Stop Trying and 2001: A Space Odyssey

Making stuff is space travel.

“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” -HAL9000

I’m looking for ideas that have actual use in our effort to live full, meaningful, authentic lives. Every piece is the product of that search and a roadmap, not to my conclusion, but to the conclusion most relevant to the viewer at that time. The goal is not to be impenetrable, but the product should resist any single interpretation lest it become a piece of propaganda.

I’m working from the idea that the process of making something, if approached correctly, can generate new ideas that have significance both for the work itself and a larger context beyond the artwork. You can discover things that have meaning for your life and others that are the result of an extra-scientific process. That’s idea #1 that’s at the foundation of everything Stop Trying Studios does. Everything I talk about in terms of discovery from art is based on this. There are three components to the process: adjacency, curiosity and synchronicity. 

When I say “there are ideas in this design” I mean two things: 1.) the design is the result of deliberately employed ideas that are used to create unpredictable aesthetic outcomes. 2.) The new ideas generated from a conceptual process can be said to be embedded in the work, as the piece is just the end result of this process. 

The initial idea for the design was to combine two simple elements with rich meaning but seemingly contradictory implications: the Stop Trying phrase and the “blossom loop” logo. Here the idea is that you have what seems like an call to use less effort and maybe even give up entirely, sitting next to a precise, refined line design that is clearly the result of “trying hard.” The central wedge element of the blossom loop suggests an act of striving or punching through the organic shape of tangentially nested circles. 

If you wanted to boil it down, you could say the nested circles represent nature and the wedge/spear represents the human will. The symbol implies that the world is made of natural, cyclical, and nested processes that we strive to transcend via the channeling effects of art, science, philosophy and spirituality. There is a veil we are trying to lift. 

I wanted to emphasize that neither the idea of the blossom loop nor the phrase stop trying suggest a complete understanding of the world. This was the draft level, but the intention of the design is to suggest that greater understanding is the result of what appears to be the tension between two disparate elements. 

If an idea isn’t working, it’s time to employ curiosity. Curiosity comes in real handy when you know your idea isn’t working but you don’t know why. I wanted to feel that there was more of direct sense of movement and multidimensionality, so I started to “unroll” the blossom loop, which led me to a series of circles of decreasing size, like a cone you see going into the distance. This started to create something reminiscent of the beam of light shooting into a circle which I keep remaking and coming across. I’ve identified this, in part, as a crude symbol for the so-called “star antenna” which is an idea I came across in Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations. The Star Antenna refers to a technology that could not only open a gateway to the numinous world that is accessible through meditation, peak experiences and psychedelics, but keep it permanently open. This gateway could enable us to communicate freely with “the other side” and any entities that reside there. It could be a way to learn how to build a better world.

I hadn’t made the connection between the blossom loop and the star antenna before. So there’s a breakthrough. Both concepts are based on the idea of cyclical processes expressed in nested fractal patterns. And I’m discovering that in trying to express both ideas I’ve used similar elements arranged in different patterns, implying by extension the connectedness in nature that I keep stumbling back onto.

The last part of the process is synchronicity. Carl Jung came up with the concept of synchronicity to describe the phenomenon of those spooky, meaningful coincidences we’ve all experienced. I call it “relevant novelty.” I’ve read quite a bit of research on the idea that entering into altered states through meditation, psychedelics, or flow state tends, strangely, to increase the emergence of synchronistic events around that state. My experience confirms this.

Surrendering control, effort and will is the first step toward inhabiting these altered states. “Stop Trying” is the first step in a set of directions intended to push other people toward this discovery. 

What happened at this point in the design is that I had it about 80% finished, but it definitely wasn’t working yet. I don’t have that stage saved, but it was very close to the final design, but missing 20% of the elements.

Then I saw this:

It’s an image on a spaceship console in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I had never seen. The movie is about cyclical time, space travel, human evolution, AI, human transcendence etc etc. I felt like Kubrick saw everything I’m seeing and this is the movie he made to explore it. Here I am watching it in awe of how beautiful everything looks in the movie, and here we find something that looks exactly like what I do - literally what I’m working on right now - that finishes my design. Oh and by the way, I’ve already established that I take things from other sources, reproduce them in a new context and use them as a new symbol to put next to other symbols. This is an example of synchronicity handing you a gift. 

The last step of this synchronistic influence via 2001 is the confirmation and expression of a premise which is already built into the way I make art: that I, you and anyone can create meaning and make meaningful discoveries via a method that resembles magic a lot more than science, but doesn’t seem to contradict science. There are profound discoveries to be made and we can make them for ourselves. This seems to be the result of a kind of layered, wave-based reality. But first, and this is the key, you have to Stop Trying.

This design is available as a hoodie on my shop.