Wisdom Seed Helen V. Pritchard in conversation with Keiken Monday 3rd April 2023, Twitter Spaces

Emily: Hi, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today for our second Wisdom Seed instalment. Before we get started, I'd like to do a small bit of housekeeping. So, today we launched an initiative for you to all submit your own wisdom, quote, or a piece of knowledge with us for a chance for it to be displayed in Times Square, along with your Twitter handle during NFT.NYC. And you can check our pinned tweet for more information. And also, we also have a Free Mint coming up on Wednesday, so make sure you keep your eye out for that as we've partnered with a really special entity for its release.

But now, I'd love to introduce today's Wisdom Seed, Helen Pritchard. Helen is an artist, designer, geographer, activist, and queer love theorist. Their work considers how computational infrastructures and digital media impact social and environmental practice. Helen works with creative practice methods for core research drawing on transfeminist and queer approaches.

Their research addresses how practices configure the possibilities for life, or who gets to have a life in intimate and significant ways. And as always, the Wisdom Seeds are led by builders of Neknel, Keiken. And today's conversation will centre around Helen's practice and how it relates to building Protopian worlds. So, with that being said, please welcome Helen and Keiken.

Helen: Hi. It's really great to be here. I'm really looking forward to the conversation today. And thanks for the introduction.

Hana: Hi. Hi. We're looking forward to this conversation.

Emily: Hope everyone's mic's working okay.

[00:04:32] [Silence] [00:05:15]

There we go. Hi, Helen.

Hana: Hey. I was like, "Let me in." And I said hey. Hey, Helen. Hope you're well. Hey, Jillian.

Helen: Hi.

Hana: Good to see you in the... So, Jillian was our teacher. So, all of us, Izzy, Tanny, and myself. How are you?

Helen: Yeah. It's really nice to be in this space with you and get to talk and dream a bit together.

Hana: Yeah. I'm really excited. We were speaking about basically asking really, like, fun questions before we kind of delve a bit more into your specific practice because it might just be nice to just start chill. So, what do you think of that?

Helen: Yeah. I think that sounds like a really great plan. We can also maybe spend some time thinking about this 1000 years in the future that you've set up for us.

Hana: Yeah, exactly. So, like, it is really important to us that, like, we've just been thinking about it a lot that we want to basically...we've been really thinking about, okay, well, imagining what would life be like, what would consciousness be like, what would existence be like in 1000 years time? And I guess for us, it's almost like this idea of, like, radical imagination is important for change. And if we imagine a space so far ahead in the future, no one can tell us that these things aren't possible.

So, we want to really be able to defy everything that's the current reality and thinking beyond that regardless of whether it has any kind of...we don't wanna be thinking, "Oh, what are the kind of parameters of this lived reality right now?" What are beyond what we can imagine? So, yeah. So, 1000 years from now, in Neknel, our future kind of world or existence when we don't have jobs, what will you be doing on a Monday?

Helen: Oh, and it is Monday today, right? Yeah, I guess that maybe... I mean, I really like this proposition, right, that you just put forward that you are thinking in 1000 years from now so that you can, I guess, do what you want or kind of imagine and dream without being told that that's not possible. And I wonder, you know, maybe that's, in some ways, a kind of state that we need to sometimes enact today, right, to be able to dream of the futures that we need in the closer future as well.

But yeah, what would I be doing on a Monday? I mean, I guess maybe I would start by, in a way, hoping that the dominance of a kind of Gregorian calendar or a linear time that Mondays perhaps no longer exist. Perhaps there's a kind of plurality to the week, the week doesn't exist, that we've kind of maybe there's a way in which the world is kind of feeling itself really, really differently in 1000 years' time in which Monday is no longer kind of linked to this idea of, like, the start of the labouring week, I guess, for many, many, or kind of another day of the labouring week, or that kind of invention really of time being divided into this kind of this idea of what Mondays are for many people, say in like Western Europe right now.

But maybe as well on the...you know, if I think about, I think you have this proposition in Neknel, which I really love, right, which is there won't be any jobs, just these shared cosmic goals. So, maybe I would be participating in some kind of forms of widening collective life in some poetry of these cosmic goals. And that would be a way in which I would be kind of participating in life. I don't know. I don't even know if I would be me. Maybe I guess I might be an algae or a bit of sludge on a rock. I'm curious though, what would you be doing on a Monday in Neknel?

Hana: Well, yeah, the other day, we were looking at just like the murmurations that birds, how birds fly because we were trying to make this in the game engine, we were trying to make this kind of mask spirit, which we recorded the motion capture of. But it's still like kind of a...it's somewhat... To do the motion capture, obviously, you're using the human motion, but we made it look like the legs were, like, the wings.

And when we were trying to make the murmuration, we were, like, trying to figure out, "Well, but how does the murmuration happen?" Because it's like a push and a pull. And then we just started to dream about, well, what happens if you... Like, wouldn't that be one of the most amazing things if you could be inside a murmuration? Like, because it's this amazing kind of collective kind of act where you could basically have this kind of...because I think for the birds, when they do the memorizations, it's not like one is leading. It's like this act of push and pull, but in the sky and they make this amazing pattern and it's like this collective act. And yeah, I was thinking, "Oh, I would be a bird in murmuration." That would be what I'd be doing on a Monday for sure.

Helen: What about maybe...I'm thinking it reminds me a bit of the philosopher, Vinciane Despret when she writes about the way in which when the passenger pigeon became extinct, the wind lost its...it lost being able to feel the passenger pigeon's wings, which I just thought was such a beautiful way to understand kind of the way of the kind of world feeling in a way that's being enacted all the time, you know, this idea that it's not just the kind of birds on the wind, but the way in which the wind feels itself in that kind of push and pull of let's say a murmuration or the way in which the wind feels itself as it kind of moves through the feathers of a bird is kind of a super, I think, kind of poignant and amazing way to kind of, like, understand the importance of all of these interdependencies, I guess, on each other.

Hana: It's kind of like an act of everything. It's like you are connected to the sky, you are connected to the ground, to gravity, you're connected to each other, but then you are also...everything's just kind of spontaneously happening in a kind of...act of kind of unconscious. I'm sure when the bird is flying, they're not just thinking, "I wanna go left, right, left, right, left, right." It's like this kind of fluid act, which I think is really an act...it feels like an act of everything and an act of kind of to be, kind of, yeah.

Helen: I'm curious because are you...were you modelling the birds? Were you trying to 3D model their movements or mark their movements?

Hana: No, no. We’re trying to... I could even maybe read you, I don't know, you might enjoy us reading you the passage. We basically were...

Helen: Yeah, I'd love that.

Hana: I'll read it to you. Let me just find it on our Google Drive because everything exists on Google Drive. Let me just try to find it. Let me think what it's called. Izzy, if you remember the name of the title of the project, that would be super helpful. Actually, maybe I have...

Helen: Which one?

Hana: I think I might have found it. It's okay. So, basically, we've been looking a lot into Butoh. I don't know if Izzy, if you wanna talk a little bit about it as well. And we've been... Do you know about Butoh, Helen?

Helen: I mean, it would be great to hear more about it.

Hana: Yeah. So, it's like, obviously, it's an avant-garde kind of dance, a Japanese dance. And it kind of comes from, like, a French avant-garde dance as well. And it's like, the idea is that you kind of just become this empty vessel. And Butoh is really about accepting the, like, grotesque, the ugly, like it's about utter darkness and it's about the unconscious.

It's about everything, the non-conformative and the kind of the, I guess like also the kind of invisible and the fluidity between those things. Like, it's a very kind of genderless act because it's all about the spirit within you. And it's something that we all kind of... It's very philosophical, there's so many philosophies to Butoh. So, it's something that we think is really important to understand and kind of digest and think about.

And I think we wrote this piece of text to kind of recontextualize. So, like, I think between us, we always feel...we don't feel, like, the collective idea that we are a self is true. So, we think it's like one of the kind of wrong...like it's a wrong way of perceiving oneself, is to see yourself as an individual or to see yourself as, like, this kind of fixed thing. Like, being this kind of fixed thing that's attached to reality is like, is not true to how we actually feel. So, therefore, it will make us confused about what is it that we are existing, like we always call it, like, our centre point.

So, our centre point is, like, this thing that's almost like it tethers us to the earth and kind of marks our point like axis of existence, but it's kind of this kind of ephemeral thing. And I think one of the most important things, and actually the reason why we started to look at stuff like morphogenesis and this idea of like cell structures and that these cells have like...they act independently amongst each other as well as collectively.

And obviously, cells are constantly dying and growing, so it's constantly regenerating and it's this thing of like we have 86 billion cells, I think, inside us. So, we're just, like, constantly, like, why everything's so confusing. It's because we're an amalgamation of so many little parts. I don't know. I'm trying to explain it simply, but each time I say something, it gets more complex. But it's something that we...I don't know.

I think it's, like, one of the primary bases of why we get confused with who we are because we don't...we try to simplify what it is as human and we try to make it very rigid compared to what it is. So, the text is...I'll read it now. We are in a perpetual process of mourning ourselves. With every new experience and encounter, you create a duplicate of yourself, and each new duplicate has an alteration that the previous version didn't have. This happens continuously and over long periods of time, you feel a sense of losing yourself, not knowing who you were before.

You experience fleeting moments of loss, but you struggle to pinpoint the root of your mourning, the reason why you feel sad. You have a fleeting moment of realisation that a piece of you is missing or gone, which is inconsistent with the belief that you are whole, a self. These fleeting feelings are the persistent reminder that you are not a single self. We treat ourselves as though we are a material or solid thing. We've coded it to make us think that we are living beings that exist in the present moment with memories.

We are really a daisy chain of immaterial spirits stretching through the fabric of space and time, beyond our physical bounds and perception of what we can see and remember. You are losing something while becoming something else. That is why the self is always in a state of strange. You push your energy forward whilst something else is leaking out, disappearing. You are happy, unhappy. You're constantly experiencing growing pains. It's funny how our mind longs for things.

So, yeah, that's the text and that's the motion capture that comes with it. So, it's us trying to make the body into the feeling that we actually think is...the feeling that we actually think exists we are rather than what is presented before us as this kind of solid, like, shape. It's not true. And we ended up making the motion capture, the legs became wings and all kinds of things through it, and it was through this kind of spirit of like Butoh essentially.

But it is important to this future thinking because it's this idea of the self-being this solid thing. For us, is we think is one of the worst, the biggest mistake for our collective consciousness. Like, people believe that you are an individual and you are a self and that you are this thing that's existing in the present moment, and you are just not. And if we recognize that we're not, we'd understand why we feel strange all the time.

Like, we feel strange because we're much more fluid, and constantly things are appearing and disappearing. We are this kind of more fluid thing. Yeah. So, that's...I think it's, like, very grounded to a lot of, like, our belief systems that we believe in the future. Like, these things will start to change as science uncovers things, as humans desire to actually visioning and also live their lives in more fluid means through technology.

Helen: And yeah, it's interesting there, isn't it, like that's quite a hopeful position...

Hana: Yeah. It's a hopeful position.

Helen: ...that things will... Yeah. The hopeful position that things will change, I don't know, through the technologies. I mean, do you see that there's, like, a particular type of technology that we need in order for those things to change? Because I mean, I absolutely, you know, would agree with you in a way, you know, if we think about those kind of like...those fixed categories of the body or some comrades and friends of mine, Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha always call it the so-called body, which I think is a kind of always a good add-on, or even like the taxonomic categories, right, of plant or animal, or the idea of a kind of species. Like, what are the kinds of technologies that you are imagining, I guess, that might enable us to kind of unsettle those categories and destroy those boundaries and those borders?

Hana: So, I think one of the ones, obviously, that we talk about a lot is morphogenesis and this idea that, like, people will start merging... Like, they will want to explore every kind of consciousness and every possibility of consciousness. So, there'll be ways in which they will be re-organically, or you would even create a simulation where you'd be re-organically re-engineered into combining other species together and creating new forms of consciousness.

I think there's a lot of possibility with organic re-engineering that I think would be potentially, obviously, you know, for example, the Silicon Valley-esque people, whatever, they're like they just want to have life extension. They wanna merge with a jellyfish to have life extension. But those are very like...they're very power-driven kind of really unconscious ideas that are just a bit rubbish and they also don't like take on the kind of consequences of these life forms. Like, a lot of them have very interesting... Like, they might live for a very long period of time or forever, but it doesn't quite work the way that, you know, it's kind of perceived.

But I think that there's a lot of different technologies that we kind of imagine an event. Like, we think of a lot about, like one of them is like an ancestor tool. So, we really like the idea that, like, this technology and like... So, for example, to keep the... It's almost like a blockchain-based technology that enable...that is complete... Again, it would be done through some sort of organic re-engineering. So, it's not done in a way where it's like... Because I think you need the intuition of like...and the fluidity of the organic.

So, I don't know how technology is gonna do it, but I think they'll be... If we understand how cells work, I feel like you could do it in an organic way rather than a way that's like... So, like hardware, like inorganic fixed... Like, fixed forms of hardware and software are like, maybe... Like, for example, I wouldn't want those kind of technologies... Like, they're near me now, I'm next to my computer and my phone, but I know how much it hurts me to exist in those technologies as well. I know how limited I feel by them.

But I think that for example, the ancestor tool, we thought a lot about how could you have a technology that is so intuitive that at certain moments in time, it will just...a whisper or some sort of word or connection just when you've made the connection in your brain, will then...you'll hear it through your ancestor, but through your body, you'll feel it through your ancestor. So, it's almost like it brings back alive the, like, feelings that are already there and it accentuates it so that you can experience it more vividly.

So, for example, I think actually Kazuo Ohno, one of the Butoh...one of the founders of Butoh, he spoke a lot about how, like, we are kind of foolish to think that...we are, like, foolish to think that our creativity comes from ourselves. It comes from every ancestor that existed before you. So, every time you do a creative act that is...and I would extend beyond that, I would say it's not just... It's everything around you as well. Like, even, like, this idea of ownership, it's like everything is channelling through everything.

So, it's like you would have certain, like, feelings from within that are...that emerge through your ancestors, but they would be emphasised through this technology. But it wouldn't...it would be completely fluid and it would be like...it would feel like you could just pick up. You could listen to your body, you could listen to all the memories of your past. And it's not about listening to it all the time, it's about being, like, intuitive.

So, I think things like that, we would, like, think a lot about. Like, we think a lot about how to emphasise like the...like what do we already have within our operating system that is like super amazing. So, like, for example, it's, like, the reason why a computer is so limiting is because we need a whole body to be able to communicate. Like, right now when I'm talking to you, I'm moving my hands because even though we are just hearing each other's voice, I wanna communicate to you through my body. So, I think that, like, we are thinking a lot about, like, how the body could...you could have these very organic technologies which help...it helps ignite and emphasise and reconnect to parts of your body so that you can use the powers that you already have within.

So, like, people have, like, intuitions, people have the possibility to heal others, but those things could be... I guess in some ways, it's like superpowers, but it's not because that's why you have all these kind of spiritual happenings that people talk about. And that's why it's very...it's ingrained within society to talk about all these kind of mysteries of life because people have these experiences. But I think things could be just...

Like, people need to be able to reconnect their own intuition. If you can connect to your own intuition and if you can connect... Like, obviously, some people are much more analytical, they're more...you know, they're maybe like, we are definitely on the much more kind of creative and this very fluid thinking, but I think there's still this possibility for everyone. So, yeah, I think with often thinking of it on those kind of lenses.

But at the same time, we're also thinking of it on wider governance too, of how does governance work, and are humans actually good? Is their operating system actually made to govern large masses of people? That's something that we think about a lot when we think of AI systems like divine fem AI systems that help with governance and long-term solutions being very frictionless but also help with distributional resources.

Helen: I mean, I love what you're saying in terms of, like, what would it mean to really have a kind of technology otherwise, or a computing otherwise, in which it's the kind of feeling of the world, right? Like, that the feeling of the world and being the world is the kind of premise for how it operates and what it does in the world. And it strikes me that that's a really, really different starting point than, you know, we might see kind of like some of those current modes that you are also mentioning, you know, their kind of work on these kind of like through the operations of things like extraction, right? That's how they aim to... Or measurement, or categorization, and actually, kind of in this sort of image or this, like, prototypian technology future you're kind of laying out for us.

You know, I can imagine that not only is there a kind of felt intuitive like sensing practices which kind of emerge a bit, but also, you know, it's able to kind of create knowledge differently, right? Like knowledge from things like...I don't know, from sleeplessness or knowledge from thinking about different types of accountability or the different types of knowledge practices that might come from self-organising. You know, maybe one of the ways in which we might kind of collectively govern isn't a kind of like overarching operating system which organises resources, but instead, you know, if we're able to really attend to that creativity or that creative life force of the world, that actually we might be able to really think about the resources and how we share them in a really, really different way.

And, you know, I think, I guess like one of the modes of, like, current technologies in the way in which they act in really extractive ways, is they actually deplete, right? And in our project, The Institute of Technology in the Public Interest, we have this term of digital depletion, right? So, we say we're kind of...we want to fight against this modality of digital depletion in which, in a way, like lots of the ways that we operate, are getting taken over, you know, by those Silicon Valley big tech companies.

And actually, what they're doing is depleting our creative life, right? They're depleting our community resources to be able to organise, to manage, to resist, to love, and to feel, right, which is what I'm really hearing from you now as well. What might it mean to kind of imagine this, I don't know, sludgy, smooch, slimy, biotic kind of future, right, of kind of flourishing and liveliness?

Hana: Yeah, for sure. I think we've just got things... We're, like, in a strange direction, but at the same... It's like I feel like we're in a strange direction because it's so much like the systems that we are in are, like... Like, things are very... Like, we take things as very fixed and that's, like, a huge implication. But then at the same time, there's so many existences going on right now with so many amazing ideas and inventions and there is like a...there's just so many variables to the kind of human organism and the collective like human organisms.

And I think that always we talk a lot about our hope is that this kind of the Rupert Sheldrake idea of that. You know, he talks a lot about collective resonance. And I kind of... You know, when I think of my example is always when you watch TV a few years ago and you watch it back and you see how terrible people were and so many things misaligned to what our belief systems are now. And I do think there is some level of collective resonance.

So, our kind of hope on it is that we will just become, we will start to appreciate... Like, we'll start to value the immaterial. So, for example, science. Like, a lot of the most contemporary science out there that's the most innovative, they've kind of...they're like no longer materialist. They're really looking at the kind of how energy is circulating and working within the body or within other life forms. So, I think this idea of, like, both collectivity and immaterial, as that gets more popularised, maybe that will shift an understanding in our existence that will help people not only realign with themselves better, but they will also...of course, because it starts with the...you need to connect to yourself to be able to give outward.

But I think even if the kind of rigid kind of Silicon Valley very like...you know, they're doing...they're successful within the system, so why would you want to make it change? Because they're profiting. But I do think that the scientists will help with that because a lot of science is now not aligning with a lot of things. And I think actually there's a...like if you go to, like, I don't know...like, there's basically every environmental issue has been problem-solved by a scientist. Like, it's not that we can't care for our environment better.

We have all the knowledge there, and we have all the people that actually... There's a lot of people that also want to do it. There's a lot more people who have innovative ideas. Obviously, it all comes down to like, you know, change. And also we talk a lot about, like, fear and how fear keeps people...it makes you, your vision more closed, and obviously in a time where you don't know what the future's gonna be like. But at the same time, I do think there's like...there is also a collective resonance.

Like, people seek...people wanna know more. Like, we are pre-programmed as, like, humans. Your natural disposition before like... Obviously, it's dependent on your...obviously, it is dependent on your kind of chemical kind of structure or whatever, or, like, what you are experiencing in the present moment and how that's making you feeling unwell or feeling well. But the natural disposition to be in on a day to day is seeking mode, which is like Jaak Panksepp, who's, like, a neuroscientist.

He was, like, kind of very much in the field of kind of emotional intelligence. I think he passed away in 2007 or something. But he studied the...he basically studied the emotions of humans through the emotions of animals. And his belief system was...his belief was that if you understand how animals feel, then you will only understand how humans feel. And by using these kind of...by quantifying the basic human emotions and the disposition that he always said that you are like...your base disposition is seeking. And if people are seeking more, so the more that people know, the more that you find. I think that there is also, like, hope in that sense, if that makes sense.

Helen: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think you're right about kind of also what, in a way, what type of science gets given space or what kind of science, you know, gets written about and how that gets taken up by people. I recently met a evolutionary biologist and soil scientist and I was kind of amazed when she told me that actually in their practice, so they create these kind of long lists of numbers in which they use to be able to kind of map the biodiversity say of an area that they're a forest or a landscape.

And she said to me, "Oh, yeah, we know that the categories of species don't exist, you know, and we actually don't... You know, we see that all the time, you know, kind of species hopping, gender-bending, the amalgamation or interdependencies of different species on each other. And for us, we are just working all the time with these really, really long numbers and that's what we recognize as the things we're encountering. But it's when we have to kind of tell the story, that that's when we have to kind of reduce it down to, oh, you know, this is, like, an area where there's a lot of this species of kelp, for example."

And I just thought it was kind of amazing, right, this kind of that, in a way, if we think about, like, things like taxonomic categories and the way they hold in place particular things, right, which is, like, one of the kind of, in a way, core things that kind of underpins how many things like technologies are structured, that actually on that kind of...in the scientific practices themselves, right, they don't hold to those categories, which I thought was the kind of pretty amazing thing to learn.

Hana: Yeah, that's incredible. I love that kind of that everybody wants to be multi-species. Like, everything is defying what we actually know. And that's what's amazing about science. Like, the best science is always proving that things are wrong and then trying to dig deeper. I wanted to ask you some more of the questions because I think that is super fun. So, maybe, let me see what question. What would you put in a time capsule to send to 1000 years' time?

Helen: Oh, this is really, really difficult. Oh, a time capsule. Okay. So, this is difficult because the things that immediately spring to mind are things that are kind of living and lively, and I'm not sure how well they'd survive in the time capsule, but maybe something needs to be kind of infrastructured in that.

I think perhaps one of the things that maybe I might send in a time capsule might be some mycelium or a spore library because I think perhaps they would have a kind of amazing capacity to stay dormant in that time capsule. At the moment on this project, regenerative energy communities that I'm working on with Eric Snodgrass, Miranda Moss, and Daniel Gustafsson [SP], we are thinking a lot actually about something that you brought up earlier as well, Hana, which is like, how might we know the kind of energy of the world, the kind of geochemistry of the world differently? You know, if we could feel the kind of matter and energy of the world differently, how might that change our practices?

Some of the ways that we're doing that is thinking about different types of micro energy. So, we are trying to really kind of experiment with things like crystals and things like urine-powered microbial fuel cells. But also one of the things that we are learning a lot with and thinking a lot with is mycelium spores and fungi. And Daniel's been working on a mycelium wind turbine.

So, we had this idea, what would it mean if you could kind of create a micro energy generator, which could also kind of contribute back into the soil, what might it mean to kind of think about these different infrastructures and technology futures if instead of kind of starting with things like optimization and extraction, to think about the future, we actually started with, like, nourishing the soil. And so, we've been learning and thinking a lot with mycelium.

One of the things which Daniel's been developing for our energy lab is a spore library in which people can also kind of share and swap different fungi and mushroom spores. And one of the things that we've learned about them is that spores, interestingly, like they change quite a lot if you move them from their place of origin. And they have these kind of, like, transformational journeys. And so, perhaps the kind of spore library from the regenerative energy community lab might be something we could put in a time capsule to send to Neknel. And you could have everything from kind of, like, mycelium sort of structures there right through to all of the kind of interconnections that mycelium and fungi offer us.

Hana: That's really beautiful. I just kept seeing visuals of this wind turbine, but this wind turbine is made out of mycelium, but it's connected to underground and it has this kind of cyclical. I was just like, "Oh, this looks great." Like...

Helen: We often joked that the mycelium wind turbine is the most charismatic of all our prototypes that we're working on.

Hana: Yeah. It's definitely very vivid, the idea, but it also makes kind of complete sense. I have quite an affinity. When I was a little kid, I remember we had, like, no money and I remember I just... Me and my brother kept trying to save up for a wind turbine. And we put like, money in this jar, and then my dad would take out the jar and use it and then me and my brother would put it back in the jar and try to save up for this wind turbine. In our head, we just thought we'd be able to do it. So...

Helen: And all you needed was some mycelium.

Hana: It's like I should have put the mycelium in and then it would've just grown into a wind turbine just outside my house. The Cornish wind is very strong, so I'm sure it would've generated a lot of energy. I'm gonna ask you more questions because this is fun. I think... Okay. So, name, like, one book or text that you'd like to enter into the library of Neknel.

Helen: Oh, just one?

Hana: Maybe more.

Helen: Just one for the library.

Hana: Maybe more if you want, actually.

Helen: Maybe I should try to challenge myself to one. Maybe I would choose... I think that, like, poetry, hopefully, is a big part of Neknel. And so, maybe I would choose to put in a book from a good comrade of mine, Cassandra Troyan. They're an abolitionist thinker and poet.

And their book "Against Capture," I think would be quite a good fit for this dreamy Neknel space because, in a way, it's a kind of call for...it's a book which kind of plunges into these different types of freedom dreams and kind of deals with, like, the struggles that we need to make against borders and whiteness and patriarchy, thinking about the ways in which also, we might kind of abolish the category of species in the book. And I think, as well, the book's really written during COVID and perhaps also, it would be a kind of, like, snapshot of this particular moment. So, I think that would be the gift in the book. It also has a couple of poems about hedgehogs, which I think would be a pretty nice thing to read in Neknel.

Hana: That's really nice. Okay, I'm gonna ask the next question. Let's see. So, what would... Like, what does your ideal distant future world look like? If you could create a space, we always think of there just being loads of spaces that you can go into, but they're kind of...they can...you can create simulations, but they feel as real as the earth. And I also think that they would have the organic mass.

They would, like, be able to exist in the same kind of life forms as like...that you would... It's not just like a fabricated digital world, it's much more than that, if that makes sense. Like, it would be, like, organic kind of bio-engineering into simulations. Like, that's more how we like to think about it. So, what kind of world would you...yeah, what would your distant, ideal future world look like? I guess ideal is not the right word because I think ideal is like, there's nothing ideal. Like, everything is an amalgamation of positive and negative and just so many variables, but yeah.

Helen: I mean, I think a kind of a distant future world, I hope there will be a lot of community infrastructures and maybe there would be a lot of very nourished and loved for and cared for soil in which maybe perhaps all of the kind of governance and decisions would be taken around the soil. So, maybe it would be quite like a rich soil future, and through that, a kind of place which would kind of nurture freedom for everybody and a nourishing full life for everybody in which that kind of nourished soil was not just the kind of property of a few, but actually something in which you could kind of grow kind of abundant, like, joyful queer life. I guess that would be what my ideal distant future would look like.

And maybe amongst that, there would be many kind of spaces for...you know, maybe there'd be some soft mycelium cushioning, some spaces of poetry. There would be a kind of...I think there would be a querying of the damages perhaps that we've experienced through things like racial capitalism and the depletion of big tech. So, there would also be a kind of like attending and querying to those damages and taking them up and creating a very, very different possibility for lives, and kind of widening the possibilities for life for everybody.

Hana: I was getting lost in it. Yeah, I definitely think that... Sometimes we think about how we're kind of farming work in the future because there's something so incredible about being able to grow your own food, being able to be super connected to the process of the beginning of the seeds, to the growing, to the eating and experiencing it with people and then being able to tend to things. I think that process of being very connected to the soil but also connected to the soil in relationship to food, I think is something that there needs to be spaces within the future that really can encapsulate that.

Also, I think being connected to the soil helps with...it helps you with the pace of time changes as well. So, it's like as soon as you are in a kind of more, like, organic or natural space, your sense of time tends to get much more aligned and connected. So, you need to have spaces that allow for that.

I know definitely growing up, coming from the countryside and also coming from the very tip of Cornwall, it's like, I remember being a teenager and even a kid, just my sense of time growing up was so... Like, obviously, when you're a kid you have a...days feel longer. But not just that. If you are in such a kind of isolated space where the nature is more prominent than the people occupying it, your sense of this alignment is so...it just becomes so interconnected and it feels...it makes you feel so good. Like, there's something about it that makes you feel so, so good.

Helen: Yeah. I mean, on the...in the regenerative energy project, we really also, I think, informed and inspired and practising a lot from some of the histories of black agroecology practices, for instance, and those practices in which that kind of, in a way, both think about who gets to kind of have resources, but also what it means to think across that space of agroecology practices, not through perhaps a kind of optimised extractive mainstream science, but instead, many of those practices really kind of think in ways with the kind of ghost, the poetry of that space, the nurturing, the care, and the kinship, right, the communities can form through these kind of practices.

Hana: Yeah, no definitely. I think I'll ask the next question because it's quite... So, tell us one piece of wisdom, good or bad, that someone has given you that you always remember.

Helen: Hmm. A piece of wisdom. Okay, maybe... I guess, like, maybe this is gonna be, like, a moment for thinking in a trans-species way. And recently, Ren Britton [SP] and I were kind of speculating and dreaming with this metaphor of four CS in which we tried to think about different formulations of this...of the CS, which often gets to stand for computer science. And we were thinking of all of the different combinations of CS like cushions and stargazing, crying sabotage, and also careful slugs was one of them.

And so, we then kind of set out and we thought, "Okay, well what would it really mean to, like, think with the practices of slugs in the way in which we might, like, start to design technologies?" And one of the things that we learned about from slugs is that they have a particular type of stickiness, which both kind of lubricates their movement, but also sticks them to surfaces, which is just kind of this amazing, I think, slug practice to think with, right?

What does it mean to kind of both stay sticky, so to stay responsible and accountable, but also to be able to move? And so, we called this a kind of like lubricated accountability that we learned from the careful slugs. So, I think maybe that might be, like, a particular type of wisdom that could be important in a space like Neknel.

Hana: That's really beautiful. I really like that. It was making me think of...because obviously Jillian's in the call with us, listening, but there's...with Haruka who is one of that she was in the year...couple of years below me, and she's incredible. One of her works was, like, I remember she carried a potato with her for, like, months. She just carried it on a piece of rope and just walked it like a dog every day and just watched it change for ages.

And I remember there was a time where me and her were like, "Okay, we're gonna try to become snails." And we, like, tried really hard to become snails for, like, a few hours and we were trying really hard to, like, imagine what it was. And then I think I had to go see my brother and his new girlfriend. And she's always absolutely crazy because I was just explaining this to her afterwards, like, "Oh, I just spent the last two hours trying to train to be a snail." And she would just look at me like, "Who is this person? Like, what's happening?" But we were really trying. We were really trying to, you know, get into the what does it mean?

Helen: Yeah. I mean, I think there's also a shared quality, right, between the careful slugs and the careful snails, maybe something around slowness and stickiness as well.

Hana: Yeah, it's a really nice like metaphor to, like, think about slowness. Like, I don't know. I feel like I need to spend longer thinking about the relationship to slowness, stickiness, and permanence and impermanence because a slug is also very impermanent at the same time. Because I remember the other day there was a slug in my corridor and I put it outside and I looked at it for a second, I was like, "Am I gonna leave you there or am I not gonna leave you there? And then what's my, like, responsibility on this?"

And I moved it, but then I was there, like, I was thinking, but you...I couldn't tell if it was alive or dead to begin with. And I was just thinking about how fragile it was, but also, how... Yeah, it was, like, super stuck to the ground. But yeah, I think there's something... I don't know. It's just the weird wisdoms that you can get when you analyse the meaning of why an organism exists because there's so many types of them, and they have such weird, different weird purposes. But, yeah.

Helen: And I mean, I was gonna say as well, so many of them have also... In a way, we can think about how so many of them have made particular scientific practices or technologies, like the way in which the algae or the diatom was really a kind of big part of the invention of the microscope, or the way in which I think also, this slug stickiness has informed a whole kind of array of these hydrogels that are used in heart surgery. So, I don't know. There's also, I think, this way in which we can shift our thinking and our trans-species thinking to also really account for those amazing qualities, right, of whether it's algae or slugs, or these other kind of critters that we are interdependent with.

Hana: Like, it's a lot to do with like our value system. It's like we have to... I think 99% of all species are extinct in relation to how many exist now, which Michael Levin, a lot of his ideas for morphogenesis is like, it would potentially have the possibility, if you have like...you can bring back species that no longer exists. This is...I don't know. I don't really know how exactly, but I'm kind of like, "Yes, please do that." But I think yeah, being able to... Our value system on things and the way that we look up and down on things is very funny when we could look at things almost from a...with serendipity, and we can look at things with curiosity and an open eye if we kind of change our hierarchy on how we observe things.

Helen: Yeah. I mean, that also reminds me of another, I think, amazing bit of wisdom from Kara Keeling, who I think in her book she has this line about always starting in the middle because of the need and the importance to tune to the improvisatory possibility, and that's where we might find the kind of openings that we can push into, right, for transformation and change.

Hana: Yeah. No, I think I'm gonna ask you another question I think before...because there's only three minutes.

Helen: Okay.

Hana: I'm gonna ask really, really quickly now. Actually, I'm gonna make up one because I'm looking...I've got some questions. I was like, what does love look like in 1000 years' time?

Helen: I guess the question might be, what does love feel like, right, in 1000 years' time?

Hana: Yeah, exactly. I made it up in my head though.

Helen: And I mean, maybe, you know, this is... You know, if we think with kind of like these amazing queer thinkers like people like Lauren Berlant or the poet, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, right, like, thinking about love not as something that is a kind of individually possessed, right, but that love is something that is a community project or love is something that circulates in community. So, maybe that's what love will feel like in 1000 years' time.

Hana: That's really beautiful. What industry spaces or landscapes do you look to for wisdom? Industries is kind of... Sorry, I'm, like, listening and reading the questions, at the same time as knowing them.

Helen: What was it? What industry space...?

Hana: Yeah. What, like, industry space or landscapes do you look to for wisdom?

Helen: Yeah. I mean, I think it changes a lot all the time. You know, I think there's some amazing practices in these...some of the kind of regenerative or agro-ecological practices right now in relation to soil that are really like a place that I'm kind of looking to, especially people like Leah Penniman's work on the Soul Fire Farm. Kind of amazing inspiration for, like, thinking about a very, very different relationship to community resources and technology.

I also...you know, I think looking to or kind of being within communities of resistance and practices and the kind of activist communities which I'm part of and work with are really a massive space for me to think and dream together of what types of changes we might be able to kind of spot or open into, how to kind of nurture ourselves with solidarity. I think also, the kind of work of abolitionist thinkers, people like Ruth Wilson Gilmore for example, were kind of an amazing place to kind of inhabit and also, kind of think about how, you know, we might kind of...we might, you know, abolish particular types of infrastructures and practices, and actually move towards a more flourishing and joyful future.

Hana: That's really beautiful. I've got, like, lots of things to research. This will be good. And then I think another thing would be like, what does a leader look, like, for you in 1000 years' time?

Helen: Hmm, what does a leader look like? I mean, I think maybe in 1000 years' time, like, maybe everyone's a leader or nobody is a leader. But maybe there's a kind of real understanding and a practice of self-organisation in which, you know, communities are able to realise and the world is able to realise itself for itself. And there's kind of practices that we might learn from now from things like mutual aid and, like, abolitionist practices, kind of like working towards a set of future practices in which, you know, maybe, like, poets are leaders and they're helping us to kind of organise our operations and self-organise.

Hana: I think it's 7 now. So, I don't wanna take up, like, super amounts of your time, but I think all of the stuff you said is, like, really incredible and we really appreciate you being with us today. And yeah, thank you so much for being here. I don't know if, Emily, if you wanna say anything.

Emily: I'd just like to say thank you once again for having this, like, conversation out in the open. It's, like, really amazing. And I think something interesting from what you were just last saying then about leaders and community is that within this sort of like Web3 space, community management has become such a sort of integral and new role. But I've always had a problem with it being a community manager because I don't think our communities want nor need to be managed either. So, it's super interesting to think about how that would take shape in Neknel in 1000 years. Hana, will you be in Discord for a debrief now or have you got time?

Hana: Yeah, I can do that. Helen, is there anything you wanna ask us as well, any last things?

Helen: I guess just, you know, thank you. It was a really fun inspiring conversation. And I am looking forward to also spending some time in the Neknel space as well.

Hana: Yeah, we're hoping to like... I think it's just... For us, it's just, like, really important to reimagine without the limitations of the fixed realities out there. And if we can... Like, it's always about defying the things...defying beyond that so that we can be more boundless.

So, if we can help also create a space where that kind of... Because I think there's a lot of things that people want to talk about, but it's just creating those seeds so that it hopefully, you know, has the kind of emergent strategy where, you know, micro-actions create macro impact and it can...people can start talking about these things and activate these conversations. But I think you're an amazing activator of all these different thoughts and I think you've just like...yeah, you've explored it in so many different ways and angles and you have so many beautiful ideas and technologies and of re-imagining, which is yeah...I think is a super important and powerful thing to do.

Helen: Great. Well, I look forward to our next conversation.

Hana: Yeah, me too.

Hana: And yeah, we'll be in Discord now, right, Emily, for half an hour. So, if anybody wants to join us, then you're welcome to and you can ask questions there. Okay, cool. Thank you so much, everyone, for your time. And I hope everyone has a lovely evening and a good sleep tonight.

Helen: Bye for now.

Emily: Bye.

Hana: Bye.