Artistry, Sensemaking and Dialogue Projects by John Oliver
Art Installation Milan by Tyler.World (John Oliver)
for the Bridging Dialogues Annual Conference July 2025
Developmental Stages Reimagined
Mission
This art installation was commissioned by the organizational consulting company PeopleRise with the theme of complementing the keynote speaker Jennifer Garvey Berger and her seminal work on adult continuous development.
Jennifer Garvey Berger was the keynote speaker developing further her thought leadership in adult learning and development (with the recent release of the 2nd edition of her book Changing on the Job) through to how we might even dare to embrace love in our professional roles.
Vision
Having worked in developmental pscyhology for many years, I wanted this installation to integrate the symbolic, imaginal and narratives dimensions of how we might understand such hierarchical models in more nuanced and contextualised ways - including an integration of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person perspectives as an integrated whole.
I had had also the privilege of filming Jennifer's portrait on two occasions, and so it was the perfect opportunity to integrate her 1st person narratives into the themes of developmental "forms of mind".
Jennifer was gracious enough to collaborate on the art installation, with us working together on a collage process of symbolic images that we could associate to each form of mind. The rich imagery from the collage images, ripped out intuitively from a range of magazines allowed us to explore subtle characteristics of each category.
See here for the full 17 page installation write-up
Explore here the previously filmed portrait moments with Jennifer