a book called 40×41: Midlife Crisis Postponed. It was a surprisingly rewarding experience. Emancipating even. As if publicly owning the awkward but increasingly meaningful transition gave me freedom and courage

by virtue of shrugging off the fact that I wasn’t quite myself;

by acknowledging challenges and disapointments and setbacks and a few somewhat shallow aspirations;

by proclaiming lofty hopes without hedging against the risk of failure;

by conceding that middle age — however you define it and even absent the proverbial midlife crisis — introduces a parade of challenges psychologically akin the adolescence;

and by deciding that I would do everything in my power to embrace midlife as an opportunity for creativity and growth and revitalization and healthiness and happiness.

I’ve revisited many of those poems on this blog since publishing 40×41: Midlife Crisis Postponed, and many of the images accompany (or sometimes illustrate) earlier posts. In the gallery below you can see the the black-and-white images that are included in the book but that did not previously appear on the blog, at least not in their final ink-on-paper format that you can witness below.

Gallery: Spine Splitting Spreads

Alright, you’ve made it to the good stuff, thirteen lucky solecistic spine splitting spreads. These are black and white photographs taken from the book, randomly cropped snapshots that take you into the book a bit like a voyeur sneaking a peak over a shoulder. The result is a sort of digital collage. A sort of combinatorial creativity that exists somewhere between documentary and collage. Maybe?

“Pickup Lines” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“Canine Time” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“Rupture Relief” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“Design Shoal” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“Like a Lichen” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“Phototoxic” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“Handmade Healing” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“Ink and Trinket” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“El Miedo Paraliza” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“Tele Time” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“Recycling” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“Walkabout” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

“Fossil” by Geo Davis (Featured in Midlife Crisis Postponed)

Thanks for taking a look. Images of images. Hope you get the chance to hold the book in your hand. Old school. Black ink. White paper. A spine that splits if you open it wide enough to observe the full spread. Analog.

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Strata said:

"The future belongs to those who understand how to collect and use their information successfully."

Marcel Proust said:

"But genius, and great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them."

Coincidence said Louis Pasteur has a tendency to occur only to the mind that is prepared to notice it. Combinatorial creativity as espoused by Maria Popova, who said:

"Curation is a form of pattern recognition – pieces of information or insight which over time amount to an implicit point of view."

What she does is about an "intellectual hunger for that sort of cross-disciplinary curiosity and self-directed learning." Susan Sontag wrote:

Gesamtkunstwerk: a look at Hans Ulrich Obrist and protean creation... #creativity

Gesamtkunstwerk? Gesundheit!

I’ll pass on poetry for this afternoon’s look at Gesamtkunstwerk. It’s tough enough to splutter off the tongue, much less massage into melody.

Ever interested in matters curatorial, I recently discovered Swiss art curator, critic and historian Hans-Ulrich Obrist who is currently working as the Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London. My…

The Daily Compost http://wp.me/p5FM1y-9s #40x41 #amwriting #poetry

I’ve called it munge, the Daily Munge, for two decades, a term I pilfered from an article about archeology and layers of detritus compressed, transformed over time, long-long time. But the article vanished. Or maybe my memory invented it for want of an apt metaphor. Munge. Unverified. And while it’s served me well enough over the handwriting, typing, and dictating days since, I have begun to…

Teabag Truism (from dumpster diving to mainstream) #40x41

Dumpster diving for new goals and a clean slate.

It’s paramount to create from decay and erosion.

From margins to mainstream, mind over mattress.

Incentives are paramount. Stay tuned…

Combinatorial Creativity (with Maria Popova)

Maria Popova is the editor and creator of interestingness at Brain Pickings.

Debbie Millman is the inquisitive mind and voice behind Design Matters.

Maria Popova explores the idea of “combinatorial creativity” on her blog in myriad contexts and ways. One of her head-on looks at the idea is highlighted here:

“[Combinatorial…