I talk with pop culture scholar Shawn Taylor about fandom at the Immersive Design Summit 2019, and be sure to check out his post “We the Fans: How Our Powers Can Change the World” for more on his thoughts on fandom. We also talk about Edward T. Hall’s concept of Monochronic vs Polychronic time. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. In the previous conversation that I had with Reese Antoinette and Marianne Talavera about the Aresha Project, I They were talking around the past, present, and future and these other concepts of time. There's actually a conversation that I had with Sean Taylor back at the Immersive Design Summit that really stuck with me. You've probably heard me mention things around monochronic time and polychronic time. It came from this interview that I did with Sean Taylor back in 2019. It's actually the interview I did right before my conversation with Michaela Ternowski-Holland, which I'm going to air next. in the next episode i wanted to dip back into it because it was one of those interviews that i never got around to publishing you know the pandemic came along and everything turned upside down but it's a concept that really really stuck with me and also just this conversation is great on many other fronts in terms of sean taylor talking around like fandom the ways that fans are creating this whole world and participating and helping to create the speculative futures we talk around like the movement around Wakanda and the Wakanda Dream Lab. He did a whole white paper called The Black Freedom Beyond Borders, a Wakanda immigration anthology that he talks around. But in this conversation, we also talk about this concept of monochronic versus polychronic time. It's actually an idea that originates from Edward T. Hall. He writes about it in both Beyond Culture and then also a book called The Dance of Life, The Other Dimension of Time. So I wanted to read a quote from Beyond Culture just to kind of flesh out this concept of monochronic and polychronic time. We talk about this interview, but I just wanted to quote directly from Edward T. Hall. So monochronic time and polychronic time represent two variant solutions to the use of both time and space as organizing frames for activities. Monochronic time emphasizes schedules, segmentation, and promptness. Polychronic time systems are characterized by several things happening at once. They stress involvement of people and completion of transactions rather than adherence to present schedules. So in this conversation, Sean Taylor, coming from the Caribbean, and he's Jamaican, and so he's talking around from his own culture that he comes from more of a polychronic culture. So I just really appreciated the introduction of this term and this concept, and I had a chance to kind of unpack it a little bit more within the context of this conversation, as well as many other thoughts and ideas and concepts around fandom and world building and speculative futurism, some philosophical concepts and ideas. But yeah, just a lot of deep thoughts around the impact of fandom as a tool for social change. So overcoming all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Sean happened on Saturday, February 19th, 2019 at the Immersive Design Summit in San Francisco, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:00.359] Shawn Taylor: My name is Sean Taylor. I'm currently a senior fellow with the Pop Culture Collaborative, looking at what fandom power looks like going forward. I'm the co-founder of the nerdsofcolor.org and the co-founder of the Black Comics Arts Festival. In the immersive space, I do more consulting than creating and how to make richer, culturally relevant story worlds for people and also how to make... events not feel like events, but actually feel like a part of people's mundane, regular spaces. So what is fandom? I think people are asking that question all the time, hence the millions of words of academic research. But I think fandom is really just loving something to the point where you want to participate in it, as long as it brings you joy and belonging. I mean, I think that's like the boilerplate answer for me.
[00:03:52.358] Kent Bye: So maybe you could tell me a bit about your journey with fandom and where it began and how it kind of led to what you're doing today. I'm dyslexic.
[00:03:59.644] Shawn Taylor: Well, I should say I have dyslexia. And I couldn't read. But I learned how to read Book of Three, Lloyd Alexander. It took me a year to get through that book. when I was like, oh, I read really, I was really, really smart with dyslexia. And then I was also able in the future to teach my illiterate grandfather how to read using E.E. Doc Smith books, right? And Star Trek, my grandfather was a huge Twilight Zone and Star Trek and Outer Limits fan. And Star Trek was just like, it completely changed the way that I speak, talk and move through the world. I mean, Star Trek has had as big an impact on me as hip hop culture did growing up in New York. So for me, coming to this work, it's really, it's always about science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and horror. I mean, that's like, I love those things. I think those things can say so much about who we are and where we're going.
[00:04:50.405] Kent Bye: So I guess over the course of a year, there's many different events. Do you have like a rhythm of different events that you absolutely must go to in order to explore these different dimensions of your own personal fandom?
[00:05:01.748] Shawn Taylor: Usually it's people. I'm actually more excited about how people express their fandom than large scale fandom events. Of course, you know, New York Comic Con, Comic Con. indigenous Comic Con, Flame Con. I go to different conventions, but I'm more interested in the people in the comic book shop and like what they're doing. And I can, hey, have you tried this, right? I'm more interested in how people interact online for the most part. But for me, it's really like the flesh space. the in-person stuff, like that's what I'm interested in. Cons can be kind of overwhelming. It's cool to see, but it's still performative and it's still commercial. Whereas I want people like, how does fandom play out in your life? How do you utilize your fandom impulse in your actual life? Not like the pocket universe you create for your fandom, but in your everyday life. That interests me more than anything else.
[00:05:48.228] Kent Bye: So maybe give me a little bit more context of this Pop Culture Collective and what you're doing there in terms of an organization.
[00:05:54.591] Shawn Taylor: So Pop Culture Collaborative is a grant-making organization that funds different projects for people. Like they've done 13XP, they've helped give me money too. But I'm a senior fellow where senior fellows take a particular... subject in pop culture and actually really build out either a model, a story system, a project to address and ask deeper questions about that particular subject. For me, it's the power of fans, just because of my previous work. That's where my senior fellowship is. We have one, Zara Norbush, who did about portals and entryways into stand-up comedy. We had Maita Al-Assan, who did about Muslim stereotypes in Hollywood and how to combat those. And so each person has a niche. and they just are funded to be able to explore that niche and to give a deliverable to the collaborative.
[00:06:38.923] Kent Bye: What are those deliverables? What do they look like?
[00:06:41.043] Shawn Taylor: I mean, there's one called Hawk, H-A-Q-Q in Hollywood that Maita Elassan did. And it's really about how to sidestep Muslim stereotypes. It's a beautiful document. Zara Norbush is creating an actual pipeline in the comedy for non-straight white male comedians. And I have no idea what my deliverable is going to be because I'm researching towards fans and researching towards fans. content creators in relation to fans. So I'm not sure what the final thing will be, but I have like a month to put it together. But I have about 300,000 words of notes that I have to put together into something.
[00:07:18.698] Kent Bye: So you're obviously very immersed in all this pop culture and fandom, and you're producing these different deliverables. And then what happens? Like, who are getting these insights? And then what happens with these insights or these patterns that you're trying to discern as to what's happening in fandom?
[00:07:32.489] Shawn Taylor: Yeah, I think we figure out what the best insertion point is. Like, for example, I personally missed a huge opportunity with Miles Morales, the Into the Spider-Verse movie, where I could have, some of the things I've been researching, I could have actually tested out during the rise of that movie, which I didn't do. But I think that with Captain Marvel coming out, it's a really good time to talk about misogyny in comics culture and being able to do some of the stuff that I've done and other people have done and use that as almost like an intervention around these giant IP pop cultural events.
[00:08:03.402] Kent Bye: Are you looking at some of these behaviors that may be exhibited in the actual artifact of pop culture, like the movie, if there's misogynistic behavior? Or are you actually looking at, in terms of how the fans are relating to each other, the misogynistic behavior and then how you do an intervention of that?
[00:08:18.166] Shawn Taylor: It's usually how people interact with whatever the project is, right? You have comics gave idiots. who are just so trapped in their whitewashed nostalgia that anybody playing in their sandbox, they freak out. But I'm like, what you loved in the past is still there. Like, why are you afraid of something new happening? And so what's the intervention for that? Part of me is like, ignore them, let them go away, let them scheme themselves out, who cares? But there's a really important point to figure out why are you so afraid of multiple stories and pluralistic stories being told? What's the fear? What are you losing? Because pop culture is not a zero sum. If it's good, you just make the table bigger. You just don't sit there. I mean, so people are looking at this as a zero sum and from a deficit model. And what I want to do with fandom and look at fandom and fandom activations and fandom insertions and interventions as an abundance model. There's enough for everybody. And you might like what somebody's doing over there if you can get past your own BS.
[00:09:11.765] Kent Bye: And during the panel this morning, you had mentioned nostalgia. And what is the tension between nostalgia and what is the opposite of nostalgia? And what is this kind of debate about nostalgia?
[00:09:21.074] Shawn Taylor: I think nostalgia is like trauma without the pain. It anchors you in a moment and colonizes a moment. But everything you do going forward is always measured against what was nostalgic for you. And that's not fair to you. It's not fair to anything else that you encounter. It's kind of like having a boyfriend, girlfriend, whomever, and you're always comparing everybody to that one great lover you had 25 years ago. How fair is that? It's not. And I think that being trapped in nostalgia also traps your ability to have an intellectual curiosity. because you're so busy. Well, what about Ghostbusters back in 1980, whatever it was? I'm like, well, you moron, you're 46 years old now. Why are you still back there? You still have the memory. Nothing has changed. You can still go stream or rent or do whatever with Goat. You still can do that. But let these people have their interpretation of it as well. What if the sandwich is only peanut butter forever? Then it wasn't like any other types of foods in the sandwich. It's like, stop trying to gate, because nostalgia is also like a key component to gatekeeping. which I think is so detrimental to any type of community, not community, but like pop cultural work. Well, what's the opposite of nostalgia? There's actually a word for it, and I can't think of what the word is right now, but for me, it's aspirational involvement. Like for me, there's two types of curiosity, right? There's the curiosity to figure out how something works, how to fix it, how to whatever. Then the other curiosity is to just experience something for what it is without bias or judgment. So that second level curiosity is where I think we should all be. And that's the opposite of nostalgia.
[00:10:50.088] Kent Bye: I see. And one of the other really interesting things that you mentioned is these different concepts of time and linear time and how that is a very Western concept of time and how there's maybe non-Western cultures that are looking at other aspects of time. And you maybe could expand on that a little bit in terms of the concept of time and how that relates to story and how we relate to each other.
[00:11:11.397] Shawn Taylor: I mean, there's a researcher, Edward T. Hall. Beyond Culture is one of his books. The Dance of Life. The guy has a bunch of books. He talks about polychronic and monochronic time. Like European, like Germany is a monochronic culture. Trains run on time. One thing happens after the other. Whereas my folks are Caribbean, a polychronic culture because... Grandma's holding the baby on the phone, cooking, helping with homework at the same time. And to like really Western folks, that looks chaotic. But that's not chaotic because that's how we operate. We operate on these multi-levels of these different time signatures and rhythms. And I think with storytelling, we've been almost bludgeoned into a three-act, five-act structure on some Joseph Campbell crap, which Joseph Campbell needs to die for storytelling to get better. And I think that's something that's what we need to all focus on. Like, what's post-Campbell? That's why storytelling.
[00:12:03.572] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot. And I think of Campbell as this like young archetypal journey, like it's very linear and very making choices and taking action where you're really having this very individualistic. It's about individuation of an individual. And I think that the Yen archetypal journey is about how you as an individual either have to have some sort of ego disillusionment experience, but the deeper intention is that you're seeing how you as an individual are connected to this larger whole. And that while Campbell is a very linear way of thinking about a story, there's cycles and cycles upon cycles. And so it's more of a many different cycles that are unfolding and processes. And so it's philosophically the more young archetypal journey is like the more reductive materialism where you start to see things in like false binaries or ways of kind of splitting things very simply. And that if you actually look at the complexity of an ecosystem, then you start to look at things as more of like a metaphor of what an environment is or what an ecosystem is. And that's more of like Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy or Carlo Ravelli's relational quantum mechanics or Chinese philosophy, African philosophy, other sort of non-Western philosophies that within the philosophical community kind of gets put off into like something that's either analytic or continental or all the other things.
[00:13:18.621] Shawn Taylor: because most philosophy as it's taught is white guys jacking each other off. I mean, that's really what it is. And it's very valuable, but it's been weaponized in a way that makes it useless to non-white middle-class people. So being able to look at indigenous philosophy and people try to argue that there's no philosophy because there's no rules there's no teleology there's no like the things that philosophical rules but no there's philosophy you're just not a part of it because you've separated yourself into these continental philosophy and this and that i'm a hegelian so when you start following cults of personality especially when it comes to the mind and epistemology ontology you're doing yourself a huge disservice
[00:13:59.895] Kent Bye: Yeah, so I've been really interested in the Chinese philosophy and these other metaphors because I think that actually looking at Eastern cultures and the mythologies and the stories that they tell, I think that a lot of these alternatives to the Campbell, you start to see some insights as to where that might go, but it's also not trying to have complete authorship, which is what Campbell has, but allowing a context to be built and that the story is being created by the people who are experiencing it. So as they come out of it, then they're the ones who are telling the story. And that seems like what a lot of what's happening with fandom is that it's putting that authorship back into the hands of the fans.
[00:14:34.579] Shawn Taylor: It's like the losing guitars idea of the rhizome. This is what's happening. Things are branching off into really great and wonderful things. And I think what fandom does it treats whatever ip it is as a two-way street i'm no longer voyeur looking at something it's like oh you mean i was dissatisfied with the last season of buffy i'm gonna go write an entire final season to wrap it up the way that i think is important or oh my god you're gonna cancel the expanse i'm gonna galvanize the story hasn't been told i'm getting this show back on the air or in the sense of ghost in the shell why are you whitewashing and I'm gonna make sure this movie tanks, right? And so there's a level of power there. Is it too much power in some cases? Yeah, but I think there's a level of power that fans have now that they only have ever utilized for commerce and commercial reasons that are now they're recognizing that, wait a minute, we can actually shift culture. and it's very infancy, it's very nascent right now, but next two or three years, I think fandom is probably, I'm just saying this, not because I'm a fandom scholar or whatever, but I'm saying this because I think it's true, I think that fandom is gonna be the next great playing field or tool for mass social change.
[00:15:49.116] Kent Bye: You had mentioned this polychronic time, and I'm just curious, what is your experience of how you either experience polychronic time or how you make sense of what that means?
[00:15:57.565] Shawn Taylor: I mean, I grew up in a Caribbean household, so that's just kind of my baseline. When I went to other households that were very regimented, I felt really out of place. When I went to my white friend's house, I was like... It's so quiet. It's so like organized. Before it wasn't organized, it was compartmentalized, what it felt like. And so for me, now I can kind of like move in and out. I go back home, visit my family in Jamaica, then it's like, oh, I'm back at it again. You know, it's like all relationships as opposed to schedules. And there's a difference. There's a huge psychic difference when you relate to somebody as opposed to, like for example, you go into like a land assessor's office in the Philippines and people put their chancletas, the chancletas, the sandals in line and they go sit someplace else. And people respect that. That would never happen in a Western society. Somebody would butt in line and be like, well, it was just shoes here. It wasn't a person. but there's rituals that happen in cultures that happen, different time signatures and different rhythmic signatures that make sense for them that Western folks come through and lose their minds because it's so alien.
[00:16:59.232] Kent Bye: Yeah, the way that I think about these differences between these two is that the Greeks had two words from time. One was Kronos time and one was Kairos time and that the Kronos time is a little bit of like the unending march of time and that it is have that linear mental scheduled feeling and that the Kairos is more about the quality of the moment, which is that you're in the context of these different cycles and these different rhythms and that you are paying attention to your embodied experience and your emotions and you're listening and you're actually in participation with the larger connectivity of the universe rather than being sort of individuated.
[00:17:28.797] Shawn Taylor: to moment to moment to moment. And I think that once you realize that we're temporal beings, we're also time travelers in temporality, that makes it, for me, it's easy. I feel more at ease recognizing, oh, wait a minute. I can be all things at the same time. It's not just marching inexorably towards death, which I think why we look at time. We look at time as an enemy and we look at rhythm as an anomaly when they're just really constituent parts of who we are.
[00:17:56.465] Kent Bye: Yeah, you had mentioned chaos magic. I'm just curious how chaos magic kind of fits into all of this for you.
[00:18:01.188] Shawn Taylor: I mean, I'm a lapsed Catholic. We're one of the future-making Catholics that there were. I mean, but for me, chaos magic is really about being able to take whatever elements I wanted to create who I was on my terms with my agency. And so I was able to like, oh, I'm a dyslexic. poverty kid in the projects who now has gone to university, magna cum laude, graduate school, magna cum laude on multiple occasions. Like, who ever would have thought that? But that was for me, being able to craft an identity that was authentic but aspirational at the same time. It wasn't who I was. I actually created like a ghost body that I had to go towards and inhabit. And that's what Chaos Magic did for me. It allowed me to make formula to accomplish things that I never would have accomplished without my exposure to chaos magic.
[00:18:51.757] Kent Bye: And imagine that being from Jamaica and the Caribbean culture, that there's a little bit of either voodoo or part of the religious practice there that may have a lot of similarities to that as well.
[00:19:02.223] Shawn Taylor: My family is Catholic and Rasta and Seventh-day Adventists and Anglican, and we have Obeah practitioners in our family. For me, those are cultural touchstones, but they didn't speak to me as much because what chaos does... And we need to move on from cast, there's a lot of problems in cast magic, but my foundation is cast magic, so I'll speak from there. It was always about interacting with the world on your terms. Right. I want to go impress a girl. I'm going to dress up like James Bond. I'm going to listen to James Bond music and I'm going to get in that zone and I'm going to have that confidence and I'm going to talk to this person and the courage to do so. Right. For me, like, it's weird, though, I had a reverse moment when I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the very first time, when the two government agents go to see Dr. Jones in the library and they pull out this big illuminated Bible. I'm like, you can go to school for that? And my mind just got blown. And so then I went to the library and got every book I could get, you know, being dyslexic hard as hell, but I went through every book on mythology and folklore, learned to read German to read some of the folklore researchers in the original German and like all these things. Then, you know, first undergraduate degrees in philosophy, it was religion. It was like, you know, and I made it because of being able to craft a future version of myself that I wanted to occupy.
[00:20:22.165] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's interesting to look at how so much of the pop culture is using these types of forward-looking aspects of either magic or these abilities that are beyond the human potential of what exists now, but it's sort of calling in these almost like mythological elements of these magic and then seeing like what would life be like if we had these abilities.
[00:20:41.094] Shawn Taylor: And I think that most of us are mythically illiterate. We forgot, we can't read the bigger stories that connect us. We're real atomistic. We're really down. And I think that's, I mean, I guess for science, it's great. But for human interaction, I don't think it's as great. I think we need to go back to the mythic. I'm not saying that we want to tell each other there's a sky god in the sky who's making it boom. But I think we need to understand that the bigger story that we're occupying together should make us swell with wonder and awe. and approaching the world with wonder and awe is how I try to live my life. And that gives me a mythic sense I think a lot of people don't have. It's like why people look at somebody on the street and they're angry and they identify, but somebody on the street who's happy and full of awe, why are they crazy? What's wrong with them? That's a really ugly default to have for me.
[00:21:28.956] Kent Bye: Yeah, I agree that there seems to be like a lack of mythic understanding and that perhaps that reductive way of looking at things has led to the society and all the structures that we have. And that either way that you look at it, we're in a bit of a crisis and trying to come up with a new paradigm. And so there was a panel this morning that was bringing together about 15 different people that were coming from many different perspectives. And so it seems like that there's a sense of how the power of immersion and immersive storytelling and fandom could be used to change the existing culture. And so I'm just curious to hear a bit about the deeper context for how this came about and how you see this unfolding of how this kind of mythic understanding can bring about larger change.
[00:22:09.686] Shawn Taylor: I mean, I think part of it, I think it's we overcomplicate things as humans. And we always make the mistake of conflating difficult with complex. This stuff is not complex at all. People have been changing the world with stories since time began. Before the fork happened, the fork was a story and the fork became an actuality, right? I mean, these small things. And so I think what's going to happen, there's going to be two camps. There's going to be that Entertainment should only be entertainment, which is bullshit, because entertainment is political. And there's other people who realize, oh, there's these multiple points. So hey, how do we get fans to be immersed in this environment? And how do we get them to come out of that immersive environment and take the lessons that they've learned to actually actualize in the world? And I think that's where the me, that's where the tension is, the good tension. That's where I'm like, oh, this is really not complicated. It's just difficult. It's not complicated at all. And like, that's the part that's going to be super excited. That's the part where, you know, I've been toying around idea of starting a company that actually really works with other people to do these things, because fans are always told to basically have opinions and there's never an ask. And so how do we, from the architecture of an IP, how do we embed our ask?
[00:23:22.534] Kent Bye: Well, from the perspective of fandom, what's some of the most interesting movements or events or things that are happening in the world of fandom that you look to in terms of like maybe an early indicator of where this is all going?
[00:23:32.726] Shawn Taylor: I think all the hype around Black Panther. I mean, nobody cared about Black Panther. Everybody cared about Wakanda. And so that is an immersive world. I mean, just like with Avatar, with James Cameron, you know, Fern Gully in space, but here you go, people are crying after the movie because they felt this world was so important. You got them talking about ecology, deep ecology, talking about radical interconnectedness, things that they weren't even on their vocabulary radar until that movie came out. And with Black Panther, here's our people who are talking about Pan-Africanism. Here's the people who are talking about having a Blackness in the world never touched by slavery. And what would happen, like Muda Baruka, who's a dub poet from Jamaica says, slavery isn't African history, slavery interrupted African history. And that's what was so great about Wakanda. Like, wow, what would Black history or Black life in the world be, the diaspora be, without slavery? And that was a question I think people were trying to ask for decades. but never had the words. And I think that what Ryan Coogler in Marvel did was actually put that question pretty bluntly out there and showed us a possible answer.
[00:24:38.496] Kent Bye: Yeah, because you studied fandom and I'm really curious to hear your own personal experience of Black Panther and the fandom. Like, what was it like for you to watch Black Panther and then to see what kind of unfolded after that?
[00:24:50.547] Shawn Taylor: I mean, me and a couple of friends bought out four theaters and made them free for all these kids and families who wouldn't be able to. We rented school buses, had to go back and forth, and it was a phenomenal experience. And for me, Black Panther was like, finally. Like, this is the greatest thing. Like, I mean, for me, it wasn't even the movie. The movie was a good movie. It's a great movie. But it was seeing parents and their kids crying and hugging. And like that one funny video on social media, like this is what white people feel like all the time, all the time after every movie. Oh, my God. That was like being able to walk around with a sense of pride and not having to have whiteness as a default. Right. But having your culture, your even fictional projection of your culture as a cultural default was the most like literally one of those heavy cultural shifts I've ever experienced.
[00:25:43.369] Kent Bye: Wow. And there seems to be a whole movement of people that are thinking about Wakanda and trying to flesh out this world and Wakanda Dream Lab and these other. What else is happening around immersive entertainment or in the space in terms of different organizations or things that are happening around Wakanda?
[00:25:58.453] Shawn Taylor: For me, the best thing that came out was WakandaCon, Wakanda Dream Lab, Terry Marshall, Aisha Shetland-Ford, a couple other folks, where they actually did an anthology based on the end of Black Panther, where they opened their borders. So they're like, okay, so what does migration look like in relation to this fictional land? And so this anthology, it's free. I think it's wakandagreamlab.com. I can't remember. But that anthology is... I know people, policymakers, who are reading that to the lack of a migration. We did such a really good job of encapsulating what does it mean to move. What does it mean to move from one place? Why do people move? What's the impact of them leaving? And what's the impact of them entering? And so I think for me, that has been like out of ours, though, the Wakanda paratext, we'll call it, which got us like a freaking academic nerd. But the paratext around Wakanda, that to me has been the most significant. And the Wakanda syllabus are two things to me that have been the most impactful culturally.
[00:26:55.543] Kent Bye: Well, and I've also just been hearing and talking to different people. Monica Villasquita, someone who is a futurist that travels around the world, and she said that there's these movements of decolonization that are happening all over the world and that there seem to be explicit talking about that, the impact of dreaming what a world will look like after decolonization has happened, where you have this sort of return to those indigenous roots. And so just curious if you see that as a pattern in terms of worlds and story or just also in the culture of this decolonization idea.
[00:27:23.809] Shawn Taylor: I mean, it's a self-defense mechanism. It's an antibody that's fighting the virus. We have to think in a decolonial way to be able to move forward. Because I tell a buddy of mine, we had a funny argument conversation the other night. I'm like, he's like a really staunch anti-racist. He goes out and I'm like, me, I don't consider white supremacy. If white supremacy comes into my space, I'm going to kick the shit out of it. But until then, I don't go looking for a fight. I build what I'm going to build over here. But if you encroach, then we have to have a different conversation about that. And for me, that's how I raised my kid. You know, she knows how to defend herself. She understands this, but she's also able to celebrate and be without always having to have oppression as a reference point.
[00:28:04.892] Kent Bye: What's that called to go out and build the future in that way? Does it have a name? Is it like world building, future dreaming? What do you call that?
[00:28:11.196] Shawn Taylor: I don't really call it. Some people call it visionary fiction. Some people will call it different things. I don't call it anything yet because I'm actually working on a framework to work with social justice organizations and social work organizations to do this work and the therapy. There's really no name. I'm going to keep that kind of under wraps right now because I have like I'm writing a bunch about this right now as a framework and as an intervention model. So I'm kind of hold that one to myself a little bit.
[00:28:33.248] Kent Bye: OK, well, for me, I was thinking about like world building as a part of it. But for me, I just thought of like future dreaming because you're trying to imagine the future and dream it, but actually like future dreaming, world building or something. But is there going to be some term like what that's called? Because philosophically, it feels like there's a lot of critical theory that's criticizing things, but there doesn't seem to be as much stuff that's trying to build that. And I'm just wondering if there's a name that's been called it yet.
[00:28:55.957] Shawn Taylor: There has been, but I mean, I'm working on something, but I'm a lapsed philosopher. And part of it is that I'm tired of taxonomy and I'm tired of that whole argument. What it is is like, let's act on it because you'll be in a room full of social people or justice impact folks. And we'll spend an hour and a half arguing about what to call something. And we just wasted an hour and a half not doing any action. Language is important. Make no mistake, it's important. But I think we need to actually figure out how action dictates language and how language dictates action.
[00:29:26.829] Kent Bye: No, that's a good point. No, I think it's happening. I think that it's happening now. And that's as I'm covering it, I feel like unable to make the philosophical arguments that I want to without this proper term to call it.
[00:29:37.137] Shawn Taylor: And that's okay. I think that ambiguity, that cultural and philosophical ambiguity is where we need to be right now. My grandmother had a word that says, if you name it, you kill it. And let's just let the fucking thing breathe for a little bit before we start trying to name it to death. So I love feeling off kilter right now. I love the ambiguity. I love like, I really don't know right now. And I love it because it's giving me more space to grow.
[00:29:59.281] Kent Bye: Great. And so for you, what are some of the biggest either open questions you're trying to answer or open problems you're trying to solve?
[00:30:06.284] Shawn Taylor: I mean, I'm really I mean, like for me, it's like being somebody who's multicultural. My family's multicultural. What does Fernando Ortiz's idea of transculturalism actually look like? Because diversity and multiculturalism are really inherently conservative. and serve to assuage feelings as opposed to build a map, a roadmap for action and interconnection. And so Fernando Ortiz is an ethnomusicologist from Cuba in the 40s. He has this thing called transculture. And I think we need to understand what that means. It's not going to be pretty or ugly, but what's the benefits and the trade-offs of this world? Because I want to live in a world where, you know, my six foot nine Scottish friend and i can be friends with our friends without all this distrust happening right and i think i never understood why anybody could be racist or homophobic or misogynist because how can you devalue somebody else's story like what is it about their story that you think you're losing and so one of my biggest things to try to do with fandom and art and things is try to really destroy the idea of the zero sum and be real pluralistic understand pluralism is valuable for everybody And that's kind of where my focus is.
[00:31:16.930] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive design and immersive storytelling is and what it might be able to enable?
[00:31:25.981] Shawn Taylor: I think it's going to be about healing. I think so many of us are living with a level of anxiety or a level of depression because we live in a world that basically tells us we suck so many ways. I mean, you go to the grocery store, one side is magazines telling women that you suck and can't please your boyfriend. Other side's candy. So you're finding solace. You're going back and forth. You're finding solace. But I think what the immersive design world should be focusing on and can't focus on is how do we heal people? Kind of like the ancient Greeks, the Asclepian. You know, you walk down the hallway and people are behind the walls whispering to you, you're going to feel better, you're going to feel better. And people are feeling better because even our many others in Colombia has a new MS now in narrative medicine. Like we are doing all of these things now. But I think that widespread cultural healing is where this can go. And I think that's going to be focused for a lot of people. Like having like a spa is immersive reality, but it's very regimented. Massage for 25 minutes, hot stones for five minutes. And it's like, no, what if we did an entire immersive space that's all about healing and reconciliation and self-care without the Lululemon yoga pants buzzwords around it?
[00:32:37.217] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:32:41.159] Shawn Taylor: I just wanted to make it more accessible and inclusive to people who aren't in the community. There's got to be better roads to advertise. There's got to be better roads for letting people know that this happens because people would be interested if they felt included, especially marginalized folks.
[00:32:56.227] Kent Bye: Yeah, just to follow up on that, maybe you could talk a little bit about the, was it called the Black Comet or the other organization that you had founded around that?
[00:33:02.967] Shawn Taylor: The Black Comics Arts Festival, we just had our fifth year. It's really about highlighting creators on the margins. that aren't affiliated with any of the big three, DC, Marvel, or Image. All independent creators. Well, we will have guests that are part of huge communities, but we want the individual creator who wouldn't get the pub otherwise to be celebrated. And that's where it's really Black Comics Arts Festival is about. Like me, John Jennings, Aaron Grazell, I mean, Sanford Carpenter, Damian Duffy. There's all these people who really wanted, you know, we love this form, but not all of us love superheroes. So we're going to go into horror, you know, as John Jennings says, the ethnogothic, like all these things. And so that's what Black Comics Arts Festival is about. And thenerdsofcolor.org is the online portal for marginalized folks to talk about pop culture.
[00:33:49.335] Kent Bye: Great. Awesome.
[00:33:49.956] Shawn Taylor: Well, thank you so much. Thank you. I appreciate it.
[00:33:52.708] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the voices of your podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast and please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a, this is part of podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
