Brave New World

I’m a printmaker (among other things) which means I make intaglio etchings – like this one.  There are a pile of ways of doing this, but all basically involve etching a groove in a ‘plate’ of some sort, then smearing it with ink, rubbing that back so that the ink remains in the grooves, and transferring the ink to damp paper by running it through a printing press – which looks something like the old wrangle washing machines.

I fell in love with this art form years ago, having avoided it for ever because I thought it was so rule-bound, meticulous and uptight.  How wrong could I be?  Maybe it was in Rembrandt’s day but these days anything goes, and ‘mistakes’ are not only rampant, but actively sought.

To make a metal (usually zinc or copper) plate, you clean it off, cover it in a waxy bitumen ‘ground’, exposing parts of the metal to create the image you want.  Then you chuck it in an appropriate tub of acid and let it do it’s thing.  The acid bites away the exposed metal and creates a ‘plate’.  In doing this, you essentially hand it over to the art gods, because from this point, while you can direct the process, you can’t really control it.  Which is the bit that I like best, because unlike ‘direct’ art forms like painting, while I have an idea of what I put in (albeit in negative and in reverse) I usually have no idea what’s going to come out.  Sometimes it’s what I expected or a step in the right direction, sometimes it’s a disaster, and sometimes it’s brilliant in a way I could never have deliberately created (but am always happy to take credit for).  Which is SO cool.  And at each reveal stage; cleaning the bitumen off, inking it up and then printing a proof, I look at the thing I created with curiosity and excitement – like a kid opening a christmas present.

It’s the same in business.  So many of my major breakthroughs and successes in both have resulted from accidents – encouraged or otherwise.  I know that to create something original, I have to improvise and trust the fact that I have the skill and ingenuity to find another way to do something if what I’m doing isn’t working.  As my old teacher used to say, chucking a dud plate back into the acid: “Where there’s metal, there’s hope”.  And the more skilled we become, the more we can relinquish control of the process, because whether in business or the studio, unless we make space for a bit of chaos, for random accidents and opportunities, our outcomes will be limited by what we can mentally project.  Which in hindsight is often very limited indeed.

Acid bath anyone?

WorldWarped ©mofox

I  am totally, tragically addicted to WordWarp.

It looks harmless enough. Basic anagram game App: 6 scrambled letters, a list of blank word spaces, 2 minutes, go.  If you don’t get the 6 letter word, it’s all over red rover.  If you do, you go onto the next level and your score accumulates.  SO.  On this fateful evening, I’d managed to scrape my way up the escarpment to a grand total of 17,500.  I had no idea whether this placed me amongst the deities or the plebs.  I didn’t care.  It was about 4,000 more than I’d ever achieved before.  Now in an earlier moment of inspiration, I had ferreted out an Unscrambling App.   I wouldn’t use it, I said to myself, because that would be cheating.  It was kind of a ‘just in case’.  (Love the logic.) So I’m at 17,500, and I could not for the life of me unscramble the rather liberally-vowelled mess.  Feeling the pressure, and knowing how much was at stake, I threw conscience to the winds and scurried to the other app.  The answer?  OUTRUN.  Cool, I thought.  There was even a certain synergy to it.

Next word comes up: another unintelligible mass.  I powered through the list but when it came to the big kahuna I was stumped.  And here the insanity began. read more »

New Broom ©mofox

The worm has officially turned.  The downtrodden rise to overthrow their oppressors, an unfair situation is being reversed, and the soil is being aerated in preparation for new growth.  The business world is being forced to shift from a mechanised, information-based model to a creative, conceptual one.  What’s your stake in the revolution?

It may seem a bit of a stretch to liken creative thinkers as earthworms, yet Darwin insisted the earthworm is one of the most important creatures in history.  By doing what it does naturally, the earthworm transforms nutrient-starved dirt into rich, fertile, arable soil.  And it’s major enemies?  Commercial fertilizers, pesticides and extremely dry soil.  Not so dissimilar then.  The mega tsunami of technological developments, available information and globalisation have created a commoditised market where efficiency rules, and Better/Cheaper/Faster is the order of the day.  Dry soil indeed, for in a commoditised market, information is NOT power – it’s just data.

True power now lies in the ability to make information mean something so people can do something worthwhile with it.  Or to say it posh; the ability to extract insight and leverage it to create value.  Or in worm words, chewing the mulch to excrete the castings that fertilise the soil.

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Symphony in Fish Major ©mofox

Backyard Aquaponics is a Queensland company that combines aquaculture and hydroponics in a way that each not only cancels out the negative aspects of the other, but actually uses it as nourishment.  The fish tank and gravel veggie bed are linked: the fish-poo water gets used to feed the plants, which in turn clean and oxygenate the water for the happy fish. It uses 1/10 of the normal water required, the fish get less lurgies, and a patio-sized system can feed a whole family.

How cool is that?  A completely symbiotic system where the sum of the two combined is greater than the sum of the two individuals.

Symbiosis is of course the key to many business relationships too: supplier/dealer, partnerships, and cross-referring affiliations with shared infrastructures to name a few.  The most obvious example is the employer/employee relationship, but how often is this as healthy and maximising as it can be?  The key to the symbiotic relationship is balance of power – hardly something the classic company situation is renown for.  The rhino may be huge compared to the oxpecker but it still depends on it for its survival – not always the case with commoditised workforces.  But what if we looked at it differently?

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Dump Poppies ©mofox

Kibera is Africa’s largest slum  (with over 1 million inhabitants) and one of the most spectacular testaments to the transforming power of human ingenuity I’ve ever seen. With huge limitations on land, energy, water and food, people’s survival depends on how ingenious and innovative they can be.  My favourite story is of how a local farming company Green Dreams is working with a group of reformed young criminals to convert garbage into organic manure and transform the slum garbage dump into an organic farms.  The google earth shots are amazing.

Three months after clearing the dump, a community of 30 families were harvesting, eating and selling organic produce, and are now selling their expertise to raise funds and help others. read more »