Worldbuilding and speculative design was a big theme at Sundance New Frontier 2021, and I had a chance to participate in an experience that facilitated a collaborative & deliberative process of worldbuilding that was called Beyond the Breakdown. Created by Tony Patrick, Lauren Lee McCarthy, and Grace Lee, it builds off some of the foundational work and processes developed by Alex McDowell and the USC Worldbuilding Institute. The core idea of worldbuilding is to design the underlying context and structures of society projected out within the context of a future time and place, and then to apply an evolutionary cultural, technological, economic, political model in order to imagine some potential futures from a variety of different perspectives and points of view. In the end, there will hopefully be some common themes and consensus that emerges.
In order to facilitate this process the Beyond the Breakdown collaborators created a simplified teleconference application that replicates the feeling of a group Zoom call. There were six participants who are on this call along with an AI-assistant named Serenity that’s puppeteered by a human off screen. The goal is to project out into the future into 2050, and then have a group discussion that’s catalyzed by a series of prompts provided by the AI assistant. The goal is to find the underlying principles and values that are consistent today and in the future, to imagine a better potential future, and then create a collaborative community dialogue to see where there are common interests and goals so that people can individuals within a community can start to think about what types of actions that can take today in order to make these imaginal futures a reality today.
I’m really excited about the power and potential of democratizing these types of community worldbuilding practices, an especially the potential of using immersive storytelling to actually build out some prototypes of these speculative futures within a virtual environmnt in order to start to prototype the large-scale designs, architecture, and emergent social dynamics of some of these imaginal futures. We’ll be taking a look at some specific examples of this in our next episode on Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So continuing on in my series of looking at some of the immersive experiences from Sundance 2021, today's episode is with an experience called Beyond the Breakdown. So this is a group discussion to get like six people together to do this world building exercise. So world building is this really important concept that is into a lot of different films and stories and science fiction, as well as a lot of virtual reality experiences. you're trying to build up a whole world and context that has its own rules and has a vision of the future that's different from right now. So it allows you to really tap into this space of imagination to imagine these potential futures. And when you bring together all these different perspectives and points of view, then you start to have these interesting discussions to be able to start to see where there's convergence around these different ideas and trying to create this shared vision of a shared future. So world building was a theme that actually came up quite a bit this year at Sundance 2021, as well as this concept of speculative design. So creating these experiences that are trying to embody these potential futures. And the whole idea is that you start to brainstorm and come up with these ideas and eventually start to embed those into either immersive experiences or to start to actually build them within your local communities. I had a chance to talk to the creators of this experience, Tony Patrick, Lauren Lee McCarthy, as well as Grace Lee. They were part of a world-building residency program that was back in 2017. They actually made a lot of very precedent predictions for what was going to happen in the year 2020. So as everything was unfolding, just as they had predicted so many different dimensions of how this past year was going to unfold, they decided to come back together and to create this experience called Beyond the Breakdown to be able to hone down some of the principles into this process, but also to get it into more hands to facilitate this type of community world building process. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Tony, Lauren, and Grace happened on Saturday, January 30th, 2021. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:16.798] Tony Patrick: Tony Patrick, world builder. And by that, I mean, I assist communities and groups of people in co-creation processes, which generate speculative futures or fictional worlds that can be distilled down into modern day, real world actionable items and impacts. And my background has been in TV and film. It eventually. converged into comics and video games. I also have a video game initiative for black and brown youth called the Tenfold Gaming Initiative that also pushed me into VR and emerging technologies and into a wonderful residency where I met Grace Lee and Lauren McCarthy, who I am collaborating with today.
[00:03:07.162] Lauren Lee McCarthy: Awesome. Yeah, I'm Lauren Lee McCarthy. I'm an artist and I'm often working with code or technology in different forms. But I really think of my practice as grounded in performance and asking questions about what our social relationships look like in the midst of surveillance and automation and algorithmic living. So my first experience with world building was as Tony mentioned in that residency that we did three years ago. And I think with this piece, It's a little bit different than some of the art that I'm making normally, but there's a lot of similar themes in terms of thinking about AI and our relationship to it and conversational automation and how that plays out for better or worse. And yeah, besides that, I'm also an associate professor at UCLA and I also run a nonprofit, which is focused on prioritizing access and diversity for people learning to code, especially in the art space.
[00:04:05.152] Grace Lee: Nice. I'm Grace Lee. I'm a filmmaker, kind of traditional filmmaker, and I first was introduced to worldbuilding in this same residency. It was actually a Sundance residency with Tony and Lauren. It was a New Frontiers residency that Kamal Sinclair invited us all to participate in. And it was the first time I actually had heard of the term, but in many ways, the topic we were exploring was the future of work in Los Angeles in 30 years from 2017. But a lot of it related quite a bit to what I've been doing as a filmmaker, kind of organizer, someone working with a lot of archival material and things like that. So, Yeah, it's been an interesting evolution for the last three years, you know, working with these guys in that first residency and then evolving our collective project building since then.
[00:04:59.542] Kent Bye: So, yeah, I've been able to hear Alex Miguel speak a number of times about world building and his involvement with Minority Report. I think it's probably the touchstone where he starts to build out the world. Before there was a script, there was like an intention and maybe like a idea of the story, but Really listening to Alex, one of the big things it seems like he tries to do is to bring up lots of different experts from different domains, have them all come together in conversation and start to think about what the street corners of the future look like in terms of how all these different contexts start to blend together. And so it's like this speculative design process where you're asking people to imagine a future that doesn't quite exist yet, given their specific orientation. And then from there, start to see what can happen today to be able to start to build into that. And that's why I think your project to be able to actually formalize that into a process of a conversation of dreaming into these futures of speculative design, but also bringing it back into today. And so I'm wondering if you could each go back to that world building residency program and maybe just give a little bit more flavor or context in terms of the, that project and what you really took away from that process of what that project was and then what you took away in terms of these underlying principles of how to think about all the different contexts that you would be designing and what the outcome of that would be. And then that is leading us to today.
[00:06:23.964] Tony Patrick: So in terms of. the world building residency. And I'm glad you brought up Alex McDowell, because our residency took place at USC at the USC kind of World Building Institute, which is housed in a facility at USC. And Alex McDowell actually gave us suggestions at the end of our build. It's one of his hubs. I also had the chance and the opportunity to work with him on another build following our future of work. 2037 Los Angeles based build. And I want to get into that second build in a minute. But the major takeaway that I got was that world building was my practice. And what I mean by that is, is that I finally discovered an umbrella in which all of my talents could congeal into a process that could help spin out to help iterate more outcomes. Right. So it's great that you mentioned Minority Report because the light that went off in my head was, wait a minute, Minority Report has also been hailed as a movie that has spun out over about 100 patents as well, right? And so a lot of the gestural technology targeted advertising that was visualized in that film exists today. And so for me, it split into three outcomes, which is like the ability to spin out, to iterate art, speculative technologies, right? The technologies that we'd like to see in the world that we may need. And then third, civic solutions, right? And so I also had the pleasure to work with the facilitators of our original world build. They had a company called Pigeonhole, and I know that they are iterating into another company as we speak. But they're the ones who introduced all the experts to us in our world building session. They flew people in and we had a chance to explore gaming and advertising trends and marketing and to look at the lens of politics. So I'm, and I'm going to try to shorten this so I can let my collaborators speak. But one of the, the other major outcomes of this build and trust me, Kent, we're still building. as we're talking, as we speak today. We looked at ancestral AI, community AI, renewal centers, hyperlocal economies, gifting platforms, humans as kind of the liaison between, you know, man and machine, in terms of AI, in particular, the future of documentary, which Grace also was diving into at the end of it. And so all of those outcomes, came from, I would say, trying to figure out how to build a protopian version of Los Angeles 2037. And the thing that has brought us back together, and then I'm going to pass the mic here, is that we couldn't figure out what would push Angelenos into alignment. What would push us towards a hyperlocal protopia? And we realized that we needed a crisis event, right? In screenwriting, you need the Dark Knight of the Soul. And so we realized that we needed a breakdown of systems, some civil unrest, and a massive data hack to get us to a protopia in 2037, Los Angeles. And at first, we called that event, ah, the Second Civil War. But due to a little bit of pushback, we decided to reframe that as Breakdown 2020. And we did that in 2017. So last year, when we watched exactly what we imagined happening in 2020, we decided to kind of unite forces again and continue building. Obviously, there was some merit to the process and in our union. So I'd like to pass that on to Grace and Lauren.
[00:10:12.117] Kent Bye: I just want to interject that that's amazing, the prescience that can happen in these types of processes. I mean, also horrifying that that's actually what happened, but when you look at it at the long scale of this, in order to get to that protopian vision of 2037, we kind of have to be going through what we're going now, which I think could help recontextualize where we're at in this moment and where it could lead in the future. So anyway, I just want to sort of add that in there because that's pretty amazing.
[00:10:39.985] Lauren Lee McCarthy: Yeah, it was very strange to read some of the texts that we had written in March or April, think about what was happening and then continued to happen the rest of 2020. Yeah, I mean, I think Tony covered it really well. The only thing I would add is just that I think what's attractive to me about working in this way is that like Tony and Grace and I have really different practices, but we're able to come together through this process in a way that, you know, we're building something together, but also in parallel, we can each be kind of like, moving our own threads forward. So as an example, out of that first world build, like I had this kind of dream of becoming Amazon Alexa. And so this was sort of like a side or one of the outputs of the world that, you know, I put after that world that I continued to develop for several years after that. So I guess that's what has kept me engaged with this process, even though it's quite different than how I normally work. It's just that opportunity to, yeah, work with Grace and Tony and, you know, different collaborators where we really are working and thinking in different ways. And so when we come together in conversation, it's like a structure for coming together in conversation that even though we are approaching things from such different angles, we're able to really like find common ground and build something between us.
[00:11:53.625] Grace Lee: Yeah, I would add that, you know, when I came into the world building residency, I was really excited because I was getting not bored but a little bit tired with this sort of same narrative structures that I was immersed in, in terms of documentary. And two takeaways for me, aside from Breakdown 2020, which we were imagining back in 2017, the other one was when we talked about the future of work in 30 years in Los Angeles, I started applying that to myself as a documentary filmmaker. Like, what is my job going to be? Like, it's not going to be what I'm doing right now because I'm already bored with that, right? And so, you know, we started thinking about what's interesting about world building is like this aspect of conversation, kind of open-ended exploring ideas and imagining another world. And I had happened to have worked on this a few years prior, a documentary about the activist Grace Lee Boggs, who really talks about conversation as this sort of building block of organizing and activism and stuff. And I had this idea of ancestral AI, like, who are the elders that can kind of help guide us through, like, all the traumas and crises and rebellions and revolutions that, like she did through the 20th century. And so that was an idea that kept coming back in addition to another piece I had done prior to the world building residency, which was this interactive piece about the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest. And it just felt like as we were imagining the world 30 years from now, it seems like every 30 years, there's like a rebellion or some kind of uprising unrest in Los Angeles, whether it was the Watts riots, the Rodney King riots, and we're like, well, it's probably going to happen in 2020, or let's just sort of explore, like, look at the conditions around us in terms of politics and what's going on in the country. And, you know, Breakdown 2020 just felt, like, plausible enough. And so we wrote it down as, like, a kind of, here's our history. And then, like Lauren mentioned, in April or May of this year, or especially after the murder of George Floyd, I remember texting these two. I'm like, it's happening. Like, what are we doing, you know? And I think that was the beginning of Beyond the Breakdown.
[00:14:04.331] Kent Bye: Nice. Is that a document that you put together breakdown 2020? Is that available online anywhere?
[00:14:09.475] Grace Lee: Uh, not public.
[00:14:11.036] Tony Patrick: Well, we'll have to discuss that.
[00:14:13.338] Kent Bye: Okay. It'd be very interesting to read that in hindsight.
[00:14:16.220] Tony Patrick: And now that we're in 2021, we should make a landing page or something. Great. And Lauren and put that there because I mean, what's also interesting is that, so I think what month did we reconvene was that like July, August. So I've been had a rapid response. residency. And from what I believe, and I know Lauren can speak to this way better than I can, Lauren was part of that residency and received a small grant to look into a project or create a project that was basically geared towards a COVID response. And we utilize that as an opportunity to reconvene our work and collaborate once again. And the reason why I'm mentioning that is that in one of those sessions, I want to bring up the rupture We spoke about, although we're building Protopias, we really tried to embrace some of the challenges that we're facing in modern day. And we talked about this point of no return, and this has appeared in other builds that I've been part of, which is, what is that point? When is the day going to occur where we realize that we can't turn back, right? And that we have to move ahead or we have to barrel through. And I think the joke was like, oh, you mean the rapture? And I don't know, Grace, if it was you or someone else, but I think it was you, Grace, when you mentioned, no, it's the rupture. You know, it's the day where things just split. And honestly, I think there have been two days in the past, I would say, four or five months where I'm like, OK, it's the rupture. I think one was that orange haze over the Bay Area. Grace texted me on that day and was like, oh, might be the rupture. And I think the second was the Capitol riots. And this is, you know, for me, another day where there's no turning back. We get a chance to see what the past four years in particular, or, you know, more than that, a lifetime of this kind of strain of supremacy, if you will, that keeps rearing its head in a myriad of ways. And so what are we going to do post rupture? Now is the question.
[00:16:25.723] Grace Lee: Kent, to your question about whether that document exists, I was thinking about it. The only thing we did not predict was the pandemic. I mean, we talked about the racial unrest, political nationalists. And I think we talked about the climate, which we've all experienced. There was even a data dump, which we've all experienced in the last multiple times. But not the pandemic. We weren't thinking about that.
[00:16:54.340] Kent Bye: Yeah, what's really striking to me when I really look at the history of a lot of technologies of virtual reality, especially, I could see how there's these connections to pop culture and science fiction and you have Neuromancer by William Gibson, you have Snow Crash. Back in very early days, you have The Ultimate Display by Ivan Sellerlin, which was sort of the white paper that kicked off and Even before that, you have the sensorama and other aspects of Link Trainer. But there's ways in which that artists and creators kind of slip into these speculative designs to really think about the fundamentals of our human nature and how do those fundamentals play out in these different contexts as you have this evolutionary trajectory of our culture and all the technology and our economy and our political systems and everything else. You really have to have at least some model of saying, here's where we're at now and here's where we want to be in the future and what that looks like. And I think that's such a rich space to be able to start to have a collaborative process of doing that with a group of people, like this project that you have with Beyond the Breakdown, of having these questions that are being asked by this AI serenity, but asking people to really step into that speculative design and really think about where things are at now and what things might look like into the future. And it can either go towards a utopian or dystopic area. I think in my session, at least, we had folks that started right off the bat being like, oh yeah, climate change is going to be really terrible by 2050. Or you can go more of like, oh, here's the ideal world that we could live into. And I think it's like some tension of that. But I'm just curious to hear about your process of trying to take this vast, you know, like at the end of Minority Report, they have a fully fledged movie that had input from all these experts that were distilled down into these architecture and cultural artifacts that turned into a hundred different patents. So that future dreaming process is very powerful, but yet to really break it down step-by-step in a grounded, pragmatic conversation that people are having now, and then to connect the dots between this imaginal future and then how that can be embodied today. I think that's the big thing that I took away from Beyond the Breakdown is like, this is a group process where you can start to do that, imagine the future, and then come back grounded to today, to what you can do today to be able to get to that on that trajectory. So yeah, I'm just curious to hear about that framework and how you structured that as a conversation with six people and with the AI to be able to help moderate that. I guess there's two parts there. There's the AI part and there's the world building conversation part, which maybe we'll start with the world building part and then we'll sort of get to the AI after that.
[00:19:23.091] Tony Patrick: So if it's all right, Lauren, I'll talk about the world building and if you want to chime in on the AI. Okay, perfect. So beyond the breakdown really has is a expression of a myriad of world builds that I've experienced since 2017. And so basically what I consider my process to be, and this is an iteration of, I'd say some of the other world building processes that are out there or a convergence of some of them. But when we talk about experts, I think that the major distinction is bringing experts in. It's perfect in terms of, let's say kicking the tires on a world or a shared vision that you're building. However, for me, I think of it as a community world building process. And I find that people from different backgrounds, nationalities, genders, lifestyles, all coming together to sit down at a table to imagine and play in the sandbox together usually yields solutions that we wouldn't have thought of individually or in other contexts. And so my work moving from the future of LA into, I did this in Detroit, with a group of nine black Detroit residents who wanted to take Grace's concept of ancestral AI. And they said, get rid of the artificial. All we want is AI. And I said, does AI mean ancestral intelligence? And they're like, yeah, that's what we want. So then that's, I'm still playing around with this AI concept. But in Kansas City, working with Pigeonhole in particular, Joe and Trish and Dion and Linda Han And Mark Beam, there was an opportunity to take the most dangerous intersection of Linwood and Troost in Kansas City and reimagine that as a hub of a regenerative community, you know, which includes hydroponics, biofrequency and voting platforms that were all online. So each community that I've been part of has helped me test out a personal roadmapping process that I have. and kind of unlock this conversational magic that can yield outcomes that I've experienced time and time again, the moment that we put three to six people together from different backgrounds in an imagination space and give them the opportunity to play and imagine together.
[00:21:42.093] Lauren Lee McCarthy: Yeah, I mean in terms of structuring the conversation, it's like Tony's describing these experiences that have expanded over days or months or years, and how do you do that in 30 to 60 minutes with a group of people that haven't met each other before. I think the AI part for us was really interesting, both as like a prototype for the future, but also as a mechanism that destabilizes things enough that people are kind of shifted into like, okay, this is sort of a different space. So I'm going to like open my mind a little bit. At least that's what we're going for. And then having this automation of aspects of it to move people through, like when we're thinking about what those questions would be or how to move people, it was really trying to strike some balance between like people that are totally new to world building, like how do you walk people into that process without it just seeming too overwhelming or abstract, but also giving enough space for people to really take in directions that they wanted to. So there were like a lot of balancing. So that was one. Another one was like, how do you balance between thinking about these large systems of a world that you're imagining while still tapping into something that feels personal? Because I think when it just gets speculative and theoretical, that's, I don't know, there's something lost there too. And then I think trying to end it with getting really specific about like what, okay, you've imagined this world, you've talked speculatively, theoretically, imaginatively, but like, do you actually want this? And what is the first step towards that? And then, you know, in the follow up, reminding people that, hey, these were the actions you committed to, are you going to go do that now? So it's really a balance of all these different factors. And we did a lot of practice sessions, kind of iterating and refining and I think one of the most interesting things is just how, with each group, it's really different. Everyone responds in a different way, and the dynamic is different. So the prompts are sort of a structure in which the people coming to it pour themselves into it.
[00:23:39.171] Tony Patrick: And then there's Serenity.
[00:23:42.813] Lauren Lee McCarthy: Yes.
[00:23:43.474] Tony Patrick: Which is, as Lauren stated, we're prototyping. I feel like we're prototyping community AI and building this AI character. which is centered around our care, you know, next level Siri with a little bit more, I'm not going to say the AI has heart. However, maybe it's tapping into our own, you know, an opportunity for us to reflect and practice collective care.
[00:24:11.774] Grace Lee: I was, I was going to add that over the summer when we started meeting again like I haven't, you know, we've been in touch Tony Lauren and I but we haven't really seen each other. But when Lauren proposed that we continue these conversations were, you know, we were just everyone stuck in their home. quarantining and didn't want to put a bunch of pressure on us to achieve something, but really like the act of just having conversations with each other about what we're living through right now was really healing, you know? And we brought in, we each brought in another person, you know, that we thought would be into this building together. And that was great to like include some new, fresh voices into the mix as well. But just the simple act of like connecting in this situation that we're all in was really nourishing, I'd say.
[00:25:02.858] Kent Bye: Yeah, as time has gone on, I think I've more and more identified as world building as a practice that I engage in, but through the medium of podcasting and oral history, because I've been tracking the evolution of VR since May of 2014 and gone to a hundred different events and somewhere between 1500 to 1600 oral history interviews. And at the very end, I asked people, what do you think the ultimate potential of VR is and what it might be able to enable? And In that, what ends up happening is that people collapse usually into a singular context and they'll talk about the future of identity or economics or communications and telepresence or education or virtual homes and connect to our family or entertainment or medicine or virtual beings and AI assistants and how we deal with death and grieving and higher education and skills training, the philosophical frameworks to be able to navigate the ethics of it all. And then you have career, the cultural dimensions of friends and community in general. And then finally the accessibility and trying to be as inclusive as we can. So as I have been been on this journey, I've realized that this is sort of a map of context. And when I look at Alex McDowell's process, it's like, Oh, well, he's doing the same thing. He's starting with energy. And then he's going through all these different contexts to say, okay, what is the education system? What is the medical system? What is school? How do people get around and transport themselves around this area? And I think that practice is born out and minority report. But one of the things that I found in this conversation, at least was that Sometimes people will have a center of gravity where you ask them to talk about the future and they go straight to climate change, or they go straight to communications or identity or human augmentation. What was so interesting to me about having that conversation was having people have that conversation across those different contexts. to originally start with what your values are, and then from your values, how your values get put out into the future. But the way at least I conceive of what this process was, was setting a context, asking a question like care, what is care? And for me, I went straight to the medical context for other people, that principle of care led them to other contexts. And so you're talking about these underlying character dimensions and then seeing what context emerges. And then from there, trying to synthesize it down into like a principle that becomes people's like, okay, here's my theme that I'm going to step into. And I'm going to carry this forward and to try to embody this theme in my day-to-day life. So that's at least my conception of what happened in this process. I don't know if there's other conceptual frames that you, that use for me, I use the frame of context to be able to think about all those things. Or if there's other ways that you do a sensemaking process of as you're ingesting all this information, how you like internally start to code it or document it or add it to your repository of future dreaming.
[00:27:49.190] Tony Patrick: Yeah, I think we are embarking on the process now of cracking the code on that. I think, I think in terms of world building. there's always a, synthesis is always a challenge, right? In exhibition in particular. I suspect that I'll be cracking that code a little bit later. In 2021, I have some ideas, but we can't give away any trade secrets right now. Can't, but we're working on it. But I definitely think that there is an opportunity in terms of how we showcase world, A, which is based off of all of our archived and documented materials. and assets that are produced from those builds, but also you were speaking to values in particular. And in terms of the process that I am sticking to as a practice, I believe that what we're also talking about is space-making and place-making. And I think this is really important. So in terms of context, if you get, and in particular, let's say with Beyond the Breakdown, we are giving people a space to stand in, which is 2050. And so there are all these opportunities within the session for convergence, right? Because, and of course, this is a no brainer, but underneath it all, right? Underneath all these meat and bones are some shared visions, or at least some shared desires, regardless of how different and unique each one of us can be. And so I think honing down, if we talk about values in particular, you know, the only thing I think that we brush up against are like diehard dystopians. Even underneath that dystopia, There's just a flicker of hope that the world won't be completely on fire in 2050. And so I think that's an interesting starting point. So I think that part of the magic for me in terms of this process is giving people a space to discover their similarities and also express their uniqueness simultaneously. But I also think that if you ground it in either a, you know, those constraints can be, right, usually a great world build has great constraints. But I found that if you can ground it in, I'd say, a geographical region. So I think in particular, let's say if we talk about Minority Report, I believe it was 2050 Washington, DC, right? So that's one of their constraints. So the three of us met imagining 2037 Los Angeles, right? So if I can find a geographical location that will tether us. And we can imagine what we want for this geographical space. Then we can expand out into the local, and then state, and then to the wider realms. But I think that is key, I'd say, to a community world building process, if you will.
[00:30:41.012] Lauren Lee McCarthy: Yeah, I mean, as an artist, I can't help but just make things constantly. So it's not always such a linear. here's the world build and then we make this plan or something and here's the next steps. Like I'm just kind of making things. And then a question as I'm participating in these world building sessions or conversations, it's just like, how does it intersect and how does it push the work forward? A lot of times I'm just making things to understand for myself how I feel. So I think one of the things I really appreciate about this process is that we can all do that in our own ways. Tony through his kind of like high level visioning and grace through making films or thinking about other ideas for projects or community building and needed by our practice. And then we see that with the collaborators that we work with in these as well.
[00:31:23.122] Grace Lee: I mean, on a really basic level, when we did the sessions over the summer, the other people who came in to the room, like I learned a lot from just hearing about intuitive healing, you know, from one of our participants and like went down a kind of rabbit hole with that. And
[00:31:39.695] Tony Patrick: Claudia Pina, yeah.
[00:31:40.776] Grace Lee: Yeah, Claudia Pina. And just hearing other people, like how they think and how they process the world is always kind of, it's inspiring and also triggers like other thoughts, which I don't know how they will manifest later. But actually today I just had a, I was in a conversation with somebody else and I realized, you know, trying to figure out this failing institution. And I just thought, oh, we should do a world building session, you know, to imagine its future. And I was like, I need to tell Lauren and Tony about it, so.
[00:32:09.700] Tony Patrick: Yeah. Sign me up. Sign me up.
[00:32:12.721] Kent Bye: Yeah. When I was listening to some recent lectures from Alex McDowell, he was really emphasizing the importance of just going to these different disciplines and domains and bringing these experts together. And I think what you're doing with more of the community building is that there's actually like a lot of wisdom that we already have from science fiction. and pop culture and being able to track it. And we don't necessarily need the people who are professionals that anybody can be a part of that process. So I like how this process that you're creating here is really democratizing that process and giving people access to those different perspectives. Cause there is something magical about just having those different perspectives collide with each other and having new insights that come out and how surprising that can be when you get into that imagination space. So.
[00:32:53.650] Lauren Lee McCarthy: I think that's such a good point. One of the questions that one of our participants in the last round of Worldbuilding, Romy Morrison, kept asking us was like, you think you're being speculative here and imagining the future, but so many of these questions have been addressed before. What if you look at history? How has this been done before? What are we not seeing? What can we learn from the vastness of the human experience before we think we have to go out and like completely reinvent everything? And that point really resonated with me. And that's kind of worked into some of the prompts and provocations of Serenity herself.
[00:33:30.334] Tony Patrick: Absolutely. I feel as if there's always this opportunity with world building to unearth these intangibles and blind spots. For me, that's the other valuable aspect of this process, because I think it builds a better world. You know, we're always missing something, you know, so that's the next trajectory of the build. That's where iteration lives. But, uh, I was going to say also, cause we have to give a shout out to our third, you know, like as Grace mentioned, we each invited one individual to build with us and our previous sessions of beyond the breakdown and Aldo Velasco. How do I say it? Yeah. Aldo Velasco also was, uh, our editor on the beautiful video that precedes our session. Anyway, so there's a lot of talent behind the scenes and a lot of collaborators, other collaborators and facilitators who have joined the fray. But again, I think the best result from a world build that I've seen time and time again is the community that forms or the bonds that form from these sessions. And I think even in the sessions during Sundance, there's a chance for individuals who may not know each other to create a shared vision. And I think that's magical. once that opportunity is presented. How often do we have those kinds of opportunities? Unless you're at Sundance Online 2021.
[00:34:58.343] Kent Bye: Yeah. World-building is actually a pretty big theme of this year's festival in terms of there's a lot of different approaches to speculative design, imaginal futures from the changing same. There's a Afrofuturism at the end. There's Yasmin and then, you know, there's a number of the pieces of interstitium.
[00:35:14.794] Tony Patrick: Oh yeah. Interstitium. Yeah. Yeah. That spun out of a world build that I was part of. So I helped facilitate that initial world build. So I was going to add Octavia to that list of the William Gibson list. Octavia Butler, because the magic of the interstitium was that we did one session in person at the end of January. Our second session, I returned to New York for the second session at New York Live Arts. And it was days before New York's lockdown and before COVID really hit New York City. Speaking of forecasting, futurism, it felt like we were being pulled into, and someone quoted, you know, because we're sitting there in this room trying to imagine a space. The question was the initial question from one of our artists, I believe it was Sophia, one of the five artists, asked, where's the psychic space that Black women go to internally for resilience during times of duress? And from that, I feel like a portal opened. in the room, you know, with all these beautiful Black minds all in one room. And Kamal Sinclair, who brought us together, who brought Grace, Lauren, and myself together for our initial world build, mentioned, because we talked about an in-between space, where is this in-between space, this kind of liminal, you know, also a liminal space. And she mentioned that she had a conversation with someone about the interstitium, which is also the term for the fluid between organs. So it's the fluid between organs which also functions as an organ itself. So this idea of the interstitium was born in that room where it is a space that people enter under times of duress or for learning and they enter it and it has a myriad of senses and perceptions that once you exit the interstitium, you are fuller and whole and more knowledgeable. But the reason why I'm mentioning it is that I believe it was Medebo Futunde, who's one of our futurist writers, part of the futurist writers room for the Guild of Future Architects, who's behind the interstitium as well, mentioned that it felt like we had been pulled into Octavia's imagination once the pandemic was starting. Because Parable of the Sower, It felt like we were living in Parable of the Sower at the beginning of the pandemic. So in terms of to speak to Lauren's statement, and that's where I'm going to shut up and mute myself right after the sentence, because I have an internal timer now, this is where the role of artists should be recontextualized. Because artists are forecasters. Artists are essential workers, if you will. As we've seen under the umbrella of the pandemic, We still lean on our artists to communicate things we cannot articulate, to help us process, to lead the way. And so in terms of the world building process, it's impossible without those creatives and artists in the room. And from there, Tony will mute himself.
[00:38:26.864] Kent Bye: Yeah, as we're coming up to the last five minutes or so, I just invite both Grace and Lauren, if you want to share some thoughts directly responding to what Tony just said, or just some final thoughts as we're kind of wrapping up here.
[00:38:38.718] Lauren Lee McCarthy: Well, I mean, one of the things that we're thinking about a lot, especially in building the software for this experience, was we are surrounded by software and technology where the values behind it are dubious. You know, we don't have a lot of say into what values they're based on. They don't necessarily align with ours. People are often seen as like the product within these apps where your data is the thing that's kind of being taken and sold. So yes, there's a lot of like user experience design that we encounter, but it's not necessarily designed to empower us to make or live in the world that we necessarily want to be. So with this experience, we were really trying to think about what would it look like to build technology that's directly based on the values that we share. And I think some of the ideas that went into this were making space and time for conversation, having a space where you can just pause, or having a prompt that says, you know, take this further, looking, reflecting on what's been done before on the past. and being really intentional with how we want to move into the future, thinking about what are the actions that actually manifest in the world that you want to see, and then trying to build software around that that supports that. So I'm really enthusiastic about that trend in general, like what would it look like if we had a lot more technologies and infrastructures around us that were really grounded in the values that we shared as communities. You know, maybe it needs to be less of a top-down model of the company model, and we need to start making things that are more community-based and responding to our immediate needs and desires and intentions. So that's something I'm tracking and hoping to see develop in the future.
[00:40:27.335] Grace Lee: Yeah, and not just community, but I think I personally and I think a lot of artists are always grappling with the question of what does it mean to be human? What is emotion? What are these feelings that we have? And I think even in the process of developing Beyond the Breakdown, I'm very concerned with relationships. How are people going to feel comfortable coming and talking with other strangers and this AI? What can we bring from what we know about being careful or tender toward each other? How can we be more human to each other, even in the midst of so many things that are automated and technology taking over our lives?
[00:41:05.424] Kent Bye: Awesome. Tony, I don't know if you had any final thoughts here.
[00:41:11.581] Tony Patrick: Yes. And those answers are why I'm working with Grace and Lauren.
[00:41:16.044] Kent Bye: Nice. Beautiful. Well, Grace, Lauren, and Tony, thank you so much for joining me here on the podcast. For me, I find just the whole process of worldbuilding, just a deeply inspiring process. It's something that's really intrigued me and happy to see and go through this process to have a direct experience of it. And just makes me want to do more and more and more and to gather people together to dream about the future and to put it into action. And I really, really look forward to seeing where you take us in the future and continue evolution and other writings. Please consider publishing your previous writings because I think it'll be pretty prescient to look at that. And yeah, just looking forward to see where you take beyond the breakdown and where it goes in the future. So thank you.
[00:41:56.270] Lauren Lee McCarthy: Yeah. Thanks for having us. It was a pleasure. Thank you.
[00:41:58.971] Grace Lee: Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
[00:42:01.200] Kent Bye: So that was Tony Patrick. He's a world builder, as well as Lauren Lee McCarthy, who's an artist and creative coder, as well as Grace Lee, who's a documentary filmmaker. So I've a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, I am really, really, really super compelled by this concept of world building. In fact, I think there's a certain amount of The Voices of VR that you could consider as a part of this world building of having people start to dream into this ultimate potential of what VR is and where it's all going to go in the future. So there's a number of different things that are really striking to me of actually going through this experience. One is that Tony said that artists are these forecasters. People who are making art are tapping into their own natural intuition and trying to imagine a new future. There's an inherent part of worldbuilding that happens in so many different artistic mediums already, especially in the form of science fiction, where you're literally building out these worlds that don't exist yet and so often there'll be dreams of the future that actually inspire a lot of people who have the technical capabilities to make that happen, and then it starts to form the culture that is actually going to sustain the desire and all the technological development to actually create that vision that was inspired. I think there's a lot of things about the vision of the metaverse and what that means that comes from these early science fiction pieces. Octavia Butler was also somebody who was deeply inspired from another experience that Tony mentioned here at the end that I'll be diving into this follow-on interview, traveling the interstitium with Octavia Butler, which is a series of different web experiences that result from this whole world-building process of trying to tap into the imagination of Octavia Butler and try to translate some of her ideas into this and blackness type of experiences. That is a whole other project that we'll be diving into here next. But I wanted to get back to this experience, because the other dimension about this experience was that there was a whole serenity artificial intelligence, which, in a way, is a way of saying, hey, this is what we're doing. was more or less somebody, Wizard of Oz, behind the scenes. I think there was a lot of human augmentation there. I mean, artificial intelligence isn't quite to the level of being able to track a conversation like this and be able to respond in that way. It reminds me of some of the different conversations that happened at Frankenstein AI at the IFADOC Lab of 2018. where the team behind Frankenstein AI was having people sit around a table and having these discussions and they were listening into the conversation and then trying to code it in real time and feed it into an AI and then the AI was going to feed one person at the table a question and they had to repeat it. just this idea of using artificial intelligence to facilitate these different types of community discussions. And so I've had a couple of experiences of that now. And one of the things that Lauren Lee McCarthy was saying was that they wanted to try to flip us into this other mode of being, meaning that We don't normally have artificial intelligence trying to modulate our conversations. And so that when we step into a space where that's happening, it maybe flips us into a mindset where we're kind of suspending our disbelief and maybe allowing us to tap deeper into our imagination. It's hard for me to know to the degree to which that that was successful or not, but that's an interesting conceit. to use AI in that way. And I do think that moving away from artificial intelligence and more into this concept of ancestral intelligence, and generally, when you bring together all these different people from different backgrounds and have these different discussions, then that was one of the big takeaways that I got from this conversation was that You start to get ways where there's consensus and divergence, but you can start to perhaps form a shared vision of what you want to create. And just to see how that's actually playing out and being implemented across these different contexts. And my following interview with Kamala Sinclair, she talks a little bit more about some of the different projects that Tony was involved with and how that's actually a process that allows a community to come together in this democratization of the collective imagination of a community and to be able to tap those visions and those dreams and actually put forth resources to be able to make that happen. And so it's this future dreaming process that is able to actually bring about real change. I think that's the thing that is a little bit mysterious in terms of how do you translate this brainstorming, open-ended discussion into something that's guided towards how are you going to ground that into taking actionable steps right now into a future that doesn't quite exist. That's something that Tony's been thinking quite a lot about and has his own theories about what that looks like. We'll be having more information about that, how to take all this information and synthesize it and digest it and create some sort of artifact, whether it's an immersive experience or a story or whatever that ends up being, some way of artifacting those collective dreams into some sort of vision of the future. So I'm super, super curious to see where this goes, and I'd love to be able to see some of the original documents about their brainstorms and how they were able to think about the long course of history and say, in order to get to this vision of Los Angeles in 2037, then this is what we need to have happen between now and then. You need to have the dark night of the soul, where you're able to have something that's able to catalyze this real shift, this turning point where there's a point of no return, where you have to change the way that you're behaving. In a lot of ways, the pandemic has been that, to some degree, in terms of changing all of our behaviors, just from a sense of public safety and public health. But, you know, we have all sorts of other dimensions where we need to take this type of collective action, whether climate change or whatever else, to be able to live into a future that we want to have, but we have to kind of do these incremental steps right now and today. So bridging the gap, I think, was one of the things that Lauren was saying, is that there's this tension between how you take something that's essentially a long-term process and then condense it down into a 30- to 60-minute conversation that's really trying to boil down to the essence of your values, and you're kind of left with, this is my theme, this is the thing that I'm really thinking about in the future, and how I can start to bring that future in today by these embodied actions. But also balancing, you know, how do you onboard people who have no idea what world building is versus people that are very familiar and they want to have something that's not so structured and locked down that they feel constrained and not able to kind of have that natural dialectical process that this world building process engenders when you have all these perspectives coming together. But also thinking about these large scale systems and then trying to really personalize it into your own personal story and to not get too abstract or theoretical, but to really have it grounded into your own emotions and your own personal experiences. So those are some of the different dialectics that Lauren was talking about that they're trying to balance here. And two other points here. One is just that when you think about this in terms of space making and place making, and so Tony said that a good rule of thumb is when you're doing this type of world building exercises is to set a specific geographic context as well as a time context. And so minor report was set in like Washington DC of 2050. This world building experience was also set not in any specific geographic location, but just in general in 2050 and then. where they met in this world-building residency program back in 2017 was projecting out 30 years into the future to look at the future of work in Los Angeles in 2037. So, given those constraints, then you can really start to tap into, okay, these are the trends that we're seeing today, and you have to have this robust model of evolution to see how things are going to propagate out into the culture and how you're going to have these different cultural shifts, and then really imagine what kind of world you want to be living into in 2037. And then finally, just this concept that in order to really project out into the future, into those different timeframes, then you could also look back in history to see how far we've come over these similar timescales. And so looking into the past, a historical dig to see how we can learn from what's already happened and to not have something without any sort of historical precedent or any context, but to actually look into the past and do this archaeological dig into some of these different cycles and then try to do this type of forecasting and world building out in the future to say, OK, given this is what happened here and then now and then projecting out into, say, like 2045 or 2050, given that same time scale, where do we want to be in another 30 years from then? So those different ways of looking into these cycles of history and then projecting out to where you're going to go in the future. So I think that's a really powerful way that us all collectively doing this exercise and creating these imaginal worlds that we want to live into. And the thing about the virtual experience is in that you're able to actually kind of like have an embodied experience of a culture that doesn't quite yet exist. We already get that in some sense with science fiction novels and science fiction movies. But to actually create a fully immersive experience that has a social dimension, then at that point, you start to cultivate the social practices and the rituals and the heroes and the other language and everything else to actually embody something that doesn't quite exist. And so just really prototyping these imaginal futures in these immersive experiences, I think, is a very rich concept and idea that I hope to see a lot more of. And I think there's just a lot of power there. And as we dive into the next traveling the interstitium with Octavia Butler, we can start to see that in action already with some of the open web experiences that were shown there in the context of that piece. So we'll be diving into that in the next episode. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of ER podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of ER. Thanks for listening.
