The Groove Issue 32 - Your Imagination, Your Most Powerful Sense
Welcome to the 32nd issue of The Groove.
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YOUR IMAGINATION, YOUR MOST POWERFUL SENSE
We would be nowhere without human imagination. Think about it: all the developments, creations, and advances in every field, from art to technology to science, were first born in people’s minds. Our imagination is a kind of sixth sense: we are all born with it and as children we don’t have to exercise any skills to grow it.
Alexander Calder working at his home/studio in the village of Saché, Loire Valley, France, ca. 1971.
The Universe Is Real but You Can’t See It
Imagination as the ability to form mental pictures, analogies, or narratives of something that is not perceived through our senses, can take us places emotionally and financially, if only we allow those ideas to come to the surface and we decide with conviction which ones to pursue. How many times has our inner critic taken us away from our wildest dreams for no reason other than labeling them as “impossible” or “crazy” or “nonsense”? No longer.
Take Alexander Calder, for instance, the indisputable pioneer of the now universal “mobile.” It’s hard to believe that mobiles didn’t exist prior to Calder, but they weren’t commonplace until he started imagining them. Calder used to say, “the universe is real, but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it.”
How powerful is that quote? We have anything and everything at our disposal. It starts in our imagination and we have the power to materialize those ideas, even as crazy as they may seem.
The Sky Is The Limit
Calder overseeing the installation of the iconic .125, at Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International Airport), New York, 1957. It’s hard to believe that before him, there were no mobiles in art (neither hanging from babies’ cribs).
One day in October 1930, Calder was living in Paris, and he went to visit the studio of one of his greatest inspirations: Piet Mondrian. Calder remembered that day for the rest of his life, because not only did he turn his practice into abstraction after that meeting, but he told Mondrian that “perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate” referring to his paintings. Mondrian wasn’t having any of it and replied, “No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast.”
But Calder’s imagination didn’t stop circling around the idea of adding movement to his work in ways that were more palpable than just strong colors and energetic compositions. After dreaming of a piece of art whose parts moved independently, his first mobile was born in 1931. It was an abstract tabletop sculpture fueled by a motor. Marcel Duchamp christened it a mobile, which means both “motion” and “motive” in French.
Making Imagination A Profitable Superpower
Calder’s studio in Roxbury, CT was filled with mobiles which made Calder an incredibly wealthy and renowned artist all over the world.
From then on, Calder was unstoppable, and he developed the mobile as we understand it today: an object that moves on its own, propelled by air currents. Thousands of mobiles later, in 1976, a few months before his death, Calder debuted White Cascade at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. It was, and continues to be, the biggest mobile structure ever created, composed of stainless-steel rods and 14 white aluminum discs, measuring 100 feet from top to bottom, and 60 feet across at its widest.
Calder’s imagination turned him into a world-renowned and sought-after artist. Almost 40 years after his passing, “Lily of Force,” a standing and hanging mobile he made in 1945, sold in 2012 at Christie's for $18.5 million, making it the most expensive mobile ever sold.
The Calder Foundation, which is controlled by his heirs, listed art as assets with a fair-market value of $272 million 2018, and that of course doesn’t account for the hundreds of mobiles, paintings, textiles, and other Calder sculptures in the hands private collectors and museums all over the world.
Learning Without Experience
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand without having to have an actual experience. We can imagine ourselves going to places, doing things, and seeing others, exactly the way our brains decide to do so.
Also, imagination is the precursor of creativity. While imagination is about envisioning things that do not yet exist, creativity is the more concrete application of those ideas to solve problems, fill needs in the world, and come up with something better or different than what is currently out there.
Imaginative power belongs to every human being, not just to artists and poets and filmmakers. Our mind is so powerful that even involuntarily it can overtake all our emotions: we may wake up screaming or with our heart racing after a nightmare or have the most pleasant and surreal dream that we don’t ever want to wake up from.
Imagination is More Important Than Knowledge
It is because of human imagination that Karl Benz invented the Motorwagen in 1885. When people were pedaling bikes or moving in horse-drawn carriages, he dreamed the first automobile fueled by gas. What if the Wright Brothers would have taken at face value the naysayers that told them that no machine could fly, much less as heavy as motor-operated airplane? It was their imagination and then the practical application of their wild ideas that allowed them to build the machine capable of the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft, on December 17, 1903.
What if JK Rowling stopped writing Harry Potter because the story was too outlandish? What if Steve Jobs dropped the plans for the iPhone because making an object with that degree of seamless design, with so many capabilities and a fully integrated operating system, was too expensive or too difficult to materialize?
When imagination is alive, people find the resources and develop a coherent set of steps to take so that each one of them brings us closer to our completed vision.
Never shut down or silence the power of your imagination. If you ever feel tempted to do that in favor of a purely rational approach, remember Albert Einstein’s infamous words: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
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THE EXTRA GROOVE
Read:
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture by Achim Borchardt-Hume
Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step-By-Step by Edward de Bono
Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World by Neil Gaiman
Watch:
Calder - Sculptor of Air, a documentary co-produced by the Centre Pompidou and AVRO
The neuroscience of imagination - Andrey Vyshedskiy for TED-Ed