for - book - Citizens - foreward - Brian Eno

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.
• The new story becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward.
• By this process it starts to come true.

• Imagining the future makes it more possible.

• 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

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

!- 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

!- Title : Brian Eno – "We need the creative industry to help inspire climate action"

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.

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.

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.

ways to link this to oral traditions in music and memory?!?

Brian Eno had a notebook-based practice of some sort.

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.

"process not product"

Zettelkasten-based note taking methods, and particularly that followed by Luhmann, seem to focus on process and not product.

http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

Digital version similar to WTFEngine.

https://www.oblique-strategies.com/

A web-based version similar to WTFEngine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv7epY75Wa0

https://www.enoshop.co.uk/product/oblique-strategies?filter=Oblique%20Strategies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRc7MUybCsE

Interview with BBC in which Brian Eno discusses the origin of his Oblique Strategies with Peter Schmidt.

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.

https://www.openculture.com/2013/07/jump_start_your_creative_process_with_brian_eno_oblique_strategies.html

http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/OSintro.html

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno

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).

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.

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?

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

https://kk.org/thetechnium/scenius-or-comm/

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.