Florian Brody applies “Accomplishing more by doing less” and puts forward his message: Don’t innovate! By innovating in order to make things better, we at the same time win and loose. Brody promotes adapting a habitus of mindfulness and awareness. Knowing before we know it. Embracing the greek concept of prognosis and the corrsponding buddhist concept.

Poet Allen Ginsberg had talked about taking an old form and using it come up with a new form. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.

In her framing talk Silja Graupe applies Asian Perspectives on concepts of enabling innovation, thus cherishing Chaos. Chaos acts as the context of a spontaneous encounter of “swift” and “sudden”, where they both assume meaning. But we are warned by this old asian saying: We cannot see the true face of mount Lu because we are standing on top of it. Thus prepared we move from space to BA and – as in Japan – we change slippers for each different room we go to.

Under the heading ENABLE! the LIFT@austria conference is looking at enabling structures for game-changing innovations. Markus Peschl from the University of Vienna in his framing talk points towards the metaphysics of innovation: Potentia – Actus – Emerge. Innovation happens when there is something latent which wants to break forth. For this to take place we have to give up control, nourish our love for details and awareness of weak signals and – most hard in today’s business environments – have to be able to wait.

Stefan Wiltschnig reminds us that we can 0nly act in a genuine way if we are clear about our intentions. Based on this we should consider adopting the “doing less”-attitude rooted in Chinese culture and – following C. G. Jung in this – appreciate the shadow of our movement.

Michael Bauwens of P2P Foundation points to the the emerging models dealing with the ciritical balance between giving away and making money. His Prezi “Everything open and free” shares the current landscape of change for Openess.

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Curating last week’s Creative Industries Styria Convention 2010 in Graz – staged by cis.at – allowed me to meet with some great minds and to reflect on this phase of paradigm shift in the creative industries currently under way.

Workshop Opening

The event brought two days full of inspiring input and experiences: Three workshops on Creative Semantic Web, Design Commons and Cloud Creativity, led by Steve Rogers from Google, Andrea Goetzke from New Thinking and David Sasaki from Global Voices. Followed by an evening with Science Fiction writer and activist Cory Doctorow. More on the results of the Convention as soon as the documentation is complete.

Convention 2010

With all good aspirations, which were maybe never really good, with all the great hopes, which were maybe all too naive from the beginning, which all the expertise, which was all too often obviously pressured not be objective, with great and encouraging pilot projects in Denmark and other countries – the summit of Copenhagen failed both the climate and humanity.

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With the realization filtering in that investment banking has returned to normal, states have failed to properly regulate the financial system and the next breakdown being already prognosed while crisis effects will linger a while longer, the expression “So Sorry” may be understood to encompass humankind’s inability to learn from failure. Darwin’s nightmare in a different guise.

The gesture of Ai Weiwei titling his current exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich “So Sorry” relates his wonderfully analytical and precise works even more to the crisis context, i.e. the current state of affairs, than they are by themselves already a commentary to what is going on.

His injuries and their traces in the media sphere point to an ambiguous unity of art, media and politics and present the artist’s body as the ultimate adressee of the “So Sorry” expressed unhealthy unity of the governmental and financial agencies.

mourning Jeanne-Claude / a final wrap-up

breaking boundaries at last

The animals are all around us, actually all the time. The wear felt or a skin of leaves. We might find some of them in the classical indexes of the animal kingdom, but most of them we would seek there in vain.

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