Our world is no longer what we have thought it to be, and a new world is struggling to be born. Visionary Creatives are driven to bring this new world to all of us Visionary Creativity is a series of posts on scattered topics that, taken together, constitute a glimpse into our emerging world. (Or, as I sometimes like to put it, an updating of Spengler and Campbell with McLuhan and Wolfram. What that means will unfold as we go.)
Expect a new post once a week, and if you subscribe to our newsletter, you will get a monthly emailing that summarizes and links to the latest posts
In his op-ed “How to Raise a Creative Child: Step One, Back Off
Adam Grant writes that, compared to others in their fields, Nobel Prize winners are:
- 22 times more likely to perform as actors, dancers or magicians
- 12 times more likely to write poetry, plays or novels
- 7 times more likely to dabble in arts and crafts
- 2 times more likely to play an instrument or compose music
Visionary Creativity builds on that notion, suggesting that “other discipline” can be sources not only of relaxation or stimulation of creativity, but whole other ways of thinking.
For example, let’s define perspective in painting, developed during the Renaissance, as assuming that an observer is both outside and a part of an infinite, continuous, uniform space that has been frozen in a moment of time, in which objects, some in motion, are situated. Looking at this definition, we see that it precisely describes Newton’s notion of space and time, and our relationship to them. (But the artists were 200 years ahead–suggesting that physicists might have gotten a 200 year jump by being aware of what was going in in art–think Leonardo da Vinci.)
My approach looks at numerous disciplines and seeks to shake them together. So for today, we might start with the remark by Stephen Wolfram, “I think when I find the code that generates our world, it will be about six lines.” (Note: he just found it a couple of months ago.) So the notion here is that the world is rule-based, or as I like to put it, all is networks of fractals computationally generating themselves and each other. And suddenly contemporary physics, evolution by symbiogenesis, the architecture of social networks, and genomic fabrication are all parts of the same emerging phenomena. (Also, we might think of Indra’s Net.)
So stay tuned as ideas accumulate on Visionary Creativity, and add your comments.
~ John Lobell, 2020
