Somerset Haus R&D Day 1

The get-in is both exciting and itchy... there is all the time ahead to create stuff, but what if it's all shit? There is no requirement to create stuff today, it's the get-in, getting our bearings. One of my favourite bits is opening doors...finding doors...opening doors...an unassuming office door opens into an underground set of shallow tunnels, water has flooded the stone floor and some kind of seaweed is growing around a chair-leg....ace! The building slowly reveals itself... beyond this 1990s looking office space with it's ceiling tiles, striped curtains, navy blue carpet tiles and cream walls covered with bits of blue-tac from old important communications. The building is under the forces of entropy...future...self-cleaning buildings (already in our speech) /self-repairing buildings. feelings amongst the group: overwhelmed, dissociated, alienated, restless, not good enough but through community, conversation, empathy and being listened to, we can be soothed, given permission to be here to play and be inspired. we spoke of MEME A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture".[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[3] The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme (from Ancient Greek μίμημα pronounced [míːmɛːma] mīmēma, "imitated thing", from μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, "to imitate", from μῖμος mimos, "mime")[4] coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)[1][5] as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches.[6] We spoke of the common pursuit of happiness, are we allowed to be happy? Let's be artists, not tortured artist's... because we aren't. Some artists are tortured... usually by their former lives or their minds... we fortunately are not...it does not mean that we don't take our work seriously or that serious concerns may appear within our work... we just don't need any pretend angst getting in the way. Later we went for a tour of the building and learnt more history .... We decide as a group that each day we would meet and discuss our dreams.. 'Dream Time'... this meant that we needed to spend time dreaming.