//author
adrienne maree brown
//year
2017
//link
//Guiding Questions
Introduction
“A mushroom is a toxin-transformer, a dandelion is a community of healers waiting to spread…” (9)
- Q: In your view, what is a function of humans in the universe?
“I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free” (18)
- Q: Have you felt trapped inside of someone else’s imagination? How have you broken free?
General Questions
brown often uses the words of Nick Obolensky to explain emergency as ‘Emergence s the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions’ – and then goes on to expand on that definition it in her own words, for example “Emergence is beyond what the sum of its parts could even imagine.” (16)
- Q: How would you define emergence? What is its opposite?
brown often refers to sci fi writers. She quotes Ursula Le Guin saying “It’s up to authors to spark the imagination of their readers and to help them envision alternatives to how we might live.” (19).
- Q: Do artists, designers, and technology have that same or similar responsibility? What are the nuances between those roles?
Principles
- Q: Do you find any of these principles more difficult to achieve than others in your own creative practice? How?
Elements
- Q: Without overthinking it: which of these elements brown describes most immediately feels evident as part of your creative work, and how? Or, if none of them do, which feels like one you might intentionally integrate, and why?
Fractals
brown identifies a list of patterns that “start small and then become movement wide” – burn out, splitting, stagnation, etc.
- Q: What is a negative pattern that you see in a small way that reverberates outward, that you could attempt to disrupt today?
//key quotes
Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone’ else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.