Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 147! Joining Summer’s Creativity...
Dear followers, joiners, surfers, attuners, helpmates, and co-catalyzers of summers exuberant creative processes,
It is now July, and this week we are offering some active suggestions on summer enjoyments that bring us into and of the summer's ongoing creative processes.
Over the last few weeks, we have been exploring creating-enabling configurations and their emergent propensities (Volume 144, 145, 146). All life at all times is organized. And how it is organized—how it is configured—has agency. Organization, a configuration, has an ongoing creative agency to shape, form, and propel things in certain directions (propensities) rather than in others. These creative configurations are also stabilizing, and as such, they enable certain patterns to creatively emerge and roughly repeat. How do configurations stabilize and enable things to repeat? They do this by creatively shaping the components that make up the configuration via constructive feedback and feedforward loops.
We are always in, and more importantly, of these configurations. There is no self separate from an environment that co-makes it. This is one of the great insights of the Buddhist traditions: all things are without a fixed internal essence, are brought into being relationally (configurational creativity), and are inherently the outcome of dynamic ongoing relations (Anattā).
Much of these critical concepts are also found in the discussions of self-organization and how creative order emerges in the world around us spontaneously. The agency of configurations spontaneously leads to the creative emergence of weather patterns, plate tectonics, waves and currents, cellular structures, digestive ecosystems, neuronal rhythms, and organizational behaviors.
The last few newsletters focused on this, concluding: (1) that creative processes are thus an unexceptional and ubiquitous quality of all reality everywhere, (2) causality not being a helpful sensibility to engage with this reality, and (3) human creative practices always involve a collaborative co-shaping “surfing” of creative-enabling configurations and their propensities.
And now, as the summer creatively configures propensities in, through and of us, we thought that it might be a good time to suggest ways to experiment consciously and actively with joining these worldly creative processes:
If you don’t already, try a practice that dynamically joins a very dynamic creative reality—oceanic activities like surfing, sea-kayaking, sailing, or ocean swimming are all great practices.
But you don’t even need to become of an ocean—fly a kite or play frisbee. Making the kite (or making a few kites) is even better, as you are learning the attuning and creative correspondence practices so central to human collective creativity.
The list of possible practices is quite long, and we are certain most of you are already participating in some relevant art: perhaps gardening, foraging, climbing, contact improv dance, making things with clay or carving wood, etc.
What matters for us in relation to these creative practices of joining is that:
Here are a few suggestions, but feel free to ignore them and sleuth out your own!
Human creative practices are, like all creative practices, collective. A critical creative aspect of our creative collaborations with configurations is the emergent dynamics of other humans. Playing team sports is a great way to gain a feel for these logics. This could be formal and organized or very informal – pickup games of basketball in the neighborhood, or a formal ultimate frisbee league. Find a team sport you enjoy and stick with it.
Not into sports? Join a band or orchestra – especially one that skews more improvisational. Not musical? This is a favorite workshop activity of ours – get some friends together for a picnic and perform Pauline Olivernos’ Rock Piece. This is a wonderful, simple exercise to explore relational dynamics, emergence, and mutual attunement. If you do it, please let us know how it goes!
Not into this? Join an activist social collective; it could be a community mutual aid organization or rewilding society. The creative joys of working across the dynamics of human creative-enabling configurations will be richly rewarding.
Summer is not really the season to be fermenting things. But for our readers on the winter side of this shared earth, it could be a good moment to explore ways of creatively working with the infinite, live-driving abundance of microbial symbiotic life. Over the years, we have led community workshops that involved making miso, wine, beer, cheese, yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchi.
Not sure how to get started? Talk to your friends, consult the intra-webs or read Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation and The Noma Guide to Fermentation, both brilliant resources.
(NOTE: All these links are to Amazon; we do NOT recommend that you buy your books from them, but you can easily read a sample there.) We suggest that you look at buying any of these books used from your favorite local bookstore, Biblio (or a similar platform), or using your public library.)
Summer is a time to play board games. Two of our favorites that really allow for a collective emergent space of worldmaking forms of speculation are Signs and Dialect. They are both from the amazing folks behind Thorny Games, who have a new game, Xenolanguage, that we are excited to try out this summer. Signs takes its inspiration from how deaf children in Nicaragua collaboratively created their own sign language. Dialect focuses on how communities in isolation will collectively develop new dialects. Both are astonishingly fun experiences in creative collective emergent worldmaking.
Of Xenolanguage, they say this: “We are no longer alone. In this roleplaying game, you play as the first humans tasked with deciphering an alien language. As you uncover meaning, you begin to see the world differently. “ We cannot wait to dive in!
Books give one an excuse to just be somewhere and breathe of an environment. They hold us gently to a beach or a grassy hill, whispering to stay longer—drift, nap, muse, and perhaps return to reading…
We have a few suggestions:
1. At an Edge of AI
We have been experimentally wandering through the emerging worlds of AI, especially after our recent newsletter series on AI: (Volumes 138, 139, 140, 141). Here are four enjoyable reads for very distinct perspectives:
We really enjoyed this book by Ethan Mollick - Co-Intelligence - Living and Working with AI. In addition to him detailing what AI is (useful pattern mimicry) and isn't (intelligent - for it knows absolutely nothing more than how to predict the most likely next word and can't explain why or how it chose it), he proposes a set of heuristics and strategies for working with AI as a relational partner. To co-create with. Not from. A primary proposition in the book is to treat your AI in critical “near human” ways. Because, well, humans are deeply memetic (especially with language), often hallucinate, are biased, and don't always tell the truth. He also suggests utilizing AI in your daily work to at least understand what the tools are capable of by experimenting with an area you have a deep understanding. No matter your take on AI, the fact remains, "Whatever AI you are using now is going to be the worst AI you will ever use." It's not going away, so it is important to critically and creatively understand it and actively participate in its emergence. Note: His chapter on creativity is the antithesis of this newsletter and our approach to the new. So please don’t read into this recommendation that we’ve suddenly swerved to an overly simplistic, human centered. Non-worldly approach to creativity.
In the spirit of understanding and further critical participation, we also recommend Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor’s great critical dive into AI: AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference. They do a really great job at explaining in clear, accessible language what it is and is not. It is especially useful at cutting through the corporate BS—the “snake oil” of so many current AI hucksters.
Zooming out to the bigger picture of what is experience, intelligence and how we make sense of things is a really good and highly readable book by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience. In a world where science and technology are part of every aspect of our contemporary lives, this is a critical resetting of the discourse of the sciences. The Blind Spot is a “call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes—rather than ignores or tries not to see—humanity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism. The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.”
From this description, it might sound like a heavy – e.g. non beach read—but it is very well written, important, and a page turning read.
A final book on this general topic is Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. Much of our contemporary discourse about the development of new technologies (including AI) is either trimumphantalist and techno-utopian or it is a form of acquiescence (“it is simply inevitable; learn to live with it...”). But neither is true. We need a critical and creative approach to the future. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has written a number of exceptional and important books in this regard, primarily focused on the long history of critical debates about how to work with technologies that are shaping our environment (The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz; and Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change with Fabien Locher). Happy Apocalypse is a powerful corrective history of technology in which Fressoz “demonstrates how risk was conceived, managed, distributed, and erased to facilitate industrialization. He explores how the polluter-pays principle emerged in the nineteenth century to legitimize the chemical industry, how safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital, and how criticisms and objections were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity. Societies of the past did not inadvertently alter their environments on a massive scale. Nor did they disregard the consequences of their decisions. They seriously considered them, sometimes with dread. The history recounted in this book is not one of a sudden awakening but a process of modernising environmental disinhibition”.
That AI is part of our near future is pretty certain, but how and what this is – that is up to us – creatively and collectively. Fressoz’s work is helpful in grounding us in the actual creative acts that produced our modern technological economic conditions and give us insight into strategies to create new futures.
2. The Perfect Beach Book
I (Jason) grew up on the beaches of Long Island. The beach is the only place I ever wish to be - reading a book and walking the shore in an effort to satisfy my lifelong quest to find a shark tooth sticking up in the sand alongside the myriad of shells that have washed up on the beach. And while I've yet to find one, I've found plenty of beautiful shells and sparkling sea glass. I've always been fascinated by their shapes and swirls, rounded edges, vibrant colors, and the smooth backs that were once the home of some of our favorite foods (Iain loves oysters, Jason mussels.) "The Sound of the Sea" by Cynthia Barne is a detailed look at seashells and their important roles as historians, currency, industrial material, and carbon absorbers. To tell the human story is nothing without including seashells and the creatures that inhabit them. A great read as you look up from your beach chair and gaze upon the ocean.
3. Summer Time Walks
To be human and alive is to move and for many of us, this involves walking. Yet we take for granted the complexities, assemblages and our embodied actions required to walk and move from one place to the next. In a society of speed, walking is the space to slow down and connect deeply with our environment, nature, and the earth beneath our feet. Walking One Step at a Time by Erling Kagge illuminates this embodied action. It reminds us how we feel when we walk, how our bodies are connected to our surroundings, sights, sounds, and smells. Feeling time slow down. Our mind wandering. Our thoughts crystallizing. Our anger dissipating. Our resentment melting away - with every step. Erling captures the embodied enactive spirit of walking here: "The longer I walk, the less I differentiate between my body, my mind and my surroundings. The external and internal worlds overlap. I am no longer an observer looking at nature, but the entirety of my body is involved." For us, to be deeply embodied and enactive is critical to creativity, and we need not look any further than walking.
Take your walking a “step” further with an enactive approach: Enact walking “out of the space behind you” instead of how most of us tend to walk - which is “to step into the space in front of our bodies”. This practice subtly but profoundly transforms walking from originating in your head to connecting your body with the surface beneath your feet and the ongoing event itself.
Give it a try, and let us know how it feels.
Surf Summer Surfing You
Till next week—walk, surf, kite, sing—joining creatively with others—both human and more-than-human—in new configurations to surf the emergent propensities that you collectively bring forth and bring forth you as summer 2024.
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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