Summer

There are linen sheets on my bed, it is Summer! more photos from trafal

It is Summer. This blog is taking a break.

What does that mean?

I love to write. I also love to write this very personal blog. It is that I just do not find myself in the personal-blogging space very often these days. It could also be that I am bored with writing about myself in the first person singular here. The exercise has however been good and thoroughly enjoyable. Between writing a novel, theoretical man, a few odd short stories, academic work, and the occasional policy bit here and there… to mention a few of the ongoing projects… I will be dropping a few balls. Catch one if you can!

Occasionally I need a break from weightier matters and go for more visual and fewer words on trafal.

I am looking forward to reboot, a community event for practical visionaries and a chance to talk with some very cool people, breathe a bit of the Scandinavian air… this I needed!

Creativity Utopia Workshop | LIFT conference

 

Perhaps you joined Henriette and me last year for the workshop… or perhaps you had then neither heard of LIFT, Henriette or Geneva. Fondue brought you here? Impossible!

 

Let us start with the truth, the naked screaming truth. The creative do not care about creativity, they simply create. This year Henriette and I want to guide you through an exploration of what is behind the creativity hype. Hype?! Hype!

Why this? Why now?

For me the past year has been one of exploding tabus. Yes, exploding tabus. Your mileage may differ, but I on my part have found no other way to deal with tabus. I set an explosive charge to them, and then press the detonate button. Tabus are supposedly consecrated to a special use or purpose, and sometimes restricted to the use of a god, king, priest and forbidden to general use. Tabus are discrimination pure and simple. Tabus are the intellectual prisons invoked to control. I like the use of intellectual dynamite in exploding tabus. How about you?

Utopia, on the other hand, is the divine soup from which our dreams are made of. Utopia is the primordial soup of imagination and limitation. Utopia is paradoxland uncharted!

In this workshop we will explore tabus, utopias and forget creativity.

 

Creativity Utopia Workshop | LIFT conference

xposted from tensoriana

 

Now…

Loads happening right here. Theoretical Man is happening at a rate that I do not quite feel ready for, or so it always is in life. The future always meets me unprepared. Really! I have been served a few whopping surprises in the past few weeks. This is good, very good indeed! I am also at times impossible with my friends and this will range from behaviours that have me telling them to get lost and stay away from me, to being overwhelming in my need to communicate. Mileage always varies with me, steady-state was never quite my domain of endeavour.

I am working on the issue of identity. It is one of the tallest orders regardless in which context you decide to pick that one apart. Identity is one of the first issues that any novelist ever tackles. Read James Joyce’s Ulysses, read Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and you will find studies in identity beautifully and critically packed as works of literary art. I was blessed by the gift of identity in a way that has me feeling like I have had unprotected intercourse with it, and am now not only impregnated with its DNA, but also virally infected by it. Identity is another key to the man-theoretical, as knowledge and paradox are its accessories.

I have wondered for whom I am writing Theoretical Man, and once again, like with fiction, I find that it too is written for me. I want to understand what it is that I have somehow connected in my mind as being the puzzle of human existence. The only way that I am ever going to understand it, find its flaws, and gain some satisfaction, is if I write it and thus expose my mind’s machinations and fantasies. All of this is done in the name of nonfiction, all of this is done in the name of human inquiry in action to use Peter Reason‘s expression.

My inspiration is coming from the digital culture that I am embedded in. That is, inspiration is coming from what I read, from what I have learned, from the interactions, from the relationships, from the conversations and from what I am learning at all loci of my existence. I was surprised to see David’s first reactions to what I have been rattling off here. In particular I do like the reality aspects he brings in, and the questions that he is asking.

On occasions I do experiment with putting myself in the bin of the transhumanists, but often I prefer to call it trans-humanism. In a sense some of this can be looked as being beyond humanism and I have also played with the expression “Quantum Humanism.” And here we are right back to the question of identity. How do we classify this theory? How do we label it? Where does it belong to? How do we transact with it?

Still, to be in a place where people firmly believe that life can be artificially enhanced and augmented to the point of immortality, goes against my own tao. My own tao does not believe in much at all, it is a non-believing tao, and that is exactly who is informing my reasoning and writing.