Each year the Presencing Institute offers u.lab, a free, online-offline program through MITx. Launched in Sept and running through Dec, it’s a self-directed learning experience, punctuated by monthly live broadcasts where the community comes together. It’s also part of a wider-scale Societal Transformation Lab that you can read about here.
Find below the final scribed image from each live session, as well as key content overviews. Hope you find this gallery useful. Enjoy!
For all pictures on this page… please share as you’d like, respecting the creative commons information here and linking back to this page. Also please consider donating to the Presencing Institute, which would not exist without individual donations, grants, and program revenues.
Visual Reviews, using iPadPro with Procreate app, Photoshop, and a Bird font.
Life offers chance encounters with destiny. And to be clear from the start – this is not about my professional destiny, but is about the destiny of meeting others in a field of potential. As the timeless poet Rumi penned:
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.”
This perfectly echoes my own conviction leaving EuViz 2018—the annual, global conference for visual practitioners, held this year at Rungstedgaard in Denmark. Over 180 burgeoning social artists gathered in blazing summer heat to explore the bounds of our work. And this we discovered: we can’t go back to sleep.
I was honored to deliver a 3-hour keynote session on generative scribing, and my heart has been profoundly moved by what we experienced in the room together. My aim with this post is to share the session beyond the confines of a hotel ballroom, to convey the larger movement that was felt, and to keep us—a social body of practice—awake.
The birthing of an “engagement process“: July 2018 with the Presencing Institute.
The Visual Practice Workshop that preceded the conference, where we howled at the blood moon from the beach and tried to stay awake for the eclipse. About half of the group stayed on as organizers, crew, and participants of the larger gathering.
Other workshops over the past year and half that seeded the field, so that when a container needed activation at the conference, there were over 25 people ready to energetically hold the larger group to help it see itself more clearly and grow.
The MAIN PRESENTATION (commentary under each picture once you click in)
At this point, to convey the feeling of level four scribing, i played a video by Abby Johnson:
And then i continued to describe generative scribing and the role of containers:
Ripley Lin, from Taipei, had been scribing this whole time. Here is her stunning image. (Photo by Visual Facilitators)
THE EXPERIENCE
Here we shifted into the more experimental part of the session, diving into “source” and an exercise with resonance. I read a chapter from my book, everyone drew with black marker into an A3 sheet of cream colored paper. I then referred to Arthur Zajonc‘s framework of “Focused Attention” and “Open Awareness”, rang a bowl three times, and asked everyone to practice attending and opening, in succession.
Participants hung their drawings on a wall of windows, stepped back in silence, absorbed the field of energy the images generated, then returned to small groups to converse about the “after image”—any impressions, feelings, gestures that arose as a result of the absorption.
From there, we began the third part of the session and shifted into a fishbowl dialogue. Participants from five previous workshops initially seeded the center chairs, and the incredibly poised Anna Siegel anchored the circle. People rotated in and out as they felt moved to be part of the unfolding conversation. It lasted about 40 minutes, and could have gone on much longer had we not needed to break for lunch!
Oh, and i scribed that final fishbowl—in part to give a demonstration of my “live” work, and also to synthesize the conversation of the conversation, the resonance of the resonance.
Remarkably, i barely remember the content. It was an immersive exchange, and I rely on others now to help recall what was expressed. Reflective highlights from fellow practitioners:
Scribing as swimming. Not only swimming, but diving. Scribing as dancing. Art surfacing in the scribing (the kiss). Connecting to source and distilling the essence. In Finnish we say “päästä iholle” : get to the skin/ your skin/ someone’s skin. It is something to do with getting close & feeling—both as something emotional & tactile. Something to do with permission & trust. – Raquel Benmergui
Generative Scribing brings us to a place where we have an opportunity to connect with parts of ourselves and with others like never before. Which explains emotions, feelings, resistance, and shifts. I’m always surprised by what it brings up and welcome it by remembering “let come/let go”. – Heather Martinez
I felt an energy accumulate in the room and in me. Or resonate. I felt very emotional. So now the question is in my head, that Karolina Iwa expressed: “How do [we] become kung-fu jedis of and open heart & keep it open, being at the same not more protected than a shell-less snail??” – Laura Lagaaij
Let‘s put the spirit into practice – let’s cross the pond together – Ben Fellis
And notes from the dialogue, tx to Marieke van der Velden:
‘how far can we go in reflecting what wants to be seen – when clients aren’t there yet?’
‘in case you feel alone, as a scribe, trust that you are NOT. there is a sense of belonging. you are with your clients. and also: you are part of this bigger community.’
‘stop chasing. lean back and trust what happens next. what wants to be seen will unfold.’
And last but certainly not least… A VIDEO ENCAPSULATING the WHOLE DAY (by the Visual Facilitators team of Christian Rath, Tim Rath, Rico Reutimann, and Joep van der Laan).
It was a magical time. Thank you EuViz! “There is a field…”
AND…… this post would NOT be complete without mentioning the 2 other keynotes, by Martin Haussmann/Karina Antons and David Sibbet, which obviously fed the field. (Full schedule of the conference activities is here.) And and and – a HUGE shout out to the organizers, some of whom worked for years behind the scenes to pull this off: Coordinators Christina Hemmingsen and Mara Callaert; Stream Leads: Bea Broskova, Nicolas Gros, Olivier Pesret, and Sabine Soeder; MCs Karolina Iwa and Anna Siegel; Bookstore by Aušrinė Balkaitytė; Environment +++ by Mona Ebdrup; Branding and marketing by the team of Visuality; Support from the International Forum of Visual Practitioners; and crazy-generous Neuland – keeping us all with markers in hand and surfaces to drawn into.
Just outside Berlin, during a 3-day Presencing Ecosystem Gathering in Nauen, I had the good fortune to challenge my practice in the safety of 35 friends and colleagues biased toward experimentation and social change. I experienced a profound shift in understanding the role of social art, and this post will hopefully map some of the contributing conditions to that.
As Otto Scharmer aptly summed it up after the session, we used a drawing “as a meditative surface,” as a specific tool for resonance—like a ringing bell—to “transform our collective attention, and give rise to a new type of collective container,” opening space for presencing and generative flow.
The drawing was about 8×8 feet (2.4×2.4 meters) on paper, made with acrylic, chalk, and permanent inks, crafted mainly during breaks and evenings, alone, in much silence. These are the main sections of the post:
WALKTHROUGH… Otto led the walkthrough of the drawing on the group’s final morning together. If you make it through the full ~17 minutes you will hear us each speak to essential parts: 1) Otto the cognitive aspects, the journey we had taken in the room that included key framings and a new process i write out at the end of the post; and 2) at about minute 10.20, my speaking to the inner aspects, the more intuitive or felt components that are suggestive of, but do not specify, meaning. It was hard to articulate, as i was still coming to understand what the drawing offered, not only what i had represented.
CONTEXT… Notes scrawled from the opening evening welcome. For anyone wondering how my “scribe” writing is so tidy, know that the process is a slow one: from listening, to gathering data, to sitting with what is most relevant, to writing on a wall. It starts out as a mess!
Before that opening, though, in a strategy meeting with the Presencing Institute (PI) that took place days before in Berlin, my friend and colleague Manish Srivastava drew the image on the left. It was a midway mapping of a Social Presencing Theater (SPT) process from our smaller group. The details i carried most strongly into the large drawing were the placement of “aspiration” on top, balanced in a vertical axis with “earth” at the bottom. This axis seemed incredibly strong and held many other parts – such as infrastructure, conscious institutions, capacity building, and absencing (to name only some) – in relation. The axis carried through to the end of the sculpting, informing the direction of PI and the gathering.
Before the PI strategy meeting, even, there are other influences: 1) the drawing from a 2018 live broadcast for Transforming Capitalism, where i drew an activated, marginalized labor population as a texture, for lack of a more clear and dignified way to represent it (see image on left, and the area under “Value”, where my hesitancy is clear and the markings not…) 2) a 2017 u.lab session where the overarching theme was connecting with our deepest humanity and creativity, and where i used my hand and red chalk ink to represent reducing fear as a gateway to access the open will.
And one final, unavoidable reference… two painting series i worked on around 2007-09. Beats, on the left, made with only an index finger, channelling the small and intimate quality of a heartbeat. Pulses, on the right, placed with masses of brushstrokes, calling to the emergence and recession of our presence. These, as the images above, show the slow evolution of the “activation orbs”.
THE DRAWING… i’m aware this image suggests multiple interpretations, and that’s intentional, and i will leave it for you to find your own meaning. I’ve been wondering how abstract my scribing can be, especially given my love of abstraction in painting and my deep appreciation for indigenous arts. How few marks can a scribe make to adequately convey wisdom and story? How many words are really necessary? What is the balance required to engage and communicate with both the rational and emotional aspects of our beings?
Here are some journal notes, trying to document the layout and order of how the parts came to be on the page. First to come out: the channel. Last: “basic bravery.”
Overall, this drawing turned out to be a perfect example of working WITH what does not come out the way we want. Notice the two lines on the lower left, coming down from the main orb… The one on the inside was the first. It felt immediately off, mis-drawn, out of balance with the upper arms. I then drew another line farther out. Neither would have worked well on their own, but together they worked with the leg on the right and held the overall shape in place, like legs of a stool, or like a 3-legged spider.
Also of note are the many smaller drawings to the right, on white, which each person in the room had created during a brief exercise on generative scribing while i read a section of my book on “Source“. These drawings were on the wall the entire time i drew, and you can observe the influence.
THE ROLE OF BLACK… Here’s a picture of the obsidian mentioned in the video, and an inspiration for letting the shiny black ink (covering mistakes) take on a positive role. Earlier in the week, a friend had given me the piece on the right from Mono Basin, CA. Thirty years ago, i had collected the piece on the left from a beach in Lipari. My fascination with this lava glass was brought right into the present moment.
Otto and i and others in PI have for years associated the black backgrounds we choose to use in branding, drawings, websites, etc with a few meanings. These include a reference to social art pioneer Joseph Beuys and his use of blackboards for note-taking, i.e.; in a 1977 installation on “improving the future of society”. When broadcasting from MIT during u.lab and other session, i scribe on old blackboards, too, ones we’ve been fortunate to have available as built-in features of the old classroom.
Black for me also represents space, the universe, places untouchable and large that situate us as specks. I think of the lines from Joni Mitchell’s 1969 song Woodstock: “We are stardust, We are golden, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden” – as relevant today as it was then.
Black has a lot of meaning. Kandinsky had a somewhat negative view: “A totally dead silence… a silence with no possibility, has the inner harmony of black… Outwardly black is the color with least harmony of all, a kind of neutral background against which the minutest shades of other colours stand clearly forward.” He continues about white, just for contrast: “It differs from white in this also, for with white nearly every color is in discord, or even mute altogether.”(1)
I have a more positive view, where black represents vast possibility. It’s introspective, rather than extroverted like yellow. Black to me is old, wise, even seductive in its quiet. White is new, young, innocent, almost drifty, like dandelion spores in a breeze. Black is the most challenging color for me to draw on, and Kandinsky is of course correct: other colors can easily take on a neon quality and appear falsely bright, insincere. It absorbs light and highlights contrast. It is the silent, if visual, dance partner that edges me to take risk.
In this drawing, i was confronted with a double challenge: how to draw into black as a space of possibility and how to work with this shinier black that seemed to have it’s own, new meaning; it had come to represent denial, my wanting to hide my wrong words and mis-drawn lines.
The shiny black started to represent absencing, an “architecture of separation” that “facilitates disconnects from the world around us and the word that is emerging… which results in blaming others and destruction.” (2) I have been experiencing absencing—especially in the US these days—as a fixed state of society , an inescapable, dominant reality plagued by polarized ideologies.
But then, as I was sitting with the two unresolved bottom left lines, Arawana Hayashi led us in an SPT “Stuck” exercise, and my thinking instantly shifted. In SPT, you essentially find one pose to embody the current reality, then sense what wants to move. Then you let a new pose that embodies a future reality slowly form.
I started to make a connection between the pain and discomfort experienced in absencing and the parts of the drawing that i felt had come out forced, lacking care. When Arawana spoke these lines: “Seeing is not about the eyes; it’s about the heart” I realized my own stuck seeing. I was looking at the lines, not yet seeing with my heart into the possibility they formed. I was seeing the shiny black as a problem, not yet as an opportunity. Likewise, i had been considering absencing purely as a destructive force, not yet relating to it’s transformative energy.
PROCESS INNOVATION… In the walkthrough video, when Otto asks: “How generative are we in using the scribing?” he was referring to a prompt by Katrin Kaeufer, who had inquired about how we actually engage with generative scribing. Earlier, during a fishbowl conversation about ecosystem leadership activation, Jayce Pei Yu Lee, Olaf Baldini, and I (left to right, below) each scribed in stationary points that formed a dynamic triangle around the circle. Consistent with my experience of scribing, the drawings served the moment and then personal reflection, as individuals would walk by the posted sheets on a wall outside our main room. But it was more passive than active engagement. And Katrin must have caught this.
The result of her inquiry was that on the final morning, we slowed down to be with the larger, primary drawing; we settled into the image and let it’s energy —harnessed from and through the group—speak back. Hence Otto’s reference to Arthur Zajonc…
During a 2011 PI Masterclass, Arthur had spoken about the contemplative dimensions of presencing, and led us through a “focused attention” and “open awareness” practice while chiming a bell. He had us first focus on the sound and then relax into the silence, while letting go of the sound and the memory of sound to let come an afterimage. You can watch a video here where Arthur leads the practice (minute 29) “If I strike the bell, it’s a call to attention. Then sound the bell again, in memory, hear the onset, and the long quieting of the bell.” This image traces Arthur’s talk with us:
With this inspiration, using the drawing as a bell, Otto guided the following process:
1) He mapped out what i’ll now call “Four Levels of Engagement” (i imagine this language and description will shift in the coming months).
Level 1: Capture. The scribe records content, and those in the room get the image as an “after-artifact”.
Level 2: Observe. People look at a drawing at the end of a workshop, as a final product.
Level 3: Reflect. Participants have touch points with the drawing midway in their process, to allow for reflection.
Level 4: Resonate. The social body opens up, shares stillness, absorbs the drawing, and contemplates any “afterimage”.
2) Otto and I each offered an orientation to the drawing, as a guide from observation into reflection.
3) Clustered at the wall, the group then attended to the image at level 4 for a few minutes, in silence, and then proceeded back to the circle.
4) Those in the room let go of the content of the drawing, stayed with the after-image, and tuned into the resonance. Then we payed attention to what was arising in terms of images, feelings, gestures.
5) We engaged in open, generative dialogue, with one comment building on another, and new meaning and understanding coming through the center of our circle.
One comment from someone in the group, shared after we had all parted ways: “The afterimage that came up this morning was how silently the large shadows of consequences (“black on black”) of absencing in our world had trickled through the entry points of the small groups [we’d shared through the session] as gatewaysinto our container. How they had stretched out taking our heart into their grip like with loooong thin black fingers (for me particularly through stories) the pain, the anger, and sadness spreading out, partially into the larger circle later.Then a second image emerged: that of the introductory circle in the morning, where each of us had presentedourselves as an individual facet expressionof the cracking global body we’re holding (“gold on gold” on upper right side of picture). It felt as if we’d all been speaking out of one force. Our words seemed to morph into asparkling bowl of strength and confidence and hope, a sovereign collectiveness building to reside amongst us…”
LITERACY… In closing, and to sum up the relevancy of everything shared thus far, one key point in the drawing (upper right corner) was around the concept of literacy. The Presencing Institute has been clearly focused on these main areas: creating knowledge, convening innovation labs, and building capacity—all in service of activating social fields and civilizational renewal. The image on the left, the bubbles. The image on the right, Otto’s framing (if i understand it correctly) that layers over the top bubble “creating knowledge” and builds on peace researcher Johan Galtung‘s work. These are seven methods of literacy: “I”, “You”, “It”, “I-You”, “You-It”, “I-It”, and “Field/Presence”. And our work now? Sharpening that literacy.
This includes how we create, how we share, how we reflect, how we sit in silence together, how we are still, and how we come to new sense. As was spoken in this sacred circle, “We reconnect language with experience, as a way to rejoin self with our deeper humanity.”
1 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art(London: Dover Publications, 1977), republished from the original The Art of Spiritual Harmony (London: Constable and Company Limited, 1914), p. 39.
Here are final images from the live sessions of the Transforming Capitalism Lab, a Presencing Institute initiative to curate stories that illustrate positive change happening around the world, leading the shift toward a new economy. Find out more here.
The Journey. Of note, the “upside down” world, which only seems upside down to those us in the northern hemisphere. At the end of session, i realized how heavy the “north” appeared, in relation to the openness of the “south”. Look at the way the blackboard, the dark space of unknown, enters into South America, Australia, India, and Africa. I had not noticed this until stepping back and having some perspective. While drawing, I resisted filling in the water space with blue, choosing to let the continents drift in a sea of black that is actually much larger than how we would expect to see the oceans. With this choice, the water that normally holds our land mass blurred in my mind with the sky that also holds us, and in this drawing blurred with the sea of content in the rest of the picture . Also, i drew the map from a less familiar angle, as a flattened earth, but then chose to keep the circular globe framing (as in the original by Olaf Baldini that i based this on.) This was intentional, to offer a subtle challenge to our understanding of things. Is it flat? Is it round? What is up? What is down? Such are the questions we ask as we explore the topic of capitalism and profound societal renewal. September 13, 2018. Watch live session here.
Original Journey Map, by Olaf Baldini.
Labor: Bridging the disconnect between work and purpose, with guests Palak Shah and Dayna Cunningham. June 14, 2018. Watch live session here.
I drew this on blackboard during an hour-long session. The highlight for me was the strange space around “value” which i tried to somehow represent with a texture of imprints from my hand, into the chalk ink, mixing white and an olive-grey. But my sense of how the word landed was hard to express, as Palak had spoken to the UNDER valuing of an invisible workforce, and i had written only the word “value” and thus was caught in between the two meanings, which both seemed important: the current state and a possible future place.
Now interesting to see is how the area around “value” (which visually lands at the prototyping phase of Theory U, represented by the large arc) is divided from my representation of “source” (not named in words, but represented by the wavy curves coming out from the “seeds of the future” on the far right) by a fainter part of the U. It’s as if “seeds” are connected by “source” to a not-yet-understood “value”. And of course that’s all surrounded by the presently named topics of “inclusion”, “attend”, “choice”, and “care”.
Nature: Addressing the disconnect between infinite growth and finite resources, with guest Winona LaDuke. May 10, 2018 by Emma Ruffin. Watch live session here.
Beyond GDP: Creating economies that generate well being for all, with guests Kate Raworth and Lorenzo Fioramonti. April 12, 2018 by Marsha Dunn. Watch live session here.
Last month just outside Hangzhou, I was part of an annual “happening” that brought together over 80 burgeoning and experienced visual practitioners from all over China. I could not keep up with the high volume of social sharing on WeChat, where there were dozens and dozens of amazing videos and photos posted. But here are some of my favorites – representing the spirit of beauty, collaboration, and fun i witnessed.
Here, too, are slides from a brief presentation I gave on scribing. The intent was to set some global and historical context for the gathering and community. I expect a bit of clarification and pushback on my accuracy and interpretation of this practice! Please comment and help flesh out this picture.
Note: As of Dec 12, i have amended the file, based on Matt Taylor’s helpful reminder of prehistoric drawings. I also found an old journal from 1983, when I studied for a few weeks in the Dordogne region of France and saw some of the 15,000 year old cave paintings. Funny, my notes are all text – but it was an art program. (Download a .pdf file here)
