Brian Eno: Adults play through art

This weekend we were listening to Brian Eno on Ezra Klein’s podcast from last year. Eno was on the show to talk about his new book, What Art Does, which was first published on Metalabel. 

In explaining the purpose of art to Klein, Eno says that while children learn through play, we lose this as adults. But not entirely. Adults play through art, Eno says. Art is how we give ourselves the freedom to detach, imagine, and see the world around us anew.

For Eno, art is not a fixed term. His book argues that hair stylists, cake designers, and tattoo artists all classify as artists. People who choose, as part of the practice of their lives, to go beyond what’s required and to make what’s beautiful or interesting to them instead.

We like this way of seeing things. Both the broad definition of an artist, as well as the idea of our practices as a form of playing, experimenting, having fun. For those of us who’ve chosen to put our lives into making creative forms, it’s helpful to be reminded that all the work is ultimately in service of play.

The next evolution of DFOS#

Over the past week the DFOS squad has been learning by playing with DFOS. There’s so much about the app we love and have come to depend on. Other parts we still don’t see as clearly as we would like.

The balance we’re always trying to strike: giving people the agency and ability to create their own worlds, while also making those worlds legible and useful to audiences or people who want to follow along.

If I were to self-assess where we are now, I’d say we do a very good job of letting people build worlds, however this comes at the expense of legibility, following along, and more easily getting started. In a way we maximized for hardcore mode (because, with us sickos here now, this is what we like) while skipping over some of the steps needed to get here.

As we’ve put our heads together around this, we’ve come to see an evolutionary path we believe in that we think can satisfy the needs of all parties. This next phase will need some deep work upfront to produce the evolution we need, which means the next couple of weeks of product releases will be more appetizers than main course. But we think they’ll be well worth it.

What might this new update look like? Think: more intuitive, more worlds, more interconnection, a dedicated member experience, and even a new OS name. Much more soon :)

SpaceCamp rescheduled; A-Corps talk next week#

In light of these product evolutions, we decided to delay SpaceCamp, originally slated for this week, for later in the month. Will be more useful to train people on the latest version rather than what’s here now. Danielle and Lena will share more as that gets closer.

Next Wednesday at 3pm ET we’ll be hosting a new What’s an A-Corp online session through the A-Corp DFOS. RSVP here to join us.

Thank you#

It's now been six months since we first started inviting this community into DFOS to build and explore with us. These have been some of the most enjoyable and rewarding experiences we've had as a group building and learning together. Grateful for each step so far, and excited by where this continues to take us.

Have thoughts, feedback, ideas, concerns? Drop a comment or hit us up.

— DFOS