Making Art, Daily Rituals, FWB Residency and Edge Esmeralda
An eclectic diary of my past few weeks
Making ‘Art’
I’ve made art my whole life, but I’ve mentally resisted the idea of being an artist. I didn’t appreciate that the ‘art world’ seems to be a social game of clout and recognition, rejected it wholeheartedly, and picked up traits as an engineer. But my restless ADHD brain never gives up, it always comes up with these grandiose ideas on fun things to make.
I’m writing this blog inspired by a podcast interview with Tobias van Schneider on the theme of always creating, building consistency, and honoring your audience. Tobias is an extremely prolific creative who co-founded MyMind — a powerful tool that’s the perfect hybrid of Pinterest, Are.na and your personal note taker.
So many of us have these strong drives to create, and each of us has our own hindrances. Some of us are perfectionists, so the things we create are never finished; some are self-critical, so the things we create never see the public; some are overly distracted, so we never build up the cohesiveness to finish that last 20% work needed to bring our projects to success.
We talk so much and often about being free, breaking away from the bull-shit jobs. But this creative path to freedom is often way harder.
So many pieces need to be together in order for the creative path to work: knowing what you want, who you want to be, what kind of lifestyle you want to live, and what you are actually good at. After all that, we have to find the right environment, the right collaborators, communities, mentors, the right project to focus on. And even if we have all that, we might not know the best framework to continue building, we expect a lot and often get very little, we feel frustrated why people on the internet seem so successful and why is it so hard for us to ‘make it’, we often try so hard, and end up burning out.
I say ‘we’ but these are all the phases I’ve struggled through, from quitting my full-time job to being a full-time creative, and I’m still struggling through them. So if you resonate, you are not alone.
Creative Rituals & Routines
I started doing morning pages suggested in The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I also started a formatted daily journal in Obsidian. I read Atomic Habits by James Clear, and I’ve been really loving the podcast New Creative Era from Metalabel.
All these endeavors come from the need for my creative brain to express herself, expression is the ultimate antidote to depression, and I have a feeling that in order to express properly, eloquently, I have to build up the creative ‘language’ and ‘capability’ that allows for that. And that comes from the routines.
The FWB Residency
A few weeks back, I joined the Friends with Builders residency hosted by Friends with Benefits, a DAO and a global creative alliance. The Friends with Builder residency is a very well intentionally designed 6-week program to help creatives produce quality work with setting containers, journaling prompts, providing accountabilities, feedback, and support for creative people building passion projects.
A cool way to engage with the FWB community is to join the FWB Fest, which happens every year around mid-August in the town of Idyllwild, California. (I’ll most likely be there this year!)
I decided to use this opportunity to explore aesthetics in digital at the intersection of nature and technology, something I’ve been fascinated about for a long time, but I can't quite explain why, so I started my little R&D about it.
The Birth of Machines
Humans created machines to solve our problems. These elegant machines are essentially pieces of art. We adore them, worship them and the makers of them because they miraculously solved countless challenges in our lives. Things like IoT, XR, were magic to someone a hundred years ago.
As we progress, the solutions to our problems also create new problems for the modern world. We live in ice-cold, isolated urban jungles that detach us from nature, we become increasingly sterile, jaded, and we start to long for paleo diet, daylight computing, Shinrin-yoku forest bathing, and desert survival during Burning Man.
On one end of the spectrum, we have the Rainbow community (or the Armish) who don't use smartphones, on the other end, we have the 'sterile' frontier-tech sphere that wants to synthesize all parts of life and upload in digital reality.
First of all, it's absolutely amazing that we live in a world that allow such a wide range of diverse lifestyles and beliefs to exist. Let's take a moment to just appreciate that. 💕
Beyond the two extremes, is there a middle path? Or, beyond the middle path of being a tech-forward entrepreneur in week days and going on camping trips in weekends, can we imagine spaces, creatures, inventions that are combinations of raw, unhinged nature, and perfect, sterile machines?
I wanted to express aesthetically what this middle path looks like, so I created these 2 pieces, Sentient Flowers and Quantum Jellyfish:
I want to take this concept a bit further —— what are other ways of combining nature and the mechanical that can feel… soft, futuristic, elegant, and functional? Following the rabbit hole, I started reading about biomimicry.
Biomimicry
Biomimicry is 'an innovative approach that learns from and mimics nature's designs, processes, and strategies to solve human challenges and create sustainable solutions'. The term was coined by Janine Benyus, a natural sciences writer, who co-founded the Biomimicry Institute.
The 3 essential elements of Biomimicry is composed of:
Emulation -- learn from nature's forms and processes to guide human innovation.
Ethical Framework -- learning life's systems in a manner that creates conditions conducive to life
(Re)connection -- acknowledgement that human activities are not separate from nature, but a part of nature.
Velcro, AquaJelly, and More...
This concept has been around for a long time, probably as long as human have existed, and is actively implemented in our day-to-day life.
Velcro was invented after Swiss engineer George de Mestral observed how burrs stuck to his dog’s fur. The tiny hooks on the burrs inspired the hook-and-loop fastening system that became Velcro.
The front nose of Japan’s bullet train Shinkansen was redesigned after an engineer noticed how kingfisher birds dive into water with minimal splash. This shape reduced air pressure and noise, increasing efficiency.
Architect Mick Pearce designed the Eastgate Centre in Zimbabwe with a passive cooling system inspired by termite mounds, which maintain a stable temperature using natural convection.
One of the most aesthetically amazing creations is these 'Aquajelly' jellyfish robots, created back in 2008! Developed by Festo, AquaJelly is a robotic jellyfish that uses fluid dynamics to move gracefully through water. It uses a decentralized control system that mimics the distributed nervous system of a real jellyfish.
Anthony Gaudí's World
Architect Anthony Gaudí repeatedly mentioned that nature is his greatest inspiration, which extends to the cultural environment beyond just ‘rogue’ nature. Inside one of his buildings, you'll find a corner of the roof made of elegant traditional Japanese-inspired architecture, with the other side of the wall composed of a beautifully arranged Islamic tile pattern.
Gaudí's work breathes the interconnectedness of everything, fractal patterns in nature, functional designs in architecture, from tropical jungles to Eastern European architecture. His creative mind soaks up everything beautiful and reconstructs it in the most unexpectedly disruptive yet surprisingly cohesive way to create truly one-of-a-kind things.
Apparently, you can now rent at Casa Vicens on Airbnb now. I’m sure it’ll be quite an amazing experience ✨
One Week Until Edge Esmeralda
I spent the last 2 weeks road tripping up the coast in my little Prius, leaving from Bombay Beach, going on a ‘friends’ tour’ through San Diego, LA, Ojai, Berkeley, SF, visiting various people I love, then finally arrived in Healdsburg last weekend, where Edge Esmeralda will be hosted!
Edge Esmeralda is a pop-up city event I’ve been most excited about this year. I know the vibes will be good: solarpunk builders, health-conscious community. The TLDR is: people here look good, are extremely friendly, love to be healthy, and are so passionate about life.
And there are going to be many kids running around, because being multi-generation is a big part of Edge Esmeralda’s ethos.
To learn more about this event, check out their blog HERE.
I’ve also been making art for the Edge City team, It was truly a pleasure and an inspiration to work with this team. And I’ve been very proud of what I made:
Thanks for reading thus far and following through with my eclectic thoughts and random life events. If you have feedback about this blog, please let me know in the comments below :)