Friday, March 10, 2006

A few things that inspire me..for those days when the only illumination i get is the one that comes through the window...

•Drift• Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

•Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child)• Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

•Capture accidents• The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

•Slow down• Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

• Don’t be cool• Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

•Ask stupid questions• Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

•Stay up late• Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.

• Avoid software• The problem with software is that everyone has it.

•Don’t enter awards competitions• Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

•Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

•Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms• Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

(incomplete manifesto by bruce mau)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

BRUCE RULES!