The Yellow Ochre Newsletter
A weekly curation of encouragement and practical wisdom to turn your art from a hobby into a purposeful blessing for your community and culture.
ChatGPT: If 1984 Were Writen for Today
I found myself reading Orwell’s “1984” just before the pandemic hit in 2020. When it struck, imagination had quite the experience!
Out of curiosity, I gave ChatGPT this prompt: “Write a table of contents with ten titles and brief descriptions for George Orwell's 1984 if Orwell had written it today.”
Here is what it came up with:
Title: "2024: A Modern Orwellian Dystopia"
Introduction: The Surveillance State Redux
A brief overview of the omnipresent surveillance culture in a society dominated by advanced technology and government control.
The New Newspeak: Digital Discourse and Manipulation
Explore the manipulation of language in the digital age, where social media, memes, and algorithms shape public opinion and control the narrative.
Big Data Brother: The All-Seeing Algorithms
Delve into the role of artificial intelligence, algorithms, and data collection in monitoring and controlling citizens' thoughts, behaviors, and personal lives.
Social Credit Scores: The Currency of Obedience
Examine the concept of a social credit system, where citizens are ranked based on their conformity to societal norms, impacting their access to privileges and opportunities.
The Ministry of Truth Online: Rewriting History in Real-Time
Explore how online platforms are used to reshape historical narratives, control information, and manipulate public memory to suit the ruling ideology.
Doublethink in the Digital Age: Navigating Contradictory Realities
Investigate the psychological impact of living in a world where contradictory information coexists, requiring citizens to accept conflicting truths without question.
Thought Crimes 2.0: Policing Ideas in Cyberspace
Discuss the suppression of dissenting opinions, the consequences of challenging the status quo online, and the chilling effect on freedom of thought.
Proles and the Panopticon: The Illusion of Freedom
Analyze the role of the "proles" in a society dominated by digital surveillance, exploring whether true freedom exists for the majority or if it's merely an illusion.
Technology as a Tool of Oppression: The Dark Side of Progress
Investigate how technological advancements, intended to enhance human life, have become instruments of control and oppression in the hands of those in power.
Resistance in the Digital Underground: Can the Spirit of 1984 Survive?
Conclude with a discussion of contemporary resistance movements, exploring how individuals navigate the digital landscape to preserve autonomy, critical thinking, and the human spirit against overwhelming surveillance and control.
Stawberries vs. Pecans
Strawberry patches only take about one year to produce fruit.
Pecan trees are different. They take 20 or more years to yield mature pecans.
How might we view parenting with this metaphor? Are you viewing this task like raising strawberries or pecans? When are you expecting a parental return on investment?
If All the Bibles Went Away
If all the Bible’s went away, who in your life (not the internet!) would you follow around to remember what Jesus was like?
Perhaps we can all spend 2024 attached to someone like that and being someone like that.
How to Create Mic-Drop Culture
One way to get a “mic drop” culture is from “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” slogans.
One Reason You Might Not See Artists In Churches
One reason the church might not feel welcoming to many artists is this…
There appears to be a sacred Spotify playlist.
And only the leaders have access to it's curation.
Barabas Days
We live in Barabas days.
What are Barabas days? They are the times when we call good ‘evil’ and evil ‘good.’
The cure is the same as 2,000 years ago: a God who empties himself and His followers who do the same.
8 Concepts of Art
Calvin Seerveld:
One misreads the knowledge won artistically if one thinks the painting or sculpture is simply a carbon copy of what is visible.
When the norm of allusively is transgressed the artwork becomes a tract.
Fundamentally art is…like a flower, like a jewel or an imaginative tear or a smile you giveaway to your neighbor, for Christ’s sake.
Walter Brueggemann
This is why poetry is so important; because the poetry just keeps opening and opening and opening whereas the doctrinal practice of the church is always to close and close and close until you’re left with nothing that has transformative power.
C.S. Lewis:
This is one of the functions of art: To present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past— are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Jean-Jacques von Allmen:
Art is “basically the longing of things for liturgical self-expression, to find their justification in the praise for which they were created.”
Makoto Fujimara:
A grieving mother drove over 11 hrs to see my exhibit at Berry College Martha Berry Museum. She stood in front of my paintings and wept for a young son she lost only a week back. Art is a portal into the New, and I am grateful and humbled by these moments.