jonnybaker

turbulence at the boundary

several years back at greenbelt we did some silent movies for worship - 4 alt worship groups rose to the challenge. i really liked the whole thing...

turbulence at the boundary was vaux's offering. if you never got to experience it that is now up on proost. it's silent but there is a recommended soundtrack at the end of the movie and on the movie page. it's 20 minutes long and is a bargain at the regular movie price of £1.99

The M25 is 120 miles or thereabouts of road looping round London often known as a car park due to its clogged lanes of traffic. This film from Vaux turns a trip round the M25 into a meditation on ourselves, on our cities and on God finding turbulence at the boundary. The film is shot on Super8 and has four sequences/meditations:
Looking back
Looking Out
Looking in
Looking forward

If you live in the UK London's M25 is iconic. If you are elsewhere it's urban spirituality that we hope will connect.

whack pack, oblique strategies and bloom apps

i recently got an ipod touch (didn't feel i spend enough for the iphone) and have been amazed how good it is. the movie quality is amazingly good. i've found myself watching quite a few things on bbc iplayer on it. and i love the apps. if you haven't seen one, the apps are the applications created to run on the ipod touch or iphone. anything from a dictionary, a spirit level, games, underground map, twitter feed, facebook, mail and so on...

there's a lot of creative potential for them i think. if i had more time i'd investigate how to create them. hopefully someone will produce something worthy of a worship trick before long...

roger von oech and brian eno have been quick off the mark with their creative thinking card sets. back in the 70s oblique stratgies was a set of cards created by brian eno. the idea is turn up a card and follow the instruction if you need a spark. you must follow the rule... similarly the creative whack pack by roger turns some of the creative ideas in a whack on the side of the head into a set of cards. i've got both sets as cards. but i couldn't resist getting the apps as well.

in both cases the app is simple. click on the screen and a card is randomly selected.

on the subject of brian eno, another wonderful app is bloom - touch the screen to create ambient sounds that create a soundscape - it's surprisingly brilliant!

improvisation and trickery at the netzer co-op - worship trick 58

i absolutely love this solving of a problem that paul soupiset has posted on his blog. in a worship service at the netzer co-op in austin where bri and tim are (hi if you're reading) the challenge was how to run a presentation on a laptop from a distance when you've forgotten your remote... i'll say no more. go and see for yourself. it's definitely a worship trick of sorts though probably not one that will be repeated much elsewhere but i am adding it to the official list as it's so brilliant - no 58 is series 3. we've had a few moments like this over the years.

there's nothing like pressure to fuel creative thinking using whatever is at hand to solve a problem - tinkering i guess. imposing constraints or limits can actually help the creative process - there's less other stuff to worry about. so if you want to be creative, intentionally throw spanners in the works like this and see what happens...

surprising what you can do with a cheap book on html and a bit of blog experience

i don't think i mentioned that i have taken over running the web site of the ealing photography group. so i gave it a redesign. i did most of the work round christmas time. you may not remember what it was like before but i used it as a chance to teach myself a bit about stylesheets and am simply writing the code for it rather than using any software package. i have hopefully gone for something clean and simple using some of the structure of the previous designer that also looks like it is part of london independent photography

part of my theory round it is that i want to try and shift some of the work over to members of the group - so rather than me creating galleries i have suggested people create sets in flickr or create a slideshow using 280slides - see my idiot's guide . then i can simply paste the code for their gallery into their members page. it seems to work pretty well though pages can take a while to load up the slidesets. for flickr sets i am using pictobrowser - see my member's page for an example. and for 280slides it gives you the code - see brig's page for an example

the only irritating thing is that when i created a group in flickr for the recent garcin challenge it turns out that only photos from people with a pro account show up in the slideshow so i have had to create a slideshow after all.

i have also set up a blog for anyone in the group to use with tumblr - tumblr seems a very straightforward interface. and i have then found a widget to pull the feeds into the blog page. widgets are ugly but my coding skills are such that i wasn't sure how else to do that and i have tried to make the widget as clean as i could. if anyone knows another way let me know...

web design and coding is not my area of expertise but it's surprising what you can do with a cheap book on html and a bit of blog experience. now is the challenge of encouraging participation in the group many of whom probably preferred it when someone else did everything!

have this gift because...

have this gift because..., originally uploaded by jonnybaker.

this was part of last night's grace exploring the theme of gift. the next grace is also on the theme and we have film, storytelling and discussion evenings through lent on it as well. the service outline is (probably with a few bits to be added) here. but it sort of went like this...

the space looked great with a huge pile of gifts, an enormous cat's cradle type installation with gifts tangled in it and a table at the far end. babette's feast was silently playing on the screen, a parable for the night.

sit and talk about gifts and experiences good and bad. then take a label and write on it what the real meaning was behind a gift and tie it to the pile of gifts. this was really good - some really good meanings and some scary ones!

then on to the installation exploring the idea of gifts with ties that bind positively or negatively. find a gift and trace it to an envelope which is the tie/string attached! mine was this message above...

give your gift to someone else without the tie...

then cut the strings down (adam scissorhands?)

gather round the table and reflect on how god gives and how we respond. the response was to pour rice until overflowing into peoples hands and then they could leave some grains as a token of relationship with god. relationship not obligation... i was doing this bit and we read psalm 50 that i then rewrote/improvised for grace as follows:

Grace listen...
I have no complaint about your sacrifices -
you certainly put the creative effort in to your worship.
But I do not need your art installations, stations, movie loops, ambient tunes, apple macs, ipods
gas masks, photography, font selection, stories, good taste, creative liturgies and new technologies.
All the silicon in the valley is mine
I know all the art in the whole world
The creation is my gallery
I made imagination!
Make thankfulness your sacrifice to God
out of friendship and not obligation
That's what it's about...

then finally a blessing having reflected on gifts we have that are for giving on behalf of the community before the usual cafe which had an abundance of danes, wine and cakes!

the photos i took are in a slideset gift and there will be more no doubt in the gracelondon flickr pool.

the inspiration for the service was lewis hyde's book the gift and for me, sigur ros' film heima which we will be watching in lent.

i have made this whole thing a worship trick - it was all so good! no 56 in series 3...

parable of the sea - mission and the church

andi mac rocks! he is one of proost's unusual suspects - new talent that we publish. he contacted us out of the blue last year and we published clouds - a quirky movie. last year at the greenbelt unusual suspects session he played vampire love - which we adored - even more quirky! that now has an electro french pop sounding soundtrack and we decided to hold it back for valentine's day so it's just come out this month. he was also one of the artists we featured as part of nine with another brilliant piece. andi is now carving out a niche as a designer, animator, illustrator... and he sent me a link to a piece he has done for SAMS ireland called the parable of the sea. it is stunning - simple, sad, powerful.

go and watch it on his site and there is a link to paypal to buy it for three pounds. also if you haven't watched any of the three movies andi has released on proost they are all on his site in the animations section...

personal productivity toolbox

what's your online personal productivity toolbox?

once upon a school

bruce stanley sent me a link to watch this video. it's 25 minutes long so i groaned and thought i haven't got time but because i trust him i did eventually. it's a wonderful example of creativity - connected with education and why we in cms are following a hunch that connecting with entrepreneurs who build and transform things is a good idea...

if you've not come across TED, ideas worth spreading, have a look

steve mannion - an extraordinary man

i was eating tea in front of tv last night watching a recording of desperate housewives (yes sad i know). i intended to turn the tv off but the programme that was on caught our attention and we ended up glued to superdoctors. it was a documentary looking at medicine practice in the developing world where the resources are simply not available to carry out western type surgery and practice.

the doctor being followed was steve mannion. he is clearly a brilliant doctor. but he has chosen to live his life alternating between doing two weeks working for the NHS in blackpool and then two weeks in the developing world in places such as papua new guinea, and malawi. the programme was following some of his work in malawi.

he loves ideas and innovation and had a few astonishing things he did.

• a skin graft where they only really had a skalpel available. he had read about a technique in the war where a piece of skin would be removed and then chopped into small pieces and those little pieces spread over the area needing new skin and the body is such that the skin would grow and join up from those little pieces.
• creating an antiseptic to put on infected sores made up of vaseline, sugar and glycrine - i.e. cheap readily available materials. he got the idea for this from an old practice using honey but honey was too expensive so figured that sugar is what is in jam and preserves it by killing bacteria so it ought to work!
• and then club foot - he piloted a technique that has now become accepted practice in the uk - ponseti method - after a lot of resistance. rather than operating, the foot on a child is simply put in a series of 5 casts that gradually move the foot back to its straight/flat position. again he had read about this as an old forgotten practice somewhere.

he thinks outside the box, searches back in his tradition finding forgotten wisdom, makes do with whatever resources are to hand and this scarcity is what provokes new practice, and spends his life on behalf of those who are poor working and training local people - an absolutely inspiring man and bit of tv (yes even better than desperate housewives).

provocations, pacman and triathlons

looks like the labyrinth was a success...

we had fun at breakout leading a session in the big top saturday night and then a communion this morning. i don't know if you have ever been to gigs where there are computers on stage and people leaning over looking busy and you are wondering what they are doing? well simon was caught on camera here with the crowd facing him in the communion service and what's on his screen?! pacman!!!!! mmmm... he tells me he was also playing music.

if you are dropping by from breakout hi... if you want to follow up any of the music visit
proost | dubb | twotone | cntrst

here's dubb and twotone in action

if you've ever heard me speak about creativity one of the idea i like is provocations. edward de bono says that we get ideas or get creative when our routine is interrupted so when something unwelcome happens learn to receive it as a provocation and see where it might lead. well on saturday we had got about an hour out of london when i remembered that i had left my laptop behind with all the visuals on. so i turned round to head back but dropped joel, harry and simon at newport pagnell service station to wait. when i picked them up two and a half hours later they had composed a new track in reason on simon's laptop and harry had written a rap on the theme of the breakout weekend - beyond. they duly performed it live that evening and it was brilliant - so leaving my laptop behind proved to be a great provocation!

jenny smashed her personal best in the triathlon this weekend getting below the 3 hour mark with 2 hours 49 minutes. that knocked 20 minutes off her previous personal best which is amazing. she has trained really hard and it all came good - congratulations! sorry we missed it...

giving church a whack on the side of the head

on tuesday i presented a seminar/workshop at the RUN conference. hi to anyone visiting the blog who was there. i used roger von oech's a whack on the side of the head as the inspiration for thinking creatively around church, along with a few of ed de bono's ideas around provocations. the sessions were fun. my favourite part was when people shared challenges they were facing and we got into groups to think creatively about solutions by breaking some of roger's mental locks. people came up with great ideas. the whack presentation slides are here - download whack.pdf . roger thanks for the inspiration - i gave your book a good plug!

neave

neave.com has had a makeover - wonderfully creative stuff as ever

wishful thinking

a blog i have been tracking for a while now is wishful thinking. i first came across it through bob carlton via a free book on time managing for creative people.

anyway the first thing to say is that there is another free book - this time on creative management for creative teams. it's aimed at people in creative business but (as you'll know if you follow this blog) mission, church planting and leadership all require creative thinking, skills and teams and are both what we need and something i am passionate about. here's a quote from the intro:

Creativity needs more than bean-bags and Playstations. And if creativity is your business, you know there’s a lot more to it than ‘thinking outside the box’. For one thing, you probably have to think inside a few boxes - such as the budget and brief, and your client or audience’s tolerance levels. So while you need to encourage blue-sky thinking and risk-taking, you also need to make things happen on time, on budget and to keep the end users happy.

Give people too much creative freedom and they may have a blast working on the project - only to end up frustrated when the client or audience ‘don’t get it’. But if you play it too safe, your creatives will feel constrained and everyone will be underwhelmed by the final result.

Not an easy balancing act to pull off. Even before you factor in a few creative egos. Plus the fact that creative people are not satisfied with just doing the job - they want to be challenged and inspired on every project, every day. They want opportunities to learn and hone their skills. And if they don’t get them in your team, sooner or later they’ll start to look elsewhere.

on the subject of creativity, he interviews roger von oech - see my review below. the thing i found most interesting in this interview was the question about limits or constraints actually helping the creative process. i really relate to this and think it's a mind shift that's useful if you are in any way involved in the emerging church - you're likely to have restraints around time and budget and people and maybe geography. rather than being a problem this could be an opportunity for some creative thinking?... my friend mark waddington is the person who introduced me to the idea that constraints and creativity were not mutually exclusive...

authors in the age of conversation also looks interesting but dare i add another book to my growing pile?...

whack on the side of the head 25th anniversary

imagine writing a book and twenty five years later it's still as good as ever and selling! well that's the case with roger von oech's whack on the side of the head. the 25th anniversary edition is about to be released (this week i think) revised and updated. i have a real soft spot for this book. i read it at a time when i was just getting going in youth work and had relied on a friend's creative ideas. but he was due to move on so we couldn't rely on him and had to get our creative juices flowing. whack provided the inspiration, so much so that we got known for our creative approach. and i have loved creative thinking ever since. i have actually given awaay or mislaid or leant my first copy so was really pleased to get hold of it again.

it's an easy book to read - oech outlines 10 mental locks to creativity and illustrates with lots of stories, puzzles and illustrations how each of those locks can be unlocked. the locks are things such as 'play is frivolous' or 'the right answer' or 'that's not logical', things that we have in the back of our minds that stop us being creative. we all think in patterns, and make assumptions that mean we see and think in particular tracks. we need a whack to knock us out of that particular groove.

creativity and imagination are wonderful things. and they are particularly important when in a season where we have got in a rut, or stuck and need to change. that's why i think that the current challenge the church faces of change in a postmodern culture is one which needs plenty of creative thinking encouraged. church planters, leaders, missionaries and so on should get training in creativity and improvisation. i got to know roger via his blog a couple of years back and we have exchanged to and fro since. i was interviewed on his blog in dec 2006 and in answer to the question what i do, my answer was that my job is to give the church a whack on the side of the head! i follow his blog in my reader - he often comes up with gems. i liked his thoughts recently on when you get ideas i could relate to the feedback that pressure/necessity is one way people get creative (i know a deadline focuses my mind) but equally so is playing around. so as roger puts it necessity may be the mother of invention but play is certainly the father.

i also have the creative whack pack - a series of cards  with creative strategies. i have used them on my own sometimes when i'm in an ideas  phase. and i have used them with groups. they are also really worth getting.

the last lock in the book is 'i'm not creative' - this is perhaps the most subtle but powerful. so many people tell themselves that they are not a creative person, or don't have that gift - but it's precisely beieving that that makes it a self fulfilling prophecy. if you think you are creative you will be. you'd better believe it...

the best looking blog...

bruce stanley is someone whose creative abilities inspire me - he is a genius. i love pretty much everything he does. well true to form he has revamped embody completely and it looks amazing. in fact i think it's the most unique looking blog i have seen for quite some time. and i am thoroughly envious...

killing good ideas can harm your future

this is kind of a negative way of looking at it but it's still fun...

ever had a good idea killed off by someone or a group?
want to see it burned in the fire in style?

then look no further

two movies of a focus group looking at fire and wheel

time management for creative people

bob sent me a link to time management for creative people

creating passionate users

love this piece from kathy sierra - don't aks employees to be passionate about the company
(ht richard). here's a quote...

People ask me, "How can I get our employees to be passionate about the company?" Wrong question. Passion for our employer, manager, current job? Irrelevant. Passion for our profession and the kind of work we do? Crucial. If I own company FOO, I don't need employees with a passion for FOO. I want those with a passion for the work they're doing. The company should behave just like a good user interface -- support people in doing what they're trying to do, and stay the hell out of their way.

creative leadership

gave a lecture for a salvation army conference church on the edge gathering leaders involved in mission and church planting. you can download the pdf of the slides i used if you are interested - creativeleadership.pdf. the title was creative leadership in the new environment: imagination, improvisation and innovation.

one of the slides i used was a picture that was in friday's guardian of a church being moved on the back of a lorry - the caption suggested it was a response to a dwindling congregation somewhere in canada. that seemed to be a metaphor for our problem - if it isn't working we transport exactly the same thing down the road and do it the same way or with a few tweaks rather than creatively re-imaginging what church could look or be like in the new environment. before anyone asks, no i don't have any notes - the slides are what i used to remind me of what i wanted to say. was fun to be able to try out ideas from the starfish and the spider...

the gift [5]: art and prophecy

one of things i remember from reading matthew fox's original blessing many years back was a connection he made between art and prophecy. he pointed out that art is clearly powerful and can be tied up with prophecy because totalitarian regimes tend to silence artists.

hyde makes a similar connection. he says that we think of genocide as the physical destruction of a group. but it could easily be applied to the destruction of the genus of a group by the destruction, or silencing of its art which kils its creative spirit.

in the comments on previous posts there's been some debate on the point or use of art. so i thought it worth throwing that thought into the mix...

that's me done for now on the gift. i thoroughly recommend it. i end with a quote i love from angelou that hyde quotes:

we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets