I can relate
A Sembl move…
about making a Sembl move?
In between Big Bang and Heat Death
[ cross-posted frpom Zenpundit — a terrific example of the DoubleQuote form, essentially showing a single Sembl resemblance, and thus the smallest form of Sembl game — and why the form is useful ]
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Some time in between t-zero and t-aleph-null, some time between the First Day of Creation and Judgment Day, some time in between the Big Bang and the Heat Death of the Universe, there’s a stretch of time known as always.
What does juxtaposing the two statements allow us to understand?
- That times have changed?
- That what you tell a foreign government is not what you tell your own?
- That Brits are more understated and Americans more plainspoken?
- That President Obama is showing specific support for Israel, while Palmerston was expressing the general rule which covers all such utterances?
- That the word “always” doesn’t necessarily mean “for ever”, “unto the ages of ages” as the Eastern Church has it?
Perhaps “for the foreseeable future” would be a better phrase to use, if it didn’t sound so iffy. I’d say it means something closer to “in continuity” than to “in perpetuity”.
The great thing about DoubleQuotes as a form is that they jump-start you into thinking about samenesses and differences, without demanding which particular implications you will select, thus giving rise to multiple possibilities and enlarging the scope of narrative or discussion.
And while I’ve sharpened the pairing of quotes — or graphics — into a tool for repeated use, it’s already a habitual form of thinking, as we can see from the fact that these two particular quotes were juxtaposed by Sam Roggeveen in his post, America’s BFF: Obama calls it, in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter today.
We naturally pair similars to contrast and compare them: it may be the most basic device that human memory affords us — this reminds me of that.
Here are a few of my own old favorites…
You can read Obama’s speech, from which the excerpt above was taken, on this Israel Times page.
Hipbone/Sembl: psychological perspectives
[ a Jungian view, Hipbone/Sembl and the feminine, also an early use of the games in dream-analysis online ]
I just received an email from Eve Jackson, an old friend of mine, Jungian analyst and Buddhist practitioner, who has recently been exploring my HipBone Games and expressed her interest in their web-based development as Sembl. One paragraph in particular stood out for me, since it speaks to the issue of the feminine in the games — something I am reluctant to do myself — and also because it emphasizes a central interest and hope of mine, the possible significance of the games in conflict resolution and its expression at the global level of the diversity of cultures:
Also pleased to read about your friend Cath’s museum game and, especially, the possibility of using the games for conflict resolution. I see the whole thing as having to do with feminine consciousness, which is much needed. Jung emphasises differentiation and the hero archetype in the development of consciousness, hence it tends to be seen by Jungians as a masculine phenomenon, arising from a feminine background of fusion. But consciousness also develops by seeing likeness. Also Jung still lived in a world where one could (and he felt should) work within ones own geographically limited tradition. Now so many strands that had been separated need to be creatively reconnected so the whole complexity can be glimpsed, it can’t be avoided.
I’m very grateful for those words, which express succinctly some of my own key hopes for the game…
Here are the relevant paragraphs of her email in full — personal in part, because each person’s own playing of the game will naturally draw on their own store of images, narratives, quotations etc, but also of that wide significance of which Anais Nin wrote, “The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythic, symbolic.” In these paragraphs you will find the personal touching the mythic, and thus giving voice to the universal:
I have been experimenting with your games, drawn back to them by cunning paths of association, and passing the link on to a few likely people. Always remembered the stuff you sent me years ago about Oppenheimer and the Gita which deeply impressed me but got sidelined by the demands of life. Perhaps I feared that such things could be addictive – have always shied away from chess, poker, bridge because I could see them keeping me awake at night.
Now I find myself pleasantly caught. Even got a copy of the Bead Game to reread. Frankly I prefer the hipbone games as less abstract and cerebral than the version Hesse implies, and because there’s a sense in which the Hesse game involves too much labour of consciousness, and even though it can induce satori it risks dryness, lacking the spontaneity/immediacy of hipbone, so that Castalia becomes a sort of severed head. Hesse was clearly aware of this problem himself, hence the relief of Knecht returning to the more natural world, which experience, alas, he can’t sustain. But hipbone is moister, more democratic and more genuinely playful as the unconscious has more free rein. Into my current life in Crete, living with great beauty and blessings in the agony of a disintegrating world, with many levels of occupation and preoccupation, your game has entered as a vivifying current.
Knocked out (not of course for the first time) by the play of the mind, how what is dimly remembered brings with it so much more. For example I moved from the bells of Aberdovey (sound of a drowned world) via Phlebas the Phoenician to Ariel’s song, and was astounded to discover that the song ends with bells. And that Donne’s tolling bell (a further association) follows an image of a clod disintegrating in the sea. And that the bells of Aberdovey are actually alarm bells (waking us from the solutio of sleep). And so on inevitably through the cycle of death and rebirth. These first images also reflect the process itself, the ringing of the Welsh song in my head evoking the underwater world of free-floating associations.
Also pleased to read about your friend Cath’s museum game and, especially, the possibility of using the games for conflict resolution. I see the whole thing as having to do with feminine consciousness, which is much needed. Jung emphasises differentiation and the hero archetype in the development of consciousness, hence it tends to be seen by Jungians as a masculine phenomenon, arising from a feminine background of fusion. But consciousness also develops by seeing likeness. Also Jung still lived in a world where one could (and he felt should) work within ones own geographically limited tradition. Now so many strands that had been separated need to be creatively reconnected so the whole complexity can be glimpsed, it can’t be avoided.
The Game relating to Oppenheimer and the Gita, to which my friend refers, is the solo game titled (after Nietzsche) What sacred games shall we have to invent? downloadable without cost from the Scribd site.
Those paragraphs describe a single human’s use of the Hipbone/Sembl game structure for personal exploration and insight, but this seems the appropriate place to mention that the games have also been used in therapeutic dream analysis. My friend Walter Logeman is a psychotherapist trained in Joseph Moreno’s Psychodrama techniques.
The “Dream Events” themselves were conducted under conditions of therapeutic privacy, but Walter’s article DreamEvents in Psyberspace, written for the International Association for the Study of Dreams‘s journal, Dream Time, can give readers a detailed sense of how the games actually work in the context of dream symbolism and therapeutic amplification without breaching that temenos.
In introducing Walter’s piece, guest editor Richard Wilkerson raised a question which gets to the heart of the therapeutic possibilities of the games:
How deep can relationships get in an online dream group? Walter Logeman, in DreamEvents in Psyberspace gives sample from a “game” that is played by adults online and creates for several weeks a closed and confidential setting. The game is based on Herman Hesse’s The Bead Game and allows players to make relational moves on a virtual board, connecting dreams, thoughts and feelings in a soulful way.
For myself, the answer to that question is profoundly personal and deeply moving. Stuart, one of the players in the first “Dream Event” which I co-facilitated with Walter Logeman, knew he was in the terminal stages of cancer as he dreamed and discussed and played with us, and at one point he told us how the game felt to him:
I have been thinking about why I am so drawn to what is happening here. It seems to be that this might be a game that consciousness can play with itself irrespective of its containment in a body. A propos pour moi a ce moment
I don’t know that I have ever felt so deeply moved, honored, abashed or humbled by a comment someone else has made about a work I was involved with — but Stuart wrote those words, and I think they reflect pretty accurately just how moving the “Dream Event” indeed was for those who participated.
The HipBone/Sembl games can be played for sheer fun, in friendly rivalry, in formal or informal education, solo or in collaboration, for problem solving, for insight, as meditations or works of art, to facilitate the therapeutic understanding of the self and others, in the analysis of complex, multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary situations, and in conflict resolution…
I am very hopeful that Cath’s work on the funding and development of the Sembl games will soon bring us a free, open source, web based version of Sembl — not just for my own delight, but also and particularly for the sake of those others who, like Stuart, can find in these games a profound depth of insight and healing.
The Story of Sembl, I: Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game
[ first post in a series on the inspirations and developments that led to Sembl, and the aspirations that flow from them ]
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Music for a Glass Bead Game, Arturo Delmoni & Nathaniel Rosen — a musical tribute to Hermann Hesse’s Game from John Marks Records
While other novelists on the whole explored the “real world” around them, the outside world, the world of other people and things, Hermann Hesse was concerned with the “inner” world – the world of hopes, dreams, distress, anguish, rage and insight. With his 1927 novel Steppenwolf, he introduced us to the “dark side” of ourselves, our “shadow” to use Jung’s term, long before Star Wars, longer before the Sith Lord Cheney committed the United States to work “sort of the dark side, if you will … to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.” And if Steppenwolf showed us our shadow, in his earlier novel Siddhartha (1922) he had already shown us the light – in a deliciously sensual revisioning of the young Buddha‘s ascetic purity.
Siddhartha and Steppenwolf between them provided cover for generations of young idealists coming to terms with their own dreams and nightmares, but it was in his final great novel Das Glasperlenspiel (1943), known in English as The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi, which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature while confusing and losing many of his admirers — and inspiring beyond measure those who stayed with him.
Hesse’s grand vision was of a game played by the members of a scholarly caste – monastic Brahmins of a secular, post European world – whose purpose, pleasure and play it was to bring all human culture into one architecture, one music, woven of similarities, parallelisms, patterns, archetypes.
As an architecture of insights, Hesse spoke of this great game of his as “harmoniously building the hundred-gated cathedral of Mind.” In musical terms, he described the game as a virtual music in which “ideas” rather than “melodies” would be harmonized or held in counterpoint:
All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number.
And the game’s ultimate destination – besides the creation of an overarching synthesis uniting sciences and arts, great leaps of discovery and profound flights of imagination?
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.
The ultimate aim is contemplative simplicity, meditation, a renewed sense of the sacred.
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It was not the characters in the novel, nor its plot, that won Hesse the Nobel Prize: there is hardly a female character in the entire book, the males are largely cardboard imitations of people, and the plot such as it is might have made a fine twenty page novella – no need there for a 550-page masterpiece.
No, it is the game itself that holds the imagination, as the Himalayas might hold the attention of one who had lived a lifetime in the lowlands. And catch hold the imaginations of brilliant minds it has.
Hesse’s old friend and rival Thomas Mann inscribed a presentation copy of his novel Doctor Faustus with the words: “To Hermann Hesse, this glass bead game with black beads.”
Christopher Alexander, the progenitor of pattern languages, distilled the essence of his own thinking in his “Bead Game Conjecture”:
That it is possible to invent a unifying concept of structure within which all the various concepts of structure now current in different fields of art and science, can be seen from a single point of view. This conjecture is not new. In one form or another people have been wondering about it, as long as they have been wondering about structure itself; but in our world, confused and fragmented by specialisation, the conjecture takes on special significance. If our grasp of the world is to remain coherent, we need a bead game; and it is therefore vital for us to ask ourselves whether or not a bead game can be invented.
Manfred Eigen, Nobel laureate in Chemistry, wrote of his book on molecular biology with Ruth Winkler-Oswatitsch, Laws of the Game:
We hope to translate Hermann Hesse’s symbol of the glass bead game back into reality.
John Holland, father of genetic algorithms, told an interviewer:
I’ve been working toward it all my life, this Das Glasperlenspiel. It was a very scholarly game, starting with an abacus, where people set up musical themes, then do variations on it, like a fugue. Then they’d expand it to where it could include other artistic forms, and eventually cultural symbols. It became a very sophisticated game for setting up themes, almost as a poet would, and building variations as a composer. It was a way of symbolizing music and of building broad insights into the world.
If I could get at all close to producing something like the glass bead game I can’t think of anything that would delight me more.
❧
Mid-way between architecture and music, forming an arch between the arts and sciences, Hesse’s imaginative game has been construed on many levels and in many ways, serving the needs of molecular biology, artificial intelligence, architecture and more. But what of its nature as a game to be played?
From my point of view as a game designer, Hesse’s game is both an artwork – to be played as Bach or the blues are played – and a game – to be played as soccer or chess are played.
And what a game!
Of children, cultural differences, and computers
[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — kids, computers, creativity and games ]
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Motorola Xoom tablet
It’s quite a triumphant story, with African kids in the foreground and Nicholas Negroponte and MIT playing the role of proud parents pushing them forward from behind…
With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages—simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens. The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs. Early observations are encouraging, said Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder, at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week.
[ … ]
Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”
That’s a striking story, and it has caught many people’s attention since David Talbot wrote about it in a piece in MIT’s Technology Review in late October, titled Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves.
I’d like to let that sink in — because I don’t want to deny it, in fact I want to share the excitement — but I do, too, want to juxtapose it with something else I read recently, where we’ll see some other African children, and where a different set of questions about their intelligence are in the air.
This quote is from Malcolm Gladwell, in a New Yorker piece titled None of the Above: what IQ can’t tell you about race:
The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement— — that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?
That one, of course, concerns me deeply — in fact they both do.
Look, my work with Cath Styles on the Sembl Game is predicated on the importance of resemblances — so the more cognitive preferences we can marshal by inviting people to make rich and varied links between things — Kpelle-style, western-style, art-style, science-style, you think of it, you name it — the better. But clearly we should also be aware in using and propagating the game that different styles of association exist, and should be explored.
And the first quote? That’s important too, because it shows the eagerness to learn that’s there, innate, before our culturally-acquired habits and assumptions and behaviors inhibit the childlike excitement of discovery, recognition, eureka! and aha!
Howard Rheingold once said of community-building digital media such as this blog, “Like all technologies, this medium has its shadow side, and there are ways to abuse it.”
When feeling the thrill of “up” stories like Negroponte’s, it may we wise to ask also what the “down” side might be. And IMO, there’s always room for optimism — but let’s keep it cautious, eh?
Steven Pinker on Analogy
[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — importance of analogy as an under-developed cognitive skill ]
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There was a interview with five prominent “science writers” in the Guardian a few days back, titled Science writing: how do you make complex issues accessible and readable? and one of the writers, Steven Pinker, makes two highly interesting observations:
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There are a couple of things going on here that I’d like to note. One is that without intending to do so specifically, he is in essence formulating a view about a possible, central difference between scientific and religious thinking, since what he says about the humanities in general applies with great specificity to religion and the arts: in both religion and art, the expansive nature of “symbolism” is a key to the experience.
And that in turn prompts me to suggest that perhaps both the arts and religion are geared towards provoking, evoking or invoking an experience — whereas the sciences are geared towards obtaining an understanding.
I’ll have to think about that, and come to some sort of understanding of my own — perhaps expressed via symbolic means.
My second point of interest is that there’s an analogy to be made between Pinker’s two remarks: each of them has a form I could portray thus in terms of cause :: effect —
science : humanities :: simplicity : complexity
Nobody present — the interviewer, Pinker himself, and four other very bright science writers — picked up on the close correspondence between those two statements at the time. And I find that very interesting.
I find it very interesting because the six of them were more interested in seeing what they could say (of what they already thought) than in saying what they could see (in light of the ongoing, immediate conversation).
I think we all tend to do that — which is why David Bohm‘s approach to dialogue is so important: if brings us to speak more into the moment as it surrounds us, not quite so much from the past as it has informed us.
Then there’s the interesting fact that Pinker’s sense of the difference between modes of thought in the humanities and the sciences as expressed in the top quote translates so directly to the difference between uses of analogy in the second — and his fairly emphatic statement:
one could argue that we understand everything except for the physical world of falling objects by analogy.
Analogy is the central device in our mental toolkit, and yet we know far more about trains of logic than we do about analogical leaps. We know so little, in fact, that distinguishing between “literary metaphor” and “scientific analogy” (both of which are based in the recognition of resemblance) on the basis of one looking for multiple, rich connectivity and the other for a single tight connection is something noteworthy enough for Pinker to bother to point it out. It is indeed a provocative and perhaps essential insight. But it is also pretty basic — dividing a field up into significant chunks, the way anthropology got divided into “cultural”, “archaeological”, “linguistic” and “physical anthropology”…
It’s time we learned to understand and use analogic with the same rigor we’ve applied to learning and using logic — and Sembl is just the tool for this.
Experience wants to be rich: factual understanding wants to be clear.
Sembl, the game of resemblance: presentation to NDF2012
This post is a web translation of my presentation to the National Digital Forum, Wellington, NZ, on 20 November 2012. (Video recording is here.)
Hello, people. Thank you for having me on this land and at this forum. I’m utterly thrilled to be here – among you all – to talk about this project.
In its first form, Sembl is an iPad game, called The Museum Game, at the National Museum of Australia. We’ve just released it in beta as a program for visiting groups.
This video is a good way to explain how the game works. (It’s a DIY first attempt, so please look past the production quality and focus on the content.)
Feedback
Over the last year and a bit we’ve gathered feedback from children and adults about their experience of playing the game.
In our first tests, we used a paper prototype; these kids used iPads to take photographs, but the board was paper, and they drew and wrote their moves on paper. Between rounds we had an analogue voting process to determine which team’s content made it onto the board. After the game, we prompted them to tell us a few things about their experience.
Several kids homed in on the principle of resemblance.
Others emphasised the social side of the game.
Once we had a digital prototype, we invited the same group back. Again, after the game, we asked them for feedback. The next slide shows some of their responses to the question: What interested you about the game?
Again, there was general interest in resemblance. But the kids are now also talking about being keen to explore the Museum, how the game used the exhibits, and democratic social curation.
I find that fascinating. You might imagine that looking at a museum through a tablet computer would detract from the authenticity of the visiting experience. But for these kids, it seems like it actually draws them in.
Education
We also interviewed the teacher of those kids; she’s convinced of the value of the game for education.
(Here’s a longer extract of the interview.)
Play
Sembl provides a new way to connect to cultural heritage. It’s about play, which is not just for kids. It’s actually a powerful mode of thought, that we lose touch with as we grow up.
As a smart friend of mine says, we all need to recognise ourselves as a maker of meanings and engage in imaginative play. In this next clip, you’ll see a boy whose first language is not English, and historian Peter Stanley, both moving their bodies and struggling with words as they play.
The game gives visitors permission to let their minds wander, to make new kinds of connections, to think differently.
For the host institution, The Museum Game involves a kind of radical trust, and open authority – recognition that knowledge and understanding is not all about curatorial interpretation, that it also comes from visitors thinking and imagining and sharing ideas with each other. Which remains rare in museums, despite the fact that it makes the experience more compelling for visitors.
Dialogue
Another way of saying this is that the Game provides a structure and impetus for dialogue, between the museum and visitors, between visitors and things, among visitors and between things. And this is not dialogue in the sense of an everyday conversation. It’s deeper than that. It’s a mutual experience of looking both ways, simultaneously.
My notion of dialogue comes from the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, and his sense of teachers and students as mutually co-intent on creating knowledge.
Quantum physicist David Bohm was also a strong advocate for dialogue.
Each of these notions of dialogue is premised on an understanding of consciousness and how thoughts shape reality. For Bohm, dialogue means holding several points of view in active suspension. He regarded this kind of dialogue as critical in order to investigate the crises facing society. He saw it as a way to liberate creativity to find solutions.
Game-based social learning
So the concept of Sembl, in its deepest sense, is social learning – game-based social learning. In its first instantiation, it is game-based social learning in a museum and – if things turn out as I hope they will – from next year it will be playable at any other exhibiting venue that has the infrastructure and the will to host games – galleries, libraries, botanic gardens, zoos and so on.
But The Museum Game is just one form of Sembl. The Museum Game is played in real time, on site, and players take photos of physical objects to create nodes on the board.
The next step is to make a web-based form, that you could play at your own pace, and from your own place. Then, Sembl becomes a game-based social learning network, which amplifies the personal value of the game – it becomes social networking with cognitive benefits.
Personal value aside, it’s the bigger picture – of humans as a community – that I most want to explore: Sembl as an engine of networked ideas, or linked data. First, though, a brief diversion to the genealogy of the game.
Genealogy
I didn’t invent it! The progenitor for Sembl is a vagabond monk called Charles Cameron.
I’ve never met Charles in person but we’ve spoken a lot over the internet, which is how I took this picture. For 15+ years, Charles has been playing what until recently he called Hipbone Games – because the hipbone’s connected to the legbone. He has always played with a static image of a board, through discussion among players, either face-to-face or online.
And Charles crafts whole symphonies of resemblance about war and religion, art and science.
Here’s a classic simple move he made, linking the word-concepts ‘womb’ and ‘tomb’. Charles didn’t invent the game either. Well, not really.
He got the idea from a novel Herman Hesse wrote in the 1940s, called The Glass Bead Game, which as you can see, has a fairly grand vision for the game, to create a kind of music from the entire intellectual content of the universe.
I first encountered Hipbone Games about eight years ago and straight away imagined a digital form, where you could see the network of linked nodes assembling as you play. Ever since then, I’ve been waiting for it to come out in digital… Well, I got tired of waiting, so at some point I adopted it as a personal mission.
Kudos to the National Museum of Australia for building the first digital version. The Museum Game is a simple version of what Sembl can be, but it has potential to grow – and actually, it’s already a little more evolved than it appears in the video at the beginning.
For example, this is the board you saw in the video. We use that one for younger players. But we have other boards, for groups of three teams, for older groups of four teams, for five teams and six.
And in the true spirit of the Glass Bead Game, there’s also talk of hosting tournaments at the Museum.
Toward a game-based social learning network
But it’s at the point of networking the gameplay and the game content that Sembl will really ‘level up’ and rock the world. Once the games are on the web, and the field of playable content is already digital, good things can happen:
- We can aggregate game-generated data and build an interface to the ever-evolving web of resemblance. So it’s not just the thought-riffing in your own game you can enjoy, but the whole generative symphony.
- We can preserve links to the objects’ context in online collections, improving their discoverability – and our knowledge and understanding.
- And – if we harvest the associations to display on the museum’s or other sites – we can forge new browseways within and between collections.
In short, the game becomes an engine of rich, useful data about collection material, and through that the world.
A web-based form of Sembl can generate linked data with a difference. It’s linked link data, and quite different to normal linked data.
- Instead of connections based on what a thing is – sculpture, or wooden, or red – Sembl generates connections based on a mutual resemblance between two things. Which, amazingly enough, is a great way of gaining a sense of what each thing is. And if your interest is to enable joyful journeying through cultural ideas, or serendipitous discovery, this approach just wins…
- Instead of compiling logical links, Sembl cultivates the analogical.
- Instead of building and deploying a structured, consistent set of relationships, Sembl revels in personal, imprecise, one-of-a-kind, free association, however crazy.
- Instead of attempting to create a comprehensive and stable map of language and culture, Sembl links are perpetually generative, celebrating the organic, dynamic quirks of cognitive and natural processes.
But the most important way that Sembl is distinct from other systems of network links is that those who generate the links learn network thinking. Which is a critical faculty in this complex time between times, as many smart people will tell you.
Marshall McLuhan foresaw this shift 50 years ago. Classification is for simple, neat systems. Networks are complex and messy; they demand new forms of literacy. But we have not yet adapted as we need to.
We’re still largely stuck in the Enlightenment thinking that began 400 years ago to institute the binary order of things. But notice what preceded 17th-century ways of knowing. According to Foucault, the ‘primary form of knowledge’ was … resemblance.
Poets have always known the virtues of analogy as a path to the truth.
And my favourite visual artists work in this way, creating in-between spaces for us to explore and discover.
As part of an installation at the Maryland Historical Society, African-American artist Fred Wilson placed a set of slave shackles into a cabinet with fine silverware and called it ‘Metalwork’.
And more subtly, this work is by New Zealand-born artist Rosalie Gascoigne, who lived for a long time in Canberra, where I’m from – so I had to include her… She took discarded signs, disassembled and reassembled them, converting text to textures into which we can read our own messages.
I like the way these artists work; I like how their works induce me to think.
I keep an eye out for opportunities to participate in associative thinking. Last year The Open Museum – a user-generated exhibit site – hosted several rounds of a game where one person would post an initial work, such as this one…
and then anyone else could come along and a post a visually similar work. After a few days the most up-voted work would win the place as the number 2 image, and so on. You can see here how this game progressed in the first 12 moves.
It continued until after 26 moves, it looped back to the original work.
Brilliant. I love how there’s no right answer, and that it encourages wide and wild associations – from a satellite image to a Miro, to a photo of a human embryo.
Polyphonic thinking
Sembl promotes dialogic, non-linear thinking, and new forms of coherence.
It’s distinct from deliberative thinking, which is rational and causal and logical and linear.
It’s another kind of thinking, which might be informed by rational thought, but its purpose is not singular.
You might say its purpose is to create – and cohabit – a state of grace, from which ideas simply emerge.
If playing Sembl gives us practice in polyphonic thinking, if it helps cultivate connectivity and our capacity to find solutions to local and global problems, it is good value. As Charles says, every move is a creative leap.
If you’re interested in working with us to supply content, develop strategy or raise capital, we’re keen to talk.
And I can’t tell you how much I’m anticipating being able to invite everyone to play.
*****
NDF delegates were a truly lovely audience. Having spoken with lots of people about Sembl in the past week – and now that I have a bit of distance from this presentation – I can already see some ways in which I could express Sembl ideas in more pithy, accessible ways. In fact, I plan to rewrite the home page of this site.
In the mean time, know that I would absolutely more-than-welcome further comments, ideas, questions or – of course – resonances with your own context. And if you want to help shape Sembl, you could tell me: in what way are these ideas useful to you, personally and/or professionally? (Or to put this another way: how might you use a tool for network thinking?)
Introducing… The Museum Game
The Museum Game is now playable on-site at the National Museum of Australia. This post links to a video introduction, curriculum links, and a booking form :)
Form is insight: a musical experiment
[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — here’s a musical experiment from the book / project i seem to be writing, which offers a grand slam intro to contemplative and artistic approaches to creative thinking, and hence a fresh angle on intelligence ]
It looks very much as though I’ve been beginning to write parts of let’s call it “a book” for a while on Zenpundit. I laid out the overall topic and approach as I see it in my previous post, but here I would like to launch into it mid-stream, with a musical experiment to explore the mind’s capabilities. I’ll explain why, later.
Okay, here’s the experiment.
I invite you to listen to a short piece by JS Bach on YouTube. This will take roughly three and a half minutes of your time, the piece of music itself is one of the glories of the classical tradition, I’ve chosen the video because of the terrific graphics that accompany and illuminate the music, there will be some rock and ragtime to follow for those whose tastes go those ways — and I must ask you to pay very special attention while watching and listening to the video.
Before you do that, however, I’d like you to take a look at the image at the top of this post, which shows you the ending of the piece both as the video graphics present it, and in the musical notation or “score” an organist would read. The graphics are terrific because they allow the untrained eye to follow the threads of the different melodies or “voices” as Bach braids them together. The work is his “Little Fugue” in G minor, which you can find indexed in his collected works as “BWV 578”.
Here’s how I’d like you to pay attention during the piece:
As you listen to the performance on video, I’d like you to follow the colored lines of the melodies as they move along in the video graphic, and listen carefully to hear how many of the lines of sound you can actually follow distinctly in your mind. At the beginning there’s only one “voice” – only one line of melody – so your task is easy. If you are used to listening to music of one sort or another, you’ll almost certainly be able to track, more or less, some kind of thumping bass line and some kind of melody rising above it – two voices.
Can you manage three? four or more?
If you’re a musician you may still find the graphics — and the exercise – illuminating, but you might prefer to make the same experiment with a version of the piece played by Robert Köbler on a Silbemann organ, accompanied on video by the score..
Here’s the video — see how many voices you can hear and track:
How did you do? How many voices could you follow at one time?
And why am I bothering to as you to do this, and then talking so much about it? After all, you may already know everything I’m saying and more, or you may simply not care that much about such things.
Here’s why: the project is about creativity and intelligence.
It’s about how to apply forms of creativity that are generally found in the arts and humanities — and in the world’s contemplative traditions — to the questions that arise for every bright human as we face the exhilarating challenging and terrifyingly complex world around us.
It’s about understanding complexity, in the way the Intelligence Community needs to understand complexity, and business leadership, and our scientists and technicians, and the congregants at our synagogues, churches, mosques and temples, and, well, all the bright people everywhere — disillusioned, or fresh and rarin’ to go.
Complex problems often require some sort of recognition and resolution of several or many distinct and sometimes conflicting voices, points of view, concerns or vectors.. which may shift in intensity and direction as the situation evolves.
In musical terminology, any music that includes two or more distinct melodic lines or “voices” playing together simultaneously is polyphonic — from the Greek for “many voices”. Counterpoint — from the Latin for a point that counters another point — is the artful way in which composers can “work” two or more melodic lines together, so they clash at times, resolve, and harmonize.
The fugue — the particular contrapuntal form Bach uses in the piece you just heard — imposes even tighter constraints on the composer, and can elicit even greater creative inspiration as a result — as many of Bach’s, Mozart‘s, Beethoven‘s and others’ greatest works testify..
I imagine you can see that the many voices of polyphony — voices in counterpoint, that at times clash and are in need of resolution and harmony — have their equivalents in the complex multi-stakeholder problems, clashing points of view and need for constructive resolutions that creative artists, intelligence analysts, strategy, policy and decision makers, and anyone who wants to keep aware of the shifting currents of our strange and complicated times all need to take into account.
So polyphonic, and specifically contrapuntal, thinking, can be extended way beyond the realm of music — as Hermann Hesse suggested in his greatest novel, Glenn Gould tried to demonstrate in his “contrapuntal radio” pieces, and Edward Said understood when he characterized the Israeli-Palestinian issue in these words:
When you think about it, when you think about Jew and Palestinian not separately, but as part of a symphony, there is something magnificently imposing about it. A very rich, also very tragic, also in many ways desperate history of extremes — opposites in the Hegelian sense — that is yet to receive its due. So what you are faced with is a kind of sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out.
The “book” may turn out to be a DVD, or a workshop, at this point who knows? Whatever format it winds up it takes, it will teach contrapuntal thinking — using examples drawn from world culture and contemporary geopolitics — as a radical alternative methodology, complementary to but very different from our current analytic methods. It will be a text in the cross-disciplinary, associative, lateral or horizontal equivalent of the kind of disciplinary, siloed, linear or vertical thinking that our increasingly specialized culture has trained us in —
and which we need to supplement, if we are to have the mental flexibility to see and make the creative leaps our times require of us.
For more on this, see also my Feb 2011 post (at least I’m reasonably consistent over time) A HipBone approach to analysis VI: from Cairo to Bach.
God only knows how many voices there are in Bob Dylan‘s song Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, or Eric Clapton‘s Have you ever loved a woman from the 2004 Crossroads Guitar Festival – the principle’s the same, but we don’t (yet) have the graphics to allow your eye to follow what the musicians are doing — and there are solos, and sidemen.
Each musician has at least one voice, its melodies and its silences, to present – and sometimes several, as we saw with the Bach organ piece. And together the individual musicians add up to an ensemble, each with an awareness of the others’ voices and a concentration on their own.
And for an insight into the varieties of organ mastery, compare Billy Preston‘s amazing solo starting at 9’33” on the Clapton piece, Al Kooper‘s organ work on Dylan’s Sad Eyed Lady, and Ton Koopman‘s rendering of the same Little Fugue BWV 578 we started with – where at times you can watch Koopman’s fingers on the keys or feet on the pedals, for yet another way of visualizing the intricate interweavings of this glorious music.
Glenn Gould had an amazing mind: for your enjoyment, here’s a version of his own fugue, aptly entitled So You Want To Write a Fugue? — with a similar graphical display to help you follow along with the interweaving lines of melody…
It’s serious, and it’s hilarious too! Or maybe you’d prefer Scott Joplin? Either way, enjoy:
Glenn Gould:
Scott Joplin, Euphonic Sounds, a Syncopated Novelty: