SFVFS

SFVFS — Seed / Form / Void / Form / Seed — grew out of watching creativity behave over time at Leake Street. A mark appears, develops, is covered, altered or lost, and then becomes the condition from which something else begins. What first looked like a simple cycle gradually became more complex: the experience seemed to move through different positions of being inside or outside the work, and of experiencing it subjectively or objectively. From that came four working states: INSIDE INSIDE — subjective dream; OUTSIDE INSIDE — subjective reality; INSIDE OUTSIDE — objective reality; and OUTSIDE OUTSIDE — objective dream. They were not intended as rigid psychological categories, but as a way of describing how creative attention appears to shift as an idea moves from possibility into form, encounters the world, and then becomes available for something new.

The crucial realisation was that this was not really a circle. It behaved more like a helix. A creative process may return to something that resembles its starting position, but it does not return to the same place: experience has accumulated, circumstances have changed, and the person returning has changed with them. That made OUTSIDE OUTSIDE especially important. It appeared to be the natural blind spot of the process, the region in which the next possibility exists but cannot yet be fully seen from the present position. Because that future state is not available in advance, the process cannot simply be reversed like rewinding a recording. You can revisit an earlier form, but you cannot become the earlier version of yourself who encountered it for the first time. The missing knowledge is part of what gives the process direction.

This changed SFVFS from a poetic description into a working structure for thinking about creation, encounter and continuation. The seed is not merely an origin and the void is not simply absence; each marks a change in what can be known, held or acted upon. A completed form can become material for another encounter, and the unknown ahead of it can eventually become another seed. That insight became a bridge from the lived creative experience of Leake Street into the later work: first the twelve principles, then The Wooden Idol, and eventually The Turing Chamber. SFVFS is therefore best understood not as a claim that every creative act follows one universal law, but as the pattern that first made the deeper structure visible.