How does inspiration move in the atmosphere? How do we inspire each other? And how does this inspiration change through each person’s unique experience? To find out, Anna Bates set an experiment by tasking an architect to find inspiration in Theo van Doesburg’s painting “The Rhythm of a Russian Dance”, and then passed his work to other architects.
The project grew to an astonishing global level and created a collection of 111 works materialized from a collaborative experimental project. Paintings, sketches, pieces of architecture, photography and even poetry. 111 renowned architects from 28 countries in 5 continents, form a chain— each contribution is a reaction inspired by the previous work.
The experiment documented in the INCEPTION book is, indeed, an open-ended exercise in art and creation, yet it points to a bigger social, political and economic problem—namely, how dated the current dominant approach to authorship is. By focusing so much on individual authorship—and so little on the shared nature of inspiration—we ourselves succumb to exhausting conflicts about ownership and leave less energy to creation itself. How did this come into being? Why should we care? And can it be fixed?
Published by Jap Sam Books
Designed by Studio Joost Grootens
Order your copy at www.japsambook.com/