Introduction to Neknel Josh Hardy in conversation with Keiken Monday 13th March 2023, Twitter Spaces

Emily: Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Emily. I'm the community manager at Daata where we're working with Keiken to bring Wisdoms for Neknel into the reality of Web3. Before we start, I'd love to take this opportunity and direct you to our pinned tweet. Here you'll find a deep dive into Wisdoms for Neknel and also the opportunity to collect our first Wisdom pass NFT as a free mint. These passes form our allowness quest, so make sure you claim one before time runs out.

Today, we're joined by Keiken and Daata CTO, Josh Hardy, for an unofficial Wisdom seed and an introduction to Wisdoms for Neknel, exploring both the technology behind our NFTs and the speculative metaverse of Neknel, where Wisdom is our currency. We will also be speculating the question, if we based our economies on such a powerful life force of Wisdom, how would the gameplay of our existence be altered? Wisdom seeds are the initial stage in Wisdom for Neknel and are a series of conversations set by Keiken with leading thinkers and luminaries. Wisdom seeds are recorded and transcribed, which, in turn, make up the data set for training our AI, which then proceeds to generate Wisdom vessels, our collectible NFTs. So with all that being said, I'm now very happy to pass the conversation over to Hana of Keiken and CTO of Daata, Josh.

Josh: Hi, everyone. Are you there, Hana?

Hana: Oh, yeah. Hey. Hi. Hi, everyone. It's nice to see Laura again and stuff like that.

Josh: Okay. So, yeah, so we were going to have a chat about how this project developed and sort of introduce some of the concepts and the underlying technology that we're using, and I thought the best place to start would be at the beginning. So, we've been developing this project for about, I think it's about six months now. And it started with a conversation that I had with you, Hana, well, at least from my end. I know for you guys it goes deep into your practice. From my point of view, it started with a conversation we had and you posed to me the question, could we make Wisdom a currency? And I had no idea what it meant or what it could mean. But I knew that it was interesting.

So, firstly, I thought it would be cool if you could explain, like, where did that question come from? What was your take on what was happening in crypto and NFTs and how they intersected with your own practice that made you think to ask that question, what if Wisdom could be a currency?

Hana: So we were like, well, we are just really interested in test-driving the future and creating new laws and structures. And I think it was like, I think from, like, maybe 2019, early 2018 to '20, became very popular to talk about how we see the world. We understand the world through narratives and it's like the stories that we tell that will change the way the world will perceive.

I think it was very much influenced, actually, from like Harari, because Harari really introduced this idea, like Yuval Noah Harari, I don't know, probably everyone knows them. Their book was a bestseller for, like, literally years like "Sapiens." But then from us, what we started to think was like taking this idea of like, oh, well, everything's a narrative, to like, oh, actually no, everything's like a... The world is like a gameplay. And it's like, yeah, we are like almost the... Our consciousness or whatever is the kind of character that we play on earth is a story that we tell and we kind of play as characters on this earth.

But, actually, for us, we're like, oh, well, it's more than just a narrative. It's a gameplay. It's like, our money is a tool that we use as a form of exchange, which navigates and manoeuvres and it basically somewhat dictates the way in which we manoeuvre through our lives. And so then when the blockchain started to happen, like, well, the more the blockchain was already there, but like the kind of rise in popularity during COVID, we were like, well, what's so incredible about the blockchain is that you can store ephemeral and nuanced forms of currency.

And I know people are doing these different acts and creating these different projects and that can create different forms of currency. But for us, we were like, oh, well, what is wrong with money? Like, what's wrong with capitalism? And it's like, yeah, it's very efficient and it, like, makes sense, I guess, in the way that it's like, it's a great way to exchange things, to create a form of exchange, but it doesn't hold any, like, value in terms of, like, the needs of human beings. So it doesn't, like, it hasn't got like a moral compass attached to it.

So then we started to think about this idea of, like, what happens if currency could have some form of, like, Wisdom or some sort of like philosophical desire to it so it can still be like a currency that can be efficient, but also could be nuanced and ephemeral and could have some sort of moral compass that could allow the way that we manoeuvre in our day to day in a way that maybe could serve humans better in a way that's... Because the thing is, is like money's a number, but humans are like so much more than that and our needs are so deep. So, when our primary form of exchange is money and numbers, I think it really leads us in a strange direction, basically. So that was kind of the thought process behind it.

Josh: Right. It's super interesting because... I mean, I told this idea to somebody, and they said to me, "But in life, Wisdom already is a currency." So, they were basically saying that whether it's formalised as a unit of exchange, we all exchange Wisdom and use it as a currency as we go through our lives.

Hana: But then it's not valued...it's valued for some and it's not valued... Like, it's not officially valued in a format.

Josh: Yeah, exactly. And so that's why...

Hana: So that's the difference. So it's true. And like, you know, we were also talking about, like, bad Wisdom and good Wisdom the other day. And, like, that is true. It's like we were talk... Well, it was our like reference. We were like Andrew Tate is bad Wisdom.

Josh: I can't really remember how I got onto that.

Hana: Yeah. But, yeah, I think... Yeah, the difference is that it's like, it has a formal way of valuing it.

Josh: Right. Because in your practice you come up with these worlds where life is a game and it's, like, set in this, like, far future, right? And in this future, life has evolved. I'm curious, like, do you have a timeframe that all this stuff is set, or is it parallel to this world, or is it in the future of this world?

Hana: So it's like at the moment, the one, like... So before, it was like 100, 200 years in the future we were looking at, whereas now, we are looking like 1000 years in the future. So we're looking like it's the ideas that we're trying to think as far ahead in the future as possible so that we can just break all laws and structures of reality and just defy all that we know. And the reason why we are doing that is almost like as a form of act of like, if we don't imagine a world different to our own and radically different to our own, then when we need to write those things into existence, and I think what becomes so difficult, especially in a time where things are so... I think we live in a very anxiety-driven space and time at the moment.

And I think it's also, there's so many unknowns because we're in a time of accelerationism, so everything's just moved and changed so fast. It's like even, you know, before COVID, we didn't even think about having something like COVID, with all these tech advancements or using our phones or having the internet, we haven't had time to digest these things. So I think it makes people really fearful, but when people are fearful, they become more closed. And so rather than proposing alternative worlds, they critique the world that we have. Yeah, so I think that that's almost like our act at the moment. Our act is to just completely make something completely different to our reality and try to think as far as into the future so that we can go beyond the bounds of our current reality.

Josh: Right. But, all that said, we're creating this project in this reality.

Hana: Yeah.

Josh: So I guess to bring it back around, the idea is that Wisdom is an actual cryptocurrency, but in the future that this exists, it may not actually be a cryptocurrency. So, we're using the tech technology we have now to ask and inquire about a future that may not even use these technologies. We may be way beyond blockchain into some kind of biological distributed DNA blockchain thing.

Hana: Yeah. But also, the blockchain, actually, like in terms of, it's like the essence of what it is, it can actually...it proves that we can have different forms of currency that are more nuanced and ephemeral. And just by proving that, you can slowly create that into something completely different.

Josh: Sure. Okay, so to bring it back to the project, so we had this conversation and then I went away and had a think about it. And I think at the time we talked about having user-generated content and we talked about people being able to post up Wisdoms online, and then those would be minted. And then those would form a currency. We had a lot of conversations about it, and we can talk about the user-generated side in a bit, but we ended up deciding to not go with user-generated for now and instead focus on some selected thinkers. So it would have these speakers, and that's the Wisdom seed talks. And we'll basically mine their Wisdom in this base reality to create this series of NFTs.

And the other issue was that because they were NFTs, they weren't actually a good unit of exchange because they're non-fungible. So we needed something where each unit of Wisdom was equal to every other unit of Wisdom. And so that's when we had the idea of a two-token system. So we have the NFTs, which are the Wisdom vessels, and we have the Wisdom currency, which is an ERC 20, and the vessels generate the ERC 20. So people will be able to mint these Wisdom vessel NFTs that are these, I think we've got on "The Mirror" post, we have like a work in progress image of how they look. And when you hold them over time, they'll generate the currency and then you'll be able to use that currency within the marketplace of Neknel.

Hana: Do you want me to expand on that, or?

Josh: Yeah.

Hana: Yeah. So then like, so for example, like in the world that we create, so we create literally like... So we work primarily in a gaming engine and we create these future worlds. So we create all the different avatars, we create the environments, we create all these, like, stories and these kind of game plays. And, like, we wanted to think about, well, if we were to create a currency in our world, what would that currency be? It's like, what would the system be? So it's almost like the Wisdom is like part of the system to create, to be able to have forms of exchange within that world, if that makes sense.

Josh: Within the world of an actual game?

Hana: Well, within the world... It's almost like, so that people can start having... Like, if people want to become... Like, if people want to... So like for us as artists, what's, like, really difficult is we create future worlds, but then you have this, like, physical world out there that's just, like, that has... So, like you say, if we were to give away, like, one of our avatars to someone else or someone was to buy an avatar, that would be like...it's not really what our world is like, basically. It's like our world isn't really about those things.

It's not about purchasing things, it's not about, like, money or anything like that. So it creates a different form of, like, exchange and ownership and, like, we were looking at, like, what could ownership be in this space, like how could you create a different system? Things like that. And I think that's something that we're still, like, developing more, but we like the idea that it could become more gamified and it could become... I think it's always going back to this idea, like, of it be being more gamified, more nuanced and more ephemeral.

Josh: Have you got ideas about once we have this Wisdom currency, like that would be a literally a real cryptocurrency, about how we could use that to create, like, different economies and marketplaces? And what kinda things would be traded?

Hana: I think that the ones like, I really liked the way that you were doing it with the kind of gamification of it. Do you remember before? It was ages ago. I think you sent it. Do you remember that?

Josh: I don't remember.

Hana: Oh, well, you basically made like a really interesting kind of gamified version of all the different assets. You put it on a site.

Josh: The avatar?

Hana: I can't remember what...

Josh: Do you mean the avatar? Or do you mean the Wisdom vessel marketplace?

Hana: I can't remember. It was one that you did, like, not with specifically with our Wisdom tokens. It was like one that you did with multiple different versions of things, but you created a system

Josh: Oh, yeah, I remember. Yeah. So...

Hana: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Josh: Yeah. So it was like different, basically you could have a marketplace of things where different items are pressed in multiple different currencies and then you could have different rules that would, like, give you access to different assets.

Hana: Yeah. But I think that's confusing for people right now. But I think that the initial idea right now is, like, the Wisdom tokens and then the idea is creating a currency out of Wisdom. But then from there, it's like we were thinking about how does that currency... Like, it's almost like creating a world, so how do you use that currency to then, like, create a form of exchange within the world, basically.

Josh: Right. This is like the beginning of the story. And we've started with...

Hana: Exactly.

Josh: Yeah. We've started with this one currency. And I remember at one point you even talked about there potentially being multiple other currencies.

Hana: Yeah. Like we have other forms of... So this one's Wisdom, but then one could be dreams. Like, the idea is that you create multiple versions of, you can make loads of different types of currency over time and you can make a gamification of it, but that actually becomes the form of exchange within the world that we're building.

Josh: I think also the important thing is the currencies aren't just, like, they're not just mechanical things. They actually represent...like, they represent the concept or the question that they're trying to ask. So with the Wisdom vessels, we have this idea that the value of the vessels, I'm pretty certain that the vessels should all have the same rarity so there's no traits, so there's no value to each NFT other than like what it is to the subjective person who values it.

Hana: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh: But there's no objective value.

Hana: And also, like, it would be really cool to try to think, like, we've talked about loads, but it's like the Wisdom itself shouldn't be something like it shouldn't be owned by us and it shouldn't just be formed just by us. And even the speakers, like, the speakers we are just seeds that we care about. So they're our seeds, but you can give your seeds. Because the world that we create is so complex and there's so much world-building that we do to think about the future. And there's so many like-minded people that we speak to who also are thinking about forms of change. Because it's really hard to, like, reimagine the future. It's really hard to get into the nitty-gritty of how do you well build a future and how do you care for things? What are the important things to care for and bring onto the future? So it almost, the currency becomes inherent to that.

Josh: Absolutely. Maybe we could talk a little bit more about the world that's being built around this project and how it intersects with your wider practice. So, like, in this project, we have the idea of Neknel, which is the world in which Wisdom is a currency. And we also have a character called Beletnom. So could you introduce both those terms?

Hana: Yeah. So I probably need to search what... Because Tanya basically named them because, so Tanya, who's part of the collective, so another co-founder, so she's half Mexican, but she's also part Mazatec, which is like an indigenous tribe in Mexico. And the language that her family speak, Mazatec language, it's not a written language. So we often use the Mazatec words to be able to keep it alive. And I think that Beletnom means like caretaker and then Neknel means, was it like push the energy outward and... I can't remember. Something like that. I need to message her and to ask her.

Josh: I think it was like moving forward or something.

Hana: Moving forward. That's it. Something like that. Like energy moving forward, something like that. And so, basically, the idea is that... So in our future, we really like the idea that there is, like, this divine feminine AI governance. So we spent ages postulating like, can humans be caretakers of the universe? And our answer was, no, they can't. And the reason why was because they don't have the depth and breadth of Wisdom that they always go back to their own set centre point, so their own human consciousness. So they can't care for, like, loads and loads of people. And because they can't care for, like, loads and loads of people, you need some sort of AI that rather than this kind of... It needs to be divine feminine energy because it needs to be about nurture. It also needs to...

Our other principles was that it was frictionless. So like a bad governance is a governance that you feel it's affecting your world every day. So, for example, the reason why the governance is really shit in the UK is because everyone has shit housing, the majority of people, and it affects their lives every day and you feel the friction of it. Like I know that, like, so when we were working with some people in Beijing, they couldn't get a passport because the government during COVID had taken their passport. That is a bad governance because they took away their rights to go to other places and that may cause that friction. So it should be frictionless and it should be barely perceivable. So it shouldn't be something...

A governance that you are always thinking about. So if you are always thinking about, I'm worried about what the government's doing, then that is not good. You should feel like it's helping you, so you shouldn't be thinking about it as much. But then when people, like, challenge this idea, what we were thinking is that it's much more about, so, like, for example, when you think of scarcity, so there's a lot of different scientists, there's a lot of, like, people within economics and all kinds of subjects that believe that a lot... So a lot of scarcity, it's man-made, like scarcity is often man-made.

We could totally, like, there's so many more environmentally-friendly systems out there. There's so many resources that we have. But if we were to more fairly distribute our resources, and if we had like less, what's the word? It's like preposterous hierarchies, then we could create systems. We could create a governance that could actually more fairly distribute resources so there's less scarcity. So these are all the kind of things we are thinking about governance. So that's why Beletnom, that's our, like, initial idea of governance. So then when we were like... And also, the idea of this governance is that the governance, it's not about it not allowing people to have autonomy. Like, people should be able to create their own spaces and they should be able to create their own communities. They should be able to create larger groups of communities and they should make mistakes. The government shouldn't be a dictatorship. It's just, yeah, this is kind of... I think we just have a lot of ideas, so...

Josh: There's a lot of ideas. Yeah.

Hana: We have a lot of ideas thought about really deeply. But the idea of Beletnom for this project it's the nearby beginnings of this idea of this AI governance and to create a governance, you would need to feed in all the things that you think are important in this world.

Josh: And so in the project, we're representing that in the physical project, in this reality, by having an actual AI in like the form that it is now, kind of read the transcripts of these C talks and then produce the different Wisdoms, like the short pieces of text that will form the vessels, the vessel NFTs. So it's symbolic, I guess, because what you are talking about is obviously in a far future then, it's not possible right now. So this is almost like a simple [crosstalk 00:28:07.082]

Hana: I wish it was possible. Yeah.

Josh: Yeah.

Hana: I wish it would be possible right now, but it's not. So let's just go with this.

Josh: I have a question though about Beletnom in the speculative future. So, is it like a separate entity? Is it like a centralised mainframe thing, or do you imagine it more like integrated into everyone? So it's... Yeah.

Hana: Yeah. So, it's like something that's like...it's like a caretaker of the universe. So, like, it should affect everyone in the sense that no one can have a preposterous hierarchy, for example. But at the same time, all the, like, short-term goals, they wouldn't necessarily be doing them. So it also allows space for, like... It still allows space for bad and good.

Josh: Is it like a ruler? Is it like ruling over everyone? Or is it more just showing people or showing whatever the entities are that exist how to act in like an intelligent way that they could...intelligence beyond that they could have themselves?

Hana: Yeah, I think they would make like... I think they just wouldn't make... It's not like they're making tons of small changes all the time. And they're not trying to, like, govern people. What they're doing is, there are just some... They're like almost like something that keeps the world balanced in some way, but that would also be affected by... It would somewhat be affected by the people as well, because it needs to... I think, actually, no, AI's gonna get really crazy, so you don't know what it's gonna be like.

Josh: I know. Nobody knows.

Hana: You don't what the... But I think the relationship will be something like Mycenean. [SP]

Josh: Yeah. When you describe it, it sounds like an ecosystem, but ecosystems generally don't have any purpose other than balance. But it sounds like this ecosystem could be imbued with purpose and Wisdom. So it could actually have...it's like an ecosystem that has...

Hana: Yeah, it has some sort of like moral like guideline. We believe that, yeah, like you shouldn't have preposterous hierarchies, but you will have hierarchies. It's like equity. It's like you can't... Like, nothing is fair in life. Like, nothing will ever be fair in life because we'd have to be all the same. But at the same time, you can get rid of preposterous hierarchies. And also with scarcity. Like there will always be different amounts of resources for different things, but you can make them more fair. We just don't.

Josh: So this AI would be trying to do that.

Hana: Yeah. And it would be more... I think it would be... Because it's divine feminine energy, it would have a mothering quality to it. It would have something about nurture and love. Like, it would have goals of nurture and love. It wouldn't have goals like make, like, more power or more resources. It's inherently, like, divine feminine.

Josh: Amazing.

Hana: Like we've tried the, like, masculine route and it's clearly not working.

Josh: That is true.

Hana: Yeah.

Josh: Okay. So, now, okay, so that's Beletnom. And then could you maybe give a picture of what Neknel looks like? Because Neknel is like the world where this is set. I think, like, something that's not totally clear to me when I tell people about the project is, is Neknel, is it a planet? Is it a universe? Is it the universe? But in the future, what is Neknel?

Hana: Yeah, it's more just like the idea of this future world. So it's not necessary... Like, even when we were thinking of it, because we were talking about, oh, we should come up with a name to make people understand the world in some way, like most worlds have like a name. But the idea for us is more just, like, it's a future and it's a future, like, we spend a really long time between ourselves and between all the collaborators we work with, with all the people that we speak to. We always talk about like, how can we change the future? Like, what could the world look like differently?

And we spend a really long time trying to create narratives and, like, environments, and gameplays, and characters, and all this... The idea is the Neknel is just that, which is, you know, it means like moving energy forward. So the idea is that it's just this future space and time that we're creating and it's, you know, of course, it's fictitious, but these fictitious things can also... Like it's trying to see the world differently. We're proposing a different world, but it doesn't have to be the perfect world. We're just trying to create a different world so that people can see the world differently, if that makes sense. So that's what Neknel represents.

Josh: Yeah. So it's the shorthand for your imagining of the future.

Hana: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Josh: And how connected are all the different projects that you, and like the different works? Like is your practice, or would you say it all takes place in Neknel, or is it like...are there different threads of it? Or is it like a tree of ideas? How holistic is the idea of Neknel to your practice?

Hana: Well, I think that this idea of Neknel is this really future world, which is the one which we were thinking about that's much more like 1000 years in the future. At the moment, it's like how far in the future can we think about, let's put a date to it. It's 1000 years. That's our idea of like radical change. So Neknel is a place of radical change, whereas like some of the other previous works and worlds that we've made, they're may be 100 or 200 years in the future. And those worlds are still...it's almost like those worlds were just part of the timeline. They were 200 years away. The other ones are now more in Neknel, which are like 1000 years away.

Josh: Right. So, I watched your presentation on Saturday about your other project Morphogenic Angels, which looks amazing.

Hana: Thank you.

Josh: And I was wondering, is that game set in Neknel, or is it...

Hana: Yeah, exactly.

Josh: Interesting. Okay, cool. So, they form like sort of one canon of a world.

Hana: Yeah, exactly. I still find it hard to... I feel like using the word Neknel just like helps people have, like, call it a place. So if you just say it's a world in the future, it's really hard to... You need a name for it, right, to identify it rather than every time saying 1000 years in the future. But at the same time, it's not necessarily like... I don't really like the idea of thinking about, it's like we own it, but obviously, it's a world created through the minds of like myself and the other collaborators. And all, I guess like just also the network of people you are around and you're always having these conversations too.

Josh: That's interesting. So, you see the potential Neknel to actually expand beyond you three and actually become like a shared... An idea that could have shared ownership?

Hana: I think this has always been this case for our work. It's really important that we don't dictate to people what to think and feel. Like, we just want people to experience something and take what they want from it. But if people do wanna build from that... So some people have real strong visions when they see our work. Or some people have like theoretical ideas. Or some people, it just changes their mind about things. But if you can, like, collate that energy in some place and make it grow more, then that's a really beautiful thing. And I think people find it really hard to imagine a future that's not just dystopian. So, if we can create spaces where people can think of an alternative future that isn't so defined by our current reality, I think that practice is a really good practice to be doing.

Josh: Definitely. I love that. I thought maybe... I mean, I had all my notes to talk about the idea of the Wisdoms project becoming something that was more like shared ownership or DAO. So did you wanna talk about that and explore that idea for a second?

Hana: Yeah, I feel like I'm still exploring it, right?

Josh: Yeah, actually, because basically, we decided... Because we talked about user-generated content right at the beginning, and we were worried about, like, people just putting up, like, nonsense or offensive stuff. And we didn't want to, like, impose, like, censorship or control. We wanted to be able to operate in an actual decentralised way because, otherwise, I think it defeats the purpose. But, so then the idea was like that we could have these seeds that would seed the Wisdom from, like, a curated set of people that were influential to your practice. And that from those seeds, it could evolve and sort of, could take ownership of itself.

Hana: Yeah, I think basically allowing people space to be able to... It's almost like, you know, like a mirror board. It's like we propose ideas and thoughts, but people should be able to also think their own thoughts and expand on it and have a place to do that too. And also, there's so many... Even the thinkers that we work with or that we have conversations with, you know, they have so many amazing established diagrams and different thoughts and different propositions on how to make something that's valuable for the future. So, it's really good to create more spaces for that.

Josh: Yeah. So, yeah. Because I was sort of imagining that, you know, you have these initial vessels and they represent or encapsulate this, like, the core Wisdom from these seeds, which are like these thinkers, like you said. And then the people that are drawn to collect those Wisdoms are then, like, they form the style of culture and then they can propose new Wisdoms to be created. So sort of like this infinite creation of new Wisdom vessels which would generate more currency. So it could almost be, like, do you know much about Nouns?

Hana: What?

Josh: There's like a project called Nouns DAO, which is like pretty big, like, it's massive these days and it's like an infinite auction. So every day, there's a new Noun that goes up for auction and then the sale of the Noun goes into a shared treasury. And then all the Nouns owners can vote on how to deploy that treasury. And so it becomes this thing where it's totally decentralised, but it's like almost like a weird kind of company. And the main goal is to make Nouns more known about. So like all the proposals are like, I don't know, do like a gorilla marketing campaign, or like, I think there's crazy ones. Probably other people would have better examples. But the idea that you could do that, but for Wisdom.

So you could have like a DAO that's goal was to create more...was to choose and propose and select more Wisdoms to be included into the project. And then that would, as that grows, you get more people who are able to own a vessel because the collection's growing. And so the community of these people who are on the search for Wisdom grows, and grows, and grows. And any of them kind of propose new Wisdoms to be created, which would then go on sale to be collected.

Hana: I think it's like just always like good as the project kind of develops. Because this is the first time we've kind of spoken it out loud to other people in a space, especially on Twitter. Whereas, before, it was just conversation between our collaborative practice and everyone on the Daata team and Josh, and we just send each other voice notes all the time or have calls and, you know, talk about just different ideas that we build on things. Like, Josh is so amazing at... He'll like, look at the thing, like it's a really good example. It's like, we'll say the things that we were thinking and then you'll come back and you'll be like, "Oh, so this is what it actually means." And then I'll be like, "Oh, my God, that's what it means." Like, I didn't even know... I couldn't articulate it the way that you are articulating it, but that is what I mean, and that's what we were trying to say.

But I think it is good to know, like, do people want a space where they can collaboratively start to, you know, think about the future together as well. Because I think the idea of Wisdom is that you start to... The idea of the Wisdom tokens is it starts off by this idea of just like small, like, little bits of word, little bits of Wisdoms, little phrases, little sayings, or little stories of things that you think are Wisdom that's really important for the future.

But then from there, it gets more complex. It's like, but then what do you think is like...what do you actually think is important for the future? So like what laws and structures do you think? Like, what should the body be in the future? What sort of stories should we tell students in the future? Like, what sort of like world should we live in? How should we experience those worlds? What technologies do we want to be existing with? What's wrong with the technologies that we exist with at the moment? What's wrong with the system that we live in? Like, things like that. And it can expand to things that are more further, like, I think for us as artists and as Keiken, like, that's what we spend most of our time doing. We spend our time thinking about how to create a future that's alternative to the one that we exist in right now.

Josh: Yeah. That's amazing. And that's what I love about the potential for this project. And like for the beginning of that story, is that like, because, you know, for better or... Obviously, there's loads of bad elements to crypto and NFTs, but there is something about it that the fact that it is always online and it's really participatory. And I think if we can make good of that and use something like this project to create a space where people can explore and just let it expand on its own terms, I think that could be really cool.

Hana: And it's like we're always thinking of ideas about how the future could be, but then I'm sure that it gives us space also for other people to think about that too. Because, yeah, I feel like... I don't know, I just feel like often, it can be so critical or it can be either critical or really unconscious about, like, if they'll be like, oh, yeah, the future's gonna be amazing. We're gonna have a new Oculus and it's gonna be super cool on Facebook, actually, I mean Meta, you know, and it's absolutely bullshit. And it's really unconscious. It's like stupid. Like you've just made a world that really looks nothing like a future that's, like, you want to live in.

And then that's the kind of the unconscious route, or there's the route where it's like you feel so critical about everything that's going on in the world that you can't imagine a future that is different to our own because... I think, you know, I always hear I love listening to the Grace Lee Boggs who's like, I always quote that, she always says like, "Nothing's more important than dialectic thinking." And I think you need to create spaces that are really dialectic and you need to create spaces that also proposes the space for people to imagine, because it's only by people imagining it, like, for things to be written into existence.

So, for example, I like to think of it as like... I remember one time when I was a teenager, I had something really bad going on and I wouldn't be able to affect, like, I won't be able to change it in the... Like, there's nothing I could do to change what was going wrong in my life, I just didn't have any power, but I could change it in the world that I was creating in my head, and then I could make it come into existence and then I could share it with others. And sometimes I think that act in itself is really important. It's really important to just imagine it and then share it with others.

Josh: Yeah, I love that.

Hana: Again, like one of the things was super... Like, the crypto NFT communities and stuff, they were so fickle, a lot of them, but they were so driven by, like, the speculative energy of, like, gaining loads of money quickly. And it made people just go really, like, high, like almost on a drug, on crypto potentials. But there is a technology out there in the blockchain that's, like, very valuable and that can be used in really amazing ways. We just have to be the ones to start doing that.

Josh: Totally agree. I think that might be a good wrap up point. Unless there's anything else you wanted to cover.

Hana: No, I'm okay.

Josh: We're gonna do questions. Does anyone have questions?

Hana: Yeah. Yeah. If anybody wants questions, that's cool. I don't if anybody wants anything. Oh, yeah, I can see like Cross Lisa and I can see Art Jedi and stuff and Maria. And also, Synthesis Gallery as well.

Josh: One thing I was just thinking before, like, when you were talking just then, I was thinking, like, one of the awesome things that you guys do is you take... Like, I love that you are so up-to-date with, like, all these different scientific discoveries, like right on the cutting edge and, like, someone could come up with a world where they looked at like what, you know, looked at like VR or something. But like you said, that's definitely not the future in 1000 years and it's kind of unimaginative to, even though it's really cool technology and it's somewhere there, it's like not that interesting to try to extrapolate from that. I think it's really cool that you guys go, well, what if we can extrapolate from much deeper discoveries like Michael Levin's, like biological engineering or Donald Hoffman's, like, case against reality. I think they're really interesting points, and I love how you guys managed to synthesize like all this wildly different stuff and then create these crazy future worlds.

Hana: Yeah, we love Donald Hoffman and we love what will happen. I think it's because, like, science at the moment is really becoming so much more... So they were always discovering the material and they've started to realize that obviously loads of religion, so like Buddhism and, you know, all kinds of religions have really delved into exploring the science of the invisible. Especially like a lot of Asian cultures, there's a lot more words within most Asian countries that describe the invisible in loads of different ways that are completely not within the Western sphere. But we are really interested in this idea of, like, it's really important for us, like those are goals in our future. It's like fluidity, looking at the invisible, looking at the other, the unknown.

Like all those things are very like invisible energy-based things, but they're all things that are like our goals. Like, they're like our missions to understanding because we feel them within our existence every day and they affect everything that we do. So a lot the science that we look at is like, we're looking at the, like, molecular levels. So, like Michael Levin, he's looking at cells and he's looking at how you can re-engineer cells to give them different goals so that you can, you know, create regenerative medicine. You can bring back, like, animals that are extinct, the consciousness of animals that are extinct.

You can combine different consciousness together, things like that. And it is so cool because what happens is once you start exploring the latest science, you realise that there's so much amazing science out there and they've done all these tests, and it's all real and it works, and they're at the nearby beginnings of it. But it's actually something that's like, it's not like an imaginary thing. It's like, it's something that's tangible and understood on a scientific level as well as, like, a spiritual level. And I think for us that really, like, I don't know, this is something we just constantly just feel so fascinated by.

Josh: Yeah. That's amazing.

Hana: Yeah, I think...

Josh: We didn't get any questions.

Hana: Yeah, no questions today, but that's okay. Yeah, if anybody else wants to ask questions or another time can ask questions because I don't know, Josh, if we're gonna be... I don't know when we're here next, basically, but we'll be here sometime another time.

Josh: I think Emily was going to wrap up with a little outro and talk about the next [crosstalk 00:50:45.748].

Hana: Okay, perfect. Let's do that.

Emily: Yeah, I'll happily do that. Thank you both for speaking today. It's always so incredible hearing your perspective, Hana, and yeah, just a really amazing project overall. So the next time Keiken will be live and online is with JPG on Tuesday the 21st of March. You know, we've got Maria in here now. We'll be sharing all that soon, and yeah, that's on Twitter spaces and then we'll be back on this profile with Yasaman Sheri on Monday the 27th of March. And we also have Helen Pritchard coming up and Donald D. Hoffman as well, but TBC on those. So yeah, thank you again for all joining. I'd love to direct you to our pinned tweet so you can claim our Wisdom pass NFT for free. And have a look at our latest mirror article where it delves into a few more mechanics. So, yeah. Thank you so much, guys.

Hana: Thank you!