I saw Kevin Hodgson’s colored-in mandala and was struck by the idea that I didn’t want to fill in anything of my own. I wanted to filter his mandala.  Here are the two side-by-side:

I think of coloring as additive, but filtering is something different. It is substitutive as well as additive.  For example, I remixed Kevin’s original by copying it

Then I filtered it with a simple blur and magnification.

I am playing with the filters.  Is this very different from coloring?  Yes, I am reminded of the filters our brains have, built-in biases both conscious and unconscious.  Filters take away.  They make signal more legible or legible in a different way.  Perhaps this week on #clmooc I will work on creating a filtering book where I will take a sample of others’ work and filter them in different ways.

Maybe I will see something different. Discover a blind spot, unveil a bias I never knew about.