- Last 7 days
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www.jonalexander.net www.jonalexander.net
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for - book - Citizens - foreward - Brian Eno
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The new story becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward.
for - stories - salience of adjacency- imagination - stories - futures - Ernest Becker - self - timebinding - symbolosphere - quote - Brian Eno - book - Citizens - Jon Alexander - Arian Conrad - citizens - not consumers
quote - Brian Eno
- The stories we tell
- shape how we see ourselves, and
- how we see the world.
- When we see the world differently,
- we begin behaving differently,
- living into the new story.
- When Martin Luther King said
- “I have a dream,”
- he was
- inviting others to dream it with him,
- inviting them to step into his story.
- Once a story becomes shared in that way,
- current reality gets measured against it and
- then modified towards it.
- As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world,
- we begin behaving differently,
- as though that world is starting to come into existence,
- as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there.
- we begin behaving differently,
- The new story becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward.
- By this process it starts to come true.
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Imagining the future makes it more possible.
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Sometimes this work of imagination and storytelling is about the future,
- as in Dr King’s story.
- Art can play this role:
- what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life.
- We become our new selves first in simulacrum, through
- style and
- fashion and
- art,
- our deliberate immersions in virtual worlds.
- Through them we sense what it would like
- to be another kind of person
- with other kinds of values.
- We rehearse new
- feelings and
- sensitivities.
- We imagine other ways of thinking about
- our world and
- its future.
- We use art to model new worlds so that
- we can see how we might feel about them.
comment - This is a really powerful writing from Brian Eno. - Storytelling is an exercise in - the imagination of alternative possibilities to our own reality. - Stories can become both - inspirational and - aspirational - They can paint a picture in our mind of - a fantasy - a world that does not yet exist - but that nonexistent but desirable reality can then serve as the goal for which we strive - Mapping Futures interventions is then, essentially an act of desirable, inspirational make believe, and mustering the resources to turn the fantasy into reality - Progress relies on design, the imagination of unrealities in vivid detail, - in order to turn them into realities - In doing this, it is not an act carried out in ivory towers, - but in the everyday life of every one of us - We are all engaged in desirable fantasies daily whenever - we decide what meal we will prepare or restaurant to dine at - which clothing outfit to wear today - what we plan to write or say next to another - Every decision we make as a choice between different future alternatives - When it comes to planning major future decisions, - we need to have as much detail as possible of the imagined future - The Town Anywhere project conceived by Ruth Ben-Tovin and employed in the Transition Town movement for many years fis an example of such a simulacrum - https://hyp.is/mqeCtAE_Ee-Yxleqg7GFww/docdrop.org/video/cRvhY4S94ic/ - It provides an artistic space for citizens to imagine a desirable fantasy that can be embodied, enacted and deeply remembered through the participatory and collective citizen act of creating a proxy of their future local habitat in the present, and exploring and momentarily inhabiting their simulacrum. - In this way, this compelling experience is like a branding iron, searing the memory deep into our memory, where it can help guide our actions to realize the desirable fantasy. - Couched within a citizen's FREEligion and FREElosophy we generically call Deep Humanity, an open source, open knowledge approach to universal raison d'etre for what it deeply means to be human, Town Anywhere can scale to fire up the imagination of citizens to co-create our collective future. - Town Anywhere, along with other citizen initiatives which I belong to that advocate healthy citizen power such as SONEC, Stop Reset Go, Deep Humanity, the Indyweb, Living Cities Earth and many, many others can emerge a human murmuration to drive the transition - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fleemor.medium.com%2Fmesmerized-by-the-murmuration-on-human-potential-f4c9ffe06ffa&group=world - As Jon Alexander and Arian Conrad write here, we have to find the narratives that matter to us, where WE is the citizens. Other thinkers like Jose Ramos write along the same line: - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-planet.medium.com%2Fdiscovering-the-narratives-that-matter-to-us-327958a2daec&group=world
- The stories we tell
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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for - Town Anywhere - Transition Town - town anywhere - Ruth Ben-Tovim - Deep Humanity BEing journey - TPF - Town Anywhere BEing journey - LCE - Town Anywhere - adjacency - rapid whole system change - futures - town anywhere - SONEC
summary - Town Anywhere provides a simulacrum, as Brian Eno talks about in the forward to Jon Anderson & Arian Conrad's book Citizens - https://hyp.is/m_HuigEvEe--6UdGv2HVDA/www.jonalexander.net/the-foreword
Summary - This is a
Tags
- Town Anywhere
- Ruth Ben-Tovim
- TPF - Town Anywhere
- LCE - Town Anywhere
- adjacency - rapid whole system change - futures - town anywhere - Deep Humanity - BEing journey - TPF - SONEC - neighborocracy
- Deep Humanity - BEing journey
- Brian Eno - book - Citizens - foreward
- Transition Town - town anywhere
Annotators
URL
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- Jan 2023
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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Storytelling Will Save the EarthEmotional resonance, not cold statistics, will bring home the scale of the climate crisis—and the need for action.
!- Title : Storytelling Will Save the Earth Emotional resonance, not cold statistics, will bring home the scale of the climate crisis—and the need for action. - See related story: Brian Eno – "We need the creative industry to help inspire climate action" https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.imperial.ac.uk%2Fnews%2F241832%2Fbrian-eno-we-need-creative-industry%2F&group=world
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www.imperial.ac.uk www.imperial.ac.uk
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Brian Eno – "We need the creative industry to help inspire climate action"
!- Title : Brian Eno – "We need the creative industry to help inspire climate action"
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- Dec 2022
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adjacentpossible.substack.com adjacentpossible.substack.com
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There’s an old joke about the Velvet Underground that I think is attributed to Brian Eno: only thirty thousand people bought the first VU album, but everyone who bought it went on to form their own band.
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/07/ambient-genius
It's not stated in the piece, but there's a hint of Brian Eno as a lone genius within music, but the piece explicitly explores his own creative practices and collaborations which go toward creating his creativity and genius by way of his path through music.
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“I have a trick that I used in my studio, because I have these twenty-eight-hundred-odd pieces of unreleased music, and I have them all stored in iTunes,” Eno said during his talk at Red Bull. “When I’m cleaning up the studio, which I do quite often—and it’s quite a big studio—I just have it playing on random shuffle. And so, suddenly, I hear something and often I can’t even remember doing it. Or I have a very vague memory of it, because a lot of these pieces, they’re just something I started at half past eight one evening and then finished at quarter past ten, gave some kind of funny name to that doesn’t describe anything, and then completely forgot about, and then, years later, on the random shuffle, this thing comes up, and I think, Wow, I didn’t hear it when I was doing it. And I think that often happens—we don’t actually hear what we’re doing. . . . I often find pieces and I think, This is genius. Which me did that? Who was the me that did that?”
Example of Brian Eno using ITunes as a digital music zettelkasten. He's got 2,800 pieces of unreleased music which he plays on random shuffle for serendipity, memory, and potential creativity. The experience seems to be a musical one which parallels Luhmann's ideas of serendipity and discovery with the ghost in the machine or the conversation partner he describes in his zettelkasten practice.
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In the liner notes of “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” (1978), Eno wrote, “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
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In 1978, he started to use the term “ambient music”: the concept stretched back to describe “Discreet Music” and the work of earlier composers, like Satie, who coined the term “furniture music,” for compositions that would be more functional than expressive.
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Eno’s strategies don’t always appeal to the musicians he works with. In Geeta Dayal’s book about the album, also titled “Another Green World,” the bassist Percy Jones recalls, “There was this one time when he gave everybody a piece of paper, and he said write down 1 to 100 or something like that, and then he gave us notes to play against specific numbers.” Phil Collins, who played drums on the album, reacted to these instructions by throwing beer cans across the room. “I think we got up to about 24 and then we gave up and did something else,” Jones said.
Example of Brian Eno using combinatorial creativity using cards to generate music.
This sounds similar to a process used by Austin Kleon which I've noted before.
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Eno was moving toward a music that changed your perception of the space around you. Geography could be as memorable as melody.
ways to link this to oral traditions in music and memory?!?
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Both albums are perverse, slightly agitated, and playful, with many of the lyrics generated randomly and cut together from various sources (mostly Eno’s own notebooks).
Brian Eno had a notebook-based practice of some sort.
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“I thought that art schools should just be places where you thought about creative behavior, whereas they thought an art school was a place where you made painters,” he said later.
We should do better at teaching and training creative behavior in schools. We say that we encourage exploration but somehow do it in all the wrong ways such we discourage it wholly.
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At Ipswich, he studied under the unorthodox artist and theorist Roy Ascott, who taught him the power of what Ascott called “process not product.”
"process not product"
Zettelkasten-based note taking methods, and particularly that followed by Luhmann, seem to focus on process and not product.
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Behind Eno stand John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Erik Satie, but those guys didn’t make pop records.
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As he told Keyboard, in 1981, “Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on—including your own incompetence.”
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Eno is widely known for coining the term “ambient music,”
Tags
- lone genius myth
- random walks
- research methods
- Roy Ascott
- zettelkasten
- memory
- zettelkasten for music
- genius
- ambient music
- music
- process
- art school
- Brian Eno
- Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten
- education
- zettelkasten for art
- avant-garde
- geography
- 1978
- furniture music
- surprise
- ghost in the machine
- creativity
- definitions
- Percy Jones
- experimental art
- quotes
- creative behavior
- iTunes
- random card generator
- generative art
- generative music
- memory and geography
- notebooks
- writing process
- Geeta Dayal
- process not product
- Marcel Duchamp
- read
- art
- wordnik
- constraints
- combinatorial creativity
- orality and memory
- neologisms
- examples
- Another Green World
- note taking
- John Cage
- incompetence
- conversation partners
- Phil Collins
- Erik Satie
- serendipity
- hw-ambient music
Annotators
URL
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- Nov 2022
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stoney.sb.org stoney.sb.org
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http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
Digital version similar to WTFEngine.
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www.oblique-strategies.com www.oblique-strategies.com
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https://www.oblique-strategies.com/
A web-based version similar to WTFEngine.
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www.enoshop.co.uk www.enoshop.co.uk
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRc7MUybCsE
Interview with BBC in which Brian Eno discusses the origin of his Oblique Strategies with Peter Schmidt.
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Changing the order in which you do things. —Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies
This sounds like the sort of shift Walter Murch made in his sound editing by doing his first cut completely without sound. If you can't tell the story visually without sound the whole thing will fall apart. But you can use the sound, music, etc. to supplement, gild, and improve a picture.
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www.openculture.com www.openculture.com
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
So much to unpack here.
Similar to experiments I've seen by Henry James Korn (esp. The Pontoon Manifesto), John Irwin, etc.
Similarities to means of forcing Llullan combinatorial creativity, but in alternate form.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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In late 2006, Eno released 77 Million Paintings, a program of generative video and music specifically for home computers. As its title suggests, there is a possible combination of 77 million paintings where the viewer will see different combinations of video slides prepared by Eno each time the program is launched. Likewise, the accompanying music is generated by the program so that it's almost certain the listener will never hear the same arrangement twice.
Brian Eno's experiments in generative music mirror some of the ideas of generative and experimental fiction which had been in the zeitgeist and developing for a while.
Certainly the fictional ideas were influential to the zeitgeist here, but the technology for doing these sorts of things in the musical realm lagged the ability to do them in the word realm.
We're just starting to see some of these sorts of experimental things in the film space and with artificial intelligence they're becoming much easier to do in all of these media spaces.
In some of the film spaces, they exist, but may tend to be short in nature, in part given the technology and processing power required.
see also: Deepfake TikTok of Keanu Reeves which I've recently run across (algorithmically) on Instagram: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/unreal-keanu-reeves-ai-deepfake/
Had anyone been working on generative art? Marcel Duchamp, et al? Some children's toys can mechanically create generative art which can be subtly modified by the children using axes of color, form, etc. Etch-a-sketch, kaleidoscopes, doodling robots (eg: https://www.amazon.com/4M-Doodling-Robot-Packaging-Vary/dp/B002EWWW9O).
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At one point, Eno had to earn money as paste-up assistant for the advertisement section of a local paper for three months. He quit and became an electronics dealer by buying old speakers and making new cabinets for them before selling them to friends.[12]
One moment this article describes Eno as eschewing conventional jobs, but then describes him going back to two different ones. The second one as an electronics dealer is at least tangential to his music/sound career and may have helped give him some tools for operating in the space which he wanted to be.
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Whilst at school, Eno used a tape recorder as a musical instrument[17]
I personally did something akin to this when I was a child sometime between 9 and 12 with our family tape recorder. Did I do so because it was simply a creativity tool, which is generally how I used it, in my environment, or had Brian Eno and others' influences seeped into the culture encouraging this? Where does zeitgeist start and stop?
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In the mid-1970s, he co-developed Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards featuring aphorisms intended to spur creative thinking.
Tags
- generative music
- zeitgeist
- TikTok
- tape recorders
- deepfakes
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- Brian Eno
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- generative media
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- combinatorial creativity
- day jobs
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- thought nucleation
- Oblique Strategies
- conventional jobs
- tools for thought
- kaleidoscopes
- aphorisms
- generative film
- generative fiction
- experimental fiction
- catalysts
- generative art
Annotators
URL
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A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the oldart-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out ofnowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. Ibecame (and still am) more and more convinced that the importantchanges in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. Icall this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius. This word isnow starting to gain some currency - the philosopher James Ogilvy uses itin his most recent book.
Book Source: Eno, Brian. A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary. 1st edition. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Section: A Letter to Dave Stewart, p 354
Cross reference quote and further usage/refinement of the word from popular blog post by Kevin Kelly Scenius, or Communal Genius: https://hypothes.is/a/SgYqomnBEe2_Yaf4i1JnCg
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Annotators
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Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”
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theinformed.life theinformed.life
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I think that there’s also the kind of what Brian Eno called scenius, that there are times like Xerox PARC in the 1970s or Florence during the Renaissance when there are just a number of people in contact with each other, and their ideas spark each other. And again, it’s a matter of building on what has been done before.
Definition of scenius, a portmanteau of scene and genius, meaning roughly the output of combining the ideas of zeitgeist with combinatorial creativity to create sustained output which might be considered genius level work.
Generally it gives more credit to the people and time than is generally seen in other instances which are often frame as lone genius.
My definition may be more complex and nuanced than that of the version coined (?) by Brian Eno.
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- Oct 2022
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stevenberlinjohnson.com stevenberlinjohnson.com
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The Engelbart story is also a wonderful case study in collaborative innovation, and the strange tendency of certain places at certain moments in time to produce a disproportionate number of new ideas:A few decades ago, the musician and artist Brian Eno coined a term to describe the collective IQ of creative hubs at their peak: Florence in the 1500s, Harlem in the 1920s. He called that group creativity “scenius”.
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- Jul 2021
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austinkleon.com austinkleon.com
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I read that Brian Eno does something similar: he makes a tremendous amount of music, and then hits shuffle when he’s answering email, etc., and whatever catches his ear, he investigates.
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