Oregon Humanities

New Ways of Seeing the World

I spent a weekend earlier in October at a place called Smoke Farm north of Seattle. It’s a beautiful spot—360 acres along the Stillaguamish River that is home to an old dairy barn, a tractor shed turned print studio, and a milking parlor turned communal kitchen. Smoke Farm describes itself as a place for artists and free thinkers, people inclined to experiment, collaborate, and experience new aspects of art and culture.

My reason for coming was the Smoke Farm Forum, hosted by Stuart Smithers, University of Puget Sound religion professor, and Brendan Kiley, theater critic for The Stranger in Seattle. The two organized the weekend around the theme, “Change we can’t believe in”—meaning, I gathered from the list of speakers and range of topics, the challenge of overcoming conventional thinking and generating fundamentally new ideas in any discipline.

Smithers and Kiley invited a diverse group of fifty people to contemplate this challenge. The forum was loosely structured: listen to talks, ask questions, and discuss what we heard over meals, on walks, and around the campfire. For the talks, we gathered in an old barn that opened up to a meadow of tents and kids playing. It wasn’t entirely informal–there were microphones and PowerPoint—but there were also snoring dogs at our feet, huge gusts of wind, the noise of crows, and hay bales to sit on. Light slanted through holes in the barn boards and moved across the floor as speakers discussed the physiology of imagination, the future of newspapers, the history of the Black Panther Party, and the search for life elsewhere in the universe.

Though they took very different approaches, all the speakers explored in one way or another the question of how we create the conditions in which new ideas are generated. What interested me most was that it seemed we couldn’t address the challenges in any particular discipline without equally considering how we as individuals might let go of expectations and habits of thinking that keep us from being open to new ways of seeing the world.

I found the Saturday evening talk, “How to start over when it’s already too late,” by graphic designer Carl Lehmann-Haupt, particularly intriguing. His lecture was accompanied by a slide show of photographs not connected in any literal way to what he said. Many of the images that flashed on the screen behind him as he spoke of Rilke and Kierkegaard, of mortality and the ideas of composer Stefan Wolpe, were abstract shapes and aerial shots of manicured landscapes. With each image, it took me a moment to realize I was seeing something familiar, but in shadow or in reflection, or from an unfamiliar angle. In that moment before comprehension, the shapes I was seeing could have been anything.

Though at first the juxtaposition of images and ideas was confusing, almost distracting, I think those images did exactly what they were supposed to do for the duration of Carl’s talk: they kept us in a state of readiness: curious, attentive to what things might mean, and just off kilter enough that unfamiliar ideas had an easier way in.

This experience shouldn’t have surprised me. Here at Oregon Humanities, we often talk about how the process of encountering new ideas, regardless of whether we ultimately accept or reject them, can be disorienting, much like that slide show of abstract images. Still, my Smoke Farm experience was an inspiring reminder that, as unsettling as it can be, a sense of readiness for new ideas is something to savor and seek out, for in those moments, everything is possible.

About Jennifer Allen

Jennifer Allen is director of programs at Oregon Humanities, and a catalyst, collaborator, and story collector.

26 October 2009 | Posted by Jennifer Allen in Inside O. Hm. New Ideas
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