The lens of simplicity: a memoir for a possibility of an integral capitalism

The similarity in their round frames is no coincidence. Comparing Steve Jobs' death to John Lennon's passing is not unreasonable. While comparing Jobs' impact on our time to that of Gandhi may be seen as a delusion, but it still holds meaning. All three of them have significantly shaped the world we inhabit today.

Revolution is the word that unites these geniuses.  Each one revolutionized the world in his own way. Gandhi brought us a political revolution, Lennon a behavioral revolution, Jobs a technological revolution. Gandhi stopped a war with flowers. Lennon showed that dreaming can be bigger than life.  Jobs flooded the world with the hope of simple, humane technology. After them, the world could no longer be the same.

If Beatles is bigger than Jesus, Jobs is bigger than The Beatles.

Jobs' revolution began with the creation of the first personal computer and culminated in the realization of the age-old dream of an all-knowing book: with the vision of iPad (which iteration led to iPhone) his devices reshaped the personal device industry and other content-related industries for good.

iPhone is the most successful single product in the entire history of capitalism. 

At this point, I no longer need to say anything for you to prove you that this product alone has changed humanity and the way it lives forever. In that sense, we could say that if the Beatles are greater than Jesus (as John once said) giving the works of time its whole, then we can also say that Jobs is, definitely, bigger than the Beatles. Again, we live in another time the time of The Beatles and the apples of capitalism keep unfolding it's powers a prowess.

He was a creative genius and a master of aesthetics. Someone once asked him about the design of PCs and he said, "They might be nice on the outside, but have you seen how horrible they are on the inside?"  This was Jobs, concerned with the integral design of the object, with the elegance of a product both outside and inside. That's the secret of Steve's apple, the concern for the whole and the detail. The integrity of the whole experience.

If there's anything the world can learn from Jobs, Lennon and Gandhi I think it's this: dream and beauty must be alive, inside and outside. What the world needs is integral people, integral brands, integral products and integral institutions with a true soul. Simple, deep and clear like a prosaic pair of round lenses.

*this article was adapted from the original article published on October 7, 2011 in the newspaper ‘Estado de São Paulo’ on account of the death of Steve Jobs.

Global Mental Health: the Invisible Pandemic

People are very simple and pretty fragile. Any help is relevant for us at this point in time. The demands are many and the resources to support our mental health in a BANI world are relatively scarce.

Today, the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, sent an open letter to all world leaders asking for the prioritization of Mental Health in the agenda of all governments. Today, despite more than 70% of human work being mental and cognitive, only 2% of the global budget for Health is allocated to Mental Health - and as the secretary general himself says in his open letter: this is unacceptable!

The issue of mental health is a wicked problem, the kind that requires countless joint efforts so that the basis of the equation of psychic suffering can be reversed and start to evolve into syntropy.

Global resources for mental health care are still very scarce and poorly structured. According to the UN and WHO, COVID19 is being controlled, but the mental health pandemic, if not given due attention, could last for more than two decades.

In developed countries, 75% of people in mental suffering say they are not receiving adequate care. In poor countries, more than 75% of the population that needs mental health care does not have any kind of help or support. But why did it took us so long to realize this? Well, as a famous prince says, maybe because the essential is invisible to the eye.

"Thinking that a talk will solve your company's mental health is like having a child addicted to drugs and thinking that a pamphlet would solve the problem."

We know that giving lectures within companies or governments about mental health, for example, is a relevant activity for raising awareness. But this has minimal potential to solve the problem. Giving a mental health talk thinking it will solve the problem is a bit like having a drug-addicted child at home and giving him a pamphlet and thinking it will change him. The action itself may even be well intentioned, but it's the legitimate case of looking the other way.

The resources needed to solve or at least address a problem such as mental health, whether inside or outside organizations, requires much more resources than we want to accept. But the point is, we need to accept. The mind is the foundation of human life and if the mind is not organized and functional - and we have a million reasons for that nowadays - everything else goes into a kind of entropy. Cognitive resources and emotional resources need to be exerted forcefully in the search and construction of solutions. As a matter of fact, the issue of mental health is a wicked problem, the kind that requires countless joint efforts so that the basis of the equation of psychic suffering can be reversed and start to evolve into syntropy.

You as a parent, employer or educator need to do a lot more in situations like these. You really need to devote more than you think you are cognitively capable of and more than you think you are emotionally capable of. Caring takes us beyond. We push our own limits - and by helping others we lift ourselves.

In terms of systems, first we need to find possible solutions and then actively transform these solutions into a culture within your organization. Furthermore, as we all have a mind, we should use this effort on ourselves first of all and, in parallel, use it on each other. Put the mask on yourself first and then on the child sitting next to you - remember that ideia?

This double effort is worth it, as the return on that investment does not directly affect your bank account, but adds more years to your life and more life to your years. First for yourself and, after understanding this new language of care, for your neighbors, colleagues, bosses, subordinates, you name it. Eventually, everyone around you. This, very briefly, is the real cadence of the mental health revolution we are starting to build now - one step at a time, onde day after another.

Let's flow

My sole intention in this post is to talk here about my different lines of work that range between Future Studies, Artificial Intelligence and Human Development. Besides this bed of knowledge (where ideas have sex) they generate culture artifacts that investigate the limits of drawing, sculpture and representation. I play with those resonances through my artwork and poetry. 

Infraslims, 2012-2024

All these interests surround a main structure of human theory to wellbeing, which also ends up connecting to what I believe to be the most important issue of the 21st century: human mental health. As a basis for this mental health is the self-regulation approach proposed by the mindfulness methodology. Mental health is not only about preventing mental conditions of suffering and low performance, but also - and more importantly - it is about promoting longer life and higher performance within this longer life. 

Certainly, in addition to the endless scientific works in this direction, one of its central beacons is the evolving and always expanding Flow theory. Initially proposed and structured over 30 years by professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow has become a center point to many theorists and an organizing destiny to the myriad of interests of my personal journey. As an introduction to the topic, I recommend the text about flow by Dr. Solange Mata Machado, scientific research coordinator at Positiv - our start-up of interfaces for mental health.

Biogramaturgies

Biograms and Space: the visibility of the monad.

Following the process of the design research course at the Berlin Art Institute, professor and artist Dagmara Genda teased me about the relationship between biograms and space. My premise that “drawing is the trail of dance in space” seemed to her still very incipient and asked for experiments along these lines. Below are 4 raw videos taken from my experimental sessions:

The Future of Biogramaturgies.

The idea of ​​continuity for this project is to edit it and a single video, using sounds taken from the album of functional songs Recursive Iterations by artist Ryan Teague who works with the idea of ​​sound architecture and generative music.

The final goal of this study of Biogramaturgies (still hidden on the horizon of future years) is to arrive in a luminous device (light hands / light fingers) that draw sculptures in space (drawing sculptures) at the same time that they react and recreate sounds.

Light and sound are two of the pillar phenomena of human perception and in the world of biograms they are one thing - synaesthetic objects.

Biograms and other Directions.

Other correlation created by this global workshop is the interest aroused in me by the project of Juan Eduardo Páes Cañas, one of the students of the course, but a seasoned semiotician whose thesis is Raíces Corporales del Dibujo. In addition to the materiality and visual virtuality of the biograms, I also understand these as signifiers of new meanings that have not yet been fully processed by humans, crediting them with a cognitive or even ontological existence.

Biograms and Biology: a task for the “long future”.

Another provocation made by Dagmara was about the relationship between biograms and biology. For this essay, even deeper questions need to be addressed and directed so that they do not become just a rhetorical exercise on the origins of biograms and their relationship with biological life itself.

Trace Theorem: from caves to cyberdance

Although the tone of this text can be understood as pretentious, this is not the intention of this small “proto-paper”. Any academic rigor is being neglected now, so that, in the light of a certain naivety, I can expose my points that largely focus on the essence of drawing. Not just essence as origin but also essence as destination.

The original theorem of drawing.

The drawing of Blombos, in South Africa, is currently the oldest drawing of known humanity. Dating from around 70,000 years ago, it is difficult to say that any other human device can be perceived as more ancestral than drawing itself. Speech or music, perhaps even older phenomenas, do not have material records and belong organically to the body domain and cannot be understood as human devices but, rather, as forms of communication intrinsic to our biological project as species.

In a crude and simple way from its primeval expression to its newest expressions within human culture, the drawing can be reduced to the following theorem:

“Drawing is the memory of a trace on a surface.”

Regardless of the pigments or tools, we use to perform this procedure the recording of a trace can create an infinite number of images, which can unfold or evolve within the culture in countless ways, given their character of permanence and permanence. However, the drawing as a record or the drawing as a project depends on the procedure of the trail on the surface. Because of this, I understand this observation as a fundamental formula of design and, therefore, one of the fundamental forms of art.

Given this observation, I started to explore a very particular form of drawing. This form consists of 10 years plus investigation about the line in space. From this obsessive and simple experimentation, what I call Biograms were born.

A new drawing theorem.

Place an image (or a bank of images) far from our artistic universe next to the biograms for a month and receive what emerges from this relationship. This is the challenge initially proposed by Ronaldo Entler during his post-graduate module in Contemporary Artistic Practices at FAAP in 2019. After marinating the drawing of two biograms next to the images of two books connected to the idea of bodies in space for almost a month, many things started happening in my psychic process in relation to the biograms themselves.

I will talk now about some of these new processes of understanding the existence, function, and relationship of biograms in the world. But initially I place here in a very direct way the change of the central axis of my understanding of what a drawing is. I can say that the drawing theorem, which even gave rise to my need to start drawing biograms, has changed from “drawing as the memory of a trace on a surface" to “ drawing as dance. ”

Forcing the relationship of these drawing lines on surfaces with bodies placed in spaces made me expand my understanding, at least, of one of the elements of my fundamental theorem of drawing. The idea of ​​surface gave way to the idea of ​​space. With the advances in digital technology, accomplishing this task has become relatively simple, even though the exploration of drawing as a memory of the trace in space is still in its early stages of expression. Its most common form occurs now within what culture calls Augmented Reality.

Researching this idea of ​​drawing in space, in a small challenge proposed by Dagmara Genda during her course ‘Drawing it out’ at the Berlin Art Institute, I responded to the task with another idea: “if every movement is a drawing, figure out a way to make your movements visible”.

Using AR (augmented reality) software I made a digital sketch as an experiment that responds in a simple way to this assignment, but that points to a series of possibilities of drawing in space and its possibility of being an essentially two-dimensional expression, for a three-dimensional expression.

Tridimensional Drawings: the real integrity of the biograms.

In my own research, this can give, for the first time, three-dimensionality to the biograms, opening up a whole new perspective not only for its production form but also leveraging questions inside the process of drawing. This discovery is revealing because it can expand our understanding of what drawing is. It is a potential actualization of the theorem: ‘drawing is the memory of the trail in space’.

I dare to point out an even more radical theorem that, certainly, creates a new brightness for the entire future productions of biograms - a new field of exploration that can be summed up in this new idea for me (and, maybe, for someone else):

"Drawing is the memory of dance in space."

- João Mognon