Author: Neera

Art Bus

Neera

I walk out of the workplace at lunchtime and find a colorful bus parked in the middle of the city walk. There is no sign next to explain what it was other than the sign on the head of the bus that says ART BUS.

What a treat! I take some photos and then hit the net to find out what it was about.

Australian National Capital Artists Inc. (ANCA) has transformed a retired Action Bus into a mobile contemporary gallery and studio space. What a great idea!

Once a humble local bus has been stripped of its seats and fitted out with gallery walls, lighting, and new external paintwork by local artist Riley Beaumont and turned into a mobile gallery. It is heartening to know that the ACT Government and Transport Canberra are supporting this initiative by ANCA.

ART BUS will be at three different sites across Canberra’s City Centre showcasing contemporary art by local artists and interactive art workshops for children.

Each artist will take over the ANCA Art Bus for a month at a time.

In November, it will display artist Ruby Berry’s work. Ruby is a textile-based artist working with three-dimensional sculptural textile works and sensory engagement.

December’s artist is Dionisia Salas, who has been working with repeated marks and patterns and has experimented with painting, silkscreen printing, burning techniques into paper surfaces, and collage.

In January 2019, Tom Buckland, a sculptor and multi-media artist focusing strongly on making and materiality, will exhibit his work.

This is what the Canberra Times is saying about it.

I would like to see more of these art buses parked at various public places in Canberra.

The first 1000 blog posts are difficult…

Neera

I haven’t written about blogging for some time. However, today’s blog post from Seth Godin, an entrepreneur, an author of 18 books, and a long-time blogger with 7000 posts to his credit (never missed a day), reminded me to talk about my blogging journey.

Seth has been encouraging people to blog.

“Daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing is clarifying, motivating, and eventually fun.”

He reckons the first 1000 posts are the most problematic (It only takes about three years to get there); after that, blogging becomes less strenuous and very rewarding.

He has found that after people get to post 200 or beyond, they uniformly report that they’re glad they did it.

It will take me six months to get there, but I already find that blogging is improving my writing, bringing clarity to my thoughts, and giving me immense happiness in pursuing creativity.

If you put monetizing aside, blogging is a compelling medium for personal development, connecting with like-minded people, and teaching while you learn.

There are thousands of generous bloggers who have been posting their non-commercial blogs regularly, and it’s a habit that produces magic.

Sasha, Gabe, Fred, Bernadette, and Rohan are some bloggers Seth follows.

I am sure you will enjoy their work as I did.

Six-hour working day

Neera

We are overworked, stressed, and not living the lives we are meant to live.

Mere four hundred years ago, there were no jobs. People did what they wanted to do and earned their living by creating value in their unique way.

Then came the industrial age. Big factories came into existence, which started employing people to do particular tasks. The payout was good, so more and more people went that path.

Since then, people have traded time for money. Creativity went out of the window. People lost their unique value. More than that, they had no control over their time and hence their lives.

With all the technology, machines, and computers, we are still laboring away in our lives.

Do we need to work eight hours a day?

Why do we keep on accepting this slave labor model of the industrial age?

Swedish culture has taken a step by making a move towards a six-hour working day.

In many organizations and companies that have made the change, they’ve noticed that their staff are happier, more productive, and more creative, which proves that if the employees feel better, they’ll do better work. So it’s a win-win situation.

Happiness is may not be good for the economy but might be good for the planet

Neera

The above excerpt is from Matt Haig’s book “Reasons to Stay Alive,” and there is a lot of truth in it.

Business thrives and flourishes on one main human trait: dissatisfaction.

Not only we are living in a “competitive” world, but we are living in a world of “excess.”

Our wardrobes, our houses, and our garages are overflowing with “stuff” we have been collecting, which we wanted so much at the time of buying and now don’t even remember that it is collecting dust still in its original packaging.

If we could be contented with less, the economy might doom, but we will save the planet.

The imagination age

Neera

Do you have any idea which age we are in?

Last time I checked, we were in the information age.

Now, I am told; we are living in the Imagination Age.

The Imagination Age is a period beyond the Information Age, where creativity and imagination are the primary creators of economic value. This contrasts with the information age, where analysis and thinking were the main activities.

Charlie Magee, who first introduced the term in 1993 in an essay, “The Age of Imagination: Coming Soon the Civilization Near You,” proposes that the best way to assess the evolution of human civilization is through the lens of communication.

Throughout human history, the most successful groups, whether they are tribes, kingdoms, corporations, or nations, are the ones where a larger percentage of people have access to a higher quality of information, and a greater ability to transform that information into knowledge into action, and more freedom to communicate that new knowledge to the other members of their group.

The technologies like virtual reality, user-created content, and YouTube are changing the way we interact with each other and how we create economic and social structures.

The rise of immersive virtual reality, cyberspace, or the metaverse will further raise the value of the imagination work of designers, artists, video makers, and actors over rational thinking as a foundation of culture and economics.

Michael Cox Chief Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas argues that economic trends show a shift away from information sector employment and job growth towards creative jobs.

Jobs in publishing are declining, while jobs for designers, architects, actors & directors, software engineers, and photographers are all growing. This shift in job creation is a sign of the beginning of the Imagination Age.

Cox argues the skills can be viewed as a “hierarchy of human talents”, with raw physical effort as the lowest form of value creation, above this skilled labor and information entry to creative reasoning and emotional intelligence.

Each layer provides more value creation than the skills below it, and the outcome of globalization and automation is that labor is made available for higher-level skills that create more value.

Presently, these skills are around imagination and social and emotional intelligence.

Rita J. King, an artist, writer, and cultural philosopher, used the term in her November 2007 essay for the British Council, “The Emergence of a New Global Culture in the Imagination Age.”

King says,

“Rather than exist as an unwitting victim of circumstance, all too often unaware of the impact of having been born in a certain place at a certain time, to parents firmly nestled within particular values and socioeconomic brackets, millions of people are creating new virtual identities and meaningful relationships with others who would have remained strangers, each isolated within their respective realities.”

King further refined the development of her thinking in a 2008 essay entitled, “Our Vision for Sustainable Culture in the Imagination Age” in which she states,

“Active participants in the Imagination Age are becoming cultural ambassadors by introducing virtual strangers to unfamiliar customs, costumes, traditions, rituals, and beliefs, which humanizes foreign cultures, contributes to a sense of belonging to one’s own culture, and fosters an interdependent perspective on sharing the riches of all systems.”

She has become a crusader for expanding the Imagination Age concept through speeches at the O’Reilly Media, TED, Cusp, and Business Innovation Factory conferences.

Her blog “The Imagination Age” is worth checking.