Turning human weakness into creative superfuel
[Music]
thank you so much for that introduction
i brought my backpack because we are
going on a journey
50 years of creative research
in the sea of creativity and
first i want to try to explain the brain
and how i see the brain
for this creative journey i’ve sort of
done a new kind of model and i would
like to show it to you so maybe you will
think about the brain in a different way
from after this
this is sort of the typical picture of a
brain you have the two sides
left and right or whatever you call it
creative or and structural
and i would like to look at it in a
totally different way
i would like to split it up in two parts
and i would like to call it the known
and the unknown
and this can actually give us sort of a
visual presentation of
the journey we’re on because this is a
journey that’s inside the brain you
don’t need
any uh you don’t need to cross any
borders this is an unlimited
journey so if you look at it as one of
the side of the brain is a boat
it’s the safe place you can keep all
your stuff and then you have the sea
and you take the boat and you place it
in the sea
and then you actually have a working
model for this creative travel
most people have sort of a sort of a
limited
kind of of c uh and it’s controllable it
can give you a bit of a
of uh waves and so on but it’s it’s it’s
pretty uh
sort of controllable and you can see the
edge of the sea
and the thing that happens when you uh
when you grow up
you tend to sort of go into this
situation
where the amount of water that you can
move in
is sort of shrinking and you think okay
my boat is safe
it’s uh i know my stuff everything is uh
is in place but the stuff that the
things that happened to me is that
my c just keeps getting bigger and
bigger
and from the very beginning when i was
standing on on the boat
in my young young years i was looking
into the sea and i just wanted to jump
in because there was so much opportunity
in here
[Music]
and the great thing is that
i brought this the only tool you need
is a pencil and this pencil is totally
magic because
at one end it has a focused delivery
point
of product in the other end it has
infinite possibilities
so having this in my hand i jumped into
the sea
and this is me at four years old
in the first picture and this other
drawing i did
a couple of years ago uh to try to
explain
the freedom you have uh in this sea and
you don’t need to use a pencil you can
use
all kinds of material so so this uh
this travel agency is 24 7 it’s low cost
and it’s immediate you can go anywhere
so this is the amazing power of the
brain
and i can clearly say my starting point
for my journey
came when i was sitting watching the
black and white tv
and jacques cousteau came on with his
adventures
in to the edge of the world and beyond
and this totally sparked a dream that
you could actually
you could live in the sea you didn’t
have to stay stay on the boat
so watching these things it totally
connected me with water and i
basically think that water is the
creative substance
it’s a it’s a magical place and yeah
you know when you’re in water you are
happy uh
sort of on a general scale uh sort of uh
it sort of it induces happiness
uh so i could hear yelling from the boat
you know my parents were standing up
there
come up come up you can’t you can’t stay
in that sea you had to get an education
you had to
learn about the life you know the real
way you had to dry out those
that water and uh but i was staying
there and i was i actually spotted a
possibility because there was this
amazing vehicle circling around in the
creative sea
and it was called advertising because
this was a safe place you can crawl
inside
this amazing yellow submarine and you
could actually stay
in creativity world and actually make a
living at the same time
so i crawled inside and yeah
this was an amazing place i walked
around copenhagen with my
drawings looking at all the different
agencies and they say get an education
get an education and the last place i
went
they actually liked what i did and they
invited me in
and this happened to be the most
fantastic agency in the world
because they had the most amazing client
yeah i’m talking about a toy company
called lego
and a little
time later i actually had another
experience
because i started to get this blind spot
on my retina and imagine this
living the dream and living the
nightmare at the same time i went into
to the hospital and was put inside a mri
scanner
and i had a look into my brain so this
was really a
it was an amazing experience because it
showed me that
was something that shouldn’t be there
but
at the same time it gave me a totally
creative look on the world because you
need to take your
weakness and use it as creative fuel
this was the kind of picture you don’t
want to take home when you are 20 years
old
but this was looking inside my brain and
there was
something not supposed to be there it
was a tumor
it was pressing on the pituitary gland
and it was pressing on my optical cord
so at the same time i was opening up the
creative world i was getting shut down
from inside
this was really really uh not a good
development
but i found out that the the body is
basically made out of chemistry
so i’ve put a little extra sentence in
this assist to be or not to be
that’s a matter of chemistry uh because
i got these pills i got these
capsules that i was eating every day and
they
were starting to like like an army of
small medical soldiers going into my
body and fighting this
tumor this was really amazing it was not
cancer
so i had really the feeling of being
reborn when i went out of that hospital
again
but the cameras chemistry had in effect
it had a side effect
and i want to rephrase survival of the
fittest
because my experience was survival of
the weakest
i had to sort of almost crawl my way
into the agency because every morning
i would feel like a zombie because of
the medicine and basically my next
object i will take forward is imagine
being
in an advertising agency where you know
everything is about you know fantastic
living and
colors and so on but when i came to the
agency i crawled into the bathroom
and i took this and you know you can
apply creativity in a lot of ways
because you can use this as a pillow as
well
so i was lying uh in the bathroom of the
agency
with my head on this and that also
redesigns another sentence
being on a roll has another meaning i
was on this role for
10 years eating the medicine and making
strange connections
in my brain which actually led to this
next development
because our fantastic client
had this series of mechanical
or biological heroes made out of
parts and it needed a story near the
universe
so why not take the capsules that i have
been eating for 10 years
and made them into this
product it’s gone after the market so i
this is not advertising but this is uh
this is bionicle and it’s a biological
chronicle
so taking the disease taking the story
of the
of the of the body that had to be
rebuilt
and put it into sort of a legendary
setting that is what bionicle is about
and this story had a 10-year
run with a lot of fans around the world
and
it’s still actually out there a lot of
fans have continued to build
and yeah those people are
going into education now they are taking
uh classes in 3d modeling and so on and
they uh
i’m still in contact with them so this
is fantastic
this is actually the secret behind the
whole bionicle
legend that you have this gigantic robot
line underneath the sea
the island that the the heroes arrive at
is um is the face
of the robot and the whole fight is
about
getting rid of the virus that’s
in this robot so taking the illness
into storytelling is a fantastic way of
of
coping with the problems and weaknesses
and the biological
uh yeah adversary
but what happens when you’re in this
submarine of advertising
uh you start to develop another blind
spot
and that’s actually uh that’s actually
uh
entitled blind spot and i think it’s
it’s a problem of a lot of uh
the western culture that you know we
think that everything is okay we
we are sort of we are on the boat we
have everything safe we
we have a pleasant everyday life i know
there’s a lot of trouble right now with
the cobit
but i will get back to that because this
was what happened to me
i had to get back into the water i had
to get get sort of this numbness out of
my
fingers and i had to sort of go back to
depending on this one
so when i went out back into the water
and looked back at the boat
i suddenly saw this this is sort of a
representation of the whole human
civilization being on a cruise
which a couple of years ago was sort of
a perfect vacation form but now it’s
more like a
horror movie being secluded on on this
on this boat but this is actually a
civilization in
a nutshell and you can find everybody
on the globe in this drawing some will
be under the water line some will be
on top inside the gyrosphere and some
will be in the front
looking for the future trying to get the
other ones to react
so based on this thing i will say that
creativity has a totally new role
uh it used to be advertising selling
stuff it used to be entertainment
but now we have we are on a quest for
humanity and the creative
people everybody needs to be on this
because we need to use the water as a
mirror
to look at ourselves and um
we also oh this text has jumped a bit
we need to move from hero to vero and
what i mean with that is
we have been searching for heroes to fix
our problems for
years and years of our civilization but
i think we’re getting to the point in
2021
where we realize that it’s actually us
it’s the we
that needs to take care of stuff and i
can see traces of this
all around you can see young teenagers
fighting for
climate change uh you know getting that
on the on the
agenda you can see old scientists doing
tv programs
about nature that is uh disappearing
you can see uh all the scientists doing
the
vaccines and so on these are these are
sort of
uh heroes that are attracting
attention to the we that we need to
accept that we are together in this so i
really want all the creatives on the
on the globe to unite we have this one
boat we are sailing in
and we need to use creativity to to make
change
so the story i really want to tell is
that going on a
rescue mission in the near near future
you can imagine having your
near relative in the future lying in
this uh
orange safety raft and you are maybe
controlling the drone on top trying to
save this
you know distant relative and you have a
windmill
which is like a new energy
and some years it will be the old way of
doing things
maybe it will be the safe haven for for
this
future relative i’m actually inviting
everybody into this
new creative storytelling project
inspired by the global goals
and it’s actually about our everybody’s
near future and our unborn children
and the world they’re going to live in
we should tell stories about that we
should focus on that
and creativity should become a serious
science
so the last thing i want to take out of
my
bag here that is uh
we’ve been giving this fantastic gift
of the global goals and i really want to
say to people
don’t make this into a blind spot don’t
just put it on your
on your jacket as a little symbol and
then you’re safe
this is this is a fantastic story engine
it’s a story starter
and you should play with it you should
put it into action
so uh for the next slide
be ready for the future tell the stories
and uh
keep this in your hand then you will be
safe in the water of creativity
thank you
you