#tellingtheevolution

[theradicantattitude]

Goad Alex, Mars, 2013.

MARS was implemented on Summer Island in the Maldives in conjunction with their coral farm in July 2018. They have had a lot of success growing coral in deeper water and we will be comparing the differences between ceramic and concrete surfaces for coral colonisation.

[theradicantattitude]

Oxman Neri, The Krebs Cycle of Creativity III in Art and Practice with Neri Oxman (seminar), MoMA, Floor 2, Creativity Lab, 2020.

Art and Practice is a series of seminars and workshops that bring together emerging and experienced artists. Together they explore the challenges and possibilities of sustaining a creative life.

Neri Oxman will discuss her team’s creative process and invite others to share their experiences with the tensions between modes of thinking and making in the bio-digital age. Oxman will present her Krebs Cycle of Creativity, a framework that considers the domains of art, science, engineering, and design as synergetic forms of thinking; the input from one domain becomes the output of another. Each discipline explains, predicts, utilizes, and informs the world around us, and ultimately the designs we create. Inspired by the Bauhaus curriculum diagram, created in 1922 by Walter Gropius, the Cycle embodies the holistic nature of the Bauhaus education, in which individual creators representing diverse disciplinary backgrounds came together in pursuit of a shared mission to reform art, design, and society.

[theradicantattitude]

Oxman Neri, The Krebs cycle of Creativity (framework), 2016. 

A map that describes the perpetuation of creative energy [...] (across) four modalities of human creativity: Science, Engineering, Design and Art. (Oxman, 2016)

You may have heard the term ‘citric acid cycle’ in a biology class at a high school: it was also called the "Krebs Cycle" after being discovered by German scientist Hans Krebs in 1937. It is an important biochemical reaction for the metabolism of living organisms and refers to reactions that occur in all living organisms that breathe oxygen. The detailed explanation is omitted here, but Neri's "Krebs Cycle of Creativity (KCC)" uses the citric acid cycle as an analogy, and how to circulate the creative energy in order to circulate the economy (Neri calls it Creative ATP, Cre ATP). 

At KCC, philosophy is at the centre of basic theory ‘Perception’, and economics is at the centre of applied practice ‘Production’. The four domains of human creativity, "Art", "Design", "Engineering", and "Science" are the carbon compounds of the citric acid cycle. The energy of creativity will be metabolized by each domain generating a currency that will be transformed into another domain. The contents will be briefly described as Science: Creating and utilizing the knowledge of ‘Engineering’ by explaining and predicting our world / Engineering: Creating practicality by utilizing scientific knowledge to solve problems / Design: Creating our behavioural changes by maximizing utility / Art: Creating new recognition in the world by criticizing our behavioural changes. Neri Oxman’s KCC works as a framework to locate the flows of human creativity across metaphorical disciplinary spaces; each quadrant issues currencies that activate other domains, circulating energy of creativity and promoting innovation. As a speculative map, the KCC is intentionally abstract and can be understood as a clock, a microscope, a compass, and a gyroscope.