Living through imagination
This is a creative sentence going here, about this long
I'm an artist who makes systems or processes, often developing technology to output my ideas. My work uses text, Virtual Reality, photography, visual material, audio and performance.
Since 2013 I have developed and designed the following projects: Now, Socrates an audio LP release under the name MIAR plus two further MIAR archive recordings, OYOTORI a card pack, TRIBAL SORCERY a process, SUNS (Sun Unconscious, Now Sentient) I & II essays, patterns and a series of prints, MUTATIONS a card pack, Systematic Prophetics and Divergent Procedures both durational online digital systems, Dostoyevsky Balancing Technique (D.B.T.) a photographic process, OMETHR and ESPELIDES both iPhone apps, UWRMA (Unconscious Writing Machine) a Twitter bot, Walk Towards The Big Sun a 24 hour novel and 210CARDS a two-pack card deck (the latter with Miles Hanson).
OMETHR and ESPELIDES can be purchased through Apple's AppStore.
I’ve written six books about creativity Looking At Art (With Your Eyes Closed) Michael Atavar's Creative Courses From Tate, Being Creative, How To Have Creative Ideas in 24 Steps - Better Magic, Everyone Is Creative, 12 Rules Of Creativity and How To Be An Artist, covering the areas of process, individual practice, generating ideas and group dynamics.
Being Creative was translated into eight languages.
I also offer leadership coaching, business workshops, 1-2-1s and group facilitation for organisations (click on the shop link to see all coaching possibilities). My systems encourage the user to step beyond the frame of expectation and take a more innovative approach to the working environment.
Plus teaching in museums and public spaces.
For eight years I was a faculty member at The School of Life, London (Summer School, New Year Intensive, TSOL Business, Creativity MOT programme). 2014-16 I ran three courses at Tate, as part of their Public Programmes (Experimental Making – Creating From Everyday, The Creative Act, Creative Process). Plus 2015-22 I taught on the Masters Programme at PhotoEspana, Madrid (Annual Workshops, Participant Tutorials, PHe Business).
I work with the unconscious (that hidden resource), drawing on the methods of psychology in order to access the intuitive in a project. My techniques are experimental, exploratory. This releases many moments of connection that clients can then integrate into the practical day-to-day running of a business or enterprise.
I draw on the group's energy, using the live moment to transform products or to formulate unexpected ideas.
Sometimes my interventions result in the development of products or processes, a collaboration with the business, that creates tools or showcases new systems – see 210CARDS as an example of my work with Collaboration Company.
I employ a transpersonal model and add to this Jungian blueprint elements of constellation work, REBT, shamanism, Zen Buddhism, process work, creative play, breathwork and self-compassion (all through my own training). I am interested in healing and transformation, consciousness raising and individuation.
I integrate these play methods, generating new ways of thinking; moving beyond existing brainstorming techniques. My book Better Magic gives a useful repository of these tips – exercises, group tasks, games – and represents a blueprint for my current form of working.
Key areas: Working with creative blocks.
Clients include Photo España, Portland Green Cultural Projects, The School of Life, Tate Public Programme. Workshops / presentations include Collaboration Company, Duckie, FlexEarn, Ikea Paris, Janders Dean, Market Insight Forum, Market Research Society, Marketing Society of Ireland, Mayo Ideas Week, Not On The High Street, Vanessa O'Brien, Ogilvy PR, OpenTable, PlaceMakers, PDP London, Saltwater Capital, Upstream Recruitment, You Can Now.
FOR, SOCRATES
MIAR
2026
Michael Atavar under a new name for audio recordings: MIAR.
33 tracks, 45 minutes.
The release feels like a full-circle return to the experimental music that I was making in the early part of my career, with the 45rpm Cabral Dynamic on the Chance label.
On these tracks I played the solo piano live into a R-05 portable digital recorder, propped up on the music ledge of an upright Baldwin, and the synthesizer output came from the analogue sounds of Roland.
Expect fragments skillfully pasted together by NEON, my collaborator in the band MIAR & NEON. Without their painstaking reconstruction of these assembled shards, there would be no LP in existence.
This record is without filtering, the sounds are non-processed, therefore explore without headphones for the best effect, ideally randomised on a CD player, at low volume.
Release date 1/8/26 alongside two further archive sound pieces by MIAR, Dusk and Blue Orange Red Brown.
Recorded January 2026, Studio Immobile
By kind permission of Sgnuj, all rights reserved
Solo piano, synthesizer, processing MIAR
Executive producer NEON
Vector graphics MIAR
Apple Music, Spotify, Bandcamp etc.
OYOTORI
(Open Your Organisation To Original Radical Ideas)
Michael Atavar
2026
A card pack for use in workshops X300 cards.
This card system was developed for business leader Miles Hanson.
The cards were commissioned to be exclusively used by Collaboration Company in their workshops, leadership training and Ideation events.
OYOTORI could easily be developed up to X1000 cards, however, the random mix in twos, small groups and the larger event is what gives the system its power and fluidity.
It's a good example of how my process interventions can challenge existing company structures by adding radical energy. Plus an instance of a commissioned product by an established business in the creative sector.
If you are interested in having a conversation that might result in a collaboration, thereby creating a client-facing object or process that would enlarge your business, contact me.
For more business-style strategies, see my book Better Magic in the shop menu.
ATTC-12: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
Original logo, reverse pattern design by Richard Scarborough
Edition of 2 (not for sale)
SUNS II
(Sun Unconscious, Now Sentient)
Michael Atavar
2026
Essays, patterns, walls, prints.
During my residency at A. Farm in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam I was working with psychic realities not visible (see SUNS in products below for further details).
I made essays exploring these ideas – flowing from the Jungian shadow, the personal, my underground, out towards the collective unconscious. The essays examine this mass of blocked material and describe the methods that historically I have used to break the log jam; namely my card outputs, systems creation and devised processes.
Energy actions: every shuffle of the cards for me is a radical intervention on the street attempting to activate change.
The images that accompany these essays are diagrammatic maps taken from HCMC sewage archives and assigned new roles, positions and a palette of colours.
Each composite contains X8 A3 panels and its total area is 1188 cms X 840 cms. Four of the eight sections that make up the surface can be seen accompanying this text.
Finally, once completed, the finished works revealed to me an important influence from my early years – the score of John Cage’s Fontana Mix, an idea that unconsciously had made its presence known, buried in my original design process.
Therefore these images are maps, scores for further expansion and improvisation.
Sortilege, Jungian shadow, the Surrealists, cleromancy.
ATTC-11: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
Graphic interfaces, studio mockups by Richard Scarborough
POA
TRIBAL SORCERY
Michael Atavar
2026
TRIBAL SORCERY is a 7-day turnaround process for individuals and businesses.
Each day of the week a new intervention is offered to the group – exercises, seek-out games and tasks. At the end of 7-days a takeaway is provided for everyone.
TRIBAL SORCERY came out of my recent artist residencies in Japan and Viet Nam. I realised that in the first 7-days of these trips I had to devise a survival mechanism. In fact, on the day of arrival, pushed into an extreme state, I made a simple thesis out of which the following weeks naturally developed.
It became a positive turnaround process that was highly effective.
I further refined these techniques as a strategy for others to follow, a dynamic interventionist system, drawing on my How To Be An Artist series of books.
The words TRIBAL SORCERY are found in the song What Do The Simple Folk Do? from the 1960 musical Camelot, with music by Frederick Loewe, lyrics and book by Alan Jay Lerner. It was a record that I heard a lot when I was growing up. This text focuses on mood, transformation and change. TRIBAL SORCERY’s nomenclature is therefore a roundabout homage to Alan Jay Lerner’s writing.
Psychoactive strategies, Fritz Perls, shamanism, coaching provocations.
ATTC-10: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
Original logo, digital design by Richard Scarborough
POA
SUNS
(Sun Unconscious, Now Sentient)
Michael Atavar
2026
Essays, patterns, walls, prints.
During my residency at A. Farm in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam I was working with pavements, what’s underground, psychic realities not visible and the feeling below the surface.
I wondered if there was an analogue twin (just like the proverbial digital twin) of the place, situated underground; whether it’s these conduits and passages that hold the reality for the city.
If so, what would this look like?
I saw the vast network underneath HCMC as a dream space, a river, a conduit that mirrored reality but sat right under the surface, reflecting, refracting.
Here I found alchemy, experiment, shadow.
Translating these ideas into images, I made X160 AO prints from photographs of Ho Chi Minh City pavement patterns that I took, overlaid in complex ways.
In the final weeks of my stay in HCMC I became ill. When I recovered, the first thing I saw in the prints was a sun centred in the frame. It felt correct – that I was moving from the unconscious, shadow, from the underground to a more sentient state of being, warmed by the sun.
Hence the title SUNS.
C.G. Jung, maps, underground systems, alchemy.
ATTC-9: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
Graphic interfaces, studio mockups by Richard Scarborough
Printing in HCMC: Brother
POA
MUTATIONS
Michael Atavar
2026
A card pack for use outside X102 cards.
With this project I wanted to create a system that would encourage, embolden me to step outside the front door again, after the times of confinement during the pandemic. So I started to experiment with pieces of paper, cards cut out with scissors and glue, pasting elements together until I felt that I had a useable model with some latitude in it – where I could easily follow my own journey.
I tested it, I went on my own trajectories around the city, for a few weeks, following my steps backwards and forwards, sometimes seeing incredible sights that I would never have witnessed without the MUTATIONS cards.
This seems to be one of the advantages of MUTATIONS: determinedly refusing to take me in the direction that I require and so frustrating my ego in neat, cryptic ways. Hence MUTATIONS is an exploratory tool for the self, a way of navigating our minds in new ways – this time spread out on the roads and pavements of the city.
Systems, chance procedures, city navigation, interior worlds.
ATTC-8: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
Original logo, reverse pattern design, digital compiling by Richard Scarborough
POA
Systematic Prophetics
Michael Atavar
2025-26
Systematic Prophetics is an online system, a big brother of my 2023-24 project Divergent Procedures.
However, unlike Divergent Procedures, the statements in this work are post-instructional, non-transactional; a world building machine that is curious, speculative and experimental.
Like graffiti on a space ship cargo wall…
Each 24 hours a pyramidal text is uploaded. These lists are never more than eight lines long, a minimalist haiku of sorts, a signal, a sound, limited in structure but expansive geographically, psychologically. The colours are randomly generated from a palette of 20,922,789,888,000 possibilities.
The piece began on 24/2/25 and lasted for one year, ending at midnight CET on 23/2/26.
Cut-ups, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Beats, programming cards, I-Ching.
ATTC-7: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
Website: Original logo, decal design, UI by Richard Scarborough. Programming by Flat Earth
FREE
Dostoyevsky Balancing Technique (D.B.T.)
ドストエフスキーのバランステクニック
Michael Atavar
2024
Performance, e-say and photographs detailing my new approach to digital image making.
During my residency at Studio Kura, Itoshima, Japan I was experimenting with non-directive, remote photography (recording only at dusk), using a discrete un-viewing lens, a technique taken from my 2019 book Looking At Art (With Your Eyes Closed).
However, I added to the methodology and I now call it Dostoyevsky Balancing Technique (D.B.T.) after a travelling copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot that I often use to rest the camera on.
I also note the latitude and longitude of each day’s photographs (to a coordinate of six digits after the decimal point).
Photography, reversals, amateur formats, dusk.
ATTC-6: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
E-say: We Watch, We Listen, We Wait For News
Photograph: Red Rusted Gate At Dusk, at Lat. 33.529259 Lon. 130.147656 (accurate to 5m)
Text, photographs and vector images: Michael Atavar
Textuals: Richard Scarborough
Languages: English, Japanese
Divergent Procedures
Michael Atavar
2023-24
Divergent Procedures is an online system offering a series of daily interventions (for surprise and reflection).
One single item is uploaded to the website every day.
Some statements are instructional; some are poetic; some invite a response from the viewer; some are inexplicable dream material.
The content is often what's available, written in my notepad that day.
The piece is inspired by my long-term interest in card systems and process interventions (metabolising action) – influences include Water Yam/George Brecht, I–Ching, Silence/John Cage, Fluxus, Tarot, Oblique Strategies/Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt, Concrete Poetry.
Only about 30% of my work ever reaches public output (70% is unpublished projects). Divergent Procedures is an attempt to bring some of this process material into visibility.
Divergent Procedures moves me firmly back to being an artist and represents a shift in my thinking: from functional tools towards the space of the unconscious in all its uncertainty. OMETHR (2020) pointed the way with its several colours representing 'irrational', 'feelings' and 'unconscious' but Divergent Procedures takes this further, placing the viewer at times inside pure colour, digital form.
Divergent Procedures became randomised on 24/2/25. All #365 consecutive daily posts are available, however, arriving at the site URL, the visitor will land on a different screen each time.
Divination, C.G. Jung, Chinese systems, card sets, aleatoric composition.
ATTC-5: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
Website: Original logo, decal design, UI by Richard Scarborough. Programming by Flat Earth
FREE
Walk Towards The Big Sun
Michael Atavar
2022
In this project I realise my long-held ambition to write a self-assembling novel. J.G. Ballard fantasised about writing a book in three days; I reduce the process and complete my novel in twenty-four hours.
I crunch through a dataset of 54,267 words, randomising the text (the original content is taken from my own dream diaries). I start on Twitter at midnight CET on 8/4/22 and release a post every three minutes of up to 280 characters (approximately 46 words).
Over 24 hours this potentially amounts to 46 x 20 x 24 = 22,080 words.
As well as Ballard, I am thinking about Burroughs' dream diary My Education, Warhol's novel a, A Novel and Kerouac's Book of Dreams.
Machine intelligence, robotics, self-assembly, 24 hours.
ATTC-4: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
App: Additional aleatory programming by Joe Webber using the UWRMA protocol, with original logo and decal design by Richard Scarborough
FREE
OMETHR
Michael Atavar
2020
OMETHR is a 500+ card system, divided up into ten subsidiary colours (each colour represents a quality). Shuffle the whole pack or focus on different configurations of the OMETHR colour spectrum.
The app contains FAQs and extensive notes (some available in preview) about the choice of colours, product development, artist background and an overview of card systems.
Psychotroptic elements, dreams, early Apple in California, the unconscious.
ATTC-3: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
App: Programming by Piers Aitman, with design and UI by Richard Scarborough
BUY
UWRMA
Michael Atavar
2020
UWRMA (Unconscious Writing Machine U-WR-MA) is a Twitter bot that delivers a new message every 24 hours at midnight CET.
UWRMA generates random sentences – a springboard for new approaches or prompts that the user can fold back into experimental writing.
ATTC-2: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
Bot: Aleatory programming by Joe Webber, with original logo and decal design by Richard Scarborough
FREE
Looking At Art (With Your Eyes Closed)
Michael Atavar
2019
The book helps you to build a relationship with contemporary art, using the gallery as a conduit to feeling – and includes 52 exercises (with plenty of tips to assist you) for your next visit to the modern art museum.
It contains Michael Atavar's teaching from his three courses at Tate.
A guide for anyone who has ever been to an art gallery.
Take it with you...
January 2020's Book of the Month at Tate.
ISBN-13: 978-0953107353
Paperback: 128 pages
BUY
ESPELIDES
Michael Atavar
2018
An app that rearranges your text in new, unseen ways. Write or paste your words into the ESPELIDES window then click on one of the buttons to manipulate the sentences.
ESPELIDES is useful for product ideas, names, titles, exercises in writing. Try it as part of your individual practice or within your creative agency.
ATTC-1: Michael Atavar for Psopo Bubble
App: Programming by Piers Aitman, with design and UI by Richard Scarborough
BUY
Being Creative
Michael Atavar
2018
We often treat creativity as if it was something separate from us - in fact it is, as this book demonstrates, incredibly simple: creativity is nothing other than the very core of 'you'.
Publisher: Aurum/Quarto
ISBN-13: 978-1781317181
Hardback: 160 pages
How To Have Creative Ideas In 24 Steps – Better Magic
Michael Atavar
2016
Uses your unique creativity to deliver new and inspiring ideas.
This is a book that offers you some techniques for generating ideas. However, rather than describing brainstorming processes that already exist, I look to the unconscious as a source of inspiration.
ISBN-13: 978-0953107346
Paperback: 256 pages
BUY
210CARDS
Michael Atavar and Miles Hanson
2013
A two-pack system, issued in a limited edition of 210 signed copies.
In the set, the orange cards are used for sparking ideas, whilst the other deck, the
grey cards, are designed for building on those initial concepts. Use both in a
sequence, orange first and then grey, to generate and complete an idea.
The cards draw on a range of influences – George Brecht's Water Yam, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies, Yoko Ono's Grapefruit, but principally my own use of the I-Ching over many years.
Systems, the oracle, processed-based interventions, divination.
BUY
Everyone Is Creative
Michael Atavar
2013
Focuses on the power of creativity and
how it can transform your life.
What do we need to be creative? Actually
we already have the tools within us; we
carry them with us every day – our eyes.
All thatʻs required is that we see, use our
vision and accurately record the world
around us.
ISBN-13: 978-0953107339
Paperback: 256 pages
BUY
12 Rules Of Creativity
Michael Atavar
2011
Contains twelve practical steps that help
to stimulate your creativity.
I guide you through the basic principles of
the creative process – how to begin,
developing an original voice and working
with creative blocks. From beginner to
famous artist, everyone at some time in
their career will become stuck. These
twelve rules will help you to navigate the
stages of impasse, freeing up the log-jam
of ideas.
ISBN-13: 978-0953107322
Paperback: 272 pages
BUY
How To Be An Artist
Michael Atavar
2009
Develops your creativity and grows the
potential of your own artist.
I believe that you can grow your artist in a
nurturing and supportive way, giving it the
time and resources to develop and
blossom. This is a book that takes the
inner artist seriously – the playful, the
complicated, the difficult part – leading it
on a journey that includes starting,
building a practice
ISBN-13: 978-0953107315
Paperback: 256 pages
BUY
After working with many leading creativity tutors as the Head of Programmes for The School of Life there is no doubt in my mind that Michael Atavar's abilities to elicit deep and sustained creative thought in others is world-class.
The general public are sometimes moved to tears after experiencing his methods firsthand and professional clients no less vitalised by his teaching.
Michael has been a mentor and a huge inspiration to me in my career for a number of years now. The sessions with him are always hugely insightful and he's taught me a lot about leadership and creative confidence. This has been invaluable to both my work and my own personal development.
Michael has the ability see your potential before you see it yourself. When I started working with him he quickly pointed out that I needed to develop my own brand and encouraged me to step up at work and take on a leadership role. Iʼve been amazed at the transformation over the years - from feeling stuck and lacking confidence, to reaching my goal of becoming a senior art director, and now to launching my own brand.
Itʼs an honour to work with Michael, and Iʼm so grateful to have had the opportunity to be coached by him over the years.
Working with Michael is always an amazing and incredibly productive experience. He combines his own artistic talents and business insights to bring fresh and exciting ways for people and teams to rediscover their own creativity.
His practical approach is a fantastically accessible way of stimulating creative confidence which can empower people to more easily turn their ideas into reality.
He is also challenging, stimulating and great fun.
Michael is a breath of fresh air that can bring a real shift in thinking and behaviours to business, leaders and teams.