Wisdom Seed Penny Rafferty and Ruth Catlow in conversation with María Paula Fernandez Wednesday 10th May 2023, Twitter Spaces

Josh: Hi, everyone. We're all here.

María Paula: Hi, Ruth. Hi, Penny.

Penny: Hi.

María Paula: Hi, Josh.

Josh: Hi.

Ruth: Hi.

Josh: Should we wait for a few more people to join us or should we start now?

Penny: Up to you. You hold the wisdom here.

Josh: Maybe we'll just start. I'll do a quick intro and then we can get going. So, yeah. Hi, everyone. Thanks for being here. We're very excited for Penny Rafferty and Ruth Catlow to be joining us for today's Wisdom Seed hosted by María Paula. If you haven't joined us before, Wisdoms For Neknel is an expansive world-building project by the artist collective, Keiken, and our Wisdom Seeds, of which this is one, are a series of conversations with leading thinkers and luminaries. Wisdom Seeds are the initial stage of this project. The wisdom from these seeds will be processed by GPT-4 and distilled into the source material for our Wisdom Vessel NFTs. Those NFTs will then produce a Wisdom currency, which will be the first currency of Neknel.

So, onto today's seeds, Penny Rafferty is an independent writer and thinker. Departing from her research and thinking, she's initiated and co-founded Black Swan DAO, proto-institution for interdisciplinary research and practice. Ruth Catlow is an artist, researcher, curator, and co-director of Furtherfield. She leads award-winning experiments with blockchain and Web3 for fairer and more connected cultural ecologies and economies. And together Penny and Ruth are the principal investigators at Serpentine Galleries Blockchain Lab and the editors of "Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts," a collection of essays, interviews, exercises, and prototypes from leading thinkers, artists and technologists across the fields of DAOs, NFTs, CryptoArt, Web3, and blockchain technology.

Today's seed is hosted by María Paula Fernandez, co-founder of JPG DAO, where she spends most of her time building cultural infrastructure for Web3's cultural objects. So, that's the introduction and I'll hand it over to you, MP, to get started.

María Paula: Sure, thank you so much, Josh, for the introduction, and I have to say, oh, principal investigator sounds amazing. It sounds so mysterious like you're about to... Ghost of like a mystery of life. So, I want to know everything about that, but I also prepared some questions for Ruth and Penny, who I've known for a while. So, I hope my questions aren't too deep for our audience. I'm hoping also that they're able to explain some of the stuff that we're going to discuss, because, you know, audience renew themselves all the time. And in Web3, there's new people coming in very fast all the time. So, it would be nice to record as part of this Wisdom some context because context is wisdom after all.

Okay, so cool. Welcome to this space that I have the honour of co-hosting today. I'm very happy I've been working with the Neknel team as say Neknel council member for some months, and it's just a delight to see them embark in this new world-building experiment. It's also very interesting and very, very timely that the NFTs are launching alongside a currency, ERC-20 called WISDOM because we're seeing a disaster of meme coins happening now. So, I believe that WISDOM, which is not a meme coin, is actually a very well-constructed part of an incredible world. It will bring some peace, quiet, and reflection to the NFT space. But without further ado, hi, Penny, hi, Ruth. Again, long time no see. Let's talk a little bit about your backgrounds. I also would love to know, you know, what does being a principal investigator imply.

Ruth: You'll to say who you would like to speak first because Penny and I are both very polite. And we might just have a lot of airtime silence.

María Paula: Okay, who wants to start speaking?

Ruth: Okay, I'll go. I'll go and, Penny, interrupt me. So, the Blockchain Lab at the Serpentine is really a space for investigation and research into the possibilities and hazards of life at the crossover of blockchain and art. And Penny and I have been working at a certain time but also like, connecting up our own networks of artists, techies, activists who have been like, basically mining, and digging around, and understanding what is interesting about decentralised tech and decentralised different ways of working and doing creative practice.

And so Penny and I working together at the Blockchain Lab have been inviting our network communities to come and think through the philosophical, ethical, practical hazards and opportunities of work in the Web3 and blockchain space. And, yeah, that's involved labs and think tanks that also include embodied practices, a lot of collaborative practices and experimental collaborative practices that then produced a series of artworld DAO prototypes a couple of years ago.

And our most recent collaboration with this community of amazing people was on our book, "Radical Friends." And the reason a book about artworld DAOs is called "Radical Friends" is because, like in the world of very complex decentralised tech, it's really easy to get carried away by economics or the speculative opportunities or like, just the next wild thing that the tech will allow us to do, and some really awful things can happen when we just follow the tech innovation. And to avoid spreading more universalizing and colonial values, we focused on friendship because friendship is a kind of fundamental principle in nearly all societies...well, all societies that we know of. And by focusing on what it takes to support friends across distance and difference, we think we can centre care, which is both about softness but it's also about building a kind of fierce resistance to the kind of infrastructures that really tear us apart and tear our communities apart.

You asked me a simple question; you got a very long answer. Penny, you should jump in.

Penny: I think that you've laid it out there. I mean, maybe the only thing that I would perhaps add is that the way that myself and Ruth have always approached this space is very much from looking at the way in which the code practises itself but then also looking at the history of, sort of, social and political practices and I think that's also maybe what sometimes sets our thinking apart is the way that we have tried to create a hybrid of compatibility between the communities and cultures that we actually live and breathe inside alongside this code and technology that at times may seem oppositional to the political parameters that we speak of. And I think that what I've always enjoyed about working with Ruth is the way that we allow ourselves to be uncomfortable and we also strive for a way to navigate the now, looking at very real ecologies and how you can never find total solutionism to that journey.

María: Wow, thank you so much for those very thoughtful answers. Actually somehow they magically segue perfectly into almost all of the questions that I prepared for you. So, this is a quite incredible magical scenery or a radical friendship that I'm noticing on my side of the spectrum. So, thank you for that. Let's start then by talking about the concept of radical friendship. So, let's obviously not describe it because Ruth has done it really well. But you both are experts as well in speculation not in the sense that the crypto people see speculation but in artistic speculation were built and we're building. And I've even been the lucky spectator to some of those actions.

And I wanted to touch upon the concept of radical friendship and how to translate it into new worlds because I think that in the world that Keiken is trying to build, the Neknel world, it would be really valuable if we could translate this pure concept that's based on collaboration and trust to build new infrastructure and economies. Why not?

Penny: I think there's one thing that always is intrinsic to the foundations of world building and especially when we look at it through the lens of technology. And that is to really understand that technology is a social instrument. It is also practised by human exchange and typically lends itself to this sense of belonging. which may or may not be kind of, I guess a darkness to it. But I think that with all of these new modes of connectivity and also reimagining how we want to live, and how we want to organise, and how we want those visual and linguistic streams to flow between ourselves and either our local, or trans-local, or global, or anonymous communities is this real recognition towards a human being, which I think actually in recent years when we speak about world building, the science fiction of the '70s and the '80s was very much about moving away from the human being. It was very much about thinking of the cyborg or exiting this world. And I think it's quite interesting how spaces and landscapes for that cringe-worthy titling such as the Metaverse, but it's as if we've actually taken those notions of exiting the world but almost like built them on as an extension to this world like a conservatory or something like that.

And what I think is also quite interesting is that, you know, even in the facade of the avatar or down to a username, it's less of a cyborgian surgery but more a state of masked alliance with the very essence of you. And I think these are all quite interesting, maybe quite delicate positions when it comes to worlding today.

María Paula: Ruth, do you want to speak? Okay. Oh, lots to think about there, Penny. It makes me want to jump onto my next question, which is one of Omsk's actually worlding experiments that I experienced in the planetarium in Berlin where there were indeed avatars. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course, sometimes I forget things. They were indeed avatars, and there was a journey to where it's a new galaxy, and the whole journey was explained by several beings and a main narrator that was taking us. And it made us transport... Because the planetarium of course was dark, and everyone was just sitting...actually semi-laying down because it has reclinable seats. So, it's a really nice experience. And looking at the sky, which had an animation, and it was like one was removing from oneself and just mutating into one avatar. So, I thought that was a fantastic experiment and art artwork as well. And I would love to talk a little bit about this piece and the world and the reflections and the wisdom that it proposes.

Penny: Oh, I mean, maybe what I can do is outline or lay the landscape of The Waxing and then maybe also Ruth can jump in as one of the travellers on board. So, The Waxing was a work that was engineered by Omsk Social Club that I'm closely affiliated with and Joey Holder. And it was commissioned by Creamcake as part of 3hd Festival here in Berlin. And the story of worlding of The Waxing was in essence about a nascent star seed brood that had swarmed together. And the notion being that every person in society today is sort of faced with this fact that very few of their interests converge with the rest of societal members they inhabit planet Earth with nor do they necessarily conflict so much that there's meaningful patterns or they can utilise tools to exit to these worlds.

And in response to this, this work was created. But instead of thinking about how to exit Earth, there was this notion about bringing earthbound-alien beings that were incubated. And, yeah, I love the way that you described it, MP, that they sort of mutated or began to form and crystallise inside the body. And actually the story really thinks about what working together we can splinter different types of culture and what the complexity of conjuring this may be and, in a sense, thinking about how networks of autonomous narratives straddle decentralised ebbs and flows of information.

And the work itself was basically people entered an airport and were transported over a journey that was led by a set of visiting alien beings. And it wasn't the first time that these alien beings had visited. There was part of this group that were present that night and had previously been experimenting with the loops of information and the social matrixes that had been flowing from this oozing plasma. And so there was some guides to this hyper sigil whilst it was being downloaded.

And in a way, The Waxing was somehow about channelling personal embodied knowledge and collective hallucinatory fictioning, which did of course require a semi-active presence from the viewer or the audience member. But at the same time, it gave a certain set of tasks and tools that honed in on your interpersonal sensitivity and somatic insight so you could render an earthbound-alien perception. And I think what was very interesting about this mode was the way that majority and minority played into it. In a sense, if an alien being or a completely new fabrication was allowed to land on your body, would you accept it or not? And I think there's certain charismatic moments, whether that be aesthetical or there was brilliant sound scores by Ernstalbrecht Stiebler who's 88 years old, and Dylan Kerr who were sort of the engine of the work. But simultaneously if you weren't feeling the sort of vibes of the community, I think you'd probably also push back against these earthbound-alien hatching.

So, it was I think a kind of interesting moment that probably propagated a very real reaction to the landing of aliens, which I think is also extremely interesting in terms of the research and development around this notion of the alien, which I think also has strong connections to community belief and language but also simultaneously asking questions about what and who is understood to be human. So, I was also extremely inspired by Octavia Butler's work but also people like Marge Piercy as well and how sci-fi has often been a catalyst to being able to speak about social relations, exclusion, and I think worlds where you do not belong. Ruth, do you want to jump in?

Ruth: Yeah. Sorry, I was talking before, but I had my mic switched off. Not very helpful. Yeah, what I loved about The Waxing was how it really kind of played with the tension between otherness and belonging across difference and the limitations of language, how language lets us down and places really a lot of... We have to make an awful lot of effort to kind of try and understand otherness and to find where we sit in relation to it. And this just feels super important at the moment and it's why I think possibly... Actually, we haven't talked about this, but maybe this is why both Penny and I are so interested in these participatory, immersive, improvised fictions is because there feels to be a real sense of urgency around cracking open new imaginaries or into new spaces that extend beyond the conditioning that we're all really constrained by...kind of limited especially by current economic and political and social systems. And so through these participatory, immersive environments, we actually get to re-hurt and pre-figure other worlds by just making these imaginative twists on something that might be a little different.

And I think one of the things that... Always the things that make these things land the strongest for me are the quality of the embodied physical experience. So, especially in The Waxing, I felt like the use of language was it felt quite far away. You were kind of grasping to make some sense of what this alien conception of the world meant and what it was trying to do. But there in the room, we had this amazing pianist playing a tonal improvised music accompanied by a young opera singer, and it was just something this kind of layered... which there's something very moving about the multiple generations that sat between these two musicians and their ensemble improvisation that it felt incredibly true and meaningful, and we could feel it in our bodies. Yeah, that's what I'd like to say about that.

María Paula: Such a beautiful conversation between you two. And I was really in awe of being a spectator to The Waxing, and I thought it was very special. And I do believe that sort of larping or worlding in the context of imagining the different prototypes of either societies or even tools, everything really, is actually a very safe test environment in a world where, as you mentioned, Ruth, technology is letting us down and the urge to ship and to get tools in the hands of people as fast as possible to pump the numbers and get astronomical evaluations doesn't leave space to understand consequences as well. There's very little philosophical reflection on blockchain tools, so I love that you guys are doing this with DAOs and that you have been doing it for a very long time so that there's time enough to see how these tools evolve and how these tools interact as well in different settings.

So, the tool that I'm mentioning is actually Black Swan DAO, which has been running for many years now. And, yeah, maybe you want to talk about that and what are your findings and the lessons learned from all of this time that ended up in a book as well.

Penny: Ruth, do you want to start or...?

Ruth: Well, I love talking about Black Swan, but it came from you, so I would ask your permission.

Penny: You can definitely talk about Black Swan. We can also talk generally about our learnings and stuff like that.

Ruth: Okay, so I will talk about Black Swan because it's the project that is influencing our...it's kind of feeding into and informing our next piece of work together at the Serpentine, which I won't say too much about, but the research that underpins it has been super important to thinking about what we actually want to build. So, we've had years of philosophical inquiry listening to the uncomfortable feelings in our stomachs with a lot of other people, getting excited with a lot of people too about what possibilities seem to be available. But Black Swan DAO... Oh, [inaudible 00:34:44]. Sorry, I'm in a hotel and I turned the telly on accidentally. Okay, I've dealt with that.

So, Black Swan DAO kind of came out of a piece of research that Penny did with a number of other colleagues in Berlin that I think was published in 2017, '18. Penny, you can fill in the crediting details if we aren't going to supply that another way. But the kind of findings of that were that in...often in Global Cities. And this, kind of, really resonated with my first kind of foray into blockchain with Furtherfield was that, you know, like the artworld and high art markets like Ghana, huge [inaudible 00:35:30], but in the world's greatest cities, most artists really struggled to scratch a living. And Penny's research with a focus on Berlin showed that the resources were held by art venues, art institutions, the funders, and maybe patrons who would then select artists from the local artistic cultural ecosystem to platform and give a higher profile to. But by doing this, very often they were not feeding the local cultural ecosystems. So, communities might be left for poorer for having some of their members plucked from them.

So, the basic model of Black Swan as a DAO is to invite the resource holders in a global city to contribute basically to state resources in the local arts ecosystem in the city's art ecosystem. And then for a collective of cultural workers from artists, curators, critics, researchers to then decide how those resources should be distributed through a system of proposals and voting. And this therefore is a kind of experimenting distribution of both resources but also agency. It's looking to return life to the ground or to allow life on the ground to flourish and to be determined by communities and places. And it also resonated with work that we had started at Furtherfield I think back in 2018, '19. Also looking at how we might enable cultural decision-making about the kinds of cultural work that get produced in a locality.

So, we have a project called CultureStake that we've been developing for a number of years now, which is an app that uses Quadratic Voting on the blockchain. So, this is a form of voting that supports a greater expression of feeling and so people express both their preferences and the intensity of their preferences. And the idea with this was that we could ask the communities that surround where our gallery is based in Finsbury Park in North London, that they would be able to help us select the work that they would like to see commissioned at a larger scale in this public space of the park.

And by doing this, we discovered that people who don't necessarily see themselves, they don't necessarily see the artists for them, were very interested and had amazing reflections on what was valuable to them and their communities in that locality. They really liked the art. And as a venue, it was incredibly exciting to be working on a project that we knew was wanted and that was meaningful to the people who were going to encounter the work. So, I think we have these kind of... I'd see them as extremely humble actually in many ways, but there are these ground experiments in kind of grounded deliberation, collective decision-making around culture. And culture is a very complex thing to do together, but I think it's what both Penny and I have been fascinated with in our...probably, it was certainly for me in 27, 28 years of practice as an artist in network environments like what it means to decide things together, what it means to cooperate all the different levels of participation, and the excitement, and all boredom associated with those kinds of processes. So, it's just trying to do close observation of what we can learn and where those learnings might be transferrable to other parts of life.

I guess the last thing...just to do a broader strokes moment, the reason blockchain-based Quadratic Voting became so interesting to us at Furtherfield was a kind of post-Brexit moment. So, after a referendum that had a 51% majority against 48%, so 51% were leaving the EU, 48% voted to remain. As a result of that vote, basically those in the media and with political power were able to tell any story they liked about what that meant. So, it could be interpreted as a vote for a kind of racist vote. It could be interpreted as a vote for escaping centralised power of the neoliberal EU political giant. You know, it was like...so, we wanted to explore a system where we would between ourselves share a much more nuanced story of what was important to people and what was meaningful and what people valued.

Penny: Yeah, and maybe just sort of segueing into that as well, I think that what is really interesting in terms of discussing these things within the art world is that, you know, some of...and also maybe sort of bringing in why arts and technology is that, in a way, the art world has become sort of activated as one of the leading protagonists in actually application worlding, imagineering, and practising technological innovation. And I think in part this has to do with the emergence of new generation of art workers who are, of course, raised on intersectional feminism, queer, anticatalyst, antiracist, and anticolonial critics of the historical workplace that they've in fact inherited. And I think it's also in part to do with the survival and this I think is also a lot of work and is situated in the practices of Black Swan is this notion of survival, not necessarily only in an unregulated market and playing field, which Ruth hinted that, you know, the vast majority of these workers are destined to remain precarious or push down.

But we've also seen in recent years an explosion of political and social work that is now actually done primarily in the arts. And simultaneously we have got a huge explosion of radical new mediums in the arts that aren't necessarily brokered so succinctly into the art world that they are given the resources and also the space that's required to develop. And I think this is also very much what came as the initial impetus to think about. Black Swan was also about trying to create an alternative funding model that allowed practitioners that stood adjacent to traditional historical practices but didn't necessarily put them inside a space of fundraising for themselves but actually offered resource holders a doorway to get in touch with these cultural workers, understand what they need for these new practices, and to interrupt the gift economy, and to really support and connect.

And I think, you know, in lieu of this, maybe it's also extremely important what Keiken is doing and also what you're doing at Daata as well of really brokering new mediums that require not only resources, but they also require archival systems. They require the curators, the carers of the work to form new skills and own new tools to be able to translate to the public, to a broader audience, and to also offer criticism and allow these new fictions and art mediums to grow and potentially become very useful ideas in a society that may or may not be on a breaking point in terms of how we anticipate future generations to live and be held in this world.

María Paula: Thank you so much for such thoughtful answers. Once again, everything that you say is so interesting that I want to just interrupt and ask micro questions based on everything, but we only have 15 more minutes. So, I want to take us back to some of what Ruth was mentioning and just acknowledge that there is a very special world beyond the worlds that we've already been talking about that is really just truly amazing. It's the world of Finsbury Park, which is an ecosystem of art nature, and it's truly like a portal. And I've experienced this. It's truly like a portal to a different art world, and I would love to share some of the legend and some of the lore and the institution of Furtherfield with this new audience, because I truly think that this is, you know, a very early world in experiment that takes a place in a park, which is super magical.

Ruth: That's such a nice way of putting it. Yeah, I mean, why don't I try and span 25 years in 2 minutes? That would be an interesting experiment.

María Paula: You have 14 minutes.

Ruth: I know, but [crosstalk 00:47:55.130] other things. So, yeah, Furtherfield really grew out of my art practice and that of Marc Garrett, who's also my life partner. So, we founded Furtherfield back in 1996. Oh, my God, such a long time ago. Really just as the web was starting, kind of, growing as a place that anyone could publish a webpage to. For people who are a lot younger than me, it's kind of like really hard to convey how revolutionary and exciting and all the utopian ideas that bloomed with the early web. This idea that we could make our own art context anew by connecting laterally with people who shared our sense of adventure and interest in art that actually engaged with social realities, not just kind of commodity.

So, we worked together with artists, techies, and activists to build the spaces that we wanted and needed in order to collaborate and experiment further with these new network technologies like technologies that allowed us to really work in real-time together across difference, also across distance. I mean, that sounds like, "Oh, yeah, everyone's doing that now." It was like a teleport. It felt as kind of strange and sci-fi as that. And also to be working with people who understood the critical that are kind of...that we needed to be folding in a critical assessment of what these technologies would be doing to relations and power and the way power would flow.

So, as we were making spaces, we were kind of looking at what they were doing both to us and to the communities and to the kind of politics around us. So, we made artist blogs before blogs were really a thing and live platforms for media exchange and live mixing and making, for instance, artist open studios where you could actually visit people on their desktop and decide what work they should make, inviting curators from the Whitney to come and visit somebody in their bedroom because it was early enough that this was kind of novel and therefore you could do these kind of eye-watering jumps from the art that gets made and a shared to leading art institutions. And to do that with a very strong sense of play and mischief inspired by Situationists and Fluxus and Dada. So, they're really quite a heated mix of different art traditions playing with this new network media space.

And I think around 2006, Marc came up with the...he came up with the concept of DIWO. So, DIWO stands for do it with others and it's a progression of the kind of punk spirit of DIY where you make your own tools or make your own instruments and make your own stage and get onto the stage. And if you can play two chords, then that's it. You are a musician, and you are making culture, and it's important to you and the people around you. And what DIWO did was kind of like basically said yes. And the tools are now part of the band, but it was also issuing this idea of the individual genius. So, it was kind of saying, "We can see now how little sense it makes for us to imagine that there is such a thing as an individual artistic genius." We can see ourselves connected. We can see how ideas and liveliness are co-created.

And this was all kind of bound together with a kind of peer-to-peer and free and open-source cultures, which were kind of antagonistic to proprietorial economics and proprietorial cultures where you would trade. Well, maybe you would trademark or you would not allow people to copy or take your image. This was a kind of very permissive space where for a work to be taken, and appropriated, and remade, and respread, and reshared. That was what the work lived for.

So, I said I'd do 25 years in 2 minutes, I failed. Okay, so let me jump to 2007. It's kind of like a little post-DIWO and suddenly we realised the web is highly centralised. I am embarrassed that I didn't see it coming. I should have listened to the smarter people around me who maybe saw it coming earlier. So, 2007, we find ourselves in a network space, which is no longer a peer and free and open source context and infrastructure but rather those tools have been appropriated by Facebook, and then Amazon, and Google and the like into these huge, megacorps that are taking all of our free creativity and mining it essentially for private profit.

And so this was kind of a really hard lesson and I often describe myself as a recovering web utopian. And that is to describe this kind of shift from the [inaudible 00:54:49] experience of high connectivity with lively human beings from all over the world to suddenly understanding that our drive to connect and share with each other was going to be exploited and used against us. And now we find social spaces often very atomizing, highly extractive. We've seen the colonising effects of digital media both in terms of finance but also culture.

And so not to depress us all to hell, we opened our first gallery in 2004 and then moved into this small but beautiful pavilion in the heart of a public park in London. And here we got to kind of experiment with this strange interface that we created in this gallery between the kind of communities of practice of critical media artists, thinking about what technology was doing to us, and where we could push back and where we could hack and what changes where we could claim agency, especially around questions on surveillance and privacy and all of these kinds of things. So, bringing those artists and having them make shows for... Sometimes about half our audience are art-going audiences who are looking for a particular kind of stimulation. But others of our gallery goers are essentially users of the park who are coming in and open to experiencing something new. And so we had to make exhibitions that made sense to this kind of spectrum.

And really in the last five years, we've been flipping our model and working much more closely with our park-based communities because we understand that the lived experience of this super diverse community...like, there's 200 different languages spoken in this park, and there's so much to know, and understand, and share with these different groups of people. To share out from the park what we learn together and put that back out into network space has kind of become our mission.

So, this culminates this year in a... We're in the third year of a three-year live-action role play about interspecies justice. And this year we'll be hosting an interspecies festival that has been co-devised with growers, drummers, people who work with re-worlding the park, working with the local council to really understand what it would take to reconnect properly with all the kind of different life forms in the park and support biodiversity for all kinds of reasons that I hope are obvious to everyone like why this kind of reconnection of a kind of empathy with more than human life forms is kind of crucial at this moment.

María Paula: That is so interesting. I'm speechless. But talking actually about interspecies and as we are at the closing of our incredible Wisdom Seed session, I would like to ask you one of the questions that Keiken has been asking the speakers. Some of the questions. Maybe we'll make it to some of them. We'll see. So, the first one, maybe we start with Penny, is if you could insert your consciousness into another species, which would that be?

Penny: Oh, I don't know if I want to give anybody my consciousness.

Ruth: This is exactly what I've been doing for the last two years. I've been spending so much time with people doing this kind of imaginative work to do exactly this. So, actually having people bond with different mentor species in the park to learn about what they need and to imagine what it would feel like to live that life. So, my answer to this is that I'd like to know what it feels like to be grass. So, kind of like the hair of the planet. I feel like that's grass. The kind of rhizomatic nature of grass is kind of like a network. It's like all these kind of network media. So, it's also quite immobile, very various, rooted, and it's also connected with the kind of insects. I'd like to know what it's like to have insects and microbes nibbling at my feet.

Penny: That's the total [inaudible 01:00:32] of the question, you know? I understood the question to be where would you insert your consciousness.

Ruth: Yeah, I inverted it because I, kind of, [crosstalk 01:00:42.557] really needs my consciousness.

María Paula: I love this interpretation. And, Penny, feel free to answer based on this. I really like it.

Penny: I mean, I think I would love to have the sky more inside me and maybe vice versa. I would insert my consciousness into the sky.

María Paula: That's a really good answer. And one final question, just one final one. A book or text to enter into the library of Neknel, the world that Keiken is building.

Ruth: Do you want to go, Penny? Oh, maybe Penny's lost her connection. I'll go quickly. I would enter Robin Wall Kimmerer's "Braiding Sweetgrass." It's a book that brings together these kind of worlds of contemporary bioscience and indigenous knowledges and cosmologies. Yeah, it's absolutely soul-wrenching and deeply informative.

María Paula: That sounds like the perfect text to insert in the gallery of a new world that's growing and learning.

Ruth: Yeah, I think so.

María Paula: Yeah. It's great. So, I guess it's time now and, yeah, maybe Penny dropped or she had to go. I'm not aware of her schedule. Either way, I'm very grateful for Ruth and for Penny to spend this past hour with me sharing their incredible wisdom. Oh, Penny's here. Okay, let's try the question again. Penny, can you hear us?

Ruth: I think she needs to be made a speaker?

María Paula: No, she's a speaker. Maybe her headphones... Oh, she muted herself.

Penny: Sorry, I dropped out.

María Paula: No worries. So, yeah, we were talking about a book or text that you would like to enter into the library of this new...

Penny: I mean, Ruth, should we not put "Radical Friends" in there?

Ruth: Very good idea. Let's do it.

María Paula: Amazing. I highly recommend the Neknelians to learn from "Radical Friends." It's really a fantastic book.

Josh: It's already in my library.

María Paula: Good for you. Okay. So, thank you so much, Penny and Ruth. This has been super special. I loved everything. I'm going to relisten because the amount of knowledge that was shared in these spaces was remarkable. Super grateful. Josh, do you want to close with something?

Josh: Yeah, I just want to say thank you so much, guys, for speaking. That was an amazing conversation. And, yeah, if anyone listening wants to listen back, you can listen on the space, and we'll also be releasing a transcript on the neknel.world site and there may even be a podcast on Spotify where you can listen anytime. But, yeah, thank you so much, Penny and Ruth.

María Paula: Thank you so much.

Penny: Thank you.

Josh: Thank you, guys.

María Paula: Bye-bye.

Josh: Bye.

Ruth: Bye.

María Paula: Bye.