Another world is possible.
The worlds I created with friends through The Young Never Sleep Studio showed me that another world was possible.
I started to ask deeper questions. If we have all the knowledge, all the tools and all the resources, why wasn’t the world better in the ways we knew it could be?
How possible was it? How could we better understand why the world was the way it was and how it could be better? I knew from my experience building worlds on a small scale, that we as a society needed some key things to make a collaborative endeavour of this magnitude happen.
clear, aspirational but realistic goals to aim towards.
a timeline.
a team.
a plan.
a budget.
and we needed time and space to experiment and pressure test our best ideas.
We needed a canvas big enough to imagine a better world...
Welcome to Earth 1.58
Another world is possible. It’s an expression I’ve used to underpin and guide my personal and professional work since sometime around 2010 when I first established what has come to be The Young Never Sleep studio.
Before I came to learn that the phrase is actually well known in circles of global policy to refer to the concept known as “alter-globalization”, I used the phrase to express my own intuitive sense that the world I currently inhabit was one of many that were potentially available to me. With time, I extended this notion beyond my personal experience, to include our sociocultural environment as a whole. The idea that this world, the anthropocentric, patriarchal, war-torn world filled with its myriad entangled inequalities, coercions and exploitations, was not the only one we were confined to. This notion of another world, of this possibility, came primarily from an appreciation for the beauty and tenacity of nature and secondarily, by the resilience of humanity.
Nature, in all its exponential wonder, had found seemingly infinite solutions to propel life forward. From the intricate architecture in the webs of spiders and labyrinthine ant colonies, to the emotional complexity of whale culture, nature has engineered flight, enabled bats to navigate with sound, given octopus the power to change the shape, color and texture of their bodies at will. Through evolutionary processes, nature has made thread stronger than steel, skin as transparent as glass, food from sunlight, made life possible in the oceans darkest abyss, the bitter cold of sub zero arctic ice, and even imbued some with effective immortality. nature made what should be impossible possible.
This aspirational, hopeful phrase has set the vision for my creative collaborative practice since its inception more than a decade ago. I’ve only recently come to discover that this statement has been employed for many years in socioeconomic and political spheres as a movement for anti-capitalist, anti-corporate globalization, envisioning and establishing new forms of alter-globalization that retains the benefits of an increasingly globalized society while eradicating the systemic inequities caused by global exploitation. Another example of intuition leading to discovery and alignment. Although, my inspiration for using this guiding statement was in exploring the wonders of nature, its capacity for seemingly infinite creative solutions. The notion was quite simple: If nature could create so many diverse ways of being, so much possibility, how could this one world we’ve created for ourselves be the only one available to us? It didn’t seem reasonable (or statistically plausible) that we could be fated to exist in an infinite loop of inequality, injustice, violence, extraction, harm and suffering. If nature could devise so many unlikely scenarios for life to flourish, then certainly another world was possible, even if one only a bit better for more living beings than this one.
Possible worlds and modal reasoning have made "counterfactual" arguments extremely popular in current philosophy. Possible worlds, especially the idea of "nearby worlds" that differ only slightly from the actual world, are used to examine the validity of modal notions such as necessity and contingency, possibility and impossibility, truth and falsity.
A standout as one of the most significant modern examples of worldbuilding in North America, the University of Arizona Biosphere 2 is an American Earth system science research facility located in Oracle, Arizona. Its mission is to serve as a center for research, outreach, teaching, and lifelong learning about Earth, its living systems, and its place in the universe. It is a 3.14-acre (1.27-hectare) structure originally built to be an artificial, materially closed ecological system, or vivarium. It remains the largest closed ecological system ever created.
Information philosophy can quantify the information in different possible worlds and thus establish the relative possibilities or "information distance" from our actual world.
Modal realism implies the existence of infinitely many parallel universes, an idea similar to Hugh Everett III's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the information interpretation of quantum mechanics, quantum systems evolve in two ways: the first is the wave function deterministically exploring all the possibilities for interaction; the second is the system randomly choosing one of those possibilities to become actual.
David Lewis(1941-2001)The analytic language philosopher David Lewis was a possibilist. He developed the philosophical methodology known as modal realism based on the idea of possible worlds. He claims that
- Possible worlds exist and are just as real as our world.
- Possible worlds are the same sort of things as our world – they differ in content, not in kind.
- Possible worlds cannot be reduced to something more basic – they are irreducible entities in their own right.
- Actuality is indexical. When we distinguish our world from other possible worlds by claiming that it alone is actual, we mean only that it is our world.
- Possible worlds are unified by the spatiotemporal interrelations of their parts; every world is spatiotemporally isolated from every other world.
- Possible worlds are causally isolated from each other.
I don’t really know if I literally mean an earth from a so-called dimension 1.58 (to be determined), I just saw this article about zero energy loss and thought it would be funny if this were possible because we aligned with some alternate version of Earth, thus creating the channel for zero energy loss from our perspective.
“Worldbuilding” has become a very en vogue word to use for things many of us have been doing since we were kids. Spending many days in my room alone, or outdoors with friends, exploring the expansive worlds of video games, building vessels and landscapes with Legos, pretending we were someone or something else with toys, sticks and stones. We’d venture off into the worlds in our imaginations, or worlds laid out before us in all the subliminal media we collectively consumed. Not only is the practice of worldbuilding not a contemporary phenomenon that only came into fruition when Mark Zuckerberg first uttered the word “metaverse”, it’s a practice that many of us have been doing all our lives. It’s something that goes back generation after generation, back through the first video game consoles, through the first vaudeville television shows, the first stories of other worlds told on radio programs, through the first plays and imaginings of heavenly kingdoms immortalized in brass and stone by long-forgotten civilizations, all the way to the first cave paintings; some of the first examples of immersive storytelling. Not only is worldbuilding fundamental to the human experience, through research and the collective knowledge of so many others through history, I’ve come to understand it as something fundamental to conscious experience itself. Simply put: worldbuilding is what nature does best. Hard as we might, we cannot extract ourselves from nature. The notion that we are separate from nature and its processes is a persistent illusion, one that nature itself might afford us for its own gain.
Another world is possible, and it exists right here, right now all around us if we take care to look closely enough.
Another world is a favorite song or poem.
Another world is the petals of a flower reflected by morning dew.
Another world is in the dreams of children, friends, foes and strangers.
Another world is the mind of an octopus, an alien right here on earth.
Another world is the tinkerings and ideas of scientists, researchers, engineers and designers who fill our lives with untold marvels.
Another world is a movie that captures a feeling that we can’t describe.
Another world is something hopeful to dwell on for just a moment and not a moment longer.
Another world is possible. But don’t take my word for it, just look around and you’ll see what I mean. You might even start to believe it too.
When reflecting on this vast endeavor, it’s easy for me to understand that this has been sitting at the core of my experience as a creative and curious individual for as long as I can remember. I understand the power and value of language, and I also understand its limitations. Understanding this has been central to my creative work, as I use a variety of languages; from visual expression, to music, dance, crafting a meal for a loved one, crafting experiences with friends and collaborators, all to communicate. And it’s that desire among many others, the desire to communicate, to be understood, that has led me here. It’s the limitations of communication that led me to the work of Claude Shannon. His mathematical theory of communication was the first time I came across something that was not overtly “creative” yet so intuitive and insightful that it resonated with me. I realized that so much of my work, most specifically a film & dance piece with the title Communication, had articulated some of the very notions outlined by Shannon in the 1940’s. It seems ironically fated that we were able to communicate with one another across this ocean of time and space. Through the noise, a signal was clearly transmitted between us. When I read about his work on communication, and his contributions to establishing information science, this body of work that laid the foundation to the information infrastructure that we so often take for granted, I became consumed and haven’t been able to shake it since.
It’s since led to a near-infinite expanse of history, ideas, concepts and fundamental understandings about our relationship with information, its role in human society and its significance at the heart of nature and reality. I began to find connections to so many questions I’ve endeavored to ask through my lifetime of interdisciplinary research & creative practice. I’ve always felt that intuition and logic, rather than opposing poles of thought, were more like companions in the ways our minds and bodies experience and navigate the world. There has always been a bit of science to my art, and my art is always informed by my love for understanding through scientific exploration. Information seemed to beautifully weave these loves together. This endless territory of learning which necessitates acknowledging that all things are integrated, interwoven, interdependent and fundamentally interconnected. Information began to connect me across time and space with more minds who have spent restless nights asking the same questions that have been at the heart of my work and curiosity since I was very young.
What I like to call “simple existential questions”:
Who am I really?
Where did I come from? Where did we come from?
Where do my ideas come from?
Is technology a part of nature or apart from nature? Is it fundamental?
Where does language come from?
What do animals think? Do they have languages?
What am I communicating with my art? Do animals make art?
Is it actually possible to be understood by another person? Why do languages of all kinds so often fail to communicate?
If it’s so hard to communicate with each other, how would we be able to communicate with other kinds of life?
What’s the deal with time?
If this present world exists as a result of its past, is it possible that other worlds exist from other pasts?
I intuitively feel that other versions of myself exist. I can temporarily and in limited ways experience them through my art. Is it possible to experience them fully?
What really happens when we die?
The significance of integrated information started to reveal itself, not only as a potential path to answer some of these questions, but maybe more significantly as a way to build a new society, a new world that gave us the opportunity to spend more time communicating more fully with one another, asking questions like these and even more profoundly simple ones about the incredible experience of our own existence.
Watch : How Information Helps Us Understand the Fabric of Reality
This new journey into information, technoculture and how they inform my work moving forward is really an endeavor of continuing to follow the threads where my intuition and quizzical thinking meet. Retracing the steps of my own curiosity and creativity through the archive of my work and thought to begin to define a fundamental reality from my point of view as an individual and through the collective conscience shaped by the body of work I’ve created alongside countless peers & collaborators.
It’s a process toward creating a new kind of mind, and from that mind another world, one which only an infinitely intricate, exquisite and terrifyingly awesome nature could create in all its endless possibility.