I've been writing proposals for that last week or so, one with Lee, for our internet curating project, one for my GRIT thing, and one for the Copenhagen symposium in June. For all of them I've been researching theories about creativity, particularly ideas aroud embodied cognition. I've found Maturana and Varela's Tree of Knowledge very inspiring, its links to Buddhism seem particularly exciting, as I'm always hoping to bring all the things that make sense to me together somehow, and they seem to do it, emphasising embodiment and immanence, mutabilty and connetion while recognising the dangers of both relativism and solipsism...the stuff about optical illusions and cognition has given me some ideas for making the Copenhagen 'audience' take part in some optical experiments, I bought some cheap torches today to see if I can reproduce the light projection experiment they write about in the book. I've also been reproducing the
Craik-O’Brien-Cornsweet disk experiment, in which the retina 'collaborates' with the cortex to
produce the result it expects (It must be a lot more complex then that!), but I know my eyes were totally happy to make these assumptions, thus generating their own kind of creative fiction...