Tag: Creativity

Posted on

msb ~038 “Let’s hear it for the vague blur!”

“Let’s hear it for the vague blur!”

Philip K Dick: no vague blur

I consumed Philip Dick’s novels by the handful as a teenager: just part of my science fiction diet. Many of his stories sit well with that other fare, but the shock of A Scanner Darkly, VALIS and The Divine Invasion comes into sharper relief away from the glare of rayguns, hyperdrives and aliens. Dick wrote his experience, not ‘fiction’. In BBC Radio’s Great Lives, actor Michael Sheen discusses Dick’s influence on him: “the moment where the central character begins to discover that maybe the reality he’s taking for granted is not what’s going on, maybe there’s something else going on behind it. That is a very frightening moment.” Continue reading “msb ~038 “Let’s hear it for the vague blur!””

Posted on

msb ~035 Ecosystems and Boundary Objects

Ecosystems and Boundary Objects

Boundary Objects

I wasn’t able to attend GroundWork Gallery’s Restore? Conserve? Rewild? but enjoyed ClimateCultures’ review. This exploration of different responses to environmental predicaments included contentious Ecosystem Services approaches. Although it’s common ground that ‘nature’ provides benefits to ‘society’, which government, business and populations undervalue and undermine, controversy arises when we’re asked to translate these into a common value: cash. Continue reading “msb ~035 Ecosystems and Boundary Objects”

Posted on

msb ~033 Room for comedy?

Room for comedy?

‘Major Ramifications Ahead’

Googling ‘comedy in climate change’ produced just one result: this 2015 piece from Australian comedian Andrew Denton. ‘Comedy about climate change’ produced over 21,000 – still low, but we already knew there’s not a whole lot of laughs in the reality. But if you get one hit for a search you’d really better read it, and I enjoyed Denton’s article. Continue reading “msb ~033 Room for comedy?”

Posted on

msb ~030 The call to paradox

The call to paradox

Looking home

Though social media’s pitfalls are well known, one of the unexpected pleasures of Twitter is to just have people drop in out of the blue. The latest person to follow @ClimateCultures is independent filmmaker Ross Harrison. When I spotted his article on Medium, I knew I could make today’s mini-post even shorter than usual: “What he said: paradox.” Continue reading “msb ~030 The call to paradox”

Posted on

msb ~027 Breakthroughs from left field

Breakthroughs from left field

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Wonderful to see Jocelyn Bell Burnell rewarded now; her ground-breaking discovery should have brought her 1974’s Nobel Prize. Her male collaborators received that, though she did the hard work on pulsars: supercondensed end-of-life stars that emit intense radio beams. Radically expanding our understanding of the cosmos, such breakthroughs also helped fuel my own interest; ten years later, I embarked on my astrophysics degree). Now she’s been awarded the Breakthrough Prize for her landmark work. Continue reading “msb ~027 Breakthroughs from left field”

Posted on

msb ~026 Negative Capability

Negative Capability

John Keats life mask, by Benjamin Robert Haydon (1816)

In Why we believe in magic, novelist Philip Pullman discusses Negative Capability, poet John Keats’ famous recipe for creative approaches to “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” For Pullman, “everything that touches human life is surrounded by a penumbra of associations, memories, echoes and correspondences that extend far into the unknown.” This ‘shadow world’ of human life is where Negative Capability is at play. Continue reading “msb ~026 Negative Capability”

Posted on

msb ~025 Magical thinking

Magical thinking

Image: Pixabay

An article for Uneven Earth provides timely illustration of yesterday’s reflection on imagination (rather than make-believe) being “a means of breaking out of the ‘dull round’ of the ‘ratio’ of abstract reason”. In Pulling the magic lever, Rut Elliot Blomqvist critiques techno-utopianism. “Ideas about the importance of the imagination in an age of political and ecological crisis are popping up everywhere: in the arts, in activism and other forms of politics, and in a wide range of academic disciplines and fields,” she writes. But without a critical view of these imaginaries, “we risk being trapped in the same old stories even as we see ourselves as thinking outside the old story box.” Continue reading “msb ~025 Magical thinking”

Posted on

msb ~024 Imagination, the key ingredient

Imagination, the key ingredient

Glad Day, or the Dance of Albion William Blake, 1794

In today’s post on the Finding Blake website I manage, our latest contributing author Kevin Fischer discusses the balance between reason, experience and imagination. Fischer explains that William Blake, radical artist and thinker of the early industrial age, “saw imagination as something profoundly different from fantasy. Contrary to common conception, this imagination is not about make-believe, the creation of the fantastical, nor is it wish-fulfilment. Blake regarded it as an essential part of life, a means of breaking out of the ‘dull round’ of the ‘ratio’ of abstract reason, of the already known, and through to that which is other than and beyond ourselves. It is a means of putting us more in touch with the world, acting as a bridge between the experiencing individual and that which is experienced.” Continue reading “msb ~024 Imagination, the key ingredient”

Posted on

msb ~023 Technofossils, fuel for thought

Technofossils — fuel for thought

Technofossil, Jared Farmer

In his contribution to the fascinating Future Remains, historian and geohumanist Jared Farmer discusses ‘technofossils’. Our technological remains last far longer than our personal relationships with these relentlessly multiplying gadgets, structures and infrastructures. Will probably outlast current civilisations. Possibly our species. And technofossils will not be just our artificial constructions; our (re)engineering of the biosphere is also a technological feat that leaves its mark for future archaeology. So, while long-forgotten subway tunnels — “worm tracks of mammoth size — might become sedimentary molds for locomotion traces”, just as telling a marker will be the distinctive layer of fossilised bones of trillions of broiler chickens, a “proxy for the ‘Great Acceleration’ of postwar global change.” Continue reading “msb ~023 Technofossils, fuel for thought”

Proudly powered by WordPress