Welcome to Open Sources from alchima_
The go-to resource and guide for leading artists and pioneering creatives who are currently busy nurturing and cultivating their next phase of work but find themselves increasingly concerned about the effects of Creative Compression on their focus, work, craft and practice.
Typical Signs of Creative Compression:
Oversaturated by the constant demands and digital noise of content production
Overwhelmed by the ‘always on’ filtering of algorithms, feeds, platforms and AI
Overstretched and disconnected from your intentional attention in your practice
Overcome by a loss of motivation around commencing your next phase of work
alchima_ is a new type of lab that leverages alchemic creativity in vibrant new ways, in order to rapidly navigate new paths into our most pressing cultural challenges and complex contemporary conversations.
The Art of Intentional Attention - Part 3
Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here
There's a secret at the heart of the myth of “creative genius”: the most transformative artists are often those who pay the closest attention to what everyone else ignores.
While the world rushes past in a blur of obvious stimuli, these visionaries are drawn to shadows, textures, fleeting moments, and fragments that seem inconsequential to the untrained eye.
You can frame this as "Intentional Attention"—the practice of attending deeply to details that exist in the margins of collective awareness.
It's not about looking harder at what's already in focus but rather training your mind’s eye to catch the glimmers that often flicker just outside the spotlight of conventional framing.
Developing what we might call "Intentional Attention"—the capacity to catch and nurture significance in what others will dismiss as digital trash and background noise.
The magic happens when these barely-there observations become the seeds of entirely new artistic worlds.
This isn't passive daydreaming or unfocused wandering. It's an active practice of attention that requires training yourself to notice what your conditioning tells you to ignore.
It means paying attention to:
The sounds underneath the sounds
The negative spaces around the objects
The expressions between the expressions
The moments when ordinary things briefly become extraordinary
The paradox of Intentional Attention is that by focusing on what seems unimportant, you often rediscover and reclaim what's most essential.
Finding that the fragment at the edge of vision frequently, often contains more truth than the focus of the centre stage.
This phenomenon reveals itself most clearly in moments of creative breakthrough, where the solution emerges not from direct engagement with the problem, but from the peripheral wanderings of an unfocused mind.
Insights arriving in the shower, driving or during walks, when conscious effort has relaxed its grip and allowed subconscious patterns to surface.
The most profound observations, scribbled whilst formal attention is for a moment directed elsewhere. Meaning, what we dismiss as distraction may actually be the mind's way of gathering scattered threads that, when woven together, form understanding far richer than any linear pursuit could yield.
In our hyper-stimulated world, this peripheral practice becomes even more crucial. We're constantly bombarded with information designed to capture our attention, but the most transformative creative insights still too frequently come from the quiet details that exist just outside this hyper stimulated manufactured urgency.
So try shifting your attention toward what you normally ignore.
For instance, notice the texture of time, the rhythm and cadence of background conversations, the way light falls differently at different times of day.
Reclaim your Intentional Attention and you might just find the seed of your next creative breakthrough now hiding in plain sight. Just waiting for someone to finally notice what everyone else is walking right past.
Alchemy, not algorithms?
In a few short sessions of working through the terms and framework alchima has developed, I went from feeling burnt-out and stuck to energised and full of an irrepressible urge to make stuff. Dan Am’s concepts helped me untangle the tangle and extract the golden threads of joy from deep within the mess. Together using this new magic language, we found ways for me to create space for myself away from my business; ways of working to satisfy my current need for physical formats; and ways of working that will enable me to process my lost ability to knit (previously essential to my work) and my late diagnosis of neurodivergence.
Felix (Felicity) Ford | www.knitsonik.com
I've worked with many creative minds over the years, but Dan stands out. His polymathic thinking, fearless exploration of new ideas, and unfiltered encouragement create a rare energy. Beyond his creativity, Dan is a steady, approachable presence — the kind of ally we all need in today's world.
Ryan Board | www.board.cc
As a modern day philosopher and practitioner of systemic constellations, I am fortunate to have to navigate paths through many original and enquiring minds - both past and present. However, there is something about Dan’s innate ability to consistently decode and decipher concepts and language into emergent and vibrant new forms that always stands out. It sometimes seems like he is channeling disruptive ideas in real time out of the ether like jazz or street poetry!
Robert Rowland Smith | www.robertrowlandsmith.com