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whatthehellistherapy · 5 years ago

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Interprofessional learning and practise. APT010l003Y

Interprofessional learning and practise. APT010l003Y (1443 words)

Dramatherapists, whether you’re still in training or have been a registered practitioner in this field for years, we all ‘kind of’ know that other arts therapies’ techniques can creep into our work. We are often encouraging our clients to embody their experiences and feelings and I’m sure you have a stack of arts materials, a box of small world objects and a drum (at the very least) that all make regular appearances in your sessions. We borrow from other modalities regularly, but what’s the link? How relevant are the skills found in the related professions to the work we do with our clients, and to us as therapist? And why is it that they cross over into our field of work seemingly so easily?

I’ve got two left feet, never got the end of ‘three blind mice’ on the recorder at school and can barely draw a half decent stick man, so how can I incorporate dance movement psychotherapy, music therapy, art psychotherapy and or play therapy into my work as a dramatherapist? And should I even bother? Can’t we just stick to what we know and draw on our knowledge and experience using character, story and script work?

I had the opportunity to attend workshops for all other modalities within arts therapy with the aim of gaining some further understanding of why I often incorporate at least some of their techniques in my own work with clients of all ages, across broad and varied settings. The first thing that really struck me about the arts therapies is that they all encourage a type of creativity that often comes naturally to children. When thinking about the development of a very young child before any sort of cognitive understanding or clarity, there often comes sound, movement, play and creativity, all of which can be linked to a means of communication. This concept resonated with Sue Jennings’s developmental paradigm of ‘Embodiment, Projection and Role’ and lectures and research suddenly came hurtling back and reminding me of the importance of understanding a client’s early interactions in relation to self and other.

One of the first things mentioned in the music therapy workshop was the idea of being ‘along side’ a client without the use of words, communicating through a ‘transcendence of language’ and ‘music links with our innermost emotional, spiritual and most private selves, and yet is also a social experience.’ (Stige and Bunt, 2014)

I learnt that a lot of research has been done into the very earliest stages of communication and there is an inherent musicality in pre-verbal infant/carer interactions. During this particular workshop I was struck by the realisation of how powerful and evocative music can be in relation to feelings. You know, every time you hear that specific song and you suddenly feel like you’re headlining your very own world tour? Or the moment in a film when you’re holding back tears and then the music starts and suddenly your popcorn is swimming in a small salty river of your own making? And haven’t we all stared moodily out of the window of a bus or car and imagined ourselves in a music video? No? Just me? Well, if we admit it or not, music can affect us. It can move us, and it can be a vital tool in helping us connect to emotions we may not be able to vocalise and sometimes they may even be feelings we aren’t fully aware of.

(the picture shows just some of the instruments used during the music therapy workshop)

I found a similar connection during my participation in the dance movement psychotherapy workshop. I learnt that the therapists’ intention is for the client to embody an experience rather than rely solely on words. We were invited to take part in a pair exercise where one person leads, moving as they wish with a motivation or an emotion in mind, and their partner aims to simply be ‘along-side.’ They are not controlling or changing the client’s behaviour but taking the time to notice and support them physically. After all, the therapists’ role is not to try to ‘fix’ but to be ‘with’ the client. This reinforced for me, the importance of considering the whole person when working therapeutically. I have personally found I difficult at times to work in the body both in training to be a dramatherapist and in my previous training as an actor but I also respect and understand how important it is for this type of creative therapeutic work. It is vital we learn to notice what a client is communicating beyond what they may or may not be saying and developing these skills can be particularly important, especially when working with clients who are none verbal or who have limited verbal communication skills. The idea of working with the whole client in therapy, establishing a link between body and mind, which is less commonly found in more traditional and more cognitive therapeutic approaches, appeared paramount across all the arts therapies and is an idea supported by Bessel van der Kolk, in ‘The body keeps the score.’ This book explores how trauma is manifested in the body, it has links to some illness and disease, and it is interesting to see how that may influence our work with our clients.

I experienced a theme of transcendence of language across all the arts therapies as each workshop focused at some point on the therapists’ ability to be along side the client in their expression of self. It was clearly less important to focus on what the client created and much more about what they were communicating. The importance is not on the creation of a piece of music, a dance or a sculpt but it is the lived experience between the client and therapist that offers the most value and space for therapeutic change.

The play therapy workshop put emphasis on giving the child permission, not to change or question their choices but to be alongside, to allow them to play and to be creative. This brought up my desire to ‘fix’ or to ‘make better’ and I often find myself wanting to step into the role of the rescuer and regularly explore this in supervision. The notion that there is no right and wrong is an idea I found, present throughout all modalities and something I learnt in each of these workshops. I found this vital in helping to establish not only a safe space for the child or client to work but also to enable a relationship between client and therapist to form. Arguably one of the most important factors for therapy.

I entered these workshops with concern over my ability, or lack thereof (thanks shadow) and thoughts such as, ‘I can’t dance, am I too fat for leggings? I’m no good at art. I can’t play an instrument and what if I play out of tune?’ all allowed my self-judgement to creep in before I’d even started. It made me think of how our life experiences, including experience of trauma, contribute to the development and growth of the shadow and what this can mean in terms of our relationship to creativity, and in turn, therapy.

The art therapist began by sharing a quote from the Peter London book, ‘No more second-hand art’ and stated ‘Meaning, not beauty, is what we are after.’ This really resonated with my own sense of judgement and the pressure I place on myself to be ‘good enough.’ In relation to my clients, I noticed how important it is to allow their feelings to be present and how a non-judgemental and permissive approach found throughout the arts therapies can help to hold a client throughout the work.

So, how and why do we incorporate these other modalities in our work? Well, I realised through attending these workshops that, in one way or another that they all go hand in hand. Creativity is not limited. It isn’t about choosing and rigidly sticking to one form or the other. As creative therapists we have a set of tools which change and grow as we learn and understand and they can be adapted to our clients. We, as humans are not mind then body. We are one whole being, we feel as well as think. Our emotions live in us and not apart from us. Creativity is usually the first and the most natural, innate means of communication and if we can keep this in mind and continue to understand its importance, we can enable our clients to work with their emotion, their life experiences, their trauma and pave the way for understanding, permission and positive change.

Bibliography

Stige, B. Bunt, L. (2014) ‘Music therapy: an art beyond words’, 2nd edition, London, Routledge.

Van Der Kolk, B. (2014) ‘The Body Keeps the Score’, UK, Penguin.

London, P. (1989) ‘No More Second-Hand Art: awakening the artist within,’ USA, Shambhala Publications

#dramatherapy artpsychotherapy dancemovementpsychotherapy playtherapy musictherapy

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we-future-first · 4 years ago

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[In-Depth] The Internet and Memes are Proof that Humanity is an Organism and Money is a Lie

I know this sounds asinine but just give me a few paragraphs to get some momentum.

You can't exist in 2020 and not intuitively just know what a meme is. Even those that exist totally cut-off from the online sphere would get the picture after a few examples. Most typically we think of image macros like this, or this, but these are just a couple of modern, digital memes and don't begin to scratch the surface of just exactly what a meme is, and why the answer to that might be really fucking important.

For example, a picture doesn't need any text to be a meme - similarly, a picture can be only text and still be a meme. A phrase can be a meme, or even a single word. A sound. Symbols. The structure of the building you're in and the design of the device you're reading this from are memetic artifacts. Musical subgenres, fashion and style trends, social patterns and institutions including family, marriage, property, law, crime, and punishment. Even complex ideologies - religious, political, and philosophical - are essentially very nuanced and enduring memes that span hundreds and thousands of years.

It's difficult to think of anything that is not a direct result of memetic repetition, as this is the way in which all information, beliefs, and ideas are shared and become socially entrenched - this method of transmission is directly related to, and reveals something specific about the origins of power, authority, control, and choice, and how we relate to those concepts and ourselves.

Human behaviour and response is memetic - a product of pattern, repetition, and context rather than a series of conscious “decisions” we make at every moment - this is not to suggest we are totally bound and determined by fate, but only that we are bound and determined to act only in accordance with our own character - we are not something responsible for our decisions, we are our decisions, and for that we bear responsibility.

Can you imagine Trump acting like anything else besides a caricature of pure petulance?

That’s his role - his constitution.

I think the belief that he, or you, or I, "make decisions" is backwards - partly a product of the language we use to speak about ourselves and the world, and partly just our basic instincts - it's plainly obvious that I am aware and alive and can consider many possibilities so it only seems to follow that I must exert some influence over my choices.

To me, there is little distinction between Me and My Choices - I am those choices, not a separate entity that chooses - that stands separate, considers, and then finally pulls the equivalent lever corresponding with the 'choice' I’ve made.

Those final three words are superfluous - to me they all reference a single thing - a localized happening from my specific perspective.

This idea is naturally unpalatable as it would seem to not only absolve one of all responsibility for wrongdoing, but also rob one of their ownership over both their good actions, and artistic creations.

I think this is simply a knee jerk reaction to protect the ego's sense of itself as something distinct and in control, as to accept the opposite comes with a great sense of powerlessness.

Responsibility is not something we take - responsible is what we are.

Language has an implicit kind of magical quality - by that I mean much like the imagined casting of a spell, it is widely assumed that speaking the right words in the right combination (and order) can influence and compel people to act, and this action is the source of change. This is why great orators have always possessed great influence over the course of history - someone must be able to give power to an idea that can move masses to act as a single, unified force of nature.

I don't believe individual human action is ever the true catalyst to change - I think it is human action predicated on and driven specifically by the memetic concepts we have at our disposal - most importantly, "What is good, right, valuable, and true?".

Language is itself inherently biased, limiting and divisive - Black Lives Matter means absolutely nothing until it is interpreted, and language is always loaded with judgments. As much as it is the primary way we communicate, ironically it just as often obfuscates and confuses because the kind of language we have available to us directly determines how we understand and conceptualize the world (and ourselves). It is not a matter of merely being Peterson-ianly "precise" in our speech, because precision is meaningless if the principles that precede it are incompatible.

How many proponents of any ideology have actually read and engaged with its foundational and supporting texts?

Probably very few.

How many have absorbed bits and pieces through their specific context - language, culture, family, friends, media, and memes?

Probably almost everybody.

These repetitions of pattern connect us to something far greater than any single one of us - our collective human ideas about value, function, purpose, and their relation with each other - memes are a portal to the sum total of all human knowledge, experience, and feeling - memes are threads sewn into the fabric of the tapestry of reality, connecting us to the past, present, future, each other, and something totally separate - something unspeakable that yet demands to be spoken of.

You may have felt it when engaged in something everyday and ordinary, yet struck as if for the very first time by the majesty and totality of all there is - all experience happening right now, billions of distinct and separate simultaneous happenings, disconnected and separated only by virtue of the limitations of their own collective conceptions of what is real, what is true, and what is possible.

This universal need to communicate and share - to be heard - is intimately linked to creative expression.

Memes are innately communal and creative - they are meant to translate a feeling or thought into a shareable format that can be used, related to, and understood, and concepts of community and creativity have a direct connection to both art and play, two qualities that (partly) define the human experience.

Memes and artistic expression both reflect something crucial and universal in the spark of our human spirit - they represent the human need to share, something intimately linked with altruism (and collectivism). Art can of course be done selfishly, but there is no artistic expression at all without the memetic patterns that allow that expression and an audience to engage with the artist's creation.

Memes are thus quite a bit more significant than just funny and relatable pictures we share - what a meme is has direct implications regarding what we are, and our current shared cultural conception of them is simplistic and, as a result, limiting. If we don’t fully grasp what a meme is, we lack the capacity to both comprehend their true power, and the ability to wield that power to our own collective benefit. Instead, we persist in an ordering of society that enriches only a small handful that have fallen to the top through nothing other than circumstance and who insist this must be the natural ordering of the world simply because it is the current ordering of it.

Can we really trust those who wield inordinate amounts of power to fairly consider how it might be meted out differently?

Is the fate of society directly tied to the fate of the billionaire class, or to the current institutions of policing and governance?

From where is their authority and power actually derived?

The primary source is our shared belief that these institutions are legitimate and just.

The secondary source is their ability and willingness to inflict violence on us if we do not accept the first source.

Violence is of course the most powerful and persuasive avenue of acquiring and maintaining power - both literal violent acts, and indirect violence inflicted and facilitated by a system of organization that regards the principle of one person's right to hoard obscene amounts of wealth as a higher and more just one than providing the material necessities of life for all people.

That is the basic moral principle that serves as the keystone of the structure of our society as it is currently ordered.

Do we really believe those with obscene means deserve it?

What about those with such means that they could lose a thousand yearly salaries in a single day and not have that impact their quality of life in the slightest?

The Divine Right of Kings still rules, although now it's simply the Divine Right of the Wealthy.

We are meant to believe this is just The Way the World Is?

I find that idea just as intolerable and narrow-minded as those that believe it.

Society bears little proof of functioning properly anywhere - properly as in for the common good of all people.

If we instead understand "properly" as to the obscene and perverted benefit of a small few at the expense of everybody else, then it is functioning tremendously properly.

Individualism is too often championed by those who don't understand the distinction between it and selfishness, and this crucial error acts as the basic foundation for an entire wing of political and philosophical thought which insists might makes right, and "value" is directly related to money and money alone, where everything can be spoken about in terms of its relative worth in US dollars, one of many currencies that can, has, and will, become as good as worthless in an instant due to nothing other than our shared confidence in it.

Now I want to make some statements that are broad and general, but ones that I think are fairly common and subconscious. These are not meant to be statements of fact, merely word and concept associations to get us to see how we arrive at 'facts'.

The relationship between progressivism and conservatism is like the relationship between masculine and feminine, which itself is like the relationship between individual and community.

Consider this disharmony between two opposing (or complementary) principles as essentially the basis of all philosophical (and thus political) thought. Also consider opposing principles as really a single thing as opposites always exist only in relation to each other.

This sounds a lot like some meaningless new-age woo, but I think many people make these associations subconsciously anyway, even though we can offer legitimate arguments against them.

Just conjure up some typically conservative imagery and symbols in your head - what kind of qualities are emphasized? What is deemed valuable, good, and of worth? What foundations precede these symbols?

The inescapable and global grasp of the Internet and the smartphone was a pivotal evolutionary shift in human history, comparable to our discoveries of fire, agriculture, steel, and the combustion engine - all of which are only useful through memetic transmission.

The Internet and our constantly connected culture has allowed us to, in a sense, act as a very rudimentary hivemind. Our access to, and saturation of information, media, and communication is both constant and instant - it is now possible to share our thoughts with almost everybody there is - our friends and family, their friends and family, people we don't know and never will, people in another country, and people who perhaps don't even share the same primary language as us - a single sentence spat out into the ether can potentially reach billions of people on the planet in a matter of hours.

You, me, and everybody else has a form of direct access to nearly every other human consciousness on this planet - what could we possibly use that for?

Memes, of course.

To crowdsource the question of 'what is good?', because that is what lies at the centre of all action and belief. The fact that we have seemingly become ever more divisive and politically polarized is not to be tutted at or wished away, but rather acknowledged as the only way in which an outcome - Truth - can be arrived at, spread, copy itself, and propagate to the point where its opposite seems wholly and utterly absurd.

Accepting all of this, it is possible to understand Humanity not as an abstracted collection of billions of separate individuals, but as a single, unique happening of organism/environment that can, given certain factors, act in unison.

The most important factor is, of course, each self knowing and feeling that they are a part of this greater self, which is not something that can be forced, but something, like creation itself, that happens spontaneously.

One can edit and correct and obsess over the minutiae of an artistic object, but inspiration strikes, it is not conjured - it is never willed into being, it is rather being itself which then acts on our will.

Those advocating for either a progressive or conservative approach to policy can not compromise, not because the facts are in disagreement (although that is true), but because what comes before the facts is not in agreement - that is, the way the world is structured and ordered, or The Way The World Is, which always itself acts as the background for an ideology rather than the reverse.

The idiom 'seeing is believing' is actually totally backwards - the truth is that believing is seeing.

So, if memes are the true catalyst of human action and social change, can we then "meme ourselves" into a better reality? Can we, together, engineer, build, or construct a meme to spread and transform our shared, collective (un)conscious and the ideas that follow about not only what is true, but what is possible?

I believe so, and I think a good place to start is to understand the illusory and mutable nature of money and wealth, and their direct relationship to power and authority and the distribution of these things. Money is a real 'thing' that performs a necessary function, but our shared understanding of it holds real power over it, and in this way we can collectively shape and alter that power it commands over our lives.

We can't function without money, but we absolutely can function with a novel way of distributing it so as to lessen the total amount of suffering directly related to poverty and the inability to provide materially for oneself.

Does Jeff Bezos really have billions of actual, tangible currency, or is his currency really in the form of power and influence as represented by money?

Is the standard work week from Monday to Friday, or Monday to Thursday?

Whatever the answer, is it because this is simply The Way the World Is, or is The Way the World Is directly shaped by our collective ideas about it?

The state-sanctioned brutalization and modern lynchings of black men at the hands of “Law Enforcement” in the U.S. is itself a memetic pattern - “Law Enforcement” tactics are memetic, including their violent response to protest, organization, and the legitimate outpouring of anger directed at the inhumanity of the institutions of "Justice". The video of George Floyd's horrific and senseless murder was spread memetically, and so too were the calls for protest all across not only the U.S., but the entire world.

A memetic call for collective struggle has been sounded, and heard by the entire planet - now is the time to take this opportunity to understand ourselves as one, to tear down and rebuild the arbitrary social patterns of power and control that rule all of our lives.

The 'legitimized' armed wings of state, police and military personnel, should stand with the people, not as their opposition - stand with them in demanding justice and equality for ALL PEOPLE and the dismantling of a system which treats all conscious beings as resources, and like its treatment of every resource, exhausts it to the point of annihilation.

A single officer taking a principled stand, to cross the illusory barrier of us/other could be the crumbled brick that begins the collapse of the whole structure. All it will take is one person of good conscience to do something difficult, but something good, to memetically begin a shift towards a better, more equal society.

If you can't bring yourself to do that, you just may be an enemy of the people.

See how compelling language can be? Nested within every word is paragraphs of subtext, assumption, and implication.

Enemies of the people are just that - enemies to a free and emancipated existence.

To preserve life violence may sometimes be the only option, but violence can be avoided memetically - you cannot put a bullet in a concept, and it’s just as futile to do the same to those who espouse, exemplify, or believe it, not to mention a wee bit of a moral grey area. Violence can be lessened with the correct memetic foundation that underpins our conception of 'self', 'other', and 'world', and the reciprocal nature of those things - violence is given power by distinction and separation, but that power can be neutered by understanding that not only are you yourself, you are every other self, too.

The global economic and social reaction to the Coronavirus is proof of this shared power our collective thoughts have over the world we inhabit. Of course we cannot simply will it out of existence through a shared psychic exercise, but we can decrease the destructive potential through the memetic spread of ideas like social distancing.

It has also laid bare that the distinctions and lines in the sand we use to divide and categorize are mostly illusory - the global community, as the aggregate of every other community, group, faction, and individual, is where we must focus our collective efforts. There is no nation but Earth, and to shift our reality in the direction we want, it will take collective effort.

The emancipation of all humanity must happen together because of the memetic nature of change and our connected world. There is no freedom until we are all free.

Somebody called the police because of a suspected counterfeit $20 and here we are.

Imagine what can be accomplished together, by simply altering our beliefs about what is inherent and immutable, and what is merely a byproduct of antiquated memetic artifacts and the resulting methods of ordering and structuring society?

We can meme ourselves better.

Black Lives Matter.

White supremacy does not.

Land matters.

Landlords do not.

People matter.

Profits do not.

Billions matter.

Billionaires do not.

These things are only true or false based on our collective ideas about what is right and what is valuable.

Justice should not be owned by anyone, it is owed to everyone.

Humanity is an organism - a unified field of conscious relationship and pattern from micro to macro, comprised of each one of us.

Knowing what we are is the first step to becoming what we can be.

We can meme ourselves into a better tomorrow, together.

submitted by /u/thegreatself [link] [comments] source https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/hf0k6k/indepth_the_internet_and_memes_are_proof_that/

#Future #Futuristic #Future oriented

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deathghost8 · 4 years ago

Text

Memes are Channeling --Parable is a meme -- humanity organism - memes, money, hope

VIA thegreatself on Alan Watts community I know this sounds asinine but just give me a few paragraphs to get some momentum. You can't exist in 2020 and not intuitively just know what a meme is. Even those that exist totally cut-off from the online sphere would get the picture after a few examples. Most typically we think of image macros like this https://imgur.com/Sc1nBL7 , or this https://imgur.com/yW2QUqt , but these are just a couple of modern, digital memes and don't begin to scratch the surface of just exactly what a meme is, and why the answer to that might be really fucking important. For example, a picture doesn't need any text to be a meme - similarly, a picture can be only text and still be a meme. A phrase can be a meme, or even a single word. A sound. Symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S#/media/File:%22Cool_S%22.svg . The structure of the building you're in and the design of the device you're reading this from are memetic artifacts. Musical subgenres, fashion and style trends, social patterns and institutions including family, marriage, property, law, crime, and punishment. Even complex ideologies - religious, political, and philosophical - are essentially very nuanced and enduring memes that span hundreds and thousands of years. It's difficult to think of anything that is not a direct result of memetic repetition, as this is the way in which all information, beliefs, and ideas are shared and become socially entrenched - this method of transmission is directly related to, and reveals something specific about the origins of power, authority, control, and choice, and how we relate to those concepts and ourselves. Human behaviour and response is memetic - a product of pattern, repetition, and context rather than a series of conscious “decisions” we make at every moment - this is not to suggest we are totally bound and determined by fate, but only that we are bound and determined to act only in accordance with our own character - we are not something responsible for our decisions, we are our decisions, and for that we bear responsibility. Can you imagine Trump acting like anything else besides a caricature of pure petulance? That’s his role - his constitution. I think the belief that he, or you, or I, "make decisions" is backwards - partly a product of the language we use to speak about ourselves and the world, and partly just our basic instincts - it's plainly obvious that I am aware and alive and can consider many possibilities so it only seems to follow that I must exert some influence over my choices. To me, there is little distinction between Me and My Choices - I am those choices, not a separate entity that chooses - that stands separate, considers, and then finally pulls the equivalent lever corresponding with the [] 'choice' I’ve made. [] Those final three words are superfluous - to me they all reference a single thing - a localized happening from my specific perspective. This idea is naturally unpalatable as it would seem to not only absolve one of all responsibility for wrongdoing, but also rob one of their ownership over both their good actions, and artistic creations. I think this is simply a knee jerk reaction to protect the ego's sense of itself as something distinct and in control, as to accept the opposite comes with a great sense of powerlessness. // Responsibility is not something we take - responsible is what we are. // Language has an implicit kind of magical quality - by that I mean much like the imagined casting of a spell, it is widely assumed that speaking the right words in the right combination (and order) can influence and compel people to act, and this action is the source of change. This is why great orators have always possessed great influence over the course of history - someone must be able to give power to an idea that can move masses to act as a single, unified force of nature. I don't believe individual human action is ever the true catalyst to change - I think it is human action predicated on and driven specifically by the memetic concepts we have at our disposal - most importantly, [] "What is good, right, valuable, and true?" []. Language is itself inherently biased, limiting and divisive - [] Black Lives Matter [] means absolutely nothing until it is interpreted, and language is always loaded with judgments. As much as it is the primary way we communicate, ironically it just as often obfuscates and confuses because the kind of language we have available to us directly determines how we understand and conceptualize the world (and ourselves). It is not a matter of merely being Peterson-ianly "precise" in our speech, because precision is meaningless if the principles that precede it are incompatible. How many proponents of any ideology have /// actually /// read and engaged with its foundational and supporting texts? Probably very few. How many have absorbed bits and pieces through their specific context - language, culture, family, friends, media, and memes? Probably almost everybody. These repetitions of pattern connect us to something far greater than any single one of us - our collective human ideas about value, function, purpose, and their relation with each other - memes are a portal to the sum total of all human knowledge, experience, and feeling - memes are threads sewn into the fabric of the tapestry of reality, connecting us to the past, present, future, each other, and something totally separate - something unspeakable that yet demands to be spoken of. You may have felt it when engaged in something everyday and ordinary, yet struck as if for the very first time by the majesty and totality of all there is - all experience happening right now, billions of distinct and separate simultaneous happenings, disconnected and separated only by virtue of the limitations of their own collective conceptions of what is real, what is true, and what is possible. This universal need to communicate and share - to be heard - is intimately linked to creative and artistic expression. Memes are innately communal and creative - they are meant to translate a feeling or thought into a shareable format that can be used, related to, and understood, and community and creativity have a direct and intimate connection to both art and play, two characteristics central to the human experience. Art is itself its own distinct form of language - a language that transmits ideas and feeling only through its interaction with another. Art is our way of speaking telepathically - a way to contain and convey something enormous and infinite bound in the confines of an object. Memes and artistic expression both reflect something crucial and universal in the spark of our human spirit - both are inherently creative and communal - they represent the human need to share, something intimately linked with community and altruism. Art can of course be done selfishly, but there is no artistic expression at all without the memetic patterns that allow that expression and an audience to engage with and be receptive to the artist's message. Memes are thus quite a bit more significant than just funny and relatable pictures we share - what a meme is has direct implications regarding what we are, and our current shared cultural conception of them is simplistic and, as a result, limiting. If we don’t fully grasp what a meme is, we lack the capacity to both comprehend their true power, and the ability to wield that power to our own collective benefit. Instead, we persist in an ordering of society that enriches only a small handful that have fallen to the top through nothing other than circumstance and who insist this must be the natural ordering of the world simply because it is the current ordering of it. Can we really trust those who wield inordinate amounts of power to fairly consider how it might be meted out differently? Is the fate of society directly tied to the fate of the billionaire class, or to the current institutions of policing and governance? From where is their authority and power actually derived? The primary source is our shared belief that these institutions are legitimate and just. The secondary source is their ability and willingness to inflict violence on us if we do not accept the first source. Violence is of course the most powerful and persuasive avenue of acquiring and maintaining power - both literal violent acts, and indirect violence inflicted and facilitated by a system of organization that regards the principle of one person's right to hoard obscene amounts of wealth as a higher and more just one than providing the material necessities of life for all people. That is the basic moral principle that serves as the keystone of the structure of our society as it is currently ordered. Do we really believe those with obscene means deserve it? What about those with such means that they could lose a thousand yearly salaries in a single day and not have that impact their quality of life in the slightest? The Divine Right of Kings still rules, although now it's simply the Divine Right of the Wealthy. We are meant to believe this is just [] The Way the World Is? [] I find that idea just as intolerable and narrow-minded as those that believe it. Society bears little proof of functioning properly anywhere - properly as in for the common good of all people. If we instead understand "properly" as to the obscene and perverted benefit of a small few at the expense of everybody else, then it is functioning tremendously properly. Individualism is too often championed by those who don't understand the distinction between it and selfishness, and this crucial error acts as the basic foundation for an entire wing of political and philosophical thought which insists might makes right, and "value" is directly related to money and money alone, where everything can be spoken about in terms of it's worth in terms of the US $ - one of many currencies that can, in an instant, become as good as worthless due to nothing other than our shared confidence in it. Now I want to make some statements that are broad and general, but ones that I think are fairly common and subconscious. These are not meant to be statements of fact, merely word and concept associations to get us to see how we arrive at 'facts'. /// The relationship between progressivism and conservatism is like the relationship between masculine and feminine, which itself is like the relationship between individual and community. /// Consider this disharmony between two opposing (or complementary) principles as essentially the basis of all philosophical (and thus political) thought. Also consider opposing principles as really a single thing as opposites always exist only in relation to each other. This sounds a lot like some meaningless new-age woo, but I think many people make these associations subconsciously anyway, even though we can offer legitimate arguments against them. Just conjure up some typically conservative imagery and symbols in your head - what kind of qualities are emphasized? What is deemed valuable, good, and of worth? What foundations precede these symbols? [][] The inescapable and global grasp of the Internet and the smartphone was a pivotal evolutionary shift in human history, comparable to our discoveries of fire, agriculture, steel, and the combustion engine - all of which are only useful through memetic transmission. [][] The Internet and our constantly connected culture has allowed us to, in a sense, act as a very rudimentary hivemind. Our access to, and saturation of information, media, and communication is both constant and instant - [] it is now possible to share our thoughts with almost everybody there is [] - our friends and family, their friends and family, people we don't know and never will, people in another country, and people who perhaps don't even share the same primary language as us - a single sentence spat out into the ether can potentially reach billions of people on the planet in a matter of hours. [] You, me, and everybody else has a form of direct access to nearly every other human consciousness on this planet - what could we possibly use that for? [] Memes, of course. To crowdsource the question of 'what is good?', because that is what lies at the centre of all action and belief. The fact that we have seemingly become ever more divisive and politically polarized is not to be tutted at or wished away, but rather acknowledged as the only way in which an outcome - Truth - can be arrived at, spread, copy itself, and propagate to the point where its opposite seems wholly and utterly absurd. Accepting all of this, it is possible to understand Humanity not as an abstracted collection of billions of separate individuals, but as a single, unique happening of organism/environment that can, given certain factors, act in unison. The most important factor is, of course, each self knowing and feeling that they are a part of this greater self, which is not something that can be forced, but something, like creation itself, that happens spontaneously. One can edit and correct and obsess over the minutiae of an artistic object, but inspiration strikes, it is not conjured - it is never willed into being, it is rather being itself which then acts on our will. Those advocating for either a progressive or conservative approach to policy can not compromise, not because the facts are in disagreement (although that is true), but because what comes before the facts is not in agreement - that is, the way the world is structured and ordered, or The Way The World Is, which always itself acts as the background for an ideology rather than the reverse. The idiom /// 'seeing is believing' /// is actually totally backwards - the truth is that [][] believing is seeing. [][] So, if memes are the true catalyst of human action and social change, can we then "meme ourselves" into a better reality? Can we, together, engineer, build, or construct a meme to spread and transform our shared, collective (un)conscious and the ideas that follow about not only what is true, but // what is possible? // I believe so, and I think a good place to start is to understand the [] illusory and mutable nature of money and wealth, and their direct relationship to power and authority and the distribution of these things. [] Money is a real 'thing' that performs a necessary function, but our shared understanding of it holds real power over it, and in this way we can collectively shape and alter that power it commands over our lives. We can't function without money, but we absolutely can function with a novel way of distributing it so as to lessen the total amount of suffering directly related to poverty and the inability to provide materially for oneself. [][] Does Jeff Bezos really have billions of actual, tangible currency, or is his currency really in the form of power and influence as represented by money? [][] Is the standard work week from Monday to Friday, or Monday to Thursday? Whatever the answer, is it because this is simply The Way the World Is, or is The Way the World Is directly shaped by our collective ideas about it? The state-sanctioned brutalization and modern lynchings of black men at the hands of “Law Enforcement” in the U.S. is itself a memetic pattern - “Law Enforcement” tactics are memetic, including their violent response to protest, organization, and the legitimate outpouring of anger directed at the inhumanity of the institutions of "Justice". The video of George Floyd's horrific and senseless murder was spread memetically, and so too were the calls for protest all across not only the U.S., but the entire world. A memetic call for collective struggle has been sounded, and heard by the entire planet - now is the time to take this opportunity to understand ourselves as one, to tear down and rebuild the arbitrary social patterns of power and control that rule all of our lives. The 'legitimized' armed wings of state, police and military personnel, should stand with the people, not as their opposition - stand with them in demanding justice and equality for ALL PEOPLE and the dismantling of a system which treats all conscious beings as resources, and like its treatment of every resource, exhausts it to the point of annihilation. [][] A single officer taking a principled stand, to cross the illusory barrier of us/other could be the crumbled brick that begins the collapse of the whole structure. All it will take is one person of good conscience to do something difficult, but something good, to memetically begin a shift towards a better, more equal society. [][] If you can't bring yourself to do that, you just may be an enemy of the people. See how compelling language can be? Nested within every word is paragraphs of subtext, assumption, and implication. Enemies of the people are just that - enemies to a free and emancipated existence. To preserve life, violence may sometimes be the only option. Violence can be avoided memetically - you cannot put a bullet in a concept, and it’s just as futile to do the same to those who espouse, exemplify, or believe it, not to mention a wee bit of a moral grey area. Violence can be lessened with the correct memetic foundation that underpins our conception of 'self', 'other', and 'world', and the reciprocal nature of those things - violence is given power by distinction and separation, but that power can be neutered by understanding that not only are you yourself, you are every other self, too. The global economic and social reaction to the Coronavirus is proof of this shared power our collective thoughts have over the world we inhabit. Of course we cannot simply will it out of existence through a shared psychic exercise, but we can decrease the destructive potential through the memetic spread of ideas like social distancing. It has also laid bare that the distinctions and lines in the sand we use to divide and categorize are mostly illusory - the global community, as the aggregate of every other community, group, faction, and individual, is where we must focus our collective efforts. There is no nation but Earth, and to shift our reality in the direction we want, it will take collective effort. The emancipation of all humanity must happen together because of the memetic nature of change and our connected world. There is no freedom until we are all free. Somebody called the police because of a suspected counterfeit $20 and here we are. Imagine what can be accomplished together, by simply altering our beliefs about what is inherent and immutable, and what is merely a byproduct of antiquated memetic artifacts and the resulting methods of ordering and structuring society? [][] We can meme ourselves better. [][] Black Lives Matter. White supremacy does not. Land matters. Landlords do not. People matter. Profits do not. Billions matter. Billionaires do not. Collective ownership over the instruments of profit, production, and class stratification is OUR right. Food is a right. Water is a right. Shelter is a right. Healthcare is a right. Education is a right. Freedom of expression is a right - this includes the right to quell and dismantle the violent rhetoric that enables violent expression. These things are only true or false based on our collective ideas about what is right and what is valuable. Justice should not be owned by anyone, it is owed to everyone. Humanity is an organism - a unified field of conscious relationship and pattern from micro to macro, comprised of each one of us. Knowing what we are is the first step to becoming what we can be. [][] We can meme ourselves into a better tomorrow, together. [][]

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erriikkka · 7 years ago

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As I develop my capabilities, I’ve been really a hoarder of movies, Disney films to be exact. Since then, it has always been a part of me to pay attention to these movie pictures that accompanied and innovated me throughout the years. Furthermore, i have abide to tackle the route in reaching my dreams and I have these bundle of films that represents my childhood in which i can relate to. These movies are the reason that at some point in my life, it also happens to me, and there, I see myself in my that particular scene so what are you waiting for? come on and see what’s inside my movie blog!

I. Beauty and the Beast

the 18th-century fairy tale was brought into life.

Beauty and the Beast

Disney has already given us live-action versions of animated films like Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty in recent years but in a way, Beauty and the Beast feels like the riskiest of them all so far, as far as potential backlash is concerned. Beauty and the Beast is still much more recent than those other animated classics, and many can clearly remember growing up during the film’s initial release and explosion in popularity. Starting from editing, the musical, the casting, setting and the whole production staff made everything possible for this film has to be brought into life and its just very alluring, it will never disappoint you. There are numerous scenes from the film that leave me breathless and had me in tears. One of these scenes is when Belle and the Beast had their first date and dance in the tune “Beauty and the Beast” which depicts their love story. Speaking of their lovestory, the story’s fantastical elements made it feel truly “realistic,” these touches the hearts of its viewers especially, the die-hard Disney fans who waited for this time to happen. It was like a time travel from time to time through the use of the music box which plays the life of Belle since she was born. Lastly, it was when Gaston fatally shoots the Beast from a bridge, but it collapses when the castle crumbles, and he falls to his death. The Beast dies as the last petal falls, and the servants become inanimate. As Belle tearfully professes her love to the Beast, the enchantress reveals herself and undoes the curse, repairing the crumbling castle, and restoring the Beast’s and servants’ human forms and the villagers’ memories. The Prince and Belle host a ball for the kingdom, where they dance and lived happily ever after. With that, I could definitely say that i am mesmerized by this film and it has a huge impact in my life. This movie get to be my favorite movie. 10/10

II. Frozen

Frozen.

My happy pill.

Frozen desalinates the new generation, our generation. Wherein, the youths are being portrayed by Elsa who would always keep a particular secret from everyone for the reason that she’s afraid that the society wont accept her. Within her, i saw myself, i saw how excruciating it is for her to lose her loved ones, i’m not saying that the same thing occurred to me but, even my family’s complete, there’s always that something that’ll be missing. Since then, this film has been my happy pill and Elsa served as my spirit animal and just like her, I should be continuing what I’ve started and what I want because basically, it’s me, that is me. No one could ever deny the hard fact that these challenges will always come and test us, but we should all believe in ourselves that we can like what Elsa did. She stood up for herself and she even managed to grow into a beautiful rose even if she’s all alone. The reason why i really can’t resist this film is about it’s life lessons that we should always think first before we should do any decisions for it might affect our future.

III. Inside Out

The universe is full of dark matter and black holes, of planets made of diamond and space clouds that smell like raspberries. It is beautiful, terrifying and very, very odd. but none of that wonder holds a Christmas candle to what goes on in the mind of an 11-year-old girl. Take Riley—a fun, goofy, hockey-loving kid from Minnesota. Sure, she might not look all that unusual from the outside. But dive into her gray matter and you’ll see towering shelves full of memories and terrifying forests of broccoli in her subconscious, cloud cities forming in her imagination and elaborate dreams taking shape on the sound stage of her psyche. Above it all, in the control tower, work Riley’s core emotions: Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear. They push buttons and twist knobs and help power Riley through each and every day, making scads of marble-like memories all the while. Most of those marbles are eventually whisked away to long-term memory storage. But a handful stay in the control room. They’re her core memories, moments so critical in Riley’s development that they’ve spawned whole islands of identity. When Joy is sucked out of the control tower, though, it becomes impossible for Riley to do much but sulk and cower and occasionally blow up. And while that’s not good in and of itself, it’s a fantastic depiction of what kids feel when they’re under a lot of stress. When you’re 11 and your whole world has changed, your inner world is shaken, too. And we learn here that our emotions, even ones that might seem, on the surface, “bad,” can help stabilize things. Riley’s parents don’t understand what’s going on with their suddenly sullen daughter, but they want to help. And so they do—through love and patience and understanding. It’s pretty obvious that Mom and Dad are great (though not always perfect) parents, and Riley, eventually, sees them as such. That means Inside Out isn’t content to depict how awful things can get when our lives take a sudden downward turn. No, it also wants to show us how important family can be in the process of picking yourself up and moving on.

IV. Moana

Princesses come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, though Disney’s latest addition to its ever-growing gallery of empowered female heroines, Moana – The sail of the century. It is a tale of the young daughter of a Polynesian chief who seeks to explore the world beyond her island in the Pacific and save her people in the process. Moana’s father continually asserts that because her role is to be the island’s next leader, she must remain on the island. However, her decision to defy her father’s orders leads to a fulfilling experience. She skillfully incorporates Polynesian culture into its plot, demonstrating its beauty and intricacy while respecting its origins. The film includes the traditional Polynesian legend of Maui, a demigod known for his mischievous personality and contributions to mankind, most notably his creation of the Pacific Islands by pulling up rocks from beneath the ocean. Maui’s character is cleverly utilized to highlight the significance of Moana’s agency as a young woman. Demonstrating his rude personality, Maui constantly doubts Moana’s ability to navigate the ocean and help her people because of her status as the young daughter of a chief. Moana’s continual capacity to prove Maui wrong emphasizes her independence and inherent talents regardless of her social standing or gender. Though Maui and his godly powers contribute to the storyline, Moana’s strength and determination are central to the film’s plot and communicate a stirring message of female empowerment. Patience is the key to happiness, they say, and nearly the entire film embodies that belief. For example, Moana must find enough patience to learn how to sail, patience in Maui who doesn’t trust her at first, and patience throughout her entire journey. During the film we see Moana fail a few times before she finally succeeds, and that added humanity to her character, which a lot of protagonists tend to lack. When a lot of people see this, especially our youth, I think it will help them realize that mistakes are a part of our journey through life, and some things require patience before success. The film will be cheered as many things — an entertaining holiday film, a princess story without the slightest hint of romance, a multicultural addition to the Disney family — but best of all, it’s a sharp attack on helicopter parenting. Unlike most of the young women we meet in fairy tales, Moana has a happy childhood and never wants for anything. Like many middle-class American kids today, she has two wonderful, caring parents who only want what’s best for her. Otherwise, the movie offers positive messages of self-discovery and empowerment. And Moana herself is a great role model, demonstrating perseverance, curiosity, and courage.

V. Coco

They say, Coco is the best movie of Pixar in years, and I totally agrees with it. Most of the scenes in the movie takes place in the Land of the Dead, but the movie never stops overflowing with life. Colors riot and effervesce, Mexican folk-art patterns tease the eye, music and song ride beneath each scene and goose it forward. The movie’s so exuberantly visual that it feels as if you’re sticking your head inside the collective unconscious of an entire culture. Not to mention it’s soundtrack “remember me” which says the whole story and within that, we can all see that many people can relate in this kind of music especially the emotional ones. Although out the movie, it made me cry for the reason that at some how I can relate and I know how it feels when your parents are contradicting the things you wanted to do. This movie is a 10/10 for me. It’s really nice and knowing me, being emotional this movie suits my sentimental heart. While all is well in the end, the movie can be dark and sad , especially for those who’ve lost beloved relatives. But it also has powerful themes of perseverance, teamwork, and gratitude and encourages audiences to love and appreciate their family and always follow their dreams.

5 worthy movies that you shouldn’t miss! As I develop my capabilities, I've been really a hoarder of movies, Disney films to be exact.

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greencultureforum · 7 years ago

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Tigrilla

My name is Tigrilla Gardenia. I live in Damanhur, which is one of the largest spiritual eco-communities in the world located in northern Italy. I’m not Italian, I’m actually Cuban-American.

Q: What do you do?

Tigrilla:  I study the effects of plant music on people by using an instrument called “The Music of the Plants”. It’s a musical instrument for the plant world, so I study the effects of plant music in two main realms; one is health and wellness (there’s growing evidence of the effectiveness of plant music in those areas), and the other is interspecies art. As David Buckland was saying in his speech: “What does it mean when we really start to look at the plant world?” He was talking about art being an easy way in - we have a tendency to open our doors to artists. We watch movies and do many things instead of listening to a scientist or reading a report. Through interspecies art we’re moving into a new realm and new paradigm of co-creation with the plant world.

Q: What was the moment (or series of moments) in your life that led you to become passionate about sustainability and the environment?

Tigrilla: Well, the spirit of the consumer is a problem because we tend to be on one side where we see the problem but we don’t really see the solution. The solutions have to be looked at from a consumer's perspective. Damanhur is a completely different reality; it’s like living in Hogwarts. Even though we call ourselves an eco-community, we really aren’t in the traditional way because ecology came as a side effect for us. Basically, we are a spiritual community that believes we can live in complete harmony with the plant world as well as other beings. You realize you have to. When you love something, you naturally protect it. A mother naturally protects her child and if you really love an object you're going to take care of that object. It’s not about looking at the environment as something you have to save, but instead falling in love with the environment. Before I came to Damanhur I was a city girl - I grew up in the city and I was living in Barcelona beforehand. My mother loves to call and say: “Why did you move to the middle of nowhere?”, but after moving here, I started to understand and appreciate not just the environment or going camping, but really loving this existence. We’re not hippies - people go to Damanhur at first thinking it’s going to be like a typical hippie commune, but it’s not. We have professionals of all types; there’s just a union/communion between all the different beings. Specifically with the plant world, where ecology is a natural step, so you don’t even realize you've been labeled as an environmentalist because you were just living your life. As a matter of fact, when you get to Damanhur many of our houses are painted with large murals and entire houses are completely covered with plants. People wonder why we do that and we do it because we realize that we are very small as humans - we think of ourselves as big, because we’ve got arms and legs and we can do a whole series of things they can’t, but in reality we’re about 1% of this planet. By painting them large on our houses, so they completely envelope us, it reminds us that we need to think of them first. They were the first inhabitants of land and if they don’t like what we’re doing, they push through the concrete. A plant can break concrete. If you build wrong, they’re just going to take over and if you leave, they’re going to be fine. They don’t need you. All of these little aspects made me realize that if I work with them instead of just stepping on them, my life would be completely different.

Q: So the moment you became passionate about the environment was when you moved to Damanhur?

Tigrilla: When I moved to Damanhur I finally realized things I had inherently felt. I was always someone who ate organic food and followed “reduce, reuse, recycle”. I guess, I had always been someone who looked at the environment as something that needs to be protected, but there was a shift that happened when I finally moved to Damanhur. I realized that how I had been living was not enough. That's why I get frustrated with events like the Green Culture Forum sometimes - I understand the importance of science, but I want to know how the little guy helps, because it's through purchases and actions that we move big corporations. Corporations are still made of human beings. Even here: if you're talking about being green but then throw your cigarette butts on the ground, or if you’re head of an environmental company but then go home and don’t recycle, there's a disconnect. Before Damanhur I had that disconnect where my actions were environmentally correct, but my entire lifestyle wasn't enough to make that leap and fixing the environment is going to require much more.

Q: What made you move there?

Tigrilla: I went to visit Damanhur in 2011 because I heard about it and I had moved to Europe. I heard about the community and when I got there I was blown away because you don't expect it. You think locations like this don't exist except in fairytales, but it’s real. We built underground temples and I put my hands into the earth to build temple spaces. The only difference between me and the pyramid builders is that we have the goal, belief, and ideal that we want to live in harmony. After being there, they asked me if I would be interested in working on a project in Damanhur and I thought they were insane at the time because I said: “I can't live in a community! I’d kill people! 20 people in one house is too much!” but I did. I thought I'd be there six months and now it's been six years and I'm really happy there.

Q: What kind of environment were you raised in? What were you taught about our treatment of the earth?

Tigrilla: I'm from Miami, Florida. We're talking about a place that is so beautiful but I see the environment through different eyes now. I’ve brought a lot of people to visit over the years since I live in Europe and come home to visit family. There’s a weird mixture: on one hand there’s a whole series of environmental and spiritual things that are the norm and yet there's a huge disconnect. For example, I love my brother but we don't see eye to eye. He is your typical consumer: he buys plastic bottles of water for his home, which I don’t purchase. I had to purchase them here and I'm kicking myself, because I hate it. He's your typical consumer who believes it's important to be comfortable in life and I think it’s a form of autohypnosis. To buy stuff for the sake of buying is something I gave it up in 2004, but Miami has this weird dichotomy where to an extent it’s beautiful so there is a certain amount of protection, but it’s only aesthetic. I went back recently and took someone from Damanhur with me. He was blown away by the trees, the greenness, and the nature, which is something I haven't seen after the big set of hurricanes that hit in the 1990’s. But it is very green and nobody would cut down a tree from their yard. You build your house around the tree. So there is a connection, but it's still subconscious, not conscious. I grew up in an environment of nature with the beach and trees and landscape.

Q: It sounds like a respect for nature without reducing consumption. Did you recycle?

Tigrilla: In my house we recycled but in Miami it was super limited. I’ve had big conversations with my mother because she does what the local government tells her to do but nothing more, and people like my brother don't even do that. He says he doesn't believe in it and remembers when people said they were just throwing the recycled stuff in the garbage anyway so he puts it all in the garbage. I'm the one who pushes the limits of the recycle bin: “They say they can accept paper, what about this kind of paper?” My mother says: “You can't put that in there” and I say: “They’ll figure it out eventually and they'll recycle it down the line.” So it's like three levels - I’m always pushing the envelope saying: “We can do more, we can be better, we can evolve”, my mother saying: “Let's do everything we're supposed to do”, and my brother saying: “Who cares, just live your life”. I grew up in the type of environment where either you do the basics of what's supposed to be done or you don't do anything at all.

Q: What would you like to tell someone who doesn't believe we need to seek sustainable solutions for our environment?

Tigrilla: I've had this conversation with my brother, but I realize that he is messed up to a certain extent because there are a few elements that have come to light for me over the years. Even if you're not religious, you have to believe that there is something beyond you. It doesn't matter what - it could be God, it could be the community of beings on this planet, it could be your children etc. You have to have a belief system that makes you realize the way we live today has an impact on something that's happening tomorrow. That's one element I think is important. The other important thing is that you don't have to look at the big scale. If you're a visionary you can make art to combat companies’ actions and that’s good. But people like my brother don't have a belief system that's beyond them, so there's really nothing I can do because they’re always going to be in the physical realm. It's not that he doesn't believe the science, because he does, but he doesn't care about it and there's no way to change that. A paradigm shift has to happen within him, so he's not our target. He's not the right person I should go after. My mother is deeply spiritual and she does the basics because she says she doesn’t know what else to do. I think that’s where the power is that we tend to skip over - the little guy looking out saying: “I can't recycle more than this”. They don't know to push the envelope or who to talk to about getting more done. If you go online there's so much information like: "Do I use cloth diapers or do I use plastic?” Well, do you have an abundance of water? Do you live in a place that has a drought? If you live in California, use plastic right now because you don't have the water to wash cloth. If you live in Miami use cloth. Both can be environmentally sane decisions based on what is going on. I think we need to have more local conversations that make it even easier for people to recycle. In Japan there's one city that has 22 different types of recycling bins. It's become part of their culture and they have fun with it - they look at the stuff and they break it apart and they chat while they're doing it. They made it part of their culture. If you don't make it part of the fun culture or the way you go to school or the way you shop, you can't make it part of the conversation in life. I think we need to do that on a regional level because each region is different. I live in an area where it takes miles to take things to the recycling bin so it's hard. It's not about people being lazy. It's about fitting it into a lifestyle and asking: How does it become a part of your lifestyle?

Q: An attendee of this forum said that she gets frustrated because she's been listening to the speeches and she's so excited, but she recycles and doesn’t feel like she’s making much of a difference.

Tigrilla: Absolutely. I think there are some smaller movements happening. The package-free movement is great. I had an eye-opening experience when I lived in a forest environment for a little bit and we did an experiment where we tried to create zero waste. There is no such thing as zero waste or zero impact, because in a place like the woods you can't put oil into the ground since it doesn't decompose quick enough. We were trying to make soaps where you wet your hands first, then put the soap in your hands and then wash because as soon as it hits the water it starts to breakdown. By the time it gets to sink into the ground it has to break down, since there can't be any kind of chemicals that are harmful, so you can't use anything oil-based and we couldn't figure out how to make conditioner.

Q: Did you use apple cider vinegar as conditioner?

Tigrilla: I grew up with that, but in Italy where I was, they didn't know about it. For example, I said we can just use coconut oil for our hair. Now I use coconut oil in my hair to untangle and I wash it after, or I use vinegar depending on when I have a certain amount of buildup. I'm still looking for the best solution and it's an experiment. The point is, that when I was living in the woods I couldn't even do that because coconut oil coats the plants and harms them. I learned that. We had a big conversation about all these soaps and detergents, but of course I live in a place where we can do this. Our experiments are things working in our house and we have lots of conversations about detergents, shampoos, conditioners, etc.

Q: Do you all make it yourself?

Tigrilla: Damanhur likes to do a lot of research on something. We start in the nucleus and if we think we've got a formula that works, we create a little company and then we test it out with all of the people. If that company works, then it gets bigger like the “The Music of the Plants” company. It was something we experimented with and then eventually it became something we sell in public. So we developed a company that makes detergents. It's developed by a chemist and a biologist and they were really interested in this, so they did a lot of testing to make more sustainable detergents and processes. But in Italy we don't have the culture of loose bulk stuff yet like in other countries. Things like zero packaging we struggle with. We grow a lot of our own stuff and have our own animals, so we try to eat as much as we can that way. When we do buy stuff like beans there is no bulk in the areas we live. There’s no market there. But these are conversations to have. I showed people pictures of U.S. supermarkets and we now have a small supermarket because we wanted zero kilometer - only stuff from our area. Our supermarket buys everything organic (we were the first organic supermarket in the area), and it's open to the public. We do as much as we can with zero kilometers, getting as much as possible from close by. That's what we wanted, so we had to build it ourselves. Our bulk section is only five little bins and it's mostly nuts. They don't have package-free because it's not a movement yet. But these are the conversations we need to have, so in that aspect the internet does help. You get inspired by seeing package-free solutions.

Q: You're also living in Italy where a lot of food is naturally grown - maybe in Miami it was different?

Tigrilla: Absolutely. And talk about ignorance - I didn't even know you could have a home garden until I moved to Seattle. When I went to Europe, a friend of mine moved from Seattle to Miami and she bought a regular house with a little backyard and turned it into a food forest. It's fantastic. Every time I go there I just look at it and say: “I didn't know you could do this with your house!” There are a lot of things we can grow: mangoes, avocados, papayas, all of these tropical fruits. We weren't raised with those conversations and I think those are important conversations to have. Edible forests like the one they're building in Seattle are great. Forest schools like the ones they have in Germany, where kids go out and play, show that a lot of schools are getting their own gardens. I think all these things start to change our relationship with nature. When you fall in love with the lettuce because it's something you grew, all of a sudden the relationship you have with nature changes completely. I had a friend from New York who would collect plastic, because they didn't recycle in New York but they did in California, so she would bring it to California to recycle. Where there is a will, there is a way. More importantly, the people who do these things need to speak - they need to share information with their friends about what they're doing, because their friends might try it and little by little it expands. I think we’ve lost the art of community, the art of friendship, the art of sharing ideas and trying experiments. I've tried so many things because my friends showed me and if we keep doing this there’s a great possibility of making significant change. If we don't change the way we're acting, we won't change the impact that anyone can make in their New York City apartment. In reality, a city is the most sustainable architecture we have. Green building techniques and shared spacing is so much better than people moving out to the middle of nowhere where you have to get electricity to them. Even if they live off the grid, the amount of car traveling to come to the city to do things is excessive. In a city building that’s very well built with compost bins and maybe a community garden, you can make a huge impact with one piece of real estate.

Q: Living in a city also usually means more walking and public transportation instead of driving.

Tigrilla: Absolutely. Transportation makes a big impact. Plus it's fun because now you’re not doing it by yourself, you’re having fun doing it with other people and that's the fastest way we're going to evolve. People ask me why I’m still at Damanhur and besides the fact that it's like Hogwarts, any idea that I have I instantly have people I can share it with. They can tell me whether it’s good or give suggestions on how to do it another way. I wanted to create something and all of a sudden this little idea I had that I thought was fantastic, turned out to only be good but became so much greater because of everybody's input. I said I would adopt their ideas after having tried it of course, and then all of a sudden people are using it and it starts to grow and that grows in the collective consciousness.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Tigrilla: I think the individual is still important. The Internet is great and talking is great, but in Damanhur one of the biggest things I've learned is that the meditation you do with your hands is so important. Do just one thing. Don’t try to change everything in one day. Change one thing you know. You want to buy a Louis Vuitton purse? That's fine because a Louis Vuitton purse is going to last you 30 years instead of buying 17 purses from Marshalls. We think cheap and it's not about that. Thinking cheap is not thinking about quality. Our purchasing should support change by buying from the right companies. If we do that on a global scale, then we ourselves are getting the bigger benefit. I think it's important for us to really think about quality and take a look at the little plants and think of them as your friends. If we have a company that's hurting something and you take the power away because you stop buying from it, that should enact change. The problem might be people thinking: "How do you get the mass to go in this and this direction?” and I understand when you have poverty and all these types of things, it’s difficult. This is what I love about projects like the food forest. The food forest is for anyone in Seattle to walk in and grab food. We also have to understand the reasons people are doing things. Why are we buying that cheap shirt? Is it because we don't have money? Is it because you can come up with €50 but you buy five for €10 instead of one quality one, because that's all you can afford? Then we need to look at the problem in a different way. I think we need to get the heart of the matter. If we don't get into the discussion points, we're always going to stay on the surface.

Q: I think it’s changing. I was raised with quantity over quality, but I don't live like that now. I don't know if that's because of the internet but companies’ transparency and quality is more affordable now.

Tigrilla: I did the same thing when I moved from a big house into a small house and I asked myself: “What am I doing?” Then I went to work for Cirque du Soleil and I went down to basically three large suitcases. I had my whole life in three large suitcases and you really start to think about what's important. Now I pretty much have one room worth of stuff. Everything I owned I used to be able to fit in a big car, but now I have a bed and some furniture, which I haven't had for years. The other cool thing about Damanhur is that we have to clean everything for the solstices, so at least twice a year we have to clean the house from top to bottom as clean as it can be. I use it as an opportunity to bring out and look at everything to ask if it’s bringing me joy. That's the question. For example, this dress was something I bought 15 years ago and maybe it’ll go. Sometimes I don't wear things but they bring me so much joy and I know that I'll wear it sometimes and that is OK, but I had pants that I bought and didn't actually like. Living in a community we have the benefit that everything we throw out goes to someone. We have two bins: one is for things going to your house first by asking if anybody wants to recycle it - we recycle a lot. Then we have a place called Trovatutto, which means “find everything”, and it's basically our own little shop - everything you don't want goes there, kind of like Goodwill. We donate there and then people from the rest of the community come. Lots of guests come who don't realize how to dress when you get to Damanhur, so they can go in there and buy a pair of pants or shoes for two euros or something. It continues the cycle of not just throwing things away but using things from the garbage, like: “These pants can be cut up and used as a rag to clean”. By the time we throw things away we don’t have much and it’s just because the item has no use anymore and lived a good life.

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jessicakmatt · 7 years ago

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Audio UX is Building Better Experiences Through Sound Design

Audio UX is Building Better Experiences Through Sound Design: via LANDR Blog

“It’s so important to have the right sound at the right time.” -Audio UX

Music is hard to miss. It’s made to catch your attention, immerse you, entertain.

But traditional ‘music’ doesn’t account for all the audio we hear in the world. In fact, a huge portion of audio goes unnoticed despite its vital role in our everyday routines.

A newly received email in your inbox, an error message on your fitness app, even that telltale chirpy click letting you know that you’ve made a keystroke on your phone: It’s all audio too.

And like most audio—music included—it was composed by humans, in a studio not unlike any other studio.

In our current moment of mass ‘there’s an app for that’ thinking, the feedback, usability and connectivity that freelance audio gives to brands and products is more important than ever.

We routinely rely on sound to tell us when we’ve succeeded, when we’ve made a misstep, when to move on or what to do next. It’s audio built for user experience (UX), and it’s the novel side of sound creation that’s redefining freelance audio work.

New York based Audio UX—a ‘one-stop-shop creative audio agency’—understands the importance of the new and growing need for audio that connects.

Their sound work for brands ranges from foley and melody that communicates the functions of an app to fully realized compositions.

To shed a light on this new (but rapidly growing) field of audio, we spoke to the Audio UX team to find out how they’re building a world with functional sound, and how they’re adapting traditional studio techniques to fit the growing need for branded audio.

What does Audio UX do with sound?

At its simplest, Audio UX is a creative audio agency. We like to say that if you can hear it, we can do it. Our speciality is helping brands define their unique voice.

We develop custom-tailored audio aesthetics that are designed to create meaningful experiences for audiences and cultivate long-term cultural relevance through sound.

How does audio fit into a user’s experience and why is it important to have the right sound at the right time while using an app or website?

Audio fits into user experience by creating emotional context and providing functional feedback. We always seek to strike the perfect balance between using sound to articulate a brand’s unique voice and providing useful responses to the user.

Take the Google Assistant sound prompt for example—it embodies the minimal, intelligent, friendly personality of Google while functionally letting you know when it’s ok to start talking, when it’s thinking, etc.

To us, this is a great example of a well-designed sound for user experience. Without that sound, the experience of accessing the assistant via the UI can actually be confusing, because it’s often unclear through visuals alone whether or not the phone is actually listening.

We want to make all those experiences sound the best that they can.

This is why it’s so important to have the right sound at the right time. And while it’s key to design unique feedback where sounds are needed, it’s just as important to understand where silence should exist within a given experience. Much like visual designers, we—as audio designers—also value negative space in the same regard.

Determining when and where sound should exist will become even more important as more interactive experiences are developed, cars become more silent and voice controlled UI becomes more prominent. We want to make all those experiences sound the best that they can.

Branding today is predominantly visual work. With that in mind, how do you approach designing audio for brands?

For us, the first step in any engagement with a brand is to define their audio aesthetic: the guidelines and framework that allow anyone to understand what a brand sounds like.

The same way a branding agency creates a visual style guide that defines how to use a brand’s logos, colors and copy, we create an audio aesthetic style guide that defines what a brand’s instruments, genres, and unique branding points are.

Once we have that toolbox and foundation to build on, we strategize with the brand on unique opportunities where music and sound can elevate their content and be the driver behind social conversation. Our unique twist is that we try to combine a branding agency’s approach with the film scoring or album creation process. The goal at the end of the day is to give a brand a voice so powerful that people would want to listen to it on Spotify.

Do you believe audio is something that’s often overlooked when it comes to design?

Audio is often overlooked when it comes to design, so much so that the very founding of Audio UX was built upon a desire to raise the bar and challenge brands and designers to hold audio to a higher standard. In our experience within the advertising and product design worlds, we often here audio referred to as an “afterthought” within the creative process.

The goal at the end of the day is to give a brand a voice so powerful that people would want to listen to it on Spotify.

We want to showcase how powerful and effective audio can be when considered as a key component of the larger strategy from the beginning of the creative process.

So if audio shouldn’t be an afterthought, how can audio impact the visual and tactile elements of a product or a brand?

In good examples of audio user experience design, you see an effort being made to create auditory feedback that is not only functional but also contributes to the product feeling dynamic and “alive” via skeuomorphism, the concept of making something designed appear and function like it’s real-world counterpart.

To use Google as an example again, a good number of Google apps share a very consistent audio language that references the physical textures and surfaces upon which their material design visual aesthetic is built.

Hearing elements like office supplies, paper sliding across a table, pen clicks, and wooden taps lend the sounds a unique tactile element which creates a satisfying level of feedback to further immerse users. This not only lends a sense of realism to the experience but also strengthens the visual metaphor and ties strongly back to Google’s branding.

Can you talk us through some of the instrumentation and studio techniques behind some of the video work you’ve done?

MAC:

The fantasy piece was all about making the soundscape feel surreal. We did lots of heavy processing on otherwise fairly normal sounds to accomplish this. For example, the horse sounds are frequency shifted and have pitched granular delay on them.

There was also quite a bit of “abstract” visuals that we had to come up with sounds for. For those, we used recordings of Harry Bertoia’s Sonambient Sculptures, and MOTM modular sine waves that we ran through an old Eventide H3000, and an old ARP 2600.

Tiffany & Co.:

The Tiffany’s series was another beautifully shot project by our friend Mackenzie Sheppard, featuring Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).

This was mostly an improvised score with piano and Prophet ’08. The piano was tracked on an August Förster at this practice studio in London while some of us were on tour. To most people’s surprise, the piano was recorded with just two 57’s.

But it’s a combination of the beautifully bright Förster and the Metric Halo (secret weapon) that make the recording shine. The pan spread on the Prophet worked great for the ambient swells that weave in and out of the piano. There’s also just a touch of FM mod to add a little haziness to the reveries. Overall, the vision was to have an emotional composition that scored the powerful tenor of the monologue.

TOTO:

The vision for TOTO was to evoke a sense of escape and wonder with the music. So creating a score that would transition from the tangible to the abstract was a cool concept to run with. We collaborated with German composer Nikolaj Egelund to open the piece with acoustic guitar and transitioned the piece into a more atmospheric landscape to capture the feeling like you’re mind is drifting away.

We used a Roland JX-8P to create the washy ambient pad and a Prophet ’08 PE for the sub-bass. The internal chorus on the vintage Roland is a definite go-to for building warm and hazy layers. The shuffling groove is a mixture of 60’s drum samples tracked from vinyl that was chopped up and pitched down to feel like being under water.

The drums and acoustic guitar create the sense of speed in the piece, kind of like your imagination is in a fleeting state. At the climax of the film, there’s a cool shot of the spiral water droplets shooting out from the head of a shower. To mirror this transcendent image, we used a mixture of sine and filtered square waves on the randomized setting of the Prophet’s arpeggiator.

What does audio bring to branding that nothing else can?

Imagine watching a Hollywood Blockbuster film without a score. Darth Vader wouldn’t be nearly as ominous without John Williams’ brilliant composition for “The Imperial March.”

Audio branding elevates a brand’s experience by giving it emotional context in the same way. We likewise use the art of leitmotif to create a world of sound for a brand to connect with their consumers. Audio and music evoke a level of emotional connection that people inherently understand and relate to. Our goal is to harness the power of that connection and give brands the tools to connect with their audiences on the same level that they connect with their favorite artists.

We see audio production becoming even more open and accessible with a shift towards creative content over technical prowess.

How do your tools and approach differ from other more common modes of producing like beatmaking or songwriting?

When a band or musician is creating a song for an album, they have complete creative control over the inspiration and direction of that product. When we set out to create an audio user experience, it’s always a collaboration between Audio UX and the brand. We have to obtain a deep understanding of a brand’s current positioning, demographic, and competitors before we can begin to plot the articulation of their voice.

We develop tools and concepts together and then iterate as a unit in order to craft a strong articulation of our collaborative concept.

We collaborate like a hive mind during branding initiatives. From the very onset of a project, we work closely together to conceptualize unique approaches and sound sources that we feel are completely distinct and align with project needs. We don’t use presets. We record unique source audio, often together as a team. We develop tools and concepts together and then iterate as a unit in order to craft a strong articulation of our collaborative concept.

How important are turnaround times when working with clients and how do you make sure audio creation can keep up with the visual aspects of a project?

Missing a deadline is never an option. We’re often working around the clock to get sounds into an app for product launch, scoring music for advertising campaigns, or launching a unique experience for audience engagement that’s tied to another brand activation.

Our value is our ability to integrate seamlessly at any phase of a project or strategy roll-out and elevate the audio without slowing down any other part of the process.

How does LANDR fit into Audio UX’s process?

We can’t deny the speed and uniformity LANDR provides to our team during the creative process, especially during our concepting phase.

We’re a boutique operation where the creatives are also running the business, so it goes without saying that we have somewhat limited resources and a lot of ground to cover.

Having a tool that not only instantly produces a “finished” sound but also creates continuity among 5 different composers’ mixes is really valuable for us.

In your view, how will audio production change most drastically in the next 10 years?

We see audio production becoming even more open and accessible with a shift towards creative content over technical prowess.

We’re embracing the future of autonomous mixing because it allows creators to focus on writing good music and getting it to a finished state more quickly.

As artificial intelligence continues to streamline workflows and starts replacing some of the more routine audio production jobs, we expect everyone’s creative output to only get better.

Hear (and see) all of Audio UX’s work on their website. Listen to Audio UX’s original music on Spotify and YouTube. Keep up with Audio UX on Instagram, Twitter and SoundCloud.

The post Audio UX is Building Better Experiences Through Sound Design appeared first on LANDR Blog.

from LANDR Blog http://blog.landr.com/audio-ux-sound-design/ via https://www.youtube.com/user/corporatethief/playlists from Steve Hart https://stevehartcom.tumblr.com/post/164225732049

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cynicandsaint-blog · 7 years ago

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Meditations on Authenticity

During the 1960s, the term “authenticity” became a buzzword. Authenticity was generally defined in opposition to “artificial”. Emerging baby boomers, often college attendees, united across America in the quest to remain honest to themselves, while rejecting that which they determined fraudulent. According to Sixties historian, Howard Brick, authenticity required “discovering, voicing, and exercising a genuine whole personality,” and this personality must be “freed from the grip of mortifying convention.” The quest for authenticity required the seeker to reflect and be genuine, while refusing to be complicit with routines that inhibited honesty. The most reaching voices of this revolution into the Real came from musicians. Elvis Presley maintained integrity through rejecting conventional standards of “white music.” Instead, he revolutionized mainstream music by sincerely expressing himself. Similarly, The Velvet Underground, led by Lou Reed, allied with avant-gardist--Andy Warhol to launch music, culture, and art into an area it had never been. This push came from an innate yearning to remain true to their artistic vision, complex sexuality, and obsession with forging a counter culture. Perhaps the most respected artist that evangelized authenticity during the 1960s was, Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan. His protest anthems are still considered music canon that effortlessly describes the tumultuous era, but his authenticity was not tied to his fame. Instead, his artistic legitimacy materialized from his desire to reinvent himself as his genius dictated. He refused to be confined to a single genre on the basis of that is how he gained his reputation. Instead, he “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, thus alienating himself from his traditional fan base. He demonstrated to the world that his authenticity meant more to him than external esteem and acceptance. Considering how committed these, and other, musicians were to remaining authentic, it is ludicrous to think of the bands paying “tribute” to them by duplicating their sound. Factory, the tribute band for The Velvet Underground, believes that the groundbreaking avant-garde can be rediscovered through a facsimile. Highway 61 Revisited honors Bob Dylan by reproducing his singularly intimate lyrics with vacuously intoned words. Elvis impersonators can be found by the thousands, mixing with gamblers and drunks in the most artificial city in the world--Las Vegas. Tribute bands have become so routine that a television program is dedicated to presenting artificial performers playing authentic artists’ music. The World’s Greatest Tribute Bands just finished its eighth season! This begs the question: Who cares if someone wants to see some awful tribute band and have a good time? The answer is that it probably doesn’t in this limited instance. Still, a more important question must be asked: Why are multitudes foregoing the daunting quest for authenticity on important matters simply because the artificial is so easily secured? The authentic is so scarce in contemporary America that it has become a pastime to engage in criticism of various artificial components of modern culture. We could join Kendrick Lamar in attacking Photoshop by asking for “somethin’ natural like ass with some stretch marks” or the creators of a well-known YouTube clip that demonstrate the artificial creation of a beautiful woman from a slice of pepperoni pizza. We could join both sides of the political aisle by ostensibly attacking pharmaceutical companies for creating an artificial dependency on medication. We could join CNN, The Guardian, and virtually every major news outlet in attacking doctors that overprescribe medication. We could join Morgan Spurlock, and countless others, that have attacked the artificial fare produced by fast food companies. We could reject, with every intellectual in the world, the hit reality show-Keeping Up with the Kardashians on grounds of lacking reality. Criticizing all of these manifestations of artificiality is futile because, if removed, a new synthetic commodity would replace its predecessor. Photoshop, unnecessary medicine, unhealthy food, and reality television are merely the fruit of the artificial tree. The fruit is easy to spot, but it is the root that must be removed for widescale eradication of the inauthentic. The root is less discernable than the fruit, and in this case, it is something we wish to be withheld from universal view. The root is us, or more specifically, our uncontrolled desire. We demand beauty at a level that is authentically unobtainable. We find comfort in the artificial hope of a cure through swallowing a pill instead of the authenticity of a daily practice of healthy eating, exercise, and mindfulness. We work late and overbook our days, resulting in insufficient time to fix nourishing meals. We present McDonald’s as the only option for sustenance on these hectic days. We turn the television to a program that has no value because judging ourselves as superior to moral degenerates serves as an adult pacifier. Plus, why add authentic experiences through reading and conversing with family and friends when you can bombard your brain with advertisements and storylines of the artificial? It is time for the pursuit of authenticity to take a place of primacy in our minds, as it was in the 1960s. One measure is as simple as talking with people we spontaneously encounter on the bus or walking through the grocery store, not just to exchange information, but to gain awareness and understanding of our communities. We move out of the confines of our minds as we seek to engage neighbors and community members that live around us.. We must listen and comprehend the music we listen to increase our authenticity. Disregarding lyrical analysis in favor for a catchy hook, or a tight beat, leaves us supporting artistic work that we fail to fathom. The music of authenticity written during the 1960s, told us that “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Through his lyrics, Dylan issued a clarion call for a movement toward the authentic as interpreted through the more humane treatment of Americans and non alike. Currently, in popular music, we find the artificial masquerading as authentic in songs like, “The Way I Are”, where the lyrics detail the lofty ambition the songwriter has of signing a woman’s chest and dancing. This musician is telling the listener that “the way I are,” or his inherent human qualities, guide him to thingify a woman and dance, hopefully with the woman he just claimed. “Listener” has become a misnomer, it should be replaced with “feeler,” as in, someone that feels the beat. Music has digressed from the authentic it once was where the composers called for equality and the betterment of all. Luckily, we can easily reclaim honesty and storytelling in music by listening and supporting artists that are authentic. Such artists already exist! Still, another way of pursuing authenticity is by familiarizing ourselves with people that are socioeconomically diverse. It seems that nearly every homogenous community accuses other homogenous communities of existing in a bubble. Most communities live in isolation to a world that is unlike theirs. We can experience various forms of diversity by traveling and learning of other cultures, enrolling in higher education, and visiting gatherings and festivals in communities that are unlike ours. Seek for ways to appreciate and understand others. If we look for these opportunities, we will notice that these chances abound. However we choose to pursue authenticity, it must be what inherently brings us joy. Authenticity is being the person we were before the artificial took over. We must free ourselves from “the grip of mortifying convention,” and discover our “genuine whole personality.” That is the only way we will return from the artificial world we have created to one of authenticity. -The Saint

#authentic #artificial #tribute band #bob dylan #the velvet underground #photoshop

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machian · 8 years ago

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The Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Design

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One of the biggest challenges that artificial intelligence faces is the ability to become creative. Humans in general, take creative intelligence for granted. This is because it is something that is inherently available to everyone. The issue with AI, though, is it is tough to teach or learn creativity on its own. Computers offset this disability with their incredible computation and parallel processing powers. But scenes are changing now, with AI taking its first steps towards uncharted territories - art and design.

Take, for example, the design of web pages. We have hundreds of millions of websites on the internet right now. Of which, a lot of websites are poorly designed and thus lead to very bad conversion rates. If the general layout of a website is bad, then the content albeit good, would be taken in bad taste. Thus, a lot of design companies have cropped up, demanding exorbitant rates for designing a simple website. Recently, platforms have also mushroomed, which give the user a lot of templates to select from. Though this is an improvement, it still makes the website generic and bland. And this is why artificial intelligence in design is a pressing need of our times.

Design is ubiquitous; existing in various forms across different fields. Interdisciplinary design partnerships are being forged more than ever now. It can be understood that effective design can improve the overall efficiency and the capability of projects. It can range from mechanical engineering bolt design to as diverse as 3D designing of medical devices. Listed below are some detailed examples of where AI is striding through and also mentioned are fields where human creative intelligence is irreplaceable.

1. Creative intelligence in web design

If there is a field that needs artificial intelligence in design, it has to be the web designing sector. Millions of redundant designs and shabbily done pages have let down good content, many a time. With the breakout of algorithm-driven design through AI, a revamp is quite possible.

An AI program from The Grid, called as Molly is turning a lot of heads in the web design business. The AI tool runs throughout the day, trying to learn from the millions of web pages across the internet about what works and what doesn't. Molly can run extensive A/B testing on all its designs, and choose the most favorable one.

An interesting point to note is that Molly is nowhere near perfection. Skeptics noted that a lot of her designs slightly resembled already existing web pages. What is important is that AI learns every day, trying to understand the best practices followed. Human designers are involved in choosing patterns and designs which can not be put in words. To learn such inherent qualities of men would take some time for AI tools like Molly.

It needs to be made clear that Molly is not intended to replace all designers in the future. But, with some tweaking on the process, she could be a dependable virtual assistant for designers, which can ease the work of a designer.

2. Artificial intelligence in design: structural elements

In a recent conference held at Rotterdam, a research paper was published. It explained how machine learning could be used to improve the design of connections used in structural element design. The normal connections have a lot of constraints with the design being very inefficient. This is because a large area of the connection remains unused in case of tension over the element. This is rectified by machine learning, where the newly designed connection weighs 50% lesser but can take the same load as a conventional connection. This can potentially save millions in a construction project and also reduce loss.

In the future, the design of construction projects would be ideally left to machine intelligence. Artificial intelligence in design helps in economic and efficient construction. It is also much lesser prone to design flaws which often happens with human design estimates.

3. AI in construction design: Autodesk Dreamcatcher

It is exactly like the name sounds to be. Project Dreamcatcher, the new CAD system developed by Autodesk works on optimizing the common utility devices' design. The designer needs to define the type of problem that needs to be solved, the criteria for design and the constraints involved. Using the objectives given, the CAD program can propose alternative designs that can turn out to be a much better version of the existing solutions.

Take, for example, the restructuring design of a desk. The constraints would be the height of the desk, the load that needs to be sustained and the dimensions of the desk while minimizing desk self-weight. Using this framework, the CAD system can design different styles of the desk in question.

Dreamcatcher can be utilized extensively in design research and also in computational science research. Designers get more flexibility with their designs through AI assistance. Thus, they can have a trade-off between the best possible design and the easiest production form for the manufacturing industries.

Projects like the Dreamcatcher are revolutionary because it reduces the need for entry-level designers and creates a work environment of the highest efficiency. They are learning the creative process with big data. Giving them proper parameters, guidelines, and constraints to work with, we can make sure the creative output is in line with what we want.

4. AI in music creative intelligence

Music creation is a difficult art to master for humans. It usually takes years of practice and hard work to create a composition that is unique and worthy. Now, artificial intelligence is trying to mimic what a human does. Amper, an AI startup based out of New York is trying to produce music through automated creative intelligence. It is targeting advertisement agencies and small time producers as its potential clients.

With this, the future looks bright. Artificial intelligence can be fed with millions of recorded music pieces and made to do the impossible - learn creativity. This musical creativity can be further extended to sync with the actual world as well. With machines getting eyes to see, it would no wonder if music could be composed based on what people see. This could be used to produce background OST music for movies, making it a more viable business model for musical AI ventures.

5. Scope of designers with a future in AI

Artificial intelligence in design is not a sign of alarm for the traditional designers. It rather should make the working environment more conducive to skilled designers. Using such design tools, humans can iterate on specific ideas much faster. Also, numerous designs can be rendered and processed through in a couple of minutes.

This also can help amateur designers in improving their skills, matching it against the artificial intelligence design tool. Also, the economic impact of this on the industry should be high, with great designs coming to the market at a much-reduced cost than before.

But as with the AI revolution in data analytics, creative intellectuals are not in murky waters as of now. Creative intelligence in humans is considered unique and to the best of the designers, the market value should never go down. In fact, with more automized creativity, the clamor for a human touch on design might also be quite validated.

6. The complexity of social intelligence

Humans have order and civic intelligence embedded in their psyche, right from the time societies started functioning. Social intelligence is about common sense, which is easier said than programmed in a computer. AI tools lack the human touch behind their processes. They can not emote or perceive culture, art, and literature like humans can. This is the part where engineering hits a wall. Although these are very simple traits to see in a human, it is incredibly hard to hardwire this in a computer program.

So, at least for now, human designers do not have the need to panic over getting replaced in the near future. As long as social intelligence and creativity are perceived by the general community as unique signs of humans, designers are safe. But it should also be understood that AI is here to stay and that involving them in the design processes would only help a designer to improve on his designs.

Artificial intelligence in design can furthermore help regular people to take up designing as a hobby. With these tools, anyone can become a decent designer, thereby leading to more self-sustenance in the field.

Source post: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Design at AI in Companies / Machian Future

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daviddalley-blog · 8 years ago

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Final Mastery Journal Post:

1) How has each course contributed to your personal and professional development as an instructional designer?

1- Mastery: Personal Development and Leadership This course opened my eyes to mastery and what it means to be a master at something. I cam to believe through our studies that not only could I earn a master’s degree but I could become a master at something. It gave me the drive and desire to set goals and see myself in the near future as a master in instructional design. I also discovered the importance of the mentor-apprentice relationship and set the goal of finding me own mentor. Someday I will be someone else’s mentor.

2- Strategies for Learner Engagement This course was partly a wonderful refresher course on a lot of what I learned in my undergrad, music education degree. The other part was an eye opening experience in me coming to understand how important engagement is to instruction. I also discovered the importance of community of practice. The key to engagement for me is in being a part of a team or staying connected with others. The social aspect of learning, I have come to believe, is crucial.

3- Visual and Verbal Communication in Instructional Design I’ve always really enjoyed and been fascinated by the world of graphic design. Typography, color, layout, hierarchy, composition have always caught my interest as a viewer of design. I had spent time many years ago studying graphic design manuals on my own as I desired for a time to become a graphic designer. But this course helped me see through experience and study the importance of clean, simple and aesthetically pleasing design. I also discovered the importance of simplicity in imagery. Overload can cause the viewer to shut down their “learning” mode.

4- Corporate Training and Motivational Development This course was probably the biggest confidence builder of any course in the program for me. I came to realize that I have not only a knack for instructional videos but also a passion. Doing the research, writing the script, setting up the studio, designing graphics, lighting, sound, post-production, it was all a thrill every step along the way. This created in me a desire to work on my niche in ID being instructional videos. I learned the importance of simplicity, the power of a good music bed and how much more effective a human or character in the presentation is. Again, this reaffirmed how important the social aspect of learning is.

5- Instructional Design and Evaluation As if I haven’t said it enough, learning is social. But so is work. I remembered during this course how important working with a team is for me. I enjoy the time I work creatively, alone. But there’s great power in creating as a team, leaning on each other’s strengths and helping each other in weaknesses. The effectiveness of team built instructional experiences was later made even more clear when I discovered the importance of a diverse group of designers. The other discovery this course was how much I learned I love working on animations. My role in the team project was to create the animations. I kept them very simple and found not only that I could do it and that I enjoyed doing it but that it’s very engaging.

6- Digital Media and Learning Applications Interactivity is very engaging! This was a discovery this course and that I also enjoy very much making interactive, animated learning experiences. This course was a test of patience as we were required to use a software that is no longer being developed, Edge Animate. It’s a wonderful program that I thoroughly enjoyed using to make interactive animated modules, but it had so many problems. I have decided to go on and take Lynda courses on the software’s replacement, Animate.

7- Music and Audio for Instructional Design Of all the courses I looked forward to, this is one of the top two. My background is in audio and I have spent many years working in sound design. So at a technical level this course was easy. However, I discovered the joy of copy writing in this course. Creative storytelling writing, I have found, is enjoyable. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of researching a subject and then finding a way to make it engaging. For the project of adding audio to the pre-edited video my step-mom gave me the idea of writing a story from a young pioneer girl’s perspective. This turned out to be powerfully engaging for young people. I see now why Christ so frequently used stories to teach. It’s hard to forget them and there’s many layers to learn. By far, the most fun I had this course, and possibly all my courses, was working with my family on the dramatized Cinderella.

8- Filmmaking Principles for Instructional Design This was the course I most looked forward to. I have always loved the power of audio and visual working together. Film has always fascinated me and after course 4 I looked forward to learning more. As in the previous course I discovered the joy of copy writing and storytelling. It was enjoyable in both projects to work with some of my children. In video projects I’ve done in the past I have always just shot from the hip (not literally) and had a final product in mind but had never done storyboarding. How could I have missed one of the most important parts to the process?! Storyboarding is now a crucial step in video work for me. It’s such a huge waste of time not to use it.

9- Game Strategies and Motivation I have never been one that was much into games, especially video or high-tech. But I learned the importance of games in instruction. I had my own a-ha moment in realizing how teaching through games is inherently self-motivating. Duh! During one of our live classes the instructor asked if anyone played Pokemon Go. Of those who responded yes he asked how many were playing it at that moment. Three students admitted they were. That is powerful! As an ID I have decided I will look for any chance I can to incorporate games into instructional experiences.

10- Learning Management Systems and Organization The whole concept of Learning Management Systems intimidated me. Even more so the design the design of a full course seemed overwhelming. Of all my weaknesses in ID I believe this is my biggest. I am not organized by nature and putting together a whole program and writing the curriculum is hard for me to even conceptualize. It’s wonderful knowing IDs usually work in teams.

11- Media Asset Creation I chose to create my final projects around diversity in the workplace. Indirectly I learned the importance of diversity in a creative team. One of my classmates and I have been talking about seeking out freelance ID work together. It was a big A-HA moment for me when I suddenly realized that one of the reasons she and I would create such effective instructional experiences together is because we are so different - very different! It’s wonderful! We will reach so many more students by creating from two different approaches. One exciting discovery this course was some of the simple yet powerful animation services available online. I felt my video and game concept presentation turned out much better using GoAnimate than I ever could have made them shooting real video. Animation is so engaging and it’s so much easier to shoot virtual video than the real thing!

12- Instructional Design and Technology Final Project Resumes overwhelm me! Putting my portfolio together overwhelms me. I find it very difficult to write about myself, my accomplishments and describing to potential employers why and what I have done. I am feel there is some type of personal block there. It feels so uncomfortable to me to sell myself. But I understand if I want to sell my services, especially if I want to do freelance work, I need to explain myself and put myself out there as good at what I do. This is something I am going to really have to work hard at overcoming.

2) How well were you able to utilize the concepts and techniques you learned from the program (theories, systems design, interface styling, and the creation of multimedia content) as you designed, developed, and implemented your Final Project? I have a very difficult time describing, naming, explaining and quantifying instructional theory. I have always found it intimidating. But I feel, for the most part, I get it and that it comes second nature. This was deeply concerning to me for a time. Then I realized that this does not have to be a strength for me. I remembered that usually instructional design work is done in teams. I have other talents and skills that can far make up for what I lack in these areas. Other than this I felt comfortable and quite confident in utilizing the concepts and techniques I’ve learned this past year. Visual layout, color choices, animations, narration and music, sound design, copy writing, interface styling, all, for the most part turned out well. I feel confident in sharing what I’ve created with potential employers and clients. It’s actually quite interesting to see how much of it came out without much conscious effort. We’ve been layering each piece of instructional design on top of the previous layers, using them so much, that it is coming second nature. That’s exciting!

3) Describe your most outstanding personal triumph in each course. 1- Mastery: Personal Development and Leadership Deciding that I could become a master at instructional design. I overcame doubts and fears and set high goals.

2- Strategies for Learner Engagement This is big for me as it is a weakness, finishing the projects and discussion posts on time. This continued to be a battle for the remainder of the program, but I never gave up.

3- Visual and Verbal Communication in Instructional Design I created an interactive infographic with narration, music and my own personal designs!

4- Corporate Training and Motivational Development I created an engaging instructional video with graphics, narration, green screen shooting and music.

5- Instructional Design and Evaluation I created animated illustrations that are engaging. And I worked collaborated well with a team in a creative endeavor.

6- Digital Media and Learning Applications I created my first, well planned storyboard.

7- Music and Audio for Instructional Design Honestly? I passed this class AND helped organize and plan my daughter’s wedding. Beyond that I was able to gather family members enough to create a fun and entertaining dramatized audio story of Cinderella. I also wrote my first storytelling type copy.

8- Filmmaking Principles for Instructional Design I was able to house-hunt and purchase a house while working full-time and creating an instructional video. I also was able to dub the narration fairly well in post after onsite audio complications.

9- Game Strategies and Motivation I stretched very outside the box and thought like a gamer for a time. I also created animated imagery.

10- Learning Management Systems and Organization I pushed through one of the hardest projects in the program for me and created a while curriculum. This is NOT easy for me.

11- Media Asset Creation I learned a whole new software/service, GoAnimate. And I learned it well.

12- Instructional Design and Technology Final Project I finished my master’s degree! I did it! And I put together a resume and portfolio I feel proud of.

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