Attention, Art & Social Capital in Branding

After a few requests and a bit of encouragement I am sharing what started out as storyboards for a presentation to get sponsorship for an event marketing solution project. I hope it encourages people to think and question some assumptions about branding, attention, social capital in sustainable profitability and of course - the role of Art Based research and the benefits to the private sector, organizations, and communities. Please feel free to contact me with questions or feedback.
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Cultural Fusion Art as Solution

This is Part 1 of a presentation I was encouraged to develop and share. It has evolved from storyboard slides I was working on for a project. With a slight bit of tweaking it works as slideshare presentation - I may convert these to eliminate the need to advance each slide but in the mean time...I hope it encourages people to think and question some assumptions about branding, attention, social capital and of course - the role of Art Based research.

Cultural Fusion Art as Solution

View more Microsoft Word documents from Yvette Dubel.

Moving Forward with Determination

Over the weekend I watched "Rocky Balboa" again because my husband had not yet seen it. It was my recollection of two scenes, that made look forward to seeing it again. Like many of the books I read - after I see a movie I often forget much of it. However, this speech from the movie sticks with me - especially on those days or at those moments when I get discouraged.

While I feel ego has been put to rest in my quest - I also feel we are the vessels of the dreams that seek expression through us. That is what my journey as an artist has been about - and although it would be easier to just paint or do something that was easier for most people to comprehend, I realize that is the challenge of doing something new.

"When you have a dream - you have to protect it. People can't do something themselves they want to tell you, you can't do it." (from the movie Pursuit of Happiness)

Yes, I have had those moments where I wondered why I didn't have an easier dream, something easier - simpler.... like "normal people". For whatever reason(s) that is not what calls me - that is not who I am. I suspect like many of you, I seek to live a life that is authentic and true to who I know myself to be....and sometimes that isn't as easy as we would hope.

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." Chinese Proverb

No one else can walk your journey for you - even if others are with you, your experience feels like a solitary one. Because there will come a time, maybe more than once, that you will have to reach inside yourself and find out what you and your dream are really made of.

So what keeps you going?
What helps give one the persistence and tenacity to keep moving forward?
That is also part of who we are.

I share this clip because when you feel you have hit the wall....that life has knocked you to your knees and you are doubting that you can get back up and keep going. Please remember that it is in you to do it.

Details & Addendum

Update 10/25/08 2:58pm



Addendum



My observation since posting this is that often in marketing or public relations what is done/intended and what is said do not match. And consumer will accept the lie. This is another contrast with customer.



In Business there are companies that serve both, so it is not a matter of right or wrong but rather I feel it informs these ideas about value distinction in:

1. Branding- building a community brand where the community defines the brand

2. Messaging campaigns

3. Valuation metrics (must know what to look for in order to know what to measure)

4. Market positioning based on where value is delivered



I feel these may form converging points to transition between the old which is crumbling and the new which is emerging. This seems to be the points that are addressed in Cultural Fusion.



See Also

http://sourceartist-ydubel.blogspot.com/2009/05/big-pictue-and-risk-of-not-seeing-it.html

which adds Quality, not Quantity, as the main ingredient for the transaction

The Big Pictue and the Risk of Not Seeing It

Had been mulling over some ideas about qualitative evaluations of Attention since I posted a few of the slides from the storyboard I had done with ppt to share with a few people for feedback.

Current dialogues about Attention are mostly superficial - referring to metrics like page views or duration on a page to evaluate qualitative attention. This is connected to other metrics called demographics which reduce people to labels and dollars.

Without questioning these underlying assumptions one is not seeing the whole picture. It like talking about an orange and only referring to the peel. If you don't get beneath that you miss some of the best parts of the fruit.

I was reading the updates to Ron's site having followed an awesome chat with Merik of Morphle earlier today about "Cultural Fusion Happenings". I found this passage and I realized this was a Source:Convergence helping to see a bit more of the answers to questions that led Ron & me to cofound Cultural Fusion.

Let me show you what clicked - as much to share with you who care to pay attention to access it, as to make note of it for myself as something I want to include because it was one of those Ah-Ha moments.

From Ron's site:

Create Attention
What is the origin of attention? How to wake up attention?
By using your imagination - Harry Palmer
I really look forward to this vacation!
By using your fantasy, you create energy. It looks like you touch an inner well, the source of energy. Creativity, in this context, is the gap between thinking (neo-cortex) and feeling (belly brain).

SoulFood is the method or model for this process. And this is key to understanding how to "work" with Attention to address challenges holistically

Soul Food emerges from oral traditions as a soulful tradition not be confused with an intellectual tradition. Rather than rely on known knowledge (intellectual tradition) it relies on the bridge between the intellect and creative intuition (soulful tradition) as am approach to developing new solutions for increasingly complex situations.

Furthermore it provides illumination about how to do this with integrity (purity of ingredients), value for the individual, and appreciation for context.

Starting with the insights from Source:Acceptance

Through this approach one finds balance and peace...here in the context of mixing ingredients, recipes, etc it is akin to "cooked just the way you like with the ingredients available to you".

In the WebAntiphon:Clear_CRM_Strategy scheme of things this approach acknowledges the value of each person served and consulted by helping you find the recipe for the SoulFood:Meal or SoulFood:Dish that best suits your needs and taste:

After noticing Ron's Twitter update I followed the link and these questions caught my Attention:

how do we keep balance between income and spending of attention? you PAY attention.
- what is the full width of an economic transaction? besides money there is also the currency of attention involved. what does the equation look like? VALUE equals a percentage (x) of money PLUS a percentage (100 - x) of attention?
- what happens with attention when we scale the economic transaction to infinitely small?

What I would add to what Ron has said is that it is a matter of quality.
For example, the spice Saffron. At $72.95 an ounce (28.35 grams), you are paying $2.57 per gram (24 servings) or 10 cents per serving it is an expensive spice that requires a good deal of attention. See: http://saffron.com/cons_guide.html Because of its value both culinary and monetary it attracts it invites you to pay attention and it is used sparingly in most recipes.

So as Ron points out with his equation (100-x) of attention...what I see is that although the quantity of attention may be small or reductionist - it is the quality of the Attention that makes all the difference. It doesn't take much saffron to add infuse its essence into a dish and the experience of in the context of a recipe vs a an actual dish or meal are not the same.

Check out this page to dig deeper: http://comfusion.pbworks.com/Attention_and_CRM_in_TransactionEquation

My understanding is that this means we must develop an understanding of really that integrates what we know. If we know objects are not solid but made up of lots of tiny particles, for example, at what point does this understanding get integrated into our general understanding and way of operating?
When do we develop social systems that catch up with our science?

Context for understanding the value of SoulFood



* Historically, much of fundamental physics has been concerned with discovering the fundamental particles of nature and the equations which describe their motions and interactions. It now appears that a different programme may be equally important: to discover the ways that nature allows, and prevents, information to be expressed and manipulated, rather than particles to move. For example, the best way to state exactly what can and cannot travel faster than light is to identify information as the speed-limited entity. In quantum mechanics, it is highly significant that the state vector must not contain, whether explicitly or implicitly, more information than can meaningfully be associated with a given system. Among other things this produces the wavefunction symmetry requirements which lead to Bose Einstein and Fermi Dirac statistics, the periodic structure of atoms, and so on.



* Pasted from




The understanding of our operating and management systems must evolve within the larger context of what we know about quarks and leptons.



There are six different types of quarks, known as flavors: up (symbol: u), down (d), charm (c), strange (s), top (t) and bottom (b).


Pasted from


There are six flavours of leptons, forming three generations.


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Cultural Fusion Art as Philosophy is about creating more than what is created and SoulFood is the framework for this paradigm.

Since the rate at which challenges when resisted, will present themselves and so any solution that can not see the big picture.....

If I am one of the drops of water at the crest of a wave - How to warn or help the people beneath?

A connection must be made between the drop of water, which is connected by context of the tidal wave/ocean to all the other drops of water, and the people on land in the path of the impending wave.

That is the potential of Cultural Fusion that is great than the sum of its parts (the artwork projects) but also imbues it with significant added value distinguishing it from previous work in the tradition of installation art.





So now I am considering that I will share the whitepaper with a few people and this blog helps with the conclusion I wanted to revise. Excellent!

Art Based Research in Community Intervention & Mental Health

With the dismantling of community mental health system and the erosion of personal support networks new alternatives must be devised. Currently I am working cf House of Cards series with that forming a recurring imagery/concept to be confronted. In contrast to the typical approach of assuming only bureaucratic systems can explore and solve these challenges, Cultural Fusion is interested in addressing them in the context of self organization, freedom, personalization, social media/technology, ecology, economics and social evolution via art based research.

The results are multilateral solutions, an art series, that combine visual art (performance, media/software, recycled materials, installations, sculpture, paintings) as well as music and audio. That while operating as art, and community intervention – are also operating as business solutions that promote innovation in economic development.

This is an excerpt explaining our collaborative Cultural Fusion Art as Philosophy series as a demonstration of the SoulFood model I have been developing as a Source Artist.

While it advances the idea of “Self Referencing Creativity” it has been inspired by key scholarship in the areas of community mental health. As art imbued with this layered integration it seeks to pioneer new approaches to project/product development and management that promote a culture of peace. While at the business or economic level this is best understood from the perspective meaningful marketing, CRM Strategy and Global Social Responsibility; at the personal - community level it is chiefly as an expressive therapy approach to community intervention/prevention strategy.

This work is distinguished by its policy of Radical Inclusion - integrating mental health, arts and culture, history, economic development, and personal development that goes to the roots of several issues including: domestic violence, poverty, crime, depression, a host of “at risk behaviors”, etc. Rather than seeking to exclude needs, each person is allowed the time to identify and distinguish real needs from perceived ones. Resources and “intangible assets” are valued above lacks or deficits.

One of the primary benefits of this approach is its attention to integrity – starting with the integrity and transparency of the SoulFood:Ingredients included in any given project recipe. Here in this paper attention is on the community mental health model and theories that were the basis of the early inquiry into this work.

In beginning to approach community economic renewal my instinct was to go to the weakest links first – homeless, those needing mental health services, neglected seniors, those living in economic poverty, and the disenfranchised (included the previously incarcerated). The point of Radical Inclusion is that the needs of all sides seeking inclusive expression need to be brought to the table and integrated into the Recipe.

Client engagement is critical, and this is the basis of using interactive high art concepts with multiple components that also operate on the level of a project-based expressive therapy approach as opposed to traditional cognitive therapy to deliver community mental health intervention/prevention programs.

Primary experience, which exists apart from language, is described by language (a representation, or secondary experience). Language is that secondary experience created by verbalizing primary experiences. Verbal psychotherapy, then, is a procedure for the verbal processing of verbal descriptions of events. According to discourse theory, language constructs its own reality rather than corresponding to it.

Among those practitioners who use them for the purpose of representation, action methods generally are regarded as more vivid and memorable and having more impact than verbal methods. Action methods simultaneously engage cognition, affect, and behavior and better engage those clients who process information predominantly in visual and kinesthetic modes. When used as interventions, action methods provide novel ways of altering habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

According to some psychological theories, formative experiences that occurred at a preverbal stage of development can be accessed only by nonverbal methods. Also, there is evidence that traumatic experiences are stored or encoded differently from non-traumatic ones, suggesting that experiential therapies may have the potential to shift traumatic experience in cases in which verbal ones cannot.

“The map is not the territory.” Action methods get clients to venture into the territory of experience, enriching those clients who have come to rely solely on the maps of verbalization. Experiencing these methods provides both a way of discovery in terms other than verbal ones and material that can be juxtaposed with verbally encoded representations. In sum, action methods put verbalizations to the test of experience.

Although psychotherapy will continue to be a verbally mediated process, the inclusion of action methods appears to promote significant clinical change in relatively short periods of time, making them particularly valuable in brief therapy and with populations not very responsive to talk-only therapy.

Why use an empowerment-based model? Empowerment may be defined as a process through which people become strong enough to participate within, share in the control of, and influence events and institutions affecting their lives; in part, empowerment implies that people gain particular skills, knowledge, and sufficient power to influence their lives and the lives of those they care about (Torre, 1985). The process of empowerment is ongoing and involves changes in three dimensions of one’s self: personal, interpersonal, and sociopolitical participation.

The personal (self-perception) dimension involves attitudes, values, and beliefs about self-awareness, self-acceptance, belief in self, self-esteem, and the feeling that one has rights. The interpersonal dimension involves acquisition of knowledge and skills, assertiveness, setting limits on giving, asking for help, problem solving, accessing resources, critical thinking to participate and work with others in networks and systems of mutual aid and education in order to enhance the world they live in. The political dimension involves participation by joining appropriate social organizations, giving back by helping others, making a contribution, voting, writing letters, teach others what is learned, and taking control in generalized areas of one’s life are specific skills that will be cultivated during participation in this fully implemented program.

The underlying assumption of empowerment practice is that clients are generally disempowered through membership in devalued and oppressed groups; that the system of governmental policies and services is a barrier to achieving desired goals; and that learned powerlessness is an attribute of many clients (Albert and Green, 2002). Therefore, practical empowerment attends to power issues and promotes the creation and discovery of personal and group empowerment among clients.

Affirmational Psychology a later model I learned of that contributed to the work and let to a few major project collaborations.


It is my hope that in sharing this document that others who have similar interests....working in related areas will contact me. I have finally had a breakthrough in visually connecting this series as it evolves and organizing the huge amount of content I have already generated. In conclusion a few links to key pages in the Development Workspace:
Cultural Fusion Futurist
This is one of the primary projects - an installation called cf House of Cards Installation i
Defining Installation for SoulFood context

Stuck with new piece, working on others

The cf House of Cards has continued to evolve. I finally got the sketch of the installation modified and put online as a conceptual drawing. At first I was fussing over details before remembering the concept would be modified for the space it is install in.....as part of the virtual counterpart I am working on a digital piece - my reason for finally learning Flash.

Unfortunately, it is not going quite as I intended. The image above is the overlay layer, the original diagram is being modified to go underneath with the top layer parting, so to speak, to see the diagram text associated with the original cf House of Cards. One of the problems is the rippling water effect I was doing for half of the top layer seems to conflict with the script being used to provide the interactive component for the viewer. Since trying to fix it has finally given me a headache I have taken a break from it.

The on site installation requires a few things I still haven't completely ironed out so I am considering possible collaborations to help address that...namely the augmented reality, software art and 3D VR integration.

One of the things I am really excited about is that the piece integrates information that has value/merit in practical terms but it is transformed by its inclusion in the piece. I am hoping the discussions with potential tech partners will deliver the tools to make the information and content being included usable for the audience.

The installation needs a home so I have wondered about what the smallest size space could be....still not quite sure about that.