29 May - Space + Grit in Montreal

Last week I attended the first C2-MTL conference in Montreal, Quebec. The conference organizers created a distinctive event to explore the relationship between commerce and creativity through non-traditional experiences including talks by leaders across the globe, special exhibitions, presentations, and collaborative events.

A temporary “Innovation Village” was constructed in a district of Montreal currently undergoing significant renovation and gentrification.  The Innovation Village consisted of a large temporary structure housing chic bars, seating areas for discussion and workshops, interactive installations, and themed lounge areas curated by local Montreal artists and designers. The temporary space opened to a central outdoor courtyard populated with food trucks, pop-up cafes, lounge tables and chairs, and ongoing art projects.

The New City Gas complex was located directly across the courtyard, a stately nineteenth century brick edifice that once provided light for the entire city of Montreal. As the conference organizers described, “C2-MTL is transforming this industrial heritage building and its surroundings into a hub of creativity. From networking plazas, brainstorming zones and collective worktables to intimate conversation rooms and exclusive content lounges, each space is designed to evoke collaboration and ignite creativity.” New Gas City was inaugurated as a new concert venue for the city of Montreal at the week’s end.

The conference featured a stunning roster of speakers for the three-day event including internationally renowned architects, filmmakers, business magnets, neuroscientists, and producers Jonah Lehrer, Arianna Huffington, Francis Ford Coppola, Rex Jung, Michael Eisner, architect Winy Maas, Jennifer Yuh Nelson (Director, Dreamworks), Patrick Pichette (CFO, Google), Daniel Lamarre (CEO, Cirque du Soliel), Robert Safian (Editor, Fast Company). Lectures ranged in subject such as  “The Eureka Moment: How do New Ideas Take Form?” to “What’s Next: How can design and architecture contribute to solve global challenges” to “The Perfect Day: What inspires and defines the perfect day?” About halfway through the second day, disparate talks on a wide array of topics began to interlace into a handful of distinctly recurring themes.

One topic that surfaced in nearly every talk is the importance of making time each day to engage in activities that upon first glance appear “unproductive.” Lecturers emphasized again and again that breaking from the intensity and concentration of the work environment can foster seemingly stray thoughts and random connections. Invariably it is during these moments new insights and breakthroughs arise. Neuroscientists Rex Jung and Jonah Lehrer each discussed that the human brain –specifically the frontal cortex – must get out of its own way to resolve strenuous intellectual challenges. The only way to find new solutions is to explore our worlds and ideas with fresh eyes.

In Lehrer’s words (quoted from his new book Imagine: How Creativity Works) “Why is a relaxed state of mind so important for creative insights? When our minds are at ease… we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere. In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we’re trying to solve. While this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems analytically, it actually prevents us from detecting the connections that lead to insights”(31). Traditional logic dictates that if we simply remain focused at our desks for a few hours longer, extend our meetings until we come to a resolution, focus more intently on the problem at hand we will muscle our way to an epiphany. Neuroscience and the experience of creative leaders across the globe strongly assert otherwise - in the words of Albert Einstein “creativity is the residue of wasted time.”

Patrick Pichette, CFO of Google, described in his talk that Google’s campus in the Silicon Valley is outfitted with long walking and biking paths, ping pong tables, laundry machines, lounges, bars, and gyms. He described their policy of Innovation Time Off, in which employees are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something that interests them personally. This policy has given rise to such innovations within Google as Gmail, Adsense, and the most energy efficient bus system in the country.

Arianna Huffington used her time on stage to introduce her new app, GPS for the Soul (soon to be downloadable from the Huffington Post site). This app utilizes music, images, quotes and a heart rate monitor to slow us down, give us iPhone Zen moments (the irony of the concept is not lost on her). Citing Roman philosopher Plotinus’ notion that “knowledge has three degrees -- opinion, science, illumination" Huffington described that the hyper-connectivity of our information society makes access to opinion and science abundantly easy to come by “but has also taken us further away from that illumination, or wisdom, or intuition, or whatever you want to call it that is so essential to living a fulfilling and meaningful life.” GPS For the Soul is a meditative tool to create space for relaxation and inspiration, a dedicated moment to unwind and daydream in an otherwise information and speed-saturated life.

Once that “aha” moment arises and the epiphany is clear, what does it then take to make the leap from idea to implementation? A second clear thread among all of the speakers in Montreal is the importance of passion and tenacity in pursuing an idea even in the darkest hours of doubt, ridicule, frustration, dead ends, and even repeated failure.  Jonah Lehrer calls it “grit.” To use the famous Thomas Edison line, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

It is the dark underbelly of the creative process and one often glazed over when stories of innovation and success are recounted. The blockbuster movie that forever changed the industry, the invention of the light bulb, an innovation in social media that forever alters the way we interact. Yet over and over each presenter at the conference discussed the critical importance of failure. It is no coincidence that among the inspiring mottos of many of the world’s most successful and creative companies including Pixar, Google, 3M, and Apple include such concepts as “Fail Faster” and “Be Wrong as Fast as we Can.”

Peter Sims of Fast Company stated in an interview that, “finding ways to fail quickly, to invest less emotion and less time in any particular idea or prototype or piece of work, is a consistent feature of the work methods of successful creators. Despite the myths, it's hard work.”  Maybe the most apt description for the delicate balance between creating the space to dream and play and having the tenacity and grit to relentlessly pursue your idea can be summarized by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm... in the real world all rests on perseverance.”

Photo via Grazia Magazine

Francis Ford Coppola described his infamous years of failure, debt, and universal skepticism while filming Apocalypse Now. He faced bankruptcy, chaos, studio pressure to quit, and an actor’s heart attack on set. Apocalypse Now is considered one of the most important and innovative films in the history of film making.  In Coppola’s words, "the things you get fired for when you are young win you lifetime achievement awards later in life. Keep an eye out for anything that rubs you the wrong way and stick with it. If it seems wrong to everyone else at the time it is probably right."

Highlighting just two of the multitudes of fascinating and though provoking themes of the conference, there is no question that the C2-MTL conference was an enormously successful and inspiring event. The conference was curated and designed by an organization called SID Lee. Their mission is to help companies recognize and unleash the commercial potential of creativity and boasts an international roster of clients including Adidas, Dell, Cirque du Soleil, MGM Mirage, and Red Bull.

The atmosphere of C2-MTL was small part business conference and large part late-night dance club. Strobe and LCD lights blazed reds, blues, oranges, and pinks throughout the village. Live DJ’s and musicians started at 9:00 each morning and extremely loud techno music reverberated across the highly stylized, dark, and frequently hazy (I never saw a fog machine but they had to have been running nonstop) sitting areas, cafes, lounges, and exhibition venues. Each speaker was announced like the start of a monster truck rally, which proved as disorienting to the speakers as the audience (Arianna Huffington nearly jumped out of her skin after a serene and meditative talk when the monster truck MC wrapped up her talk with searching strobe lights and bumping bass from the live DJs onstage).

On the opening night of the conference, Montreal-based performance troupe Cirque du Soleil performed in the courtyard of the Innovation Village. An opera singer on a 30-foot rise sang before the backdrop of the New Gas City building. It was gorgeous, inspiring, and utilized the history of a 19^th century Montreal edifice and the internationally acclaimed talent of a homegrown organization. The evening was a shining example that C2-MTL can inspire collaboration and ignite creativity by focusing on Montreal’s distinctive cultural legacy. I hope that next year’s conference becomes more opening night and less clubby darkness, DJ, and fog machine. As conference speaker Jonah Lehrer described, “scientists speculate that any open, sunny space can lead to increased creativity. Architecture has real cognitive consequences.”

For more information on the conference: http://c2mtl.com/

30 Aug - Science is Culture

30-year old Adam Bly created Seed Magazine at the intersection of science and non-science to explore “a new way of looking at the world…like the renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the renaissance before us will be characterized by a revolution in how knowledge is gathered, synthesized, and applied to society.” Bly formerly studied cell adhesion and cancer at the National Research Council of Canada, was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007 and is recipient of the Golden Jubilee Medal from Elizabeth II. He has lectured at the World Economic Forum, MoMA, Harvard, the Royal Society, the National Academy of Science, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, and the State Department on the future of science and its role in society. His book Science is Culture is a compilation of five years of conversations Seed Magazine instigated between scientists and non-scientists as part of its Seed Salon series.

One of the most fascinating dialogs is the conversation between scientist and author Alan Lightman and choreographer Richard Colton. Lightman wrote Einstein’s Dreams, to date one of my favorite novels. The book follows young Einstein, living in Berne, Switzerland in 1905 as a patent clerk privately working on his bizarre, unheard-of theory of relativity. The book strays into fiction as Einstein goes home to take a nap, and subsequently has 30 dreams in which he works out his theory of relativity. Each dream is a parable of a world altered profoundly due to minute shifts in relativity. As described in its book review “in their tone and quiet logic, Lightman's fables come off like Bach variations played on an exquisite harpsichord. People live for one day or eternity, and they respond intelligibly to each unique set of circumstances. Raindrops hang in the air in a place of frozen time; in another place everyone knows one year in advance exactly when the world will end, and acts accordingly.”

Prior to their Seed Salon conversation, Richard Colton collaborated with Lightman to bring Einstein’s Dreams to the stage as a dance performance. The Seed Salon discussion is the continuation of a longer dialog between the two on the intersection and interdependence of art and science. A few highlights of the conversation: On artists’ fascination with science Lightman says “I think artists like to have their world thrown upside down. That’s part of what art is about, in my opinion. Artists like to look at things from totally new perspectives. That’s why artists have always enjoyed staying in touch with science. There’s a long history of salons and groups of both artists and scientists… Artists very much like to get new ideas from science, because they shake up their worldview, which is what they’re trying to do with their art.”

On why scientists are intrigued with the arts: “I think that one of the things that art helps provide scientists with is the language—and the metaphors and the images—to describe what scientists are so desperately trying to understand. Our instruments tell us that these totally unimaginable phenomena are happening, and yet we have no intuitive understanding of them. So we grope for language and pictures, and I think art provides some of these for us.” I must say, this resonates so closely with Jonah Lehrer’s perspective in Proust was a Neuroscientist – I would love to see the two of them in conversation…

Lightman and Colton discuss poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who in writing a letter to an aspiring poet advises, “learn to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, or like books written in a very foreign tongue.” Lightman’s interpretation is that “a lot of art is about the questions themselves. The question is more important than the answer. So I think that artists are much better at living with uncertainty. Ambiguity is an essential part of art.”

Asking new questions, existing with ambiguity, a new way of looking at the world. Like the world created in Einstein’s Dreams, I believe that we can create an exquisite new iteration of our world by exploring the edges of uncertainty, dreaming up new questions, ultimately reaching solutions that have until this point have been inconceivable and unimaginable. In the book’s introduction Bly describes that “science is a lens through which we can visualize and solve complex problems, establish international relations, and embolden (even reignite) democracy. More than anything, what this lens offers us is a limitless capacity to handle all that comes our way, not matter how complex or unanticipated.”

2 February - Art and Dopamine

LAUNCHPROJECTS - In Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer argues that art is a critical path to knowledge. Through the lives and discoveries of Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stavinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Wolf, Lehrer highlights that "it is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will even know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness."

The Modern era was one of artistic struggle and hard-won innovation. It was a time when "the public wasn't used to free-verse poems or abstract paintings or plotless novels. Art was supposed to be pretty or entertaining, preferably both.... but the Modernists refused to give us what we wanted. In a move of stunning arrogance and ambition, they tried to invent fictions that told the truth." Throughout this fascinating book Lehrer cites examples of avant-garde artists forging the way to "truth" far before science and research caught up to their groundbreaking discoveries.

Lehrer describes in his chapter on Igor Stravinsky the initial public reaction to The Rite of Spring. Its "remorseless originality" incited a full-blown audience riot. Throughout the chapter Lehrer examines the neuroscience of this anger and hostility towards new sound, yet how ultimately it came to be manifestly adored (in 1940 it was included in Walt Disney's Fantastia). After a long discussion of dopamine, neurons, nerves, and our coticofugal system, we learn that that dopamine (the chemical source of our most intense emotions) is released only when our brainstem finds something amiss - a pattern broken, an unexpected sound. Although our survival instincts tell us to stick only to what we know, without dopamine we would feel no intense emotions, have no powerful reactions. Our lives would be lackluster, "all we would be left with would be a shell of easy consonance, the polite drivel of perfectly predictable music."

Dopamine's demand for experiential upheaval sheds new light on the critical importance of innovation in the arts. New art creates fury and hostility in audiences. Artistic breakthroughs can threaten belief systems people hold dear to their understanding of the art world and how it functions. I now understand, however, both the physiological desire for the status quo and our atavistic need for variation. "Works like The Rite jolt us out of this complacency. They literally keep us open-minded. If not for the difficult avant-garde, we would worship nothing but we already know...What separated Stravinsky from his rioting audience that night was his belief in the limitless possibilities of the mind. (The Right) is the sound of art changing the brain." Or as New York Times art critic Holland Carter wrote “confusion is demanding, but it’s a form of freedom, and it can be habit forming.”

The next time someone angrily tells me what "isn't art" I now have the mind-stretching drug dopamine on my side. I love neuroscience.