Visual identity by Giles Round
Summary
How do our dreams shape our reality? Tonight, with the help of scientists, artists, philosophers, and historians, we're sprinkling a little stardust on our understanding of the more-than-human — from fish, to demons and gods.
Produced in partnership with the Serpentine Galleries, this audio collage is a reduction and remix of The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish — a recurrent festival exploring ideas of consciousness, language and the mind across non-human species and beings
Ongoing support for this podcast comes from listeners just like you. To keep this show going, join our community at patreon.com/futureecologies
Show Notes and Credits
This episode was produced by Mendel Skulski, with help from Adam Huggins and Lucia Pietroiusti.
It features the words and voices of Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, Alex Jordan, Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, Rain Wu, Nahum Mantra, Onome Ekeh, Federico Campagna, Yussef Agbo-Ola, and Hatis Noit, recorded at The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish — a recurrent festival exploring ideas of consciousness, language and the mind across non-human species and beings, initiated in 2018 by the Serpentine Galleries and held in 2022 in partnership with the Galeria Municipal do Porto.
With music by Yussef Agbo-Ola, Hatis Noit, Thumbug, and Any-Angled Light.
Big thanks to Adam's Electric Sheep Radio co-hosts, Ryder Thomas White & Samantha Ruth, to Kostas Stasinopoulos, and to Arda Studios.
This episode includes audio recorded by scratchikken, soundslikewillem, kintana24, kyles, aurelienleveque, bonnyorbit, squidge316, veromarengere, gecop, caitlynbananas, e0fd96, fredrummer, carlopatrao, audacitier, and adviseme333, accessed through the Freesound Project, and protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses.
You can subscribe to and download Future Ecologies wherever you find podcasts - please share, rate, and review us. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and iNaturalist.
If you like what we do, and you want to help keep it ad-free, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Pay-what-you-can (as little as $1/month) to get access to bonus monthly mini-episodes, stickers, patches, a community Discord chat server, and more.
Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 00:03
You are listening to Season Five of Future Ecologies.
Mendel Skulski 00:11
Alright... check check check.
Adam Huggins 00:13
Looks good.
Mendel Skulski 00:14
Good. Would you... would you mind dimming the lights?
Adam Huggins 00:18
Oh, you want it even darker in here?
Mendel Skulski 00:20
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 00:20
Let me see what I can do.
Adam Huggins 00:25
How's that?
Mendel Skulski 00:25
Perfect. What's in this tea by the way?
Adam Huggins 00:32
It's a blend of different plants. But it's mostly sweet gale, which is a plant that grows in bogs.
Mendel Skulski 00:39
It's really relaxing.
Adam Huggins 00:41
Yeah, it's one of my favorites. And people do say that it is helpful in inducing lucid dreaming.
Mendel Skulski 00:48
Lucid dreaming... to know you're dreaming while it's happening. It's been a while since I had one of those.
Adam Huggins 00:56
Yeah, I can't even remember the last time I lucid dreamed. Maybe tonight is the night.
Mendel Skulski 01:00
Maybe!
Adam Huggins 01:01
Okay, so now that we've kind of set the mood here. I wanted to tell you that way back, before we started this podcast, and before I even knew what a podcast was, I had a college radio show for a couple of years.
Mendel Skulski 01:16
Did you now?
Adam Huggins 01:17
I did! With a couple of friends of mine. We were young. And we had an 11pm time slot that nobody cared about. And we had the keys to the station CD library, which had an excellent vinyl collection.
Mendel Skulski 01:31
Knowing you, that sounds dangerous.
Adam Huggins 01:33
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 01:34
So I'm guessing you had like two turntables and a microphone.
Adam Huggins 01:37
That was actually the exact setup. And the reason that I bring it up right now is that our college radio show was all about dreams.
Baby Radio DJ Adam 01:48
Welcome back, you're listening to CJSF 90.1 FM, 93.9 cable FM in Burnaby, and this is Electric Sheep Radio.
DJ Ryder 01:58
We'd like you to send us your dreams.
Baby Radio DJ Adam 02:00
Yeah, indeed to electricsheepradio@gmail.com If you feel like having your dreams aired on the radio, because we just love to hear dreams as you might have noticed.
DJ Samantha 02:11
We also prefer if you record them yourself.
DJ Ryder 02:13
And so I guess until we see you next time.
Baby Radio DJ Adam 02:16
Goodnight.
DJ Ryder 02:18
Sweet dreams.
Mendel Skulski 02:20
Oh my god, your little baby radio voice. Little late night DJ Adam. But other than that, nothing's really changed, huh?
Adam Huggins 02:29
Apparently not. No, I still really love to hear dreams. And that's what we're going to do now. Except that tonight, our program is called Future Ecologies.
Mendel Skulski 02:42
Well, to be precise, tonight, it's the Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish. A recurrent festival that's explored the idea of consciousness, language and the mind across non human species and beings. Initiated by the Serpentine galleries in London since 2018, recorded on stage in November 2022 at the Galleria do Biodiversidade in Porto, Portugal, and then reduced and remixed by Future Ecologies.
Adam Huggins 03:16
Tonight, with the help of artists, scientists, philosophers and historians, were sprinkling a little bit of stardust on our understanding of dreams, reality, and non human beings — from fish, to demons, and Gods
Mendel Skulski 03:35
Kicking things off, festival curators, Lucia Pietroiusti, and Filipa Ramos.
Lucia Pietroiusti 03:44
And I have the sort of impossible task of telling you about dreams. We experience dreams as a transition state between realms of the physical and the spiritual. And so dreams become a kind of translation space.
Filipa Ramos 03:59
But we refer to dreams when we speak about hope, when we speak about repair. When we give symbolic interpretations of dreams, we hold the world in place, in a sense. We shape a world, its symbols, and its myths. We shape our sense of belonging to that world.
Lucia Pietroiusti 04:17
And through the notion of the dream in this event, we hope to -
Filipa Ramos 04:21
somehow continue in our project to move away from a human-centric conception of this world. So what might it look like if we tried to de-anthropocenter the notion of a dream? Well, in the first instance, it might be that in a multi-species complex planet, non-human dreams might not be at all like what we expect of human ones, because they'd be processes belonging to completely different ways of being in the world.
Lucia Pietroiusti 04:55
So we've asked ourselves, and we'll ask ourselves all sorts of questions — how much of a more-than-human or-non human being sense of self are we able to intuit and appreciate? To hopefully come out on the other side with just a tiny bit of a slightly larger intuition, not only of how we exist on this planet, and how we share it with more than human beings, what our responsibility in relation to that sharing, and also what art,
Filipa Ramos 05:24
poetry,
Lucia Pietroiusti 05:25
science
Filipa Ramos 05:26
when it dreams,
Lucia Pietroiusti 05:27
and so many other forms of expression,
Filipa Ramos 05:30
might, in fact, be here on this earth to do?
Alex Jordan 05:50
My name is Alex Jordan, and I'm a scientist. I'm a scientist very interested in the questions that we have as humans about how animals experience the world, their sense of self, their sense of awareness, their perception, perhaps their consciousness, and how we might as humans, understand and interpret and ask questions of these animals that we might better understand their worlds.
Alex Jordan 06:18
Generally speaking, at a scientific level, I'm interested in the broad question of how behavior evolves. How, in the transition from simple life to more complex forms of life, including our own form of life, behaviors have evolved, cognitive capacities have evolved, and traits that help animals interact with the world and experience the world have evolved.
Alex Jordan 06:46
Some research we've just published this year was about sleep, and potentially dreaming in spiders. And so we've done this work here demonstrating that jumping spiders, these beautiful, intelligent creatures have periods of REM sleep, rapid eye movement, sleep. This is a trait that was once thought exists, as many traits are thought to exist only in humans. But now we're starting to expand our perception and understanding that the idea of dreaming for a spider for a fish for a plant may not be that far off.
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe 07:21
It's delightful to dream together in the belly of a whale. aWhat does it feel like to be a fish or a bird or a plant?
Rain Wu 07:31
The rivers and the glaciers, the big mammals and the imperceptible microbes, the small algae, and the complex trees.
Alex Jordan 07:40
When I showed you this tree, this evolutionary tree, it's really important for me that that tree is not in a line. There's not a ladder that humans sit on the top of, and chimps are nearer to us, and then dolphins are nearer then — that evolution is pushing all animals towards. This is an absurd concept. Evolution produces solutions and animals and organisms that fulfill whatever purpose is required and whatever purpose they have. In my opinion, both my personal but also scientific opinion, many fish and many of the animals and organisms I deal with are just as intelligent and just as sophisticated and just as subtle, in many ways, as some of these species.
Alex Jordan 08:25
And so a lot of my work is done in the places where these animals live. I try to take all of our approaches and questions out into the wild. Ours is a is a practice of going to the places where these animals are, trying to disturb them as little as we can, filming them, then using some of these machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches to help us understand and decompose and maybe intuit what these animals are feeling and experiencing — of one another and of the world around them. Contextualizing this behavior, of having our questions asked in the places where these animals live. And that means we have to understand and try and appreciate where they live. So we're not divorcing them from their experience — from their evolutionary history. We're trying to situate our studies in those places and recreate in silico or in some kind of analytical framework, the interactions they have not just with one another, but with the world around them.
Nahum Mantra 09:30
Even the word environment, right, like the more-than-human world has been reduced to an environment — like just like a backdrop where the human drama unfolds.
Alex Jordan 09:44
Some of my research has has asked the question, this classic test we have which is called the mirror test, in which an animal is presented, like here, with a mirror and asked... does it recognize its reflection as self or is it unable to do that... that thing that we do? Is it unable to deal with the concept of self? And this mirror test is a test in which you are supposed to see yourself in a reflection, and there's a mark on your body somewhere that you can't see, except with the mirror. And if you touch yourself, rather than touch the mirror, then you've understood that you exist in that reflection — that reflection is you. It's not some other entity.
Alex Jordan 10:40
And this is wonderful. This is a perfectly valid test, provided you care. Provided you care that there's a mark on your body. Provided you have the vanity, let's say to... to worry that something about your appearance has changed.
Filipa Ramos 10:56
Oh, I look different. Wait, but it's me.
Alex Jordan 11:00
Is it a problem of motivation? Or is it a problem of intelligence? Can they not understand the context, or do they simply not care in the same way we do?
Onome Ekeh 11:10
You know, what does wealth mean for a sparrow? Is it, sort of, this ability to flock?
Alex Jordan 11:17
and I settled on a species called the cleaner wrasse. The cleaner wrasse we thought was perfect, because it does care about these marks. Its whole biology, its whole cognitive capacity and its ecology is centered around this idea of seeing marks on the skin and trying to remove them. That's what it does. Because its whole existence is about finding and removing parasites from client fish.
Lucia Pietroiusti 11:47
You can only interpret the test as revealing something if the behavior can be considered strange or unusual in some way. And similarly, the notion of recognizing a mark somewhere, is also an experience of recognizing oneself with a kind of strangeness.
Alex Jordan 12:08
But this is a really important question. What on earth is unusual for an animal? How do you as a human observer, me as a scientist decide what an animal should or should not be doing? And therefore what is unusual for an animal? This is not not a simple question. I'm not being facetious here. This is a genuine question about our expectations and intuition of non human animals.
Onome Ekeh 12:39
You know, you almost don't recognize what's being said.
Alex Jordan 12:43
Hang on, this is not another individual. It's copying everything I do. Maybe it's me. And in this phase, humans perform unusual behaviors.
Federico Campagna 12:57
I think what's remarkable about dreams is that while you are in a dream is really not very strange at all. Everything is remarkably normal. It becomes strange, the moment you exit the dream, and then you look back, and then you realize that the two don't match up.
Alex Jordan 13:10
But for these fish, this was a very clear behavior, that they were doing something completely outside of their repertoire. Some of them are very easy to interpret. Upside Down swimming — fish do not swim upside down, unless it's time to buy yourself a new goldfish. Now, if you think about it, one of the main barriers that we might have in using these kinds of tests across animals is that if they're designed for humans, how do we expect an animal without hands or fingers to be able to pass them in the same way that a human would?
Onome Ekeh 13:45
You know, you wonder, like how all these different things put together? That don't fit?
Alex Jordan 13:52
One way, we've started to interrogate that question and try to get a deeper handle on what a fish is experiencing and what kind of behaviors it's performing, and what those behaviors might mean, is to start to attempt to understand the behavioral language of fishes and other animals. And as I've mentioned, we're doing that with the aid of artificial intelligence. Because for us to look at something like a fish and understand what the postures, movements and interactions mean, is an incredible challenge and potentially impossible. And so we're using an approach called behavioral decomposition. Behavioral decomposition is a method in which you look at every single movement, an animal makes — every single change in its legs, its postures, whatever it is. And you can break those behaviors down into these sort of dimensions of kinematics, and build them into this map of behavior.
Alex Jordan 14:58
The fish will go to the mirror, observe its reflection, observe that it has a mark on its body, will go away from the mirror, will scrape that mark against the gravel or a rock, and then go back to the mirror to check. If the fish go through all three of the phases that I told you, and then attempt to remove this mark, they have passed the test. By the original definition of the test, by all other standards that are applied to all other organisms, they have passed the test. Now is this evidence that they are self conscious — that they are self aware? Is the performance of this behavior enough to convince you that a fish is self aware?
Filipa Ramos 15:45
When you're obsessed with something
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe 15:47
and once you start looking for something
Filipa Ramos 15:48
you see that something everywhere.
Rain Wu 15:51
The sky told stories, remembered legends and provided clues.
Yussef Agbo-Ola 15:56
Sometimes you can be suspended in a dream and not necessarily be connected to time, but still connected to this idea of rhythm. Constantly in this rhythmic cycle of nutrients... it's like you're... you're eating reality, in a way.
Rain Wu 16:16
Food is the connection from distant and exotic landscapes, to domestic backyards — going near and far, stretching across the Earth's surface. It connects the sun above and the soil below, like a vertical axis of life.
Yussef Agbo-Ola 16:33
And at the same time, you're reflecting on that digestion.
Rain Wu 16:37
Food connects our bodies with the surrounding world. Nothing is more intimate than eating. What somebody sees can be seen by others. What somebody hears can be heard by others. But what somebody eats, nobdy else can eat. There's nothing more private, more introverted, more turned inwards on itself.
Onome Ekeh 17:03
A transformation takes place
Rain Wu 17:07
Thus the world was created. And out of Chaos, the orderly and complex Cosmos arose.
Lucia Pietroiusti 17:16
This most intimate of absorptions is what brings you to the Cosmos.
Rain Wu 17:22
Cosmos, the physical universe of things seen and touched, and the spiritual entities they existed beyond.
Federico Campagna 17:32
We'll get there by steps — we will go through three great transformations. And we will start by setting the scene — setting the parameters of this journey towards human and more than human dreams. The parameters are very simple. There are two parameters for our inquiry. There are two simple words — nothing, something. Nothing, something.
Federico Campagna 18:01
Now, the important thing are not the words. The little pause between them is the greatest mystery of all, for science, theology, philosophy since forever. How is it possible that nothing might become something? This might sound like a very academic and useless question. But in reality, it has to do with everything we hold dear. It has to do with the very stuff of the world. Asking ourselves the question "how is it possible that nothing might become something" means asking ourselves "How did it happen? That all that surrounds us — every single thing, reality as a whole, at some point, came into existence." And it's been at the center of our imagination and concerns, as I was saying, since time immemorial. We could say literally, since the beginning, the beginning of history. History begins with the first written records we have discovered. Before that there is prehistory. About prehistory, we cannot say anything, because we don't know.
Federico Campagna 19:10
And the earliest written records have to do with the problem of how the world came into existence. These are what are called Cosmogonies — so stories that tell about the birth of the cosmos. And these cosmogonies are very interesting because they address the question "how we pass from nothing to something". The question is "Can something come out of nothing?" And the answer of the mythological cosmogonies is no.
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe 19:41
The idea of reincarnation, that souls took on successively the bodies of multiple different species, from humans to animals to plants, and back again. This idea was embedded in a range of classical Greek and Roman philosophy, poetry and magic. And as we'll see, reincarnation raises fundamental question about where the identity of an organic entity rests, and how it is constituted. Is it in the movements, feelings and capabilities of the body? In the ability to vocalize or speak? Or in the capacity to remember or dream?
Federico Campagna 20:16
To the question, "did from nothing, something come out," the answer is no. Nothing is an impossible philosophical concept. It is not just unthinkable, but it is impossible. Since things exist, at least we exist as points of awareness in the world as the object to our awareness, since there is existence, non existence cannot take place. Since there is being, non-being is totally impossible. So, to the question of the beginning, how you pass from nothing to something, they say, "In the beginning, there was not nothing. In the beginning that was something, but something special." This something was ineffable — is something beyond words... impossible to describe. You have philosophers and theologians talking about this. Then, this something fragmented itself into many. Simone Weil says "decreated itself".
Federico Campagna 21:14
Why am I talking about this? How is this relevant in any way to our lives today? Well, the question of the beginning becomes relevant to our life today if we look at it in a mirror — be like those fish that we saw earlier. If we look at it in a mirror, the question of the origin is the question of the end. The question of what happens before birth is the same as the question of what happens after death. And now we start seeing how the question of what happens after death concerns us. There is a certain urgency to the question "After something, can there be nothing? After this life, can we be utterly annihilated?" And here we see that the intuition of the eternity of being becomes a powerful protection. Because it says that since things did not have a beginning in nothing, they cannot have an end in nothing. Nothing is an invalid concept — philosophically is an impossible concept.
Federico Campagna 22:14
What we have is that the beginning had to do with the fragmentation of boundaries, an establishment of boundaries. And the end, similarly has to do with the reshuffling of boundaries. It's just a matter of movements of boundaries. There is a way in which we can understand it metaphorically. The world being the dream, and the characters of the dream being the inhabitants of the world, including ourselves. Like us, the inhabitants of a dream have no recollection of their origin, and no horizon of their end. And like us, the inhabitants of a dream are made of the same substance, as the mind of the sleeper. If you for a moment, consider what is the substance of which a dream is made, you realize that is the substance of the mind — there is a continuity. The fragments are made of the same substance of the monolith.
Federico Campagna 23:08
And in fact, this idea that it's possible to understand the world as a dream, and the relationship between the world and the other worldly (so, before the beginning, after the end), is not just a metaphor that I've made up, but is a typical way of understanding the world. In many philosophies, theologies and mythologies from from all over the world.
Federico Campagna 23:30
The idea is that the world that we see around ourselves is a dream of the eternal being. It is a dream in the mind of the eternal being. And that everything we see around ourselves, including ourselves as individuals, and the things and the people around us are fundamentally characters of this dream of this eternally-sleeping mind. And to this mind, that is dreaming up the whole of reality, it is not unfitting to give the name of God.
Federico Campagna 24:03
Now, this realization can have consequences. Of course, in philosophy, often you observe a hypothesis about reality, you embrace them, and you see what happens, okay? You try them out. There is an engineering aspect to philosophy, very much. So if you try out this perspective, it could have, you know, a paralyzing effect or an ecstatic effect. Ecstatic effect, typical mystical reaction. A paralyzing effect, in the sense that you start asking yourself, "Doesn't this mean, then, that we are passive elements inside the dream?" If we are the characters being dreamt up by a great divine mind, to use the theological metaphor, doesn't this mean that we cannot do anything inside this dream to modify it? It's dreamt up by a mind greater than our own. If you remain equal with the metaphor of the dream, you realize that you can ask this question to your own dreams. Inside your own dream, what is the distribution of agency? Is it you? That is dreaming up the dream and directing it and unfolding it? Or should you rather say that in the dream, the, the one with the least agency is you, while in fact, it's the characters of the dream that unfold the story of which they are the protagonist. The dream dreams itself through its characters, typically. And by the same token, inside this world dream this dream world, it is us as the characters that have the possibility of unfolding the dream narration and the responsibility of doing it the best we can, as well as we can.
Onome Ekeh 25:44
So I thought I'd try it out.
Alex Jordan 25:46
Dreams and imagination and abstraction can function to place you in scenarios that you didn't experience. And that could be considered in the scientific terminology, adaptive. It allows your body and your mind to explore scenarios, and maybe prepare you for them, even if you didn't experience them.
Federico Campagna 26:12
So dreamers that are aware of their act of creation of the world, being part of a fiction, they understand that they can redeem the world only through narrative means.
Nahum Mantra 26:25
You know, because without the heart, there is no mind. There's no blood that pumps into the brain.
Hatis Noit 26:30
Yeah, every time I feel somehow lost, I try to connect to the memory of the nature there — the wild energy of the land.
Federico Campagna 26:50
We started with the first great transformation, birth — the beginning. The second great transformation, death — the end. And here we have the third transformation. And the third transformation is a transformation beyond the frontiers of the human.
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe 27:06
The language of demon is a bit tricky for us because it's used by Christians to refer specifically to evil demons that have a particular place in the cosmos and in the story of creation. Whereas, in the kind of broader Greek and Roman usage, it's a slightly stretchier term, and it tends to mean a kind of an intermediate spirits, something between Gods and humans.
Onome Ekeh 27:27
If she's to go into the forest realm of spirits and ghosts, she needs to have night vision.
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe 27:36
Other fragments of his work reveal that he identified himself as a restless demon. The Greek word is daimon, a kind of inbetweener spirit, and one who's been exiled from the gods — perhaps a punishment for some unspecified crime. In this snippet of text, Empedocles recalls multiple previous births, moving between genders and species apparently without effort. He becomes most eloquent when remembering the past bodily experience of being a little wordless fish leaping out of the sea.
Nahum Mantra 28:09
When I retreat as far into myself as possible, I become aware only of the shadow cast by my faint currents. The water knows no natural boundary, and occupies all niches.
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe 28:24
Did souls have a basic identity as human or animal? Were there limits to where souls could go? Plato thought that human souls could get inside animals. But Porphyry, a philosopher in the Platonist tradition, thought human souls could only enter human bodies. Otherwise, Porphyry worries, a mother who'd returned into the body of a mule might perhaps end up carrying her own son on her back. Was the destination body for reincarnation a deliberate choice of the soul, as related by Plato's Er. Or was it random? In which bodies breathe in souls as they're blown about in the air — And that's something apparently taught by followers of Pythagoras and Orpheus.
Lucia Pietroiusti 29:06
And so the question that I have for you over and over and over again, and it's not the first time that I've asked you it, is what could be a possible metaphysics of the more than human?
Federico Campagna 29:15
Metaphysics is a Greek term that has to do with what is beyond the physics. It was originally assigned to the, the organization of Aristotle's works. He wrote a work on the Physics and the work after that was called the Metaphysics, so the one after the work on the physics. So it was just a cataloging entry.
Federico Campagna 29:31
But it has to do with more than cataloguing. It has to do with the difference between what we see around ourselves, the physics, what we can experience in a particular way. And our questioning about what there is beyond. Beyond can mean many different things. Beyond can mean in the realm of the invisible, or in the realm of the infinitely small, or in the realm of the immaterial, or in the realm of the possibilities that are not actualized, and so on and so forth. Or of the impalpable, ineffable structures that hold up reality. Now, to a large extent, the things that... the structures that hold up reality are not so much inscribed within things, but they are inscribed within our mind. So within the way in which we perceive things. And in that case, we realize that the way in which we... set our interpretation of the perceptions that we have from the world goes to construct different worlds. So, it is world building in that sense. We could use another words — a Greek word "Cosmopoetics". Cosmopoetics is literally the same as worldbuilding. But maybe it's a little bit clearer, because Cosmopoetics means... Cosmos, literally order. So the setting of a particular order. And this setting is Poetics from the Greek popoieîn, "to make" — but also the same word that means "poetry".
Federico Campagna 30:59
Artists, cultural producers, because they intervene particularly on the way in which we see things, they are opticians. You know, they are eye surgeons to a large extent. Through their poetic work, they construct worlds, and they help us to construct different worlds because they intervene at that level. They are not physical engineers in that sense, but they are metaphysical engineers. To the extent to which our shifting of perspective constructs different worlds.
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe 31:30
Christians thought that human souls were restless but also fundamentally individual, singular, and monogamous in their relationship with bodies. That said, human bodies could themselves be magicked into horses or possessed by demons, so they were also porous and unstable. The most threatening creatures in the atmosphere were demons, who could operate inside human souls and bodies and minds, animating their dreams with obscene thoughts and producing powerful waking fantasies. Demons own thin bodies can take on apparently more solid disguises as wild animals or beautiful women, but they were fundamentally vulnerable too — evanescing at exorcism into a puff of smoke. We've also seen how some Greeks and Romans had variously imagined demons as close to or even identical with human souls, and also as souls as much less bound to singular bodies. Some fortunate or privileged humans might even be able to recall a faint memory of an earlier incarnation, whether as a human, an animal, or even a plant. Whether such memories and dreams of a past self were punitive or ecstatic, depends rather on what you think it might be like to live as a bird or a shrub.
Nahum Mantra 32:44
There, I was exiled from myself. But nothing lasts forever.
Onome Ekeh 32:51
I've been trying to recreate that story, over and over.
Alex Jordan 32:56
There's this idea that dreaming is feeding nonsense into the system, such that nonsense can be discriminated from sense. And this is, in fact, at a practical level, one of the methods we have to use in many of these technological approaches. We have to feed noise into the system to differentiate it from signal.
Lucia Pietroiusti 33:22
And now of course, a machine is complex as the world itself is the world.
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe 33:26
Of course, it's hard to tell from these little tiny fragments of archaic poetry by people like Empedocles and Aeneas, how they related to these past selves, and indeed whether that animal incarnations dreamed in the same way of their human incarnations. Looking more broadly, we can see that there is a great amount of disagreement among poets and natural philosophers in antiquity, about which animals dreamed, what they dreamed about, all done on the basis of empirical observation and inference.
Alex Jordan 33:57
And it is our hope that ultimately, by looking at these animals in their natural environment, by understanding their experiences, by understanding their context, by understanding their behavioral outputs, we can then bring them into the conversation — to tell us what they want, what their aesthetic preferences are, what their desires are. But also what their language means, and perhaps if we're lucky, what their subjective experience of the world may really be.
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe 34:29
If you look more broadly at the kind of spread of literary and visual production, you can see that there is some understanding that the world is interconnected and that human lives might contain echoes of a kind of previous vegetal animalistic existence. So it seems to me that there are lots of different explanations for where dreams come from in antiquity. And some of them are very naturalistic and sort of pragmatic and to do with bodily movements. And others are much more related to the sublime, be it the Divine or the Demonic — and it's particularly there that you find notions that the dream might be an uncovering of something by some third agency. There might be some interest in revealing to humans... what else they've been.
Mendel Skulski 35:31
This episode of Future Ecologies features the words and voices of Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, Alex Jordan, Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, Rain Wu, Nahum Mantra, Onome Ekeh, Federico Campagna, Yussef Agbo-Ola, and Hatis Noit
Adam Huggins 35:53
All recorded in November of 2022 as part of The Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish,
Mendel Skulski 35:59
The remix of which you heard here was produced by me, Mendel Skulski, and my co host, Adam Huggins,
Adam Huggins 36:08
with music by Yussef Agbo-Ola, Hatis Noit, Any-Angled Light, and Thumbug.
Mendel Skulski 36:16
The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, is a recurrent festival, curated by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos, initiated by the Serpentine Galleries in London since 2018.
Adam Huggins 36:28
And held last year in partnership with the Galeria Municipal do Porto.
Mendel Skulski 36:33
Special thanks to Kostas Stasinopoulos, as well as Adam's Electric Sheep Radio co-hosts, Ryder Thomas White and Samantha Ruth who you heard briefly at the top.
Adam Huggins 36:45
You can hear more from us
Mendel Skulski 36:46
and reach out across the dream and say hello
Adam Huggins 36:50
at futureecologies.net
Mendel Skulski 36:52
Or wherever you find your podcasts.
Adam Huggins 36:55
Until next time.
Mendel Skulski 36:57
Dream easy.