This is one of 12 artifacts from season 2 of Labyrinth Library. This is an excerpted sample of the full artifact, which is 16 minutes long.
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Purpose:
*to shift the focus from seeking transparency to seeking possibility — exploring ways of working with what feels mysterious, opaque, or unknown.
to practice bracketing & putting a container around what you cannot understand or control, so that you can experiment with it, encounter it, or endure it.*
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Guiding Question:
how do you make workable what you don't fully understand, or cannot see?
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Excerpt of Artifact (4 min)
Practice Guidelines
included in the full artifact
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Hi friends, welcome to the last artifact of Aries season, Black Box.
Whereas the last three artifacts of Aries — Gasoline, Adrenaline Shot, and Blood in the Mouth — were about working with fire and visceral raw feeling as the main substance, Black Box is going to be a little different — in that it's a structural conceptual container for working with what you cannot always control.
When an Aries sees a Black Box, what do they do with it? Probably throw it at the wall, try to blow it up, and run a series of rapid experiments to see what would happen.
But let me back up.
A Black Box is a system whose inner mechanisms you cannot fully see or totally understand because they're too hidden or too complex. The main way that you can work with a Black Box is in terms of experimentation, inputs, and outputs. It's basically the scientific method applied — inputting a stimulus, observing the response, letting that feedback loop shape how you interact with a Black Box.
Some examples of Black Boxes include: your brain, your body, your creative energy, a relationship, any kind of creative project, a life situation, any biological or complex organism made up of changing, evolving components.
The premise is that rather than waiting for complete transparency or knowledge, you just take action and observe what happens. In working with the Black Box, we're going to grapple with the nature of opacity — in that how opaque something is is not a problem that we must solve, but a quality and condition to work with.
In a world that valorizes what is transparent and seen and legible and visible to the other, what if we were to think about more things in our lives with the mystery of a Black Box? And to approach this from the perspective of Aries energy is to take a sort of nonchalant attitude towards it. Aries doesn't wait to research and theorize and form principles. Aries doesn't wait for permission. Aries experiments, moves, takes action, and learns through doing.
The purpose of Black Box is to shift our focus from seeking transparency into seeking possibility through experimentation — opening up ways of how we can work with what feels mysterious, opaque, or unknown.
The guiding question: how do you make workable what you don't fully understand?
To begin, let's ground in what a Black Box is — the idea of the Black Box in systems theory.
In the book Introduction to Cybernetics by W. Ross Ashby, an English psychiatrist and thinker, he talks about the Black Box. He says:
"To start with, let us make no assumptions at all about the nature of the box and its contents, which might be something, say, that has fallen from a flying saucer. We assume, though, that the experimenter has certain given resources for acting on it — for example, prodding it, shining a light on it — and certain given resources for observing its behavior — for example, photographing it, recording its temperature. By thus acting on the box and by allowing the box to affect him and his recording apparatus, the experimenter is coupling himself to the box so that the two together form a system with feedback. Box ←→ experimenter”
That is to say, Ashby is talking about having a relationship with what we do not know — simply through a process of interacting with it and allowing its responses to affect the next interaction.
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This is an excerpt of this artifact.