Worlds

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

We are building a basin. Emergent Seas is as deep and expansive as the heart of Turtle Island itself. It takes many minds in many places with many perspectives to pull off a carnival as great as the lakes. Over the past 8 years we’ve been gathering articles, stories of repair, counter-memorials, collective projects, manifestos, social experiments. Now we want to open up our research to you and invite you to add your own.

You are hereby invited to share your Emergent Seas inspiration and contribute to an inner sea of radical belonging. We have created a linktree to act as a hub for visual art, videos, articles, poems, music, websites, ongoing projects, defunct experiments, anything that grabs you by the temples and shakes you awake.

In the theatre world it’s called dramaturgy—a body of knowledge that fleshes out the context, the world in which the play takes place. It will take all the bodies coming together in a spirit of free association to turn the tides from extraction to attraction on this continent. Emergent Seas is one such body. This link tree is a dramaturgical tool. We want to share the sources of inspiration that sparked this wild project and open it up for collaboration. What comes after North America? Together we are worlding worlds, worlds within worlds, worlds against worlds. Worlding is the greatest collective party we can imagine. A carnival is upon us.

We say all this to say, how we create the Carnival is as important, if not more important, as what we create. Many of the links in the tree point to projects or artworks we are positively inspired by; some of the links provide examples of what we’re organizing against. All of the pieces of inspiration came to us as chance encounters, like this memory from Gus on discovering Life 3.0:

"I was walking to Berkeley Bowl with Saoirse and coming down Shattuck and Adeline, cutting through the Walgreens parking lot, and I looked down and there was a scrap of paper—this glossy scrap of paper—sticking out of a crack in the pavement. And I picked it up and it was this wildly esoteric story about AI that I couldn't tell if it was true or not. I walked around with it for the next month—that piece of paper on me in  my pocket. Tried looking it up, couldn't find anything online. Eventually I learned that it was the prelude to a book called Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark. It's not a fictional book, it's a fictional prelude, but the rest is nonfiction that delves into the dangers of unregulated AI. And it became like a cornerstone in my Garden* research. It kind of fed this idea for me that ideas are like plants, that they grow out of the land itself. And so it was fitting that this story would just be in the parking lot outside of Berkeley Bowl. Like it was just such a Silicon Valley idea. Stories and ideas come from places. That's how I came to my own idea of geopragmitism—that land is not accidental to ideas. It made me wonder: What are the natural ideas growing out of the Great Lakes?"

Let’s spend time slowing down and looking at the discarded scraps of paper emerging from the cracks in the pavement.

*'The Garden' is a framework we've been working with the last seven years to describe the modern hell of management and control as a way of life.