summ( )n

It took me a while to sort our my impressions from Art Brussels’10, I guess, the largest art fair I’ve been to so far. Two hundreds of galleries, thousands of artists, many thousands of guests, all that art load overwhelms you very quickly. The place was huge too, two large halls in the Brussels Expo Centre, near the famous Atomium. I first expected to see everything in just one day, but that was a total nonsense, of course, so I came there second time, and even spending two full days at the fair I think I barely scratched the (art) surface.

At Summ()n we always emphasize how important art is in exploring the possible futures: it inspires, it provokes, it kicks you off the beaten tracks of perception and thinking. There were a lot of examples of such ‘art works’ (with ‘works’ as a verb). I will refer to just a few here, simply for the sake of space/time limitations (as always, I put many of the pictures I took there to my Flickr: Art Brussels’10); also, I selected only more or less ‘interactive’ pieces.

UK-based rAndom International presented their recent installation called Audience; it is a system of interactive mirrors reacting to the presence of people in ‘their’ space. In the absence of us, people, the mirrors ‘talk’ to each other, in a lovely cute way, turing their heads and demonstrating all kinds of other ‘acts of social behavior’. I hope to make a short movie about this installation a bit later.

Large-scale installation by Dutch artist Peter de Cupere was not, perhaps, very interactive, but it was massively, overwhelmingly multi-sensorial; very smelly, to be precise. Peter often calls himself a ‘scent artist’, and tries to embed a usually deprived presence of smell into his works. This artwork consisted of a few small rooms, combined into one slightly claustrophobic maze, and each room had it’s own distinctive aroma. For examples, the Smoke room was full of heavy, well, cigarette smell; I don’t know the exact chemistry involved, but I felt suffocating very quickly.

Small and nice installation Pneuma, by Spanish artist Daniel Canogar reminded how to create truly magical experience using very simple materials and technologies. I made a small video showing at least some of the vibrance radiated by this piece. I remember seeing his large and provocative photographs in the Laboral art and technology center, in Xion, and of course his name is now widely known in Europe because of the beautiful installation displayed in the European Parliament . Daniel has a very informative website, where all his earlier works presented and explained.

There were few more interesting installations, somewhat hinting to the interactivity and involvement, like this one above; however, it was too fragile to touch, and there was no artist or a galleries to explain, so its meaning remains enigmatic for me; may be, for the better.

I have recently been at the second educational meeting by the local Chamber of Commerce (I wrote about the first one I attended, few days ago). It wasn’t a rocket science in terms of content which was mostly pretty basic, common sense advises; but the atmosphere was good, and I enjoyed it. The second meeting was was held in the TAC, Temporary Art Center in Eindhoven, the place I like very much for its wild creativity and rebelliousness. So I expected a much more creative, and also much more relevant for the creatives a talk. What a disappointment

Not only was it a plain and outdated marketing propaganda (4Ps, USPs and such stuff, irrelevant if not wrong in the new social and economic realities). But in the context of ‘creative professions’ such advices started to look simply stupid and vulgar. For example, there was quite a few artists in the audience – painters, sculptures – so, their question was ‘What is the USP (=Unique Selling Point in a marketing lingo) of an artist?”

- “I paint landscapes”, answered one of the artists.
- “Nah, that’s not enough. Everybody paints the landscapes. You have to find a way to differentiate from everyone else”.
- “Any suggestions?”, ventured the artist.
- “I don’t know, but may be you can use a special paint. Or may be you can start painting using only the fingers, and not a brush. But you must differentiate yourself from the rest!”, confidently concluded the lector.

What’s the USP of Van Gogh? of Shagal? or of Kandinsky? Did they create their work with an aim to ‘differentiate’ from the rest? Or was this ‘differentiator’ always already there with them, merely reflecting the very fact that each of them had a unique talent, and a unique personality, and just tried to express it in their own unique way (thus further developing its uniqueness)?

What is the USP of my own art? I run an abstract photography blog. One picture a day, every day, for almost eight years soon. The one at the top of this posting is of April 23. I don’t do it for eight years to ‘differentiate from the rest’. I just do it because it is the way I see the world, and myself in this world, and how I pave my way through. Images in this blog amuse some people, they write to me and we talk about these works. Some of them buy these pictures, most of them don’t. One of the them happened to be a head of the museum of contemporary art, and he liked my pictures too, and that’s how I got my first large exhibition done. And then more people liked these works, and that’s how I went to the second exhibition, this time a part of a very prestigious photographic biennale in Moscow.

Some people don’t like my works. Many, in fact. When presented at the biennale, these works also caused quite a harsh criticism from the visitors and art critics. They found them ‘pointless’, ‘empty’, ‘inhuman’ and ‘soul-less’ etc, etc. It was a bit painful to hear, but just a bit. It didn’t change the way I make my works.

Because it is the way I make MY works.

Yesterday I learned that Alexander Slusarev, a famous Russian photographer, died. A shocking news, I just met him in Moscow, during our exhibition. He was my co-exhibitor, and our show was called ‘One map, two routs’, somewhat juxtaposing our works. Some considered our works very similar to each other, some others thought we are worlds apart (once again reminding that any USP is the eye of the beholder). He didn’t do his photography to gain a USP. He did it because he couldn’t do otherwise.

Rest in peace, Alexander ‘San Sanych’.

Why do I write it in the Summ()n’s blog?

I guess because I treat the things I do in Summ()n in a similar way. My ‘USP” here is me – that way I think, the way I analyze the situations of our clients or partners, and the way I create solutions for them. It is based on a unique blend of my background, knowledge, experiences, skills. Some people are impressed with them, and we work. Some people see nothing special in them, and we don’t.

According to Toby Coop, head of the company, Digital Skin is ready to start a commercial use of its brand-new tool, virtual environment platform for business collaboration and ‘serious games’ development. I wrote about this tool earlier in February, and already published a few print-screens, but now I have of those, and also a marketing presentation about the tool on the SlideShare – How can you use virtual worlds to drive organisational collaboration and performance.

The slides still deceptively look very Second-Life-ish, and the suite from Digital Skin can indeed be gameplay-neutral (as in the case of SL); but the main value is a game engine that allows the developers to quickly design and implement a wide variety of ‘serious games’. These games can be used to both enact real-life situations and create new possible (or impossible) scenarios. All these available options make the use of the platform very wide, from a plain meeting and communication space, to collaborative environments, to training and simulations, and up to the rapid scenario development.

Summ()n is the first in a queue to try this tool, and develop our own ‘playing rooms’ in this environment. I wrote earlier about another initiative we participated, a toolkit open design, which is a nice idea but it has a MS suite as a technology platform, which would simply incomparable with the opportunities that can be provided by the Digital Skin. I am now waiting for a ‘sandbox’ of some sort, where we can start developing our games, now in virtual environments (we have at least two ideas that can go there right away).

PS: As a bonus, I was glad to see that Toby used one of the pictures I took at one of the business gatherings we attended; need to say that it’s a ‘real meeting’ yet; thanks to the Digital Skin team we will hopefully have even more crowded online meetings soon.

A bit later that I would want, but I finally uploaded the slides that I used during my recent lectures in St.Petersburg and Moscow. In both cases the original slides used a mixture of English and Russia – I left the titles and most of the description in English, but wrote the summaries for every case in Russian. I later translated all the slides in English and also added (in both sets, in facts) a sort of voiceover, few ‘word clouds’ commenting or explaining some of the slides.

Using this occasion, I re-started to use SlideShare service more actively; I used to post there some of my presentations, but not regularly, and just a few ‘private’ ones, because I obviously couldn’t post my ‘professional’ ones. Another presentation I uploaded is the slides I presented during the Innovation Conference by the Dutch Design initiatief earlier in March.

Cognitive Edge just put on the website an excellent research paper, Strategic Conversation: How to Engage 3600 Staff in Scanning and Scenario Building. It is both a case study, of how to involve employees into a discussion about possible futures of their organization, and a primer showing the use of tools developed by Cognitive Edge.

The chart above illustrates a very complex and multi-component process of gathering and processing information, which will be later used in developing scenarios and facilitating a change toward the future. I would only suggest to use a more network-looking image, otherwise it doesn’t pay a merit to the real process, as described in the paper.

The volume of the exercise is also very impressive, with over 1,600 ‘scenario fragments’ produced during the process, which had been aggregated into almost 1,200 scenarios, later analyzed in terms of their frequency and relevance (impact).

But the rich and sheer volumes of data (content) was not the only output of the project (and may be even not the most important). Great thing is that it triggered a transformation process in the organization in question (Canadian Ministry of Forests and Range in this case):

“Backed by the experience and knowledge gained from the Strategic Conversation initiative, the ministry later launched a mass staff collaboration project to help solve a specific problem in the present – how to fundamentally transform the business in light of new internal and external operating realities.”

So, the paper is really a good news, as a way to learn about and better understand the way CE works, but also as a lever in changing the attitudes of managers to such initiatives.

There is unfortunately a bad news too: as I just learned, CE has cancelled planned accreditation workshop in Brussels (which was sliding from February to May then to June and finally disappeared from their schedule). Need to figure out now how to add these CE tools to the Summ()n tool box.

Last Friday I participated in a very interesting workshop, aimed at the ‘co-creation of the future curriculum’… to explore the futures! The workshop was called by the Haagse Hogeschool (which was lately reformed into the Hague University, so I should drop the name ‘school’ in the future).

Few years ago I was teaching at the TU/e (Technical University/Eindhoven) a course about future studies and their application in design. It was a very innovative course, co-developed by a few colleagues of mine and myself, that combined both theoretical part (we gave some lectures) and practical assignments, and where students conducted their own ‘future research by design’ projects. We taught the course over three years, getting the highest scores from the students in their annual evaluation forms; it was discontinued because of the financial squarrels between TU/e and Philips.

I am currently looking for a teaching opportunity, and it is in this context I was caught into the above workshop. It was a very interesting effort to co-develop a new course for the students that would teach them to create, if not ‘future-proof’ than ‘future-oriented’ solutions, combined the knowledge of the new technologies, social developments and business realities.

The team was great, with quite diverse people, from students and just-ex-students-who-became-entrepreneurs, to professors and ‘other professionals’ (i.e., me). The workshop was moderated by Eleselien Eperma, from Sunidee company, itself an interesting example of innovative agency.

I feel we developed not one, but whole three courses for the University, with some overlaps, of course, but also with a plenty of interesting gems and insights. Kudos to all!

[This blog became a bit inactive lately, not because nothing is happening with Summ()n; exactly the opposite, too many things happen - gatherings, meetings, exhibitions, new partners, new projects. Two weeks in Moscow did kick me off the track a bit, and I was planning to restore the events in a chronological order, thus postponing the postings on the latest events. Wrong strategy, apparently, so I switch to writing on the things as they happen.]

Yesterday I came to the meeting at the Little Mountain agency, in the Strijp-S complex in Eindhoven (I actually wrote about them a while ago). This time they hosted a gathering of creative industry professionals from the Brabant region, organized by the local Chamber of Commerce. The purpose of the workshop was to help in discovering your ‘inner entrepreneur’; in principle, that task should not be difficult in case of ‘creatives’ who are by definition are, well, creative and keen to experiment, innovate and try new things. In reality a transformation of creative professionals into creativeneurs require much support and nurturing.

The gathering was jointly opened by the representations from the Chamber of Commerce and Maarten Hendrix, from Little Mountain (above). Initial reception by the 60+ audience was high, but bit cold. Everything has changed, however, after the introduction exercise and an energizing presentation by a meeting coach.

Participants got engaged into the flow, and actively participated in the event, in fact, co-shaped it.

The audience was far from the stereotypical ‘young hipster’ type of cliches many people have about so called ‘creatives’; there were young and old, man and women, and representatives from a wide variety of the creative industries, from high-tech geeks to low-tech artists.

I really enjoyed the meeting, and its atmosphere (also from the Summ()n point of view I would also propose a more creative formats for such gatherings

We agreed to discuss it with Arjan Bijvoet, CoC’s advisor on creative industries development in the region:

As always, many more pictures from the event are available in the Creative Entrepreneurs Gathering at Strijp-S set on Flickr. I will also write a short piece about the event for Demotix, independent news agency I’ve joined recently.