blogs + sites

Wildly Beautiful Visualizations of Your Brain Actively Perceiving Itself RIGHT NOW

Self Reflected is a series of complex, wildly beautiful, artistic representations of neural pathways showing what consciousness looks like — YOUR consciousness, this very moment.

How Cures And Answers Arise (Thomas Ashcraft)

Whenever we hit a period of illness or depletion, we think of this artwork our friend Thomas Ashcraft made many years ago, with its powerfully healing reminder.

We Leap into The New Year (With Yoko Ono, Mary Oliver, Muybridge, More)

As always we are taking the week between Christmas and New Year’s off. It’s a time to slow way down and reflect on the year that’s passed so quickly, and on the new one we are about to begin. Here’s a few of the things we look at, and think about.

Annals of Healing: 30 Ways NOT to Say ‘Pussy’ + Tweeting REAL

Among the best responses to Donald Trump’s now infamous “Grab them by the pussy” are Samantha Bee’s brilliant riff on improvisional pussy slang and Kelly Oxford’s powerful twitter question. Both antidote shame.

A Few Tools for Getting Unstuck + Amy Friend

Getting STUCK, whether in a relationship, decision-making process, or career path, is very much part of being human. In our productivity-obsessed society, it is an especially big concern. Here are some approaches we’ve found that work.

Life-Changing List: What You Didn’t Buy

Swiss-Miss, designer Tina Roth Eisenberg’s blog has provided us with consistently useful/interesting content for years. We especially love her new practice. She’s keeping a list of things the DIDN’T buy.

Clothes to Draw, Write, Paint On

At Kleidersachen, a German tumblr whose name name literally translates dresses things, sublime examples of out-there clothing and textiles had us transfixed, culling ideas right and left on a variety of themes, in awe, inspired. To start, we’re thinking about neutral apparel that can be drawn, painted, written on.

Living is a Martial Art (Bruce Lee)

Legendary martial artist Bruce Lee always carried a small notebook in which he wrote down quotes, affirmations, appearances, poetry, philosophical ideas and his personal practices for training his mind and spirit NOT just his physical skill. Take a look.

The New Yorker’s Cartoon Instagram is a Big Relief

We love instagram (especially our own SignLaboratory) but also get tired of….er….photographs. So the New Yorker’s cartoon-a-gram has come as something of a relief; we love having a cartoon fly into our day at random. We’ve found that a number curiously echo Improvised Life’s themes and messages…

Hungry for Cool Design Ideas? Check out The Art of Things

The massive The Art of Things: Product Design since 1945 surveys all kind of objects that we use in our lives, as well as their placement in the bigger picture, in time and place. Our quick run through a pdf we found yielded a number of useful ideas:

A VERY Strange Anti-Advertising Experiment

Websites that don’t take ads or promote branded content are a rare breed. We’re one. We have an unusual philosophy of “stuff” and how we survive. It’s definitely an experiment in a certain kind of possibility thinking.

Pema Chodron + A Site That Envisions Impermanance

+We spend a good amount of time looking for ways to be more accepting of change that seems to be moving faster and faster, the messy processes of life and our lack of control over them: what Buddhist’s call Impermanence. Pema Chodrun’s new book and this clever site help…

Artist’s Studios with Sofas + Rest Spaces

Bored Panda’s slide show of 300 artist’s studios is illuminating on many accounts: it provides an edifying survey of art works in process, as well as a look into work styles and spaces, with a number of interesting home design ideas. Like Roy Lichtenstein, above, quite a few artists have a sofa or easy chair…

3 Good Things: An App to Amplify Happiness

During the recent uncertain days when Improvised Life was under siege, I started playing with a powerful app created by digital product designer Bryan Landers. 3 Good Things is like an ultra-minimal diary: You just add three good things that happened (each day or whenever you like) for a simple way to remember the good in…

Add Some Imaginary Books to Your Library, Like Dickens

Like Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote short stories referencing imaginary books, Charles Dickens filled part of his study with fake books whose fantastical titles he invented. He had a bookbinder create imitation book-backs that he affixed to real books. The effect is rather dazzling.

We are now SIGNLABORATORY on instagram!

We LOVE signs so figured why not create a SIGN LABORATORY on Instagram? Check out inspiring/mind-shifiting signs we find and forage and that folks send us…as well the as ones we MAKE:

Happy New Year — Finally!

Improvised Life site has been down since December 26th and it’s been on a wild ride to get it going. Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of readers and friends, it looks like we’re going to be okay. We’ve learned many lessons and met some remarkable people, which we’ll report on in the coming weeks. We’ve still got a lot of work to do to make Improvised Life stable (and may experience more up-and-downs). But for now, we’re wishing you joy, health, creativity, abundance and love in the year to come.

Need a Last Minute Gift? Give Improvised Life

Casting about for an instant gift to give? Give your brilliant someone a subscription to Improvised Life, a month or year of inventive, mind-shifting tools and ideas for creative possibility-thinking, from home design and cooking to productivity and self-expression: our whole archive’s worth. Gifting is easy…

What’s The Best Gift You’ve Ever Received?

In this season of frenzied holiday shopping, Quartz asked 40 leaders in art, business, fashion, science, and social justice the question: What’s the best gift you’ve ever received? Their surprising answers cast a lens on just what a great gift really is, along with some really lovely ideas….

Madonna on Why We Go On In Spite of/Because of…Paris

(Video link here.) At her concert in Stockholm yesterday, a visibly-shaken Madonna addressed the very difficult question “…why am I up here dancing and having fun when people are crying at the lost of their loved ones?” Painfully, sadly, she gave the very wise, life-affirming answer before launching into Like a Prayer at 7 mins-in…

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