Mental palette cleansers

Starting with a quote or story: 

“The accelerating case of change means that we need to question our beliefs more readily than before.” (Adam Grant, Think Again, 2021)

Then Project description: 

‘Mental Palette Cleansers’ is a set of pop-up experiments designed to disrupt habitual thought patterns and soften cognitive biases, creating moments of mental spaciousness that allow new ideas and perspectives to land. This work emerges from an inquiry into the Age of Global Weirding, a time defined by accelerating uncertainty, ecological and systemic crises, and a growing sense of collective disorientation. 

Following these moments of cleansing, the process transitions into re-imagining: the co-creation of new rituals, stories, and practices that can help us inhabit emerging futures more fluidly. Drawing on research from experimental psychology and sensory studies, we will prototype and test early-stage interventions, exploring how embodied experiences can support cognitive flexibility and collective sensemaking.

Ultimately, this node is an invitation to embrace weirdness not as a threat but as a threshold, a passage through which we can reimagine the world together. It asks us to actively disrupt our certainties, to stay with the tension between objective and subjective truths, and to question the frameworks through which we decide what is “real,” “right,” or “worth pursuing.”

“There is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then. There is nothing that is new; there is nothing that is not new.” (Karen Bard, Parallax, 2014)

In other words this work seeks something precarious: a practice of destabilisation. It is less about promoting good narratives and more about creating conditions where narrative itself becomes porous, provisional, and alive.

In this sense, the weird becomes a method for unmaking a way to loosen the foundations on which we construct our identities, our values, and our sense of reality. If everything we hold to be true is, in some sense, a fabrication, then perhaps our role is not to abide by inherited truths but to become conscious fabricators ourselves. To fabricate not in deceit, but in awareness, to make and unmake meaning as a form of living inquiry.