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"Speculation through symbolic language has often served this purpose; take Gibson’s conception of cyberspace, and how reality fell in step with his imagining. We need metaphors to access what we can intuit is coming, but can’t prove or describe directly. Metaphors bridge the human and the unknown. "

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Anticipate Talk
Anticipate Talk 
10

The Liminist

The opposite of the specialist is not the generalist, but the Liminist. Where the generalist picks the low hanging fruit of knowledge, the Liminist operates in the liminal interzones between them.

In a world of disconnected silos stretching vertically into the sky, the Liminist stretches horizontally across them. They function as guides, navigating people across these intersecting planes to comprehend the work and ideas of their unrelated peers.

It is very much its own specialization, but where all other domains specialize in Form, the Liminist specializes in Non-Form. The evidence of their work exists at the intersections between objects.

These intersections have their own space, presence, and tangibility. They are just as “original” and “unique” as the objects that the intersection weaves together.

A talented Liminist must be a master translator, able to communicate and comprehend across domains. They must be a master weaver, able to take individual strands across many domains and pattern them together. A master diplomat that can manage the egos of others. They must be comfortable operating in ambiguity, which is their playground.

h/t to Carsten & Georgia for the conversation that gave rise to this concept

The Liminist.

radical imagination (i.e. those imaginaries that seek transformation) is something we do; it is not a possession to be ‘had’, but a process that must be continually engaged and reengaged, negotiated and renegotiated. The cultivation of a shared imagination is ‘an active process, not a steady state’ (Haiven and Khasnabish 2014: 7), and always exists in tension with competing imaginaries. To facilitate its transformative potential requires active sustenance.

“It may be wiser to try to create the place you want to live, rather than to keep trying to find it.”
Frank Bures

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”

david lynch

We have to remember that we are living under a spell, and this spell is destroying our worlds. It’s time to cast another spell, to call other worlds into being, to conjure other worlds within this world. It is clear that the situation we find ourselves in now leaves us at the limits of language, and grasping at the edges of imagination. We need art, experiment and radical disruption to learn other ways to see, feel and know.