N°104 - Marina Zurkow & Sarah Rothberg

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: And I'm still your host, Julian Bleeker. I hope you subscribe both to the podcast and to my newsletter, which you can find over at New Future Lab newsletter. I also have a patreon over@patreon.com near futurelaboratory. Both of these are great ways to stay in touch with the projects I work on and join the Patreon as a paid supporter. You also get access to the Near Future Laboratory Discord community and weekly office hours, which just crested its 300th week of Friday gatherings. So this episode is with my dear friend and collaborator from some of my first art and technology projects, Marina Zurkow and her collaborators, Sarah Rothburg. They're two of the most compelling and prominent contemporary media artists around today. They work on climate change and the intersection of, uh, global systems of all kinds. All happens through interactive installations and experiences. These beautiful public artworks. It's all very approachable and engaging and entertaining and thoughtful with humor, which is important. So I hope you enjoy our conversation. It's rangy and gets the meat of things, even as it has my TO and structuredness. I want to get right to it. Except there's one thing to say, which is it's been a long time between episodes, and I realized that, and I think I just needed a bit of a break to, you know, just kind of dive into, create different creative watering holes, the results of which you'll see if you're a Patreon subscriber. So this is my way of saying, again, please subscribe over@patreon.com inventory. It's $10 a month, which is cheap. You get what is humbly, some of the best speculative design work that $10 can buy. Plus, you get to support this podcast, these kind of conversations, and get to join the gang in our weekly office hours. Okay, enough of that. Here's my conversation with Marina Zurco and Sarah Rothberg. Um, very nice to. Very nice to see you, Marina. Very nice to meet you, Sarah. Okay, so, Sarah, tell me, tell me, what's your story? I know, Marie, that.

Speaker C: Sorry. I tell you what, what's your story Story altogether? Well, uh, I. This is unstructured. I like it. I was not totally sure what to expect.

Speaker A: Um, but, Sarah, here's the rule for your discussion.

Speaker C: Okay, perfect. Okay, so the card. Okay, that's great, actually. So the card from that, um, has been developed by more and more, which is a collapse. You see, I'm trying to avoid saying it. Um, it's actually almost impossible to try to talk about oneself without using those two Words on the. On the off. But I'll just switch to the third person. Is that. Let me try that. So Sarah is a media artist that went to itp, um, and met Marina there and has been sort of bouncing around the universe of um, media art for I guess more than ten years. Um, and the work that Sarah produces is um, in the realm of sort of media studies and using technology as a way of uh, thinking about the impact of technologies. And where Marina and I sort of overlap is kind of an obsession with you.

Speaker B: Said I.

Speaker C: Thinking oh shit.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: Now Marina has. Since I pass it off, our.

Speaker A: Where our work overlaps is. Was the end of.

Speaker B: Oh.

Speaker A: Uh, ah. Where the work of more and more overlaps between these two artists who are talking to you right now is in the space of structures and systems thinking and how those intersect with our own personal desires and our own personal value sets and how you negotiate between those things. This little ditty of a what if is much more a kind of quick one off version where you get um, a very weird card like massage is a subject in school which of course is completely verboten in the wokie. The wokie woke trigger culture. That wouldn't work.

Speaker C: Um, you know what's great about that card for today? Sorry to interrupt you but I'm about to go teach um, right after this. Like a, ah, McLuhan. Uh,

Speaker A: so maybe massage in that way.

Speaker C: Is

Speaker A: massage possible?

Speaker C: Type of.

Speaker B: Yeah. Amazing. So more and more is. Is. Is um, is you. Is. You guys, we're the core.

Speaker A: We've been, we've been chipping away at this thing since 2016. Somehow it's gone through a lot of ah. It's gone through a lot of incarnations. Um, I guess it's primary. Would you say its primary home is still in, in sort of academic environments?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I, I guess so. I mean we're always trying to push it that it's like a great party game because it kind of. It's um, a game as maybe call it. Um. But yeah, it's sort of. It started off so as a side project and then it just kept getting new life imbued into it. And then someone would say oh, I used your. The deck in my class or I used it in this, you know,

Speaker B: um,

Speaker C: other activists or I used it in you know, at a party or I want to use this at a conference. And then it just kept kind of like growing and growing. But it mostly lives in the realm of like academic slash change making organizations.

Speaker A: We threw a party was really fun, uh, at the Whitney Museum in New York. And the party was, uh, called what if A Hudson River Mixer. And so we built a new deck that was specific to where the museum sits on the site by the neck, by the edge of the river. And we. What if everything has a sound effect? I'm just looking at. I don't have a lot of the cards in front of me. They're also at the museum because I'm teaching teenagers this world making stuff, right?

Speaker B: Oh, beautiful. Amazing.

Speaker A: I want to talk more about that.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Um, but what if the Hudson river spoke to you every morning? Or what if you had to kayak into the museum? And so it was really fun. But what was party like about? It was, um, we were in this big room and it had a curtain that Sarah discovered electronically opened and showed, like, the entire Hudson. So for 15 minutes, there was a countdown clock and waiters who were our

Speaker B: cohort, um, our hired co instigators or something.

Speaker A: Co instigators were. Had these trays they were passing around. One had really weird hors d' oeuvres that were very abstract, that could have been future cubes or disgusting things you'd pulled out of the river. And you ate those. And you thought, put the brakes on just popping in your mouth and think, how does that relate to your card? Or smelling kind of repugnant and interesting smells in these, uh, uh, medical dispenser jars, your hand to those mystery jars where you don't know what you're touching. And just thinking about how these materials sort of work in your world. And then the timer goes off, we have this dj, the music changes, and the curtain just, uh, opens up, and the river's right there. Sarah, you can finish this sentence because the next part was really funny.

Speaker C: I mean, well, the whole thing was the most delightful examples of, like, not planning everything all the way and seeing what, like, a space just wants to do. Because for, like, weeks we were like, how are we going to get people to look out the window at the time that they're supposed to look out the window? Because we wanted to end it with, like, taking your card and having done all of these, like, sensory touching, smelling things, but, like, point things out that are happening in this moment out the window at this beautiful view. But we didn't want people to do that beforehand. We wanted them to be engaged with each other. So at first we were like, do we shush people? Do we play a goggle? And then when we got there, we're like, oh, there's a button that raises the curtain And I swear the first time we tried it, we raised the curtain and it was like moths to a. And just turned and like walked over and looked. It was so dramatic and amazing. And then when we looked out the window, there's always of course like something weird and funny happening. There's like a soccer game and there's like someone jaywalking and there's like, you know, like boats and weird.

Speaker B: Is the window third floor? Third floor. Okay, so you get a little bit of like.

Speaker A: Great view.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's still got, it's still grounded because you could see.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: A delivery truck go by, but not so high up that you feel like you're just, you're, you're. God. Floating.

Speaker A: No, not at all. You're really just the architect. Map of activities and the. Both on the water and on the shore, on all those sort of play spaces along Gansevoor. Like uh, in that part of the meatpacking district along the river. It was really great. And there were 400 people played over the course of the evening because it ran in these 30 minute cycles and you could come in the middle and drop in and it was just a um, fun way to speculate and, and see what resonated for, for people later. So some friends came and they're like, oh yeah, I had a card that was trash barge operators or celebrities. And then thinking about how that played out like the rest of the system that would support that kind of aim and respect, you know, what else would be required? How did you feel about trash or how did you feel about barges and how did you feel about celebrity? So it really worked in this super lo fi low, like tiny workshop way, which has always been a struggle for us because the big day more dot world. We have several themed decks and the workshop structures are really hard to do in less than 90 minutes to two hours. They're really hard to do because it's just hard to get anywhere. You got a world build with people. You got to be an individual in that world. You've got to make something. You've got to get back with your group. You got to figure out your storytelling and then collect. That's a big part of this is sort of how you look back on present through the lens of all of this absurdity that you've created.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I get, I get the challenge of that. I mean 90 minutes is like nothing World building because people are coming in with like all kinds of. To begin with. Yeah, I think the meat was off My sandwich, you know, whatever's going on in their head.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. We're gonna world build. Uh, sorry, Sarah, I interrupted you.

Speaker C: Well, I just. I was gonna say, I feel like one thing that's kind of helpful, at least in that issue brought up, like, what are people coming? Starting with this blank canvas is much harder, but because the, um, framework that we developed, you start with constraints with your group. You start with these six cards, and you're like, no matter what, these six cards are true. And most of them are pretty, um, impossible or absurd. Easy to develop the world pretty fast. So even if you're, like, not feeling super imaginative, if you're simply just trying to troubleshoot, like, how might I be able to, like, mix these constraint cards together? Um, you end up. It makes it a little easier to be creative and especially run it with people who are strangers to each other, um, versus people who know each other. So I don't know. It's. It's interesting. It's not like blank canvas world building, which is, like, much.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Much harder.

Speaker A: No, this is highly structured. This is that we have all these facilitation scripts we can give to other people. They can just read the script, do what they can, amend it and change it if they want. Um, but one of the. One of the things that we discovered is, you know, you get these little groups. You pick six cards. We have an online version of all these decks. There's one about energy. There's one about ecospheric cosmologies into other things. Like, you're committed legally and spiritually to clouds or plastic or metal or trees. And so, uh, we have one on waste, and then we have the original deck, and now we're doing a coastlines project that we're not really sure if it's going to be as expansive as those big workshops, because it's more for activist groups or.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Give that much time. But what we discovered made a huge difference was to start after the six cards are picked with a close, uh, your eyes. Visualization. And to get people to drop into their bodies, pick one of the six cards and really focus on it and where they are in the world and in their new imagination, smelling and seeing and what's around them. And then to be able to come with a more somatic experience back to their group. That was a game changer.

Speaker B: Yeah. Can we. Can we, um. Can you pull six cards? Can we. Can I. Because I want to. I need to, uh, sort of experience the structure you're talking about. This is.

Speaker A: Can we share a screen can we.

Speaker B: Yep. Let me, uh. I think I have to throw a switch someplace. I, I empathize with the, With. With both the. The wanting to do it and then also the challenge of doing it having tried to do it. People get frustrated. I don't care what I'm supposed to do with this card. Like, oh, boy.

Speaker C: Oh, uh, we have a lot of language. Having run it so many times around, like, you can reinterpret their cards. Also a humongous revelation. I think maybe year three of doing this was around advising people about dystopia. So we realized if we didn't, we'd say, you're not. We advise you against building a dystopia. We think you should take the cards, interpret them as you will, and use them to imagine a world that you want to live in. And it doesn't have to be a world.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: A world you want to live in. And that could mean a lot of things, but it's so much more fun when people are not, for some reason.

Speaker B: Yeah. And. And we. And, uh, I think so. Just parenthetically, when, when that kind of comes up in. In some. One context or another that I might be trying to operate in, um, it's. It's always worth a sidebar to say, well, let, let's. Let's wonder why we tend towards the dystopia to say, like, you know, it's. It's not your fault. I get it, but you grew up in a world in which that is fetishized Hollywood in science, you know, in the, in the kind of science fiction that we grew up in, in our, you know, whatever. If you think of our era, uh, of science fiction, it was like I came into science fiction the edge of, like, foundation series. And at the beginning of. So that was, that was the cool thing. And also, you know, and so you sort of think people, if you can get yourself outside talking about a somatic experience, get outside of yourself, recognize your place in, you know, history or whatever, that you're living in a particular moment where the, The, The. The narratives as to what future is or what's next. Doom and gloom, nuclear apocalypse. Um, it's. It's climate, you know, disaster genetics, biology, genetics, all that's all that stuff. Uh, if it's easier for you to pull a cork on a bottle of rose and give up, then go ahead and do that. But I'm going to keep. I'm going to go over backwards.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: All right. Your deck. I love decks. This is amazing.

Speaker A: Well, you have to pick. This one is coming soon the AI Futures one. So we. You can't pick that one. We're looking for partners for that one, which is why it's on there.

Speaker B: Well, tell me, because I've been doing a lot of AI stuff with AI people.

Speaker A: Fantastic.

Speaker B: Um, thank you. So am I. Am I picking one? Should I pick one? Okay. Uh, I. I want to do, um, Echo, because I have no idea what that is.

Speaker C: Okay, this is a good one. All of them are also made with like, uh, with different collaborators. So this one was made with, um, unity. And ah, the other ones have been sort of like, like the energy one was supported by like a huge number of scholars and thinkers and like people of diverse ways. Like, we had someone who was a, like a, like an energy worker in like, somatic sense. And then we had, you know, people were engineers and scientists. This one was really like out of the, ah, imagination of, um, Una Marina.

Speaker B: And.

Speaker A: Well, wait, just to finish the energy one, you. Who knew academics has become that there is an energy humanities sector now in. In the. In the Western university systems. And so we had a scholar who did energy and religion, one who did energy in science fiction, one who did energy and food. You know, one who did energy and indigenous knowledge. Like it really was for people.

Speaker B: What? And so. And what. And um.

Speaker A: We, um, can look at those cards in a sec.

Speaker B: But it's the scope of energy. Do you mean like, plug in my computer or like Vibes?

Speaker A: Everything, all of it. There's this like Reiki or it could be, but it was more focused on what you think of engineering and engine. It was energy. It was more focused on energy and policy, energy and value sets, but in the traditional sense. But I mean, I think the blurb

Speaker C: is actually really helpful in framing that one.

Speaker A: Let me go back.

Speaker C: I can read it. I'm looking at it right now. Which is considered in the domain of experts. But you know, more than you think. This deck explores how energy shapes our world. And it was mostly oriented towards energy in terms of like, um, fuel and as a resource. But finding those points of contact between that and Vibes was productive. Having. Making an entry point for anyone to be able to conceptualize how energy. Energy is a lens to look at power, energy as a lens to look at social interactions.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, maybe we should look at that one for a minute.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: We should look at the original. Can I suggest. We should look at the original. Some context for the other ones.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker C: Which is just like a more general sort of like how society, like elements of society. So the way that it works is You. You start by introducing.

Speaker B: I'm digging your ur. Uh, by the way, I appreciate the, uh, going there totally. Yeah.

Speaker A: It took us some thinking. So I'm, um. This how to play. Are you going to go over this how to play really quickly? I'm going to shut. Well, no, I mean, basically the structure is you imagine by yourself or with other people. Then you pick a role. There's all these role cards down at the bottom. And you think about yourself in the world as that role, like some kind of artifact. Anything from a to do list to a costume to an entire city. I mean, it could be anything, depending how much time you want to spend. And then to tell the story of your world if there's other groups playing. And then to reflect on how your world and the things that you discovered along the way might impact the way you think about the present and the possibilities of next or what alternatives we have. So that's the structure.

Speaker B: It's great. You got. You guys got structure. You're taking people with a hand, which is amazing because sometimes people freak out if there's not.

Speaker A: We have a lot of structure. We have a lot of structure. So I'm going to close this stage. Do you want to. I'll just pick. Pick from these 11 categories. Six. Six cards. One from six each from six of these categories.

Speaker B: Okay. Am I doing that?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. Food availability.

Speaker A: Okay. I'm going to turn them over after you've picked.

Speaker B: Okay. Um, Work conditions.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Personal communication.

Speaker C: Agree.

Speaker B: I could tell. Um, let's see. Living, uh, conditions.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And I. Two more.

Speaker A: Two more.

Speaker B: Information and learning and transportation.

Speaker A: Okay. All right. So I'm going to.

Speaker B: Okay, go.

Speaker A: Drumroll. Scavenging is your food availability. Work conditions. No one has a job. Personal communication is via scent. Oh, living conditions. Everyone uses public kitchens and bathrooms. Great combo. And information and learning is all word of mouth. And your trans. Flying cars.

Speaker B: Okay. Flying Ye old flying cars. Okay, cool. I'm digging this. And so within each one of these. So obviously you flipped the cards over. So food availability could have been something else.

Speaker C: Yeah. Should we look at some alternatives for fun?

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker C: So food availability. Soylent style. Except for a year.

Speaker A: I love this one. Everything is good. Yeah.

Speaker B: People crunching on their plates.

Speaker A: Uh, whatever's around is this cake meme. So you can kind of see how if you look at a matrix, how much these would affect how they shaded and informed the material world.

Speaker B: You have the discard. So is there optionality to be like, I don't know, I'm not feeling this.

Speaker C: Or when we run the workshop, we say you have to stick with what you got. And the trick is like, you can interpret the card however you want. And that's actually part of the, that we're doing is imagining things mean different things. So no one has a job when it comes up. Sometimes, like, leads people straight to the path of dystopia. Like, oh, everyone's unemployed. But then you get into thinking about, well, what is a job? Like, what's it. What is a job of a career is a job doing work in this world, does a job mean something that you do?

Speaker A: And it.

Speaker C: And by asking people to stick to what it is that they want in a world that they want, it actually makes a, uh, conversation about, well, what do you want when you think about like your job? Like, and we didn't pick economic system, but I think where this would end up leading is like inventing some kind of sense in this world. So usually we follow this up. Like we start with a visualization, as Marina is saying. And then we have also some world building prompts. Um, one of them being like, okay, you picked from these six categories, but what, what would the other categories be? Like, what would the economic system be in your world? What would have, uh, to look like in your, in this world that you're imagining to kind of help people? And some are very silly, like, what does a holiday look like in this world?

Speaker A: But you know what's funny? It's actually, for me, the holiday one is one of the most important prompts available because it's. Holidays are where your world exhibits

Speaker C: some

Speaker A: massive paradigms that your world possesses. So it's such a great prompt.

Speaker B: Yeah. So what happens next? So I've got the cards like I'm, um, sort of. I'm.

Speaker A: Okay, pick one. Pick one of these. Which one are we gonna keep?

Speaker B: Personal communication via scent.

Speaker A: Okay, that's one you want to think about.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay, so. So then we would tell you to everybody in this group to close our eyes. And then one of us would lead guided visualization. And so you have that card in your mind and start with this question, uh, if else would be true in this world?

Speaker B: Yeah. So something comes right, right to mind right away that there would be no perfume, there'd be no artificial sense, there would be like an eagle because it, it would lead people and, uh, you know, astray. And maybe they're like, they're, they're that are. That are. Or, or the, um, the grift. Grifters have underground labs where they create sense to lead people into various kinds of Nefarious traps.

Speaker A: And it's so funny.

Speaker B: And they put.

Speaker A: But that's like saying we all should be naked. Saying there's no perfume would be the same as to say we should all be naked.

Speaker B: Well, like, like I'm thinking like manufacture. Like there'd be no more Chanel number five.

Speaker C: Or maybe it's Top Loader. Maybe.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's kind of where my mind was going. Like the stuff that, you know, so which, which now as I, as I expand this, it's like um, value. Value is. I don't know what the right word is. More normalize. So there is no luxury. Hm.

Speaker C: So maybe we should each pick. Marina, do you want to pick a different one and sort of do just a quick. If this is true, what else is true? And then the trick becomes combining them all and that's. It becomes very rich and spooky almost sometimes.

Speaker A: Yeah, you go ahead Sarah, you pick one.

Speaker C: Oh, okay. Um, Well, I, I think that the word of mouth one is interesting because that one immediately calls to me as like, could be very dystopian pretty quickly. So if I'm try to connect to life, you know, just obviously in this like disinformation universe, maybe it's kind of realistic. But I guess if information and learning were all by word of mouth, we'd all become maybe like excellent poets and memorizers. Um, because you know, sort of in like a, like Homer, you know, epic, epic poem as a way of like remembering things and sort of like maybe you would need a little bit of a passcode as well to be able to like verify information between other people. So like some kind of like verbal verification system would have to be made if you're sort of trying to consistent between people. It's where my mind goes. The positive one being everyone is very poetic.

Speaker A: You know what else it makes me think of in relation to the scent card is your breath. The smell of your breath would really matter.

Speaker B: Mhm. Yeah. Like, would you trust people who didn't brush their teeth?

Speaker A: Well, they would be. That's a kind of form of aggression really in a sense what you're bringing to your personal communication.

Speaker C: Well, those two cards together, they're so interesting because it separates out what is information and what are you communicating personally. So let's say if you're uh, trying to tell someone something and you're lying, maybe you have like a bad breath. Like there's some sort of interesting combination there. I'm not really sure how to like where to take that.

Speaker B: But like, like valence is a Forms of communication. Because. Because we're thinking about like, oh, I just wish I knew the truth. Which. Oh, you know, I don't know. It's a little bit. It's a flippy term. But then communication, that is, that is not. It's not false in a deleterious sense. But it's like. I'm telling you a tale.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: Well, I'm telling. I'm doing a joke.

Speaker C: I'm doing like a slash. Sarcasm.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Right now or whatever.

Speaker B: What's the scent? For sarcasm or for humor?

Speaker A: So I'm gonna pick this one. This. Everyone uses public kitchens and bathrooms as a kind of complement to these notions of sharing, communication, smelling, consuming, ingesting mouths

Speaker B: as portals to the gut.

Speaker A: Your gut telling certain kinds of truth through your breath. Right. Microbial presence. Right. And so how these things could weave like a really different sort of way of living together. You know, I'm also just really interested in people sharing public kitchens and bathrooms and what that means disgustingness. And also opportunities for sharing.

Speaker B: 2. Two things to that point, there is. Because there is. There's like, um, there are those. I uh, remember there's this thing, facial action protocol or something way back in the day where it's like you could. Which you know, they trained like CIA trained on this kind of people kind of thing. And now it's like there. But it's like they have these three ring binders that they would study to learn how to read people's micro gestures in order to assess whether they're telling the truth. So the relationship between, I mean, you know, the soma, it's all connected. It's like the brain does things and. Does the brain emanate certain pheromones or whatever it might be in these things? Because you're lying.

Speaker A: Yeah. But you know, I also could sabotage you with too much garlic. So phase one is, you know, you. You visualize yourself. You share like we did. You world build. You look at these prompts. There's 10 or 15 prompts you can pick from. Then ding, ding, ding. You pick a role. Okay, so I'm gonna pick. I'm gonna click the role card. Jillian.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: That's gonna be your role.

Speaker B: Mm mhm.

Speaker A: You're a mediator.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Sarah, you're a non human animal. Could be a kitchen mouse if you'd like. Child. God. Okay.

Speaker C: Usually we let people pick their own role though, in this one too. Like. But this works. I think these ones are all pretty good.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: Because. Because sometimes if, uh, the reason we do that is sometimes someone's constructed a world where like that thing really does not.

Speaker A: Yeah. If you don't like your role, you could have another one.

Speaker B: Yeah, I like it. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm very curious. Mediator.

Speaker A: Well, you're gonna make up what it is. So what's the conflict? So what's the. What are some of the conflicts you might have to mediate?

Speaker B: For instance, and given these three cards here.

Speaker A: Well, that's as far as we got. We didn't do all six because we would need more time.

Speaker B: Mediator. In this context.

Speaker A: I'm going to throw these on out.

Speaker C: Well, it's also, we're saying typically, like we. We do this part. Um, so the beginning of the workshop is like communal. Like you and the four people or whatever, five people you're with in a group are sort of talking it out and you come up with sort of a provisional description of what your world is enough that you. A basic shared imagination for it. And then if we were doing the workshop the way we normally do, you go off and you're on your own. And we say, okay, as your role, imagine a day in the life of a mediator in this world or as a non human animal. And then you would make like the artifact from the perspective of that role. So as a. Like a contract between two people or whatever, I don't want to put.

Speaker A: I don't want to put ideas in

Speaker C: your head about what the mediator does in this world. Um, and then you're, You're. You bring that back to the group and sort of try to synthesize all of people's individual imaginings.

Speaker A: Um, unfortunately, because this here, I'm thinking of you as food at the moment, Sarah. So I'm wondering if you want this other role instead, which would be a historian.

Speaker C: No, I like being the angel scavenged.

Speaker A: I left this card up here because I was really interested in this relationship and this relationship between. And this. And word of mouth and public kitchens and bathrooms. M. I was interested in its relationship to all of that.

Speaker C: I think everything is edible is still pretty interesting in that. And it gets me out of being the only thing that gets eaten as well.

Speaker B: I was going to mediate you not getting eaten. Um, you're like, no, no. Uh, maybe you're like, I just want. I just, I'm just trying to come through to you to use the. The bathroom in the kitchen. I'd rather not be eaten. Possible. I've got plenty of other.

Speaker A: You could.

Speaker C: You could literally eat the bathroom. Why would you eat Me.

Speaker A: If you eat the bathroom, though, where are you gonna go to the bathroom?

Speaker C: I'm just saying that if you eat,

Speaker A: you have to mediate.

Speaker C: Then you'd be able to get away with a lot of cr. Your breath would smell so weird that you could lie to people about almost anything. And. And there's my pitch.

Speaker B: So let. Let me. Let me ask a question. Just maybe jumping forward a little bit to when through the. Like I said, this is like super generative. Like, I could. I could. I could see feeling satisfied just spending like, you know, a couple hours playing this and having these kind of conversations. Are you trying to get some people to, you know, at the end of it to be. It's like world building. Like, we were building a world and all these things were happening in it. Uh, is that the. Is the. Is the reveal at the end of. It's like, look, you can world build too. This is just a structured way.

Speaker A: Well, some.

Speaker C: For some people. Like, I've used it in my, like, Intro to Media Art classes in that way, like, just for the sake of, like, look, you can be imaginative, just like come up with some random constraints and so quick to get there. But, um, it's a lot more about getting to a place where you're ready to say, well, what did you. Sharing the world back to others and then listening into others people share back around. What is the world that you imagine to say about the present world? What were some things that you insisted on in the world? Um, does that make. Maybe Marina, if you want to add to that. I don't know if that was like

Speaker A: a full description, but I was just trying to think about the longest play that we run is a full semester. And.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: Um, that. I've been running that at itp, but it's right. Code shared with, uh, Experimental Humanities and Gallatin. And so it gets a sort of mix of scholars and more heavy makers in the same room. And there's a lot of, uh, structure, like researching things that were forgotten and buried. Other cults of doing things, alternative, uh, structures around kinship, uh, failed futures. Like there's. There's a big research component to it.

Speaker C: But in.

Speaker A: In what happens by the end of playing Several times over 14 weeks is the students tend to curse me and Sarah. The world as it is now being as hodgepodge, sort of brickalage together as these invented worlds in a way and that you can't unsee the analytical advantage you now have of understanding the present in a way that a lot of things for granted. And therefore that's Great though, right?

Speaker B: As you say they cursed you for that. They're like.

Speaker A: Well because they're like, I can't unsee it like now everything is exposed as an object of inevit analysis and some tooling by humans. Right.

Speaker B: Well that's a, that's a, that's a power up. That's Neo in the Matrix all of a sudden.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: I always try to teach my, my students what I'm about to like teach them systems thinking, especially the younger ones. I'm like, I'm so sorry. Because when you start thinking that like when you start systems thinking you can't go back, you can't unstart systems after

Speaker B: you sign a piece of paper. I understand exactly.

Speaker C: I understand what I'm getting myself into. And sort of like one of the threads of what this, our framework does, which is like without really thinking about it, you're doing systems thinking because you're thinking about how do these different things relate to each other? And then that moment where you're dropping into the first person pov, you're saying well how does my lived experience relate to this larger system? And that's definitely like one of the things that we're like teachable moment.

Speaker A: Also Sarah, thinking about the research we did at Princeton through Blue Lab and those students we had maybe talking, I don't know if you want to, or I could about the religion, the anthropologist who studies religion, you know, and her discoveries of play testing with her community. So basically we had seven PhD students through this ah, lab and um, they took the decks back to their communities and with as minimal week as possible they played and figured out what the impacts were for their communities. So ah, one was a historian of science, one was an architect, one was a water engineer, one was a climate scientist, one was an uh, anthropologist studying religion and she. Tellable story, don't you think? Sarah?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean her sort of narrative was that when she gets together with her group of um, people, I mean just a group of people with different religions to be honest, but scholars uh, of those times it gets to be a discussion about the religions and by doing it this way it was sort of like revealing a uh, kind of well what are the underlying values that make the, the manifestations of those religions and like the practical like way that they're lived out and it at least for a lot more of a productive like meta conversation as opposed to getting into these like, like the. I'm missing some vocabulary about how to

Speaker A: say this but like, like being unrestricted by taboos that made it Impossible to talk without wanting to top the other religions. Like, you'd have to be like, my or my Christian orientations are better than yours. And my tablet. So it erased it, leveled all of that because those didn't exist. But then Sarah and I tried to work with a actual fellowship group, like a, um, multi religious group. Do you remember this, Sarah? It was like the worst place.

Speaker C: I only remember that it was just a very strange meeting ever done.

Speaker A: Nobody would play, nobody would be creative, nobody. They could only say, well, the world is love. But that's not adequate. It's a material. It's a very materialist project in a sense, with the material of the world and the people in it. And you can't just be abstract and say love, you know, because it's, um. So that was like the worst flight test we've ever done.

Speaker B: Yeah, ground that shit. So. So what do you do in those circumstances where. Where people are sort of reluctant or they kind of fold their arms and they're kind of.

Speaker C: Well, we've had that. Like, in this, it was kind of like they had approached us to ask if they could use our deck. And then they didn't seem to want to participate. So we were like, okay, whatever. But we have done it before with groups that are just like rigid and that can be difficult. Like sometimes when we play with, like we did a big play test with, um. Or not a play test. We designed a version for, um, Lawrence Berkeley labs that was doing their six month or six. Six months or six year. Sort of like strategic planning. And this was kind of like an opening for them. So it was like scientists and policy people and like HR people. And you know, the sort of tip to those groups is like, cut the cord to the present. It does not have to be realistic. It doesn't have to make perfect sense. Um, allow yourself to imagine. And you just have to kind of continually remind people. Like, the words can mean whatever you want. This is not a problem that you're solving. This is sort of like. And so for some people, like, just the basic entry point of like yourself to imagine stuff is that takes some work. But then, you know, we. We did a version where we played with IITP students and that was like. I was like, oh, right. Like you put this in front of people who are already used to being creative and it's like, it's so fun. They just go much, much farther, really fast.

Speaker B: They're. Look, they're. I think they're. They're looking for it, the creative consciousness. Finally I get to, you Know, feel that beautiful feeling I felt when I was like 9 years old. And we did this all the time. But I understand, like, the structure. People are kind of like, they. They. I think, you know, my kind of analysis of it, having done it, maybe not as much as you guys, but often enough to be like, they're, um, do not make. Look at me. Do you know how much these shoes cost? These are Ferragamos, God damn it. And I only saw business.

Speaker A: Ah. Traumatized communities. That's also very more about that.

Speaker B: What kind of like, trauma in what sense?

Speaker A: Well, during the pandemic in the George Floyd murder, um, two people affiliated with ITP who are abolitionists and Afrofuturists came to us and said, do you think we could adapt this and run this online for black, primarily black participants? And we were like, absolutely. We'll run backup support. And, um, Ashley Lewis and Neta Bomani, these were the leaders. They were really amazing. They tweaked some of the cards, some of the content, and we ran four or five workshops that summer.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And one of the things that they were interested, first of all, I would say, because we were there at all, sort of back background support. Um, people wanted relatively simple things like safety, gardens, chosen families. Right. And it was liberatory for them to be able to express that. But you get a couple of people in a group, they're like, that's not possible. And so to try to let go, as Sarah was saying, just let go of the logics that are preventing you from even imagining a liberatory space was hard. And then also very difficult was the leaders of this wanted to ask people, how do people deal with. We now treat as carceral policies? How do you deal with violations of body of, uh, violations of property? Is there property? Right. The hard questions of what do you do when there's trouble? And, wow, people really have a hard time dealing with that. Do you want to add something to that, Sarah?

Speaker C: I mean, I think that was a good summary. It actually reminded me of the sort of initial. We launched the first deck of this. I don't want to change the subject entirely if there's more to say on that, but we launched the first deck of this in 2016 after we had been, like, studying, like, there is no alternative. And that's like, what this came out of was like we were literally taking an online class about global neoliberalism and logistics. And logistics. And we were doing this, you know, like more of a critique of a system. And we're like, what would it Be like to actually embody this. Like, what would it feel like to try to imagine different. And we printed the card deck, maybe. I feel like it was like our first playtest was like the day after Trump got elected.

Speaker A: It was, it was the first organized, invited playtest at my house in Brooklyn for like 12 people the day after Trump was elected. And everyone was like, what?

Speaker C: It was really interesting because originally our thesis of this was like, oh, it's, it's, um, you know, it's our job, we have to imagine things different. And like, if there's one thing that this administration has been, is like they're pretty wildly imaginative. Like, and then you're like, what's here

Speaker B: on the other side?

Speaker C: Yeah. So then it sort of purpose of the deck and it's been really interesting because it's like an open ish framework, means different things for different people at different times. And I think the Beyond Policing deck, which is the, the abolitionist, the one oriented towards police abolition, was like very like this moment in time. This is what people need. And a lot of it was just like a space for holding solidarity and voicing desire. And I think it's. And again, like all of these things make the deck really different. Like, do people know each other? Do people not? Do people share values or have different values? And uh, I think one of our dreams, and we haven't really gotten in such an explicit way, but like have putting this in front of people who like genuinely do not agree with each other about how the world should be and seeing like what it ends up producing. Because when you start in this place of like imagination, but we're asking you to like, connect to your values, it's, it's something I think people don't think. It's kind of how we got into this political mess in the first place is like people not really being honest about how their values connect to their lived experiences and their sort of like participation in social structures. Not, uh, to be on like a soapbox about that right now. I just got sweaty thinking about that.

Speaker A: I mean, I think between Trump's election

Speaker B: and personal comms by ascent,

Speaker C: between, between

Speaker A: Trump getting elected and the pandemic, so many realities just went flip flopping in front of us in ways that made this kind of play actually more than before that. Because all you have to do is say, if you think about reality and its flip flops, this is not that big a lift for you.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, I, uh, saw Lynn Hirschman Leeson talk last night. Um, you know, her work. I originally got into that she, it was good. And she showed this 12 minute film she made pretty recently called the Logic of Paralysis, I think. And it was uh, it was a very interesting film that seemed to follow along the logics of Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto about what AI might think and feel and its frustrations with our capacity to m. Murder it when we had built it as an instrument of war, essentially. And it's a flawed kind of romantic thinking and feeling sort of expressed, you know, acting. Cyborg, not cyborg, the AI module. Acting. Um, but there were some provocative questions in there about how we design, you know, AI for good can. That's a good big question I would have. And even that notion of AI for good versus AI for bad is, is something I think we have to really muck around in.

Speaker B: Yeah. M. So what do you, what do you want the AI deck to do, do you think? What's it, successful implementation or deployment of it?

Speaker C: I think for me, I mean we're really in like the very beginning phase of this because we're, we're focused on this coastline stack right now. Um, but I mean most of my own art practice in the past like five years has been all about like which models. And um, Marina and I have had a lot of discussion also about AI image generation. That's just been really interesting and sort of even when you're having a conversation with people who are practitioners who are using it, who are also like somewhat always like just critical by nature, you much more specificity around the conversations around what might be or what might not be. So for instance, like um, like in my own work, I think a lot about like voice and the voice of the expert. So like when a language model is a chatbot, like what its Persona is into something innate about how you feel about it. And that's not something that's like a given about the model. That's like the company designs the Persona of the models. And on some level I feel like having a deck that just sort of like got to those level of specificity. Specificity could help people think about to those really specific aspects like for. And another like totally different bucket is like training data, right? So a lot of the time I hear people talk about like, oh well, if you use your own training data, you're not like, you're not extracting, you know, ip, uh, or whatever. It's like, well, is that true? So some of it I think is m. I think having these kinds of conversations in like a fun environment could generate just like some media literacy. What, what actually is going on but also allow people to sort of decide like you know, I think um, you know like Holly Herndon and Matt Drihurst work isn't around like the ownership of data and you know, as artists and what gets to be can you opt into being part of a training data set or can you opt out of it? And like no one ever had that conversation before. All of the models were trained. But it's not too late to think about like well, going forward this like. But it seems like the, the train is moving so fast without the moments to have these conversations that you have to either polarize yourself as like an absolute no, an absolute yes or sort of someone in the middle is like well just see what happens. But like we do have agency in making these decisions like as a society who uses them and, and is part of uh.

Speaker B: I mean maybe also like living with simultaneously the, the. The accreted decisions that have already been made as opposed to denied. There was, there was a guy yeah once or twice a weekend up in one of these zoom calls or something like that. But there's this one guy who was like I got into AI because I hated it. He's. He's got a um. And I'm sure the hate was just kind of reactive. I don't think he had probably a very structured argument except he probably you know, over dinner cited something that he heard someone else say. It's like there's a good reason to hate it. I've never tried it. But then he's got a. He's got what sounds like a pretty successful um. Know if you call it, you know, reputation um, for. For doing interesting work. Some of it commercial, some of it, you know, I'm just screwing around kind of creative work. Um.

Speaker A: And yeah I just add in here a couple other things that you know what in terms of hoping what a deck like to really come into contact with the personal and the systemic around these cradle to more the cradle to grave notion of technologies and this one being the current bugbear that we all want to point our finger at. There was NFTs last, you know, but to sort of put them in some larger context of profligation and that there is no free energy to be had whether it's renewable or not and to sort of really have a more uh, in depth uncomfortable conversation about our lack of ability to be virtuous in all of this. But to take some amount of responsibility to both think about algorithm design and also personal understanding that you need to approach any generative digital tools with the same kind of consciousness you would of any other material and not to dematerialize it like, those are to me really important points. And granted, those are pedagogic in play for discovery. I understand that. But they become. They are not the end points. Those are touch points to think about endpoints and sometimes very overlooked ones. And so I, I sound like those are the end points. That's not to teach you that. It's to. It's to share a think space for. With. As an environmental artist, I'm all the time asked to be a proxy of virtue for any talk I give. And I'm like, I'm not a proxy for virtue. I'm a hypocrite. I'm involved in messy technologies. I have my wages, my cares, uh, my guilty pleasures, like all of it. But I would. To be in a larger community to talk about those things, if that makes sense.

Speaker C: The end point is usually just, can we generate an interest, like an unhad conversation, A conversation that's not being had. And I think that like the. It's. It's interesting because I think we've gone back and forth too, between is it a deck about AI or is it a deck about technology and.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Yeah. And it's. It's. Or are there two. Are they just two different, you know, one more specific and one more general. But the goal isn't so much like one specific outcome, but a space to talk about it in a different way when it's sort of untethered from the like.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Specifics and urgencies that are very real, but make it hard to talk about with people you might not necessarily agree with, with a lot of, uh, ease.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's important if you, if you need, if you need any help or conversation, we will really welcome the opportunity.

Speaker A: And funding.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah. And funding. Okay.

Speaker A: Well, that's always not from you directly, but.

Speaker B: No, but I mean, that should be upfront because this stuff, this stuff costs money.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, um, we need. But yeah, we're always looking for thought creative partners for all of these decks. We don't build them ourselves with other people.

Speaker B: Yeah, just. Just quickly because I know you have to, uh, bounce the. To the point of like, is it A.I. uh, you know, I think it could be. It could be. You know, I think you guys know this, but it could be that the value of, Of. Of, you know, serving ice cream with a flavor of the week. There's some value. It's like, I know you just want ice cream, but I'm gonna Draw, because this is what you're wondering about. And, um. And then in that, like, now that you're in my lovely shop, like, there are a bunch of things that we can talk about and wonder.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um.

Speaker C: It's a great analogy.

Speaker B: Yeah. People love Dax, man. I don't know what it is.

Speaker A: They do. I do.

Speaker B: Yeah. I'd love them, too. I love them. That's great. I got my whole collection.

Speaker A: Did we send you. Did we send you any decks?

Speaker B: Uh, no. No.

Speaker A: We have to. We shall send you an original deck. We don't have a printed. An original deck. And we have the what if party. The party. So the what if deck was at MOMA for six months, and 20,000 people played with this crazy deck.

Speaker B: That's amazing.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was really cool. And made drawings of things like rats are holy or, um, you know, green infrastructure rules everything. You know,

Speaker B: I wonder just because in the. In the exhibit context, it just made me think of a thing that guy did. There's a. There's a meetup that I go to once a month, and it's like AI and visual arts kind of stuff. And, you know, I don't know. What am I thinking? I'm thinking it's like sometimes like in the. In the forward or against it thing, if you go. It's like, you know, we're also both simultaneously and we're going to understand it more by using it, but not fetishizing its use just to be like, oh, this is crazy, but understand it. I don't know. Maybe I'm thinking, like, to practically. But if they were like, what is it? And how does it work? Sometimes opens up those questions. Ah. Or even the stuff that, um, I think. I think was New Yorker did something recently. It's like, well, uh, New York Times definitely did something where they're like, look. They're like, look at what the data centers do. And it gets the question of, like, now we turn it false and the water comes out. There's that. There's that, you know, that's part of it. Which isn't. You're not saying it's like or for it or against this. Like, this is terrible. Yeah, it's here, it's happening.

Speaker C: I agree.

Speaker B: You know that. Do you understand that? It also came as a conflict. It was a thing at a. This one kind of big branding agency does these, um, salons, and they have one salon where it's like, it was all branding, but then the people who are all 20 and 23, 25 or whatever, they're all against AI and they're also against capitalism. But the one said she really loves her new car. And then the other one said, like, if you're against a. You should. AI Is terrible. Do you know what it's doing to the Congo as they hit their vape? And I'm just kind of like, also that battery in there. And they're like, do you not know? It's like, if you haven't, you should Google it. Do you know when you Google, you're hitting all kinds of A.I. uh, so, you know, it's. You see these moments where I don't. Not to call people out and say, like, you're a hypocrite, but say you're a hypocrite, but own it also. Don't be.

Speaker A: So is everybody.

Speaker B: So is everyone.

Speaker A: And I think that. That we have to get off and start to really. I think looking under the hood and demystifying all that stuff is super important. Like intimate relations with all these kind of material realities is one way of, you know, it's. It's. It's one way of knowing, and it's a really important one. Such a. Such a serious, earnest statement I just made. I forgot you went to, um, the center for consciousness until about 40 minutes ago. That.

Speaker B: Oh, History of consciousness.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Donna was my. My, uh.

Speaker A: My totally amazing Angela Davis.

Speaker B: It was such an amazing time. I think it's changed a bit. I mean. Well, that definitely has changed. I think both those have, well, um, deserved retirement.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So cool.

Speaker A: This was awesome. Thank you. Awesome. We're excited. Thank you for having us then.

Speaker B: Of course. Of course. Easy peasy.

Speaker C: Nice meeting you.

Speaker B: Nice meeting you, Sarah.

Speaker A: I'll. I'll ping you about sending you some decks too. That'll be fun.

Speaker B: Did I send you a newspaper?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. You got a newspaper.

Speaker A: Cheap. I got a book. Got a catalog. Yeah.

Speaker B: So I'll send you, um. Send me an address and I'll send

Speaker C: you a. Oh, great.

Speaker B: Party box.

Speaker A: Yes, Awesome.

Speaker C: I would love it. Thanks.

Speaker B: Cool. See you guys.

Speaker A: Ciao. Bye.