Creative States

As we craft video games with more complex storylines and hyper-realistic graphics, is it time to ask studios to be more reflective with cultural narratives? Can we find an opening in a medium dominated by predatory aggression and addictive gameplay to create new worlds? Thankfully, new worlds are slowly emerging. Sky: Children of Light, a virtual game from the award winning gaming firm, @ThatGameCompany shows us what it can look like if winning doesn’t require killing. The world of Sky is dangerous, but to survive players are tasked to team up and collect candles as currency to rebuild and relight a map of constellations. “Gaming can be a healing experience to promote the bonds that tie all of us together and help us connect more deeply with one another,” says the studio’s co-founder and creative director, Jenova Chen. In Sky, the only way to win is by feeling, sensing and caring for one another. We are excited to see what other worlds Chen and his team create that are embodied in a quest to connect rather than aggressive conquest. See link in bio for more info. Images care of @ThatGameCompany

“Ursula’s work explored human kinship: how we locate ourselves among others, how we belong to each other in ways both galactic and within a one-bedroom apartment, or a committee meeting, how we make family, and how these connections shape societies and worlds.” ~ Moe Bowstern, A Larger Reality Contributor In this beautiful publication, edited by Connor Bouchard-Roberts as a compendium to the recent Ursula K. Le Guin, A Larger Reality exhibition at @oregoncontemporary , readers are immersed in the ideas, playfulness and hope that course through Ursula K. Le Guin’s work. We are invited to, just as Le Guin did, allow our souls to be touched in ways that offer both relatable delight and more enlightened relation. We offer this excerpt from the Introduction by Connor Bouchard-Roberts: This book is a narrow footpath meandering through the vast landscape of Ursula K. Le Guin’s body of work-running along creekside, through valleys, past cities, from the high country down to the sea. In its own subtle and tangled way, it is both an homage to and extension of her work: opening windows and doors, inwards and outwards. This book is an anthology in the original sense: “a gathering of flowers” (from the Greek anthos, “flower,” and -logia, “gathering”). This bouquet is for you: roughly flowing chronologically, alternating between Ursula’s voice and others’ in reflection. It was gathered and structured around a few important themes that Le Guin explored and revisited in each of her books: Place, Freedom, Life of the Mind, Culture(s), Self/Other, and Love. I invite you to draw your own web of connections as you move about the chapters. In the distance between here and there, then and now, known and unknown, word and occurrence, self and other, Ursula K. Le Guin crafted poems, stories, sketches, translations, worlds, realities, where beauty and truth are “no ornament.” Images courtesy of @oregoncontemporary

What kind of world can we build from the wreckage of this one? What kind of ancestors are we becoming in the process? In ‘The Craftocene’, a deeply thought-provoking exhibition now on view at the Welt Museum in Vienna, @superfluxstudio uses the aesthetic and language of the museum itself, to show how future archeologists might make sense of our material obsessions. Consisting of three large works (Refuge for Resurgence, Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream, and Relics of Abundance), The Craftocene is meant to be experienced not as a collection of objects, but rather a proposition for civilizational transition. “Beneath the stuff we consume, the systems we rely on, and the stories we tell, the myths that hold us are becoming undone,” write Superflux’ co-founders @anabjain and @jonardern : “the systems that underwrote the myth of infinite growth are themselves showing their limits. A dangerously fertile space, that we struggle to make sense of, even as this change ripples around and among us. In this space, we propose a spirit-first approach of embodied attention, the beginning of a different relationship with the world. That intentionality, care and material dialogue become the foundation of, perhaps, more hopeful futures.” Unlike other ‘ocenes’ that attempt to name the moment we are in and what matters most about it (Anthropocene, Capitalocene…) Superflux coined Craftocene to name a practice—something you actually shape with your hands, heart and spirit. In so doing, they argue that it is through the slow and deliberate crafting, of materials, stories and myths that new possibilities emerge. “The storyworlds and objects we build in The Craftocene are our attempt to create storytelling possibilities you can physically inhabit, a co-imagined myth that acknowledges our ecological interconnectedness with the planet. It becomes a container to place ideas in, a guide that can move us from the overwhelming paralysis of the present towards an embodied understanding that craft, care and imagination can lead us forward.” The Craftocene is on view @weltmuseumwein through August 16, 2026

25 years after Wong Kar-wai’s majestic film In the Mood for Love,actor Tony Leung returns to the screen in a role written for him by the award-winning director, Ildikó Enyedi, continuing his soulful search for connection, but this time with a magnificent gingko biloba tree. Silent Friend’s cinematic exploration of relationship foregrounds, literally and figuratively, the botanical world, poetically shifting our view of time, language and sentience in the process. Much like more-than-human relationships Enyedi’s film is not easy to decipher, leaving the viewer to weave their own connections and interpretations, but as @pattyrhodesbrown says in his insightful review, (posted, in part, here): “Silent Friend isn’t for everyone: it’s a puzzle I myself am still trying to solve. But I think if you give it a chance, it might help you reconsider your relationship with the natural world around you.”

@mariapopova , author of the Marginalian and one of our favourite thinkers and literary voyagers, gave us particular inspiration this week, with her reflections on the new book What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World by @prentishemphill Speaking of Hemphill’s beautiful call to live with the courage to break the pattern of the familiar in order to release the possibility of the unknown, Popova writes: “This reorientation is not merely a cerebral decision but an embodied action — something that renders the courage to change, or simply the courage to get real, all the more difficult and all the more urgent in a neo-Cartesian culture that keeps driving us further and further away from the lush life of the body, as disembodied artificial intelligences make more and more decisions for us and the real world — the world of fireflies and owls and lichen, trembling with aliveness — takes up less and less space in our mental model of reality.”

A beautiful exploration on bold new futures starting with the simple question of intimacy… We thank host @gaylenegould of the @serpentineuk ‘s Podcast Series on Intimacies for expanding and evolving our understanding of connection with ourselves, others, and the world around us. Across 6 episodes, Gould gathers perspectives from artists, designers, writers, and thinkers, including @studiotomassaraceno , @jakob_kudsk_steenson , @linaghotmeh and others, on how to rekindle trust, and open ourselves up to new possibilities for connection, both interpersonal and interspecies. What would happen if we created environments that facilitated communion rather than division? How could we design spaces that honor our body's relationship to other bodies, from the smallest microbes to other species and people, in ways that grow closeness and kinship? We enjoyed our journey meandering through each episode to unearth fuller intimacies in our deeply bodied world. Listen in via Apple Podcast, Google Podcast or Spotify. Images care of @serpentineuk and Nina Photography.

“I strive to propel radical planetary empathy into the very core of the systems and structures that shape and govern our shared human and non-human communities.” ~ enni-kukka tuomala We are grateful for enni-kukka tuomala’s work as the world’s first election artist. @ennikukka.studio came into our field when we saw her work, empatia ele in the Design for Different Futures exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. empatia ele injects a beating pulse into the increasingly hard-edged discipline of politics. She created empathy tools with policy-makers in the Parliament of Finland that helped open a more generous and collaborative decision-making process. In her work, enni-kukka tuomala "transforms empathy from an abstract concept into a tangible and aesthetic experience that can be seen, felt, shaped and inhabited for more intimate moments with oneself, each other, and our environments." We look forward seeing her bodied approach evolve as she continues a multiyear empathy council project with the Finnish Cultural Foundation, inspiring politicians to suit up with empathy instead of armour, for all forms of life. See link in bio for more info. Images care of @ennikukka.studio

Superradiance by @memo_akten and @katie_hofstadter explores how we feel our interdependence with the world around (and in) us. We love how they use emerging technologies as tools to help us feel the embodied, emotional and ecological dimensions of human experience.

From the Scientific Enlightenment to the Industrial and Digital Revolution, our species has steadfastly cemented us within a Rational Worldview. We objectify and mechanize almost every aspect of our daily existence and treat the world as inert and expendable. While the world we built has enriched many and enabled incredible progress, it comes at great cost: disconnection. When we treat everything as transactional, we deplete the relationships between our feeling bodies, our fellow humans and our fuller ecosystems. Integrating Rational and Relational Worldviews We can learn to relate differently. Creative States offers a framework that helps designers and decision-makers integrate Rational and Relational Worldviews by merging transaction-based thinking with our long-forgotten capacity of full-bodied knowing. A Relational Worldview treats us not as separate actors in an inanimate world, but as bodies within an interdependent web of sentient beings that inform our perception, choices and experience. Attuning to Our Full-Bodied Felt Experience Evolved as a means of survival millennia ago, our bodies constantly scan and process cues in our surroundings to alert the brain of danger, safety or symbiosis. This process of neuroception, or our Felt Sense, is far more important than conscious thought in perceiving what is around us. We in fact feel the world before we think about it. When our bodies feel threatened, we retreat and shut down connection. Yet when we feel safe, we open ourselves to the aliveness of interconnection. Expansive Feeling States are emotions known to release neurochemicals in our bodies that foster generous integration with others and our surroundings. Encouraging Life-Giving Possibilities Designers and decision-makers who foreground our Felt Sense and encourage expansive Feeling States in their designs and enterprise decisions not only help us to integrate the rational and relational. They engage all living beings and inspire growth within the limits of our interwoven, immersed and sensuous world. Join us in our new explorations toward life-giving possibility.

World renowned biologist and tree expert, @davidgeorgehaskell has long been an inspiration to us, not only for his bestselling books, such as “The Songs of Trees” and “Sounds Wild and Broken”, but for his pioneering voice on sensory embodiment in scientific research. Here we share highlights from his most recent interview with @emergencemagazine and its accompanying companion guide on “Playful Listening.” Enjoy! “What if we truly listened to the songs of frogs, birds and insects... would we tolerate suburban sprawl and the graveyard of biodiversity that are lawns and exotic ornamental landscaping? Would we be so keen to feed ourselves and our farm animals on palm oil and soy from plowed prairie and clear-cut rainforest… that displaced the livelihood and wisdom of fellow humans?” “Most of the stuff around us came from places that we have no direct sensory connection to. And, in fact, that disconnection is not just a side effect of the global economy: it is a necessary part of continuing the destruction.” “The fact that many of the sensory modalities that we use, and other creatures use, are being cut and fragmented now is a crisis on the same level as…climate change, species loss and inequality. They are entangled with one another.” “The measure of CO2 in the atmosphere, methane, chemical pollution, and species extinctions are absolutely vital…but life is not made merely of numbers and graphs; life is about relationship and connection.” “The senses are the means by which we integrate our mind, our emotions and our body. If we're not paying attention through our own senses, we have disengaged from the primary mode in which every creature since the origin of life has connected to its environment and other beings. To attune and attend with our senses, is to be open to the vitality and creativity of life. Listening expands the bounds of kinship, joy and…generativity.” “The accompanying practices are invitations to play with our innate sensory capacities of deeper listening… and to explore how the senses are essential, not just for the thriving of life, but for us to be good neighbors and citizens. ” Courtesy of @emergencemagazine and @davidgeorgehaskell