The ability to learn and repeat information and patterns is a monkey-like form of consciousness; whereas the ability to make new connections, to imagine, to think beyond that which is already known: this is true intelligence, this is what makes us human as separate from other animals. 

The label has something of a stereotyped misnomer about it, though. Creativity is seen to be the domain of pretentious, narcissistic skivvy-clad artists and an altogether flaky affair in general - devoid of real and tangible value. This is a mistake in category, in interpretation.

Scientific progress, for instance, is one of the greatest and most powerful demonstrations of creativity. From invention to discovery to theory - all facets of scientific progress are innately creative and require connections to be seen where none before have been known. 

The problem is that scientific testing is lumped in the same category as scientific discovery, progress and theory. They are completely separate things, though both very important. To test something’s veracity, to prove and to verify is a generally formulaic and predictable process requiring rational thought - it is the left brain of science; yet the right brain of science is categorised as same. Both the creative right brain and rational left brain of the scientific process must work together, dynamically, to achieve a successful outcome - but it is the right brain which must come first, and it is also the most defining aspect of science, for if we did not dream to make new connections, there would be nought to verify.

Even mathematics, that field seen to be the epitome of cold, rational thought, is actually very creative much of the time. If one learns their times table by rote then perhaps it is not, but if one contrives a means to work out an equasion then one is involving oneself in a deeply creative process; and again a dynamic one with the ‘left brain’* of math, as it were. Algebra requires creative thought, those mathematicians who are on the cutting edge of mathematic discovery are exercising amazing creative thought, the child who comes up with a way to add the tens together, then the left-over single digits without having been told how to is also exercising creative thought.

All humans have a natural curiosity, though many have it trained out of them to be replaced by fear and other traditions.

There is no such thing as a creative person - there are only those who are less able to repress their creativity than others, and the tortured artist is tortured not because she is creative, but because she is unable to control, conform and repress her natural proclivities in every respect of herself so as to fit in with everyone else. Mad scientists and tortured artists have a lot in common.

Being creative makes us human, and by extrapolation we may see that those aspects of ourselves which shun the creative process are necessarily base and animal. When we cling to old ideas, when we react instead of considering, when we hold to formula over exploration, when we are conservative instead of progressive, then we are acting as fearful animals as opposed to intelligent humans. To be curious and creative is to transcend our shallowness and to come alive as people capable of almost anything and limited by almost nothing.

To not only understand that we might be wrong, but to actually presume it to be the case is to embrace our humanity, our creativity and our potential. Love is fearless, fear is loveless; and fear is the enemy of creativity.  

Here’s a couple of TED talks which you may find enlightening on the subject

Do schools kill creativity: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

This guy is the ultimate mad scientist: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/237

and this one just for a nice left/right brain insight as well as a wonderful and poignant story: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229 

* perhaps that we might see the creative process as distinct from both right-brain dreaming and left-brain formulaic predictability, and instead see it as necessarily a dynamic balance between the two spheres of consciousness? 

Oh, hello there. Um, yeah, about that posting every day thing - perhaps I was a little ambitious. Let’s revise that to a solid, resolute, strong commitment to posting every now and again, sometimes months apart, for no discernible reason and following no apparent pattern. Great.

What piece of my mind should I proffer up for you… how about a ranting soliloquy on the subject of virtual reality and all the really quite scary and exciting stuff that it, potentially, entails? Don’t bother answering - I’m just going to do it anyway.

Virtual reality is really quite scary and exciting. Arthur C Clarke said something along the lines of “Virtual reality won’t simply replace TV - it will eat it alive”, but I think he’s understating the point somewhat. VR won’t merely be another form of entertainment, but a catalyst for the most profound revolution in human consciousness since some Greek guys some thousands years ago said ‘Hey, let’s think about stuff instead of just reacting like animals to everything’.

What reasoning is behind this bold statement of prophetic certainty? Well, I’m getting to it… this is a soliloquy you know - stop interrupting.

Right, well, the thing is that VR is going to mean that we’re no longer limited by the laws of physics - it literally makes anything possible. Not just in that earnest platitudinal sense of ‘you can do anything you want, Jimmy - you’ve just got to believe in pink unicorns, and they’ll believe in you too!’ kinda way, but in the sense that if you can imagine it, then you can experience it - in perhaps an even more profound and ‘real’ way than our current sensory experience allows.

Pretty much every person not doing manual labour could work from home with a high speed internet connection right now if their organisation was properly set up for it, but once real and immersive VR comes along, then it’s going to be the case that we’ll actually work much better online in VR than we ever could physically, which will mean that there won’t be any need for shops, office buildings or CBDs any more.

Imagine if you could be inside of a future version of Google Earth where the 3D buildings in Manhattan were perfectly textured and had fully realistic representations of every store in every building. Now imagine that you’re in immersive VR - you can see and hear everything exactly as if it were in real life (touch, smell and taste will be a little while yet as they will require direct neural interaction - retinal, aural and computer chip implants aren’t far off though - forget about the stupid helmets). You walk down the street, walk into the shop, try on a nice jacket and have a look at yourself in 360 degree fly-around to see if it suits you, buy it on your credit card and pay the extra $40 to have it tailored so the arms are a bit shorter to specifically suit you. Your jacket arrives in the mail.

Right, so that would be cool. It’d mean all the stuff we do in real life, like work, shop, buy groceries, go to see films etc. would be in VR. But there’s a lot more to this equasion than just how the stuff we do now will be done in VR. There’s going to be a lot of new stuff too. Stuff that will change who we are. Profoundly.

What will happen to our social structures when everyone can be anonymous and have sex with their ideal partner who is merely a conglomerate of personality traits suited to the individual with perfect, and malleable, physical characteristics to suit also? If it feels real, and the partner never gets upset because you want to have a threesome with him and Brad Pitt, then why would you want the real thing? Why would you enter into a relationship with someone who isn’t going to be exactly what you want? (well, we can all sit on our high horses of wisdom and quote dappled things, shadow defining light, yin yang and all of that - but we’re not that generation who has the choice, are we?)

What about social structures when you only ever have to interact with people who you really, really like? Why would you bother exposing yourself to (or learning from) ‘that’ group of people if you didn’t have to?

Where does exclusion, discrimination, elitism and ignorant group-think judgement go to when we aren’t forced into the melting pot of real (or virtual) interaction?

There’s obviously a lot of other potentially negative ramifications too, but maybe it’s not all bad. Perhaps it will, counter-intuitively, mean that without the territorial, sexual and ideological rub against each other being relevant because we all have whatever we want however we want it, that conflict will become less prevalent and that we will all harmonise much more readily without being able to actually harm each other physically anyway - perhaps the puerile futility of aggressive, domineering behaviour will become more apparent and less acceptable in a truly virtual world.

Irrespective, it’s pretty bloody interesting, isn’t it? Keeps me awake at night sometimes. So many possibilities.

it appears, through entirely my own fault, that no spectacular content has yet materialised itself and that this blog is therefore boring. At some point spectacular content may occur, but until then I’m resolving to post about something every day, with a nice picture of some description too. This will, it is envisaged, be far more entertaining than the spasmodic splurts of rambling nonsensicality masquerading as being about something that have thus far visited themselves upon this blog. No more. We the people - well, me the person, really - do hereby cast off the shackles of meaning, being about something and rules; and do resolve to talk shite, with pictures.

Here is a picture.

Now, on to today’s diatribe for lucky customers with auspicious karmic respect:

Why, if you were considering doing so, you should most definitely not vote for John Howard and/or his cronies.

Here in the seat of Ryan on Brisbane’s west siiieeede there exists the incumbent *cough* member, Michael Johnson. Mr Johnson was accused from within the Liberal Party of fraud, is a lawyer, was conveniently out of the country in India when the Prime Monster announced the Goodna bypass (to the chagrin of all of Mr. Johnson’s constituents), sent out a pamphlet toting how he cares for the environment on glossy non-recycled paper and generally appears to be a slimy, opportunistic piece of shit. He named his son Ryan… after the electorate. I could go on, but I won’t.

By contrast his Labor opponent, Ross Daniels, was a social worker for 12 years, is a lecturer at a university and has been very actively involved in Amnesty International fighting for human rights and appears not to be a slimy, opportunistic piece of shit.

Now, is the microcosm always the macrocosm? No. But in this case, yes.

John Howard is a bit less transparent than the member known as Michael Johnson, but the contrast is pretty similar underneath between him and Rudd. I have no doubt that both John Howard and Michael Johnson believe that they are doing the right thing, but then so did Hitler (not that John Howard is comparable to him - Hitler had a moustache and was German).

It is obvious that John Howard is also a slimy opportunist and lies but more worrying is the regression into anti-progressive, conservative, violent, base, myopic and, well, old school thought.

Instead of seeking to solve problems, Howard’s and the Lib’s mode of thought is that we should treat the symptoms and attempt to force people to change. They want to prohibit drugs with no tolerance and harsh penalties instead of doing something about why people are feeling disaffected enough in the first place to make hard drug use and consequent destitution their ‘lifestyle choice’. They want to fight fire with fire by sinking to the level of violent extremists by illegally invading other countries based on lies and thereby adding fuel to the flames instead of rising above such things - imagine if the coalition of the illing had stood firm and proud in the face of terrorist attacks and had, like their messiah, turned the other cheek. Imagine how utterly defeated and reviled extremist Muslims would be the world over if we in the west had shown the strength and maturity to not hit back. Instead they’re recruiting thousands by the day and growing ever stronger.

If I were voting in the late seventies, I would have voted for the Libs, because at that point in time they were a moderate voice of reason and the Labor party were kinda extreme reds, more concerned with ideological dogma than progress. Hawke and Keating, however, were not and they embraced free market enterprise by floating the dollar and going the way of privatisation and massive economic reform (which Howard is still riding the wave of and taking credit for).

Interest rates were going up when Labor took office in the eighties, they peaked under them, and declined - they were declining and continued to decline under Howard, and are now rising under him. Every single reason that people have voted for Howard has been a lie and a manipulation. He’s not better with the economy and interest rates have risen nine times in a row, they weren’t throwing children overboard, there were no weapons of mass destruction and the list goes on (see link above).

The truth of it is this: The Liberal Party are regressive and short-term opportunists, whilst the Labor party are progressive and think long-term. They’re not perfect, but they’re a lot better so please, in the name of all that is good in the world, for the sake of your children’s future, the future of the planet and in the name of justice, do not vote for John Howard or the Liberal Party this election.

Okay, so here’s a viral video that one of us wrote for a client about two nudist, streaker, sausage dog owners who fell in love online and met in quite spectacular fashion. Couple of million people saw it and the client was pretty happy. Reason it’s being posted here is three-fold: it’s something not dissimilar to content that we’ve produced, it’s more publicity for the client and, well, it’s a nice story. If you’d like to see the uncensored version click here

it’s a good idea to put funny stuff like this cat photo on your blog, because then people will like you and visit your blog.

What’s funny about this blog, though, is that we haven’t bothered listing anywhere, haven’t finished designing it and haven’t, really, done much of anything with it - so, if you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’re reading an archive, which means that the funny cat photo was unnecessary because you already like us and want to be our friend and stuff (yes, we will be your friend - unless you’re the kind of person who wants lots of friends just to feel important and parade the amount of friends you have about in front of other people with less friends - in which case, sorry, but, you know, got some stuff to do… might see you tomorrow or something…) those parentheses sure did mess up the flow of that sentence, hey? anyway, back to the superfluous cat photo - its pointlessness is actually spiritual - Buddhism teaches us that all is temporary and fleeting, but the cooler Buddhists also seem to giggle at stuff.

One of us went and saw a Buddhist give a talk once and at the end he asked if anyone had any questions, and this person put up their hand and said ‘Should I get rid of all of my possessions’? to which the Buddhist monk replied ‘Sure. If you want.’ and then giggled.

Cool. So, in summation, the funny cat photo at the top is a nod toward Buddhism in terms of both transitory meaninglessness and laughing at things.

Essentially this here is filler. I started this blog, got annoyed at some code trying to make it look good and have consequently decided that at least if I write something, it won’t look quite so sparse; and that might be enough to quell my frustration so that I might go get annoyed at code again and maybe accidentally achieve something at the same time.

There is still hope that the wide-eyed ideals as outlined in the post below will come to fruition, but perhaps they might do so in a somewhat more minimalistic context than had been originally envisioned. You see, I’m a designer and have been for quite a while, so I’m used to being able to point and click at things and for them to just work - like little digital software minions that scurry about making stuff look good at the whim and will of my godly design fingers. But here I am, like an aristocrat after a revolution, fumbling about amongst the proletariat web programmers trying to figure out how one might go about hunting and killing one’s own digital beast, removing it’s binary intestines, and cooking it on an ftp server.

I know, I’ll put an image at the top of this post of something I photographed a while ago so that this here blog starts looking a bit more respectable. The image is one I took whilst walking home one night listening to Sigur Ros who are an Icelandic post-rock band that incorporate orchestral arrangements and impossible falsetto vocals into transcendent progressive music (I know, this sounds hugely pretentious, but they’re actually really quite good - they turn your bus window into a film screen, you know?).

Once I’ve become very, very annoyed at some more code and complete a media section (which is kinda the point of this whole site - content) then I will upload the full slideshow set to a sigur ros track. Also in this fabled Media Section, there should be some video and audio files for you crazy Internetarians to download and do as you will with.

This website is about subverting mainstream society; and also alternative society. Generally, we’re about subversion - laughing at, parodying and bringing into question those people who would have us believe they know what’s going on, when the truth is that they either don’t, or are deluded.

Far from being a negative, angsty whinge about the world (we’ll leave that to black-clad, narcissistic adolescents) this is a place where we can have a good laugh at how serious some people are.

We intend to make some funny viral videos and song parodies, video some social experiments and share links to other acts of subversive humour.