Cargo Interactive

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about convergence. I see it as one of the main ingredients in creativity, and we see it everywhere when we look for it.

By convergence, I mean, whenever you take two concepts and put them together to create one concept. Joseph Campbell, for example, has referred to the dragon as a serpent and an eagle. It’s a very comon property of mythical creatures: a mermaid is both a human and a fish, a centaur is both a man and a horse, pegasus is both a horse and a bird. These creatures are not a patchy mish-mash of concepts. They take the best of each half to produce a meaningful whole. Birds are associated with flying, so a creature that inherits the characteristics of the bird should fly, it shouldn’t inherit a birds legs, for example.

Sometimes meaningless hybrids are produced for the sake of confusion and horror. The Chimera is the classic example, a creature which usually is comprised of snake, lion, and goat parts. What makes the Chimera interesting is how strange the combination is executed - often starting the the prototype of a lion, then swapping out the tail for a serpent, and then having a goat’s head jutting out of the lion’s back. This certainly offends our sensibilities, and it’s meant to. So it’s clear that the choice of, let’s say, ‘ingredients’ changes the taste of a mixture.

I recently watched a number of 80s cartoon intros on youtube, for nostalgia’s sake, and I was struck by how often this method of combining ingredients is employed.

I don’t know where I got the term. It might have been from Gödel, Escher, Bach. At the very least, I know what it means - I’ve been using the concept for a while to help understand analogies.

Look at the image I drew above. It has two distinct spacial interpretations. You’ve probably seen something like this before in an Escher drawing. Somehow, you interpret the image one way until *flip* the image reverses itself and you see it another way. You can’t interpret it both ways at once.

However, you might try showing an Escher drawing to a young child, and they won’t get that same flipping. Somehow that meaningful change doesn’t happen automatically. So are they only seeing their first interpretation and never flipping to another one? It seems to effortless for us, until you encounter something you haven’t learned to flip.

Try looking at this ballerina. Which way is it she turning, clockwise or counter-clockwise? Now: can you get her to turn the other way? It’s not easy for everyone.