Some Structure, but not too much.

 

 

by Yentl Spiteri

 

 

I am not the most structured person on the planet, or so I used to think – until I met Emma Maria.

I met her through a friend, who thought it would be cool to introduce us to each other during lunch. That lunch lasted 8 hours – ideas kept flowing and after months of long breakfasts, brunches, lunches, dinners and managers kicking us out of restaurants, we had to do something about our conversations.

And that, is how Von Peach was born in 2020.

It baffled me how a chaotic creative like Emma can bring so much value working with clients who are on the extreme side of having a rigid structure in place.

Well, turns out creativity strives in chaos – and the best ideas and their execution do not necessarily happen under a timely plan.

Valueable distractions & the birth of our first NFT collection

Those who follow us on social media know that we organise quarterly offsites,  pandemic permitting. Basically we fly everyone over to a destination and spend time in workshops, eating local food and doing some team building activities. Our first one happened last July in a very hot Sardegna.

In one of our workshops, we take a look at what we’ve achieved in the last quarter and plan the objectives, key results and the initiatives for next 3 months. This is usually accompanied by impromptu dancing, a glass of wine (or 7, who’s counting?) and other distractions.

One particular distraction went as follows. “If Trudy (our newbie at that time) had to be an animal, what would she be?”  The team gathered and brainstormed, doodled and plastered the wall with sticky notes depicting which animals would represent each team member. Anyone watching us would have thought we are a class of kindergarden for grown ups.

 

Back Home

 

I got intrigued by what had happened and started to read about the idea of structured chaos. I immediately found great theories by Hideshi Hamaguchi, who stated that keeping the structured chaos mode is one of the rules to break the bias we have.

Our brain has two modes, a very structured mode, and a very chaotic mode. A lot of people think that chaos makes them creative but this is not actually true. The sweet spot is somewhere between the structured and the chaotic, which he calls “structured chaos.”

The Outcome

The idea of having a spirit animal stuck to us, and we got a graphic designer -who happens to be my brother- to create proper animal cards for us to commemorate the out of context activity we had on a random hot sunny afternoon in Sardegna.

Following the hype and being an NFT buyer myself, we decided to animate the collection and put it out on Opensea. The idea is to create cards for every new employee who joins our organisation and potentially collaborate with different illustrators to bring about new series in different artistic styles.

 

Interested to join our very new NFT community and project?

Other stories

Virtual Virtuosity

Virtual Virtuosity

Unburdened by the limitations of the real world, visionary concepts and fictional scenarios of architecture and design in virtual space, are explored in /imagine: A Journey into The New Virtual at MAK in Vienna, Austria.

read more
The Lure of the Fantastical and the Unknown

The Lure of the Fantastical and the Unknown

Looking through Patricia Piccinini’s portfolio, is like stepping into wonderland; “curiouser and curiouser”, as Lewis Carroll famously wrote. Here, however, one won’t find any Mad Hatters, March Hares, hookah-smoking caterpillars perched on mushrooms, or White Rabbits donning a pocket-watch. This is a different kind of wonderland. One, which is strangely, yet decidedly, alluring.

read more
Self-Dysmorphia in the Age of Filters

Self-Dysmorphia in the Age of Filters

The age of social media has brought with it a new kind of self-dysmorphia – one that is fueled by the filters we use to present a perfected image of ourselves to the world. In the world of social media, the line between reality and illusion is blurred, and our perception of ourselves can become distorted.

read more
Disclosure Agreement

Disclosure Agreement

Fabrizio Mifsud Soler sits down with Ritty Tacsum, whose latest exhibition, Disclosure, marks her first solo show in five years. Known for blending elements of faith, vulnerability, and raw human experience, Tacsum delves into the layers of her creative process, the influence of her Roman Catholic upbringing, and the intriguing confessions that have shaped her newest body of work.

read more
Duality of Ecstasy

Duality of Ecstasy

The Duality of Ecstasy captures the complexity of human emotion through mime and rhyme. The new short film from Maltese director Keith Albert Tedesco explores the extremes that elevate us and estrange us into ecstasy through a series of vignettes interwoven with French narrative.

read more
The veiled world of curios collecting

The veiled world of curios collecting

I used to collect everything. If I found myself with two objects of the same nature, I would find myself wanting more of them. Ten or so years back I started cutting out the general collecting and focused more so on curiosities. I’ve always loved the layers of curios shelves, skulls, bottles, objects of nature naturally formed into beautiful objects. It’s also nice to have objects that have a story behind them.

read more