This New Moment

Welcome to Primitive Prime! Lab. The idea here is to celebrate that thing we’re all capable of expressing, creativity. It’s not just artists who possess this uncanny superpower, they just exercise it more (or at least more exclamatory). The intention of Primitive Prime! Lab is to remind you creativity is as human as language, culture, and problem solving. In fact creativity is inextricably tied to each one of those. Essentially to be human, is to be an artist. Without this capacity for creative expression we would’ve gone extinct a long time ago.

And I don’t simply mean the creative expression of art. It’s not just drawing on caves I’m referring to, but also things like using fire to cook and naming objects in order to talk about them. As a species, we’ve kept this primitive prime since we first got the hang of being human and never let it go.

However in our modern world where population growth is almost always more than it’s ever been before, generalization of the individual has become convenient. The group is understood as a scientific, fact-gathered statistic, and institutions have high incentives, both for order and profit, to predict the behavior of the individual. The relative harmony required as a result of so many people living in a finite space with finite resources makes this predictability a safe-measure. So we’re encouraged to adopt a baseline ‘normal’ (predictable) way to live our lives. After all, individuals alone are unpredictable and when their ideas run contrary to the group the conflict of interests can manifest in hostility.

The anxiety dial is further raised when everyone in the group is a variable. If stability and being on the same page is the foremost goal of society then encouraging everyone to do as they please may run counter-intuitive to that aim. Society isn’t likely to take the risk, experimenting if the consequences may prove chaotic. There’s a lack of faith that in the absence of established, institutionalized order, there would still be peace and calm.

While I’m not arguing for an ‘everyone for themselves’ society, with ‘survival of the fittest’ stamped onto the world-flag, I do believe the only way to find that faith in a world of so many strangers is to experiment a bit more. To hold space for everyone to show up in their truth and listen, speak up, learn, and adapt. It may not be pretty at first but it’s exactly the type of truthful challenge that could help us progress into a less divided global community in the long run. This goes for the division between groups; between self and others; and between inner-self and outer-expression.

Finding your way of being you is a gift for all. How you show up in full participation without fear, manipulation or resentment is usually explored through your capacity to envision an abstract possibility that may not yet exist and through creativity, materializing it.

While this site is really many things, at the core I wish to explore this new moment and the many more to come, where you and I work at turning the ideas of what’s possible into something as real and useful as fire...Despite the fact it could also burn our hands if used unwisely. Let’s take a look together; beginning with how our habits shape our actions, but I’ll need help from a friend. [ --> see feature ]