Alex Quicho joins us to discuss the value of arts and poetics in futures work, viewing the world through the lens of tropical futures, and finding windows into the future that invite action and movement.
Interviewed by: Amanda Reeves
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Transcript
Amanda Reeves: How can we incorporate arts and poetics into scenarios to build beautiful, or terrifying, or funny worlds that touch us deeply as we explore what might come next?
How would our images of the future change if we looked at it from the lens of tropical futures? And how might that guide us to adapt to a warming climate?
And how can we open up new key holes or windows into a future that doesn't make you feel paralyzed with inaction or nihilism?
I'm Amanda Reeves, and I'll be your host for FuturePod today.
Alex Quicho: How do you imagine the future that is different from the one we feel has been handed to us? The writer Chris Kraus wrote at one point about how certain conditions that are social, political, environmental, whatever, conspire to feel like fate.
And I always thought that was like a nice truism, right, in that certain things feel immutable, especially when you get into stuff like vectors of class, vectors of racialization, vectors of extraction and where you end up in the global order. Of course, the more you endure these force multipliers, the more stuck in that fate you may feel.
I think that beyond helping businesses stay profitable or a lot of ways that futures can be used in a practical sense, what I like to talk with people about is how you actually imagine and shift the parameters of what that fate is.
Amanda Reeves: That's Alex Quicho, associate lecturer in foresight and speculative futures at Central Saint Martins, head of cultural intelligence at Canvas8, and my guest today.
Great to have you here, Alex.
Alex Quicho: Thanks for having me.
Amanda Reeves: So let's get started with the story of Alex Quicho. Can you tell us a bit about how you found your way into the futures and foresight community?
Alex Quicho: Yeah, sure. So I grew up in the Philippines, which introduced me to a lot of climate instability early in life. I moved to
Vancouver BC as a teen uh, which is everyone knows is the home of cyberpunk. And then I studied visual art and cultural theory at the Royal College of Art in London, which is sort of where I ended up.
So, my origin story is really, like within the art world, I
really like to think of it as this almost like a landfill for research that has exceeded or mutated out of other disciplines. And I was really, I mean, I really like took to that environment of a bit of chaos, a bit of glamor a lot of potentiality around, you know, thinking about things like you know, social issues, political issues, but always sort of, simultaneously concerned with things like truth and beauty, which I really still believe in.
And also how all of that subtext is sort of folded in together, rolled together, and becomes an unstable entity in its own right. So I actually ended up writing a book about art and technology called Small Gods, which. I guess uses the drone to illuminate the many dimensions that can be contained within a single technological innovation.
The drone was convenient for me cuz there's a lot of discourse is happening around it at the time I was writing. But I really just wanted, you know, to look at one kind of like cohesive technological subject and start to deconstruct that cohesion. I wanted to understand how does it contain like, Imprints of like war or dread and violence, but also things like boredom and transcendence, the feeling of being watched, endurance the bridge between ancestry and futurity.
Like all these kinds of dimensions that were contained in what could potentially be seen as either a weapon of warfare or a cheap sort of consumer filmmaking toy. And this kind of inquiry into how technology. Is released into the world and then exceeds. And I always use the word mutates because it really does, it like really moves beyond its sort of development case and becomes far more than a tool and wanders into this realm of like mediator metaphor.
Agent of behavioral change and that kind of poetic or like lateral or like branched research approach has kind of served me well across various research spheres. So that's sort of where I'm at now is like head of futures at Canvas8 and associate Lecturer in Speculative Futures at Central Saint Martins. Really, it all boils down to these kind of. Endless inquiries around the nature of technology and society, everything in between, and how that is kind of shaping the future of our communities and our planet at large.
Amanda Reeves: Unreal. And I'm so interested, there's a few of us out here who have background in arts and have then transitioned into the futures and foresight space. Can I ask about that sort of transition? You've got this really rich art making history. I'm interested in sort of that relationship between the two.
Alex Quicho: Yeah, I think that, that's a great question. I think, like I sort of mentioned this interest in technology and art, but also stuff like political organization like dreaming and building a kind of better world or like an idealized world together, you can't really escape thinking about the future or like futures as the kind of horizon towards things are arranged.
Like every political project, even the most sort of conservative and incremental ones depend on the construction of the sort of like ideal future for these ideas to live in, to be perpetuated, to sort of reproduce each other and. So I sort of got into the space almost by accident because I was just thinking a lot about these competing visions of the future.
And how you can access them through things like artworks or narratives, film, various sort of artifacts in our world contain these, I guess like yearning for futures that are quite different from the one that we may feel like we are you know, traveling towards as a sort of, as a norm.
Amanda Reeves: Oh, that's such a good answer and I wanna ask you about sort of this I am thinking about what it was like coming from the Philippines and having a very sort of visceral experience of climate change as a young person and then, you know, moving to other parts of the world that might have a different experience of of how the climate's changing.
What, can you tell us a bit about that experience?
Alex Quicho: Yeah, totally. Obviously as like a child, I probably was only registering it on a subconscious level, but I was writing a lot of science fiction as a. As like a unformed human and a lot of it was like contending with climate. I like invented this world that experienced like seven years of sun and seven years of rain.
Like I was really interested in like weather as a thing that like enacted stuff on people. And I think that was cuz we were living in a very Weather unstable region. There'd be like intensifying typhoons, there'd be earthquakes. Every year would bring a kind of like massively scaled catastrophe that, you know, there's a lot of political discourse in the Philippines around like resilience.
The fact that, you know, there's a lot of poverty in the country, a lot of subsistence living and subsistence agriculture. And yet, you know, the kind of party line is that. You know, Filipinos always find a way to survive. We're seeing a lot of backlash against that, obviously, because this kind of narrative of resilience can often obscure political failures, right?
Failures of governance to adequately anticipate and respond to disaster. Especially at a time when we should have like, mature responses to these things that happen repetitively, even if we're experiencing almost like force multipliers around them now. So that felt very real and visceral to me growing up.
I think it's always like lurked in my subconscious. I mean, even when I moved to the west coast there is a strange atmosphere of, you know, you're always waiting for the big one, which is what you call this kind of like world ending earthquake out there.
And you have to like drive around with this like survival pack in your car.
And there's like earthquake drills that are kind of based on Cold war, like nuclear drills. And that's kind of part of the imaginary of the West coast, which has always historically been a place where people kind of society anyway. So there's just this kind of. I guess that is in a way a bit of the origin story too in that, you know, a lot of these narratives ended up, I guess, coming out in my work and in my research, even in the more, I guess, safer climate of England or
perhaps fucked up in other ways.
A lot of writers talk about how often your practice or your research is actually asking yourself. The same questions like continuously, but they're like morphing throughout your life. Like kind of how I was describing this experience of like climate derangement from a young age. It's you know, this origin story of always thinking about like the relationship between like the human and non-human.
Like how to categories of intelligence change? How does technology like warp. Or conceal or like mystify, the realities that we live in. And then how does technology become a container for like theological or existential questions? And lastly like how do aliens find a home on earth in spite of wanting to like destroy or escape from them?
Like I really love the kind of continuity between a lot of immigrant narratives and alien narratives, and
I'm a bit. Sort of post identity politics, but I think there's still something super potent in understanding, you know, what is the kind of xeno, like what is the kind of other alienated not belonging and what is the role of that in a planet we kind of have to like collectively integrate into.
Um, and I think that tension is like really fruitful to explore as well. So yeah, I guess those were other. Concerns or like other beginnings that continue on or like continue to iterate throughout, yeah, these like different paths of inquiry.
Amanda Reeves: Alex, I'm really interested in the way you approach your work and bring some of these artistic and creative elements into the way that you approach exploring the future. Can you tell us a bit about how you do that?
Alex Quicho: Yeah, sure. I always like to say I'm a bit like anti framework, which is not to say. I won't do them, but I think the, whereas the majority of my research process lies, or like in what I kind of urge, you know, my students or like working processes commercially or like my own independent research, I. Flies in more of a kind of, I guess, a bridging between systems understanding and a poetic understanding.
Systems being, understanding the kind of order of relationships, the like mechanics, systems of governance, the interactions between, I guess, living systems, information, these kinds of. Flows, how do you understand that? And bridge that with things that are, you know, that can be considered incom, computable or unquantifiable unpredictable and tropic chaotic.
So we run a yearly project called Expert Outlook. And this year we applied a more kind of distant, kind of speculative, like post forecasting approach. It's normally a year-long forecasting piece, but we wanted to extend that window far out. Our analysts undertook this like huge body of research around like social changes and tensions.
And, you know, surfacing signals and sort of provided that to our writers, so Tim Maughan and Ytasha Womack, who then sort of almost like metabolized that raw material into these like future narratives. But by bringing in the writer themselves, you're also bringing in a point of instability or a point of chaos, right?
You don't control the creative output. Of someone you don't control. How they're going to eat up all that research and turn it into essentially a built world, right? With like character and like dimensionality. And that was like an amazing process for us cuz it actually helped us think through things like, like I said, there's a systems perspective where you're thinking through.
Orders of relationships and causal chains, but you're also thinking through some of the poetic, so how do these kind of factors interact with each other in kind of unforeseen ways that can be, you know, beautiful or terrifying? Or simply funny, like Tim wrote a story about who, someone who you think is a kind of like black market freedom fighter who's like driving like trucks of forbidden goods across the like channel between the UK and the EU.
And it turns out she's like in this weird super far right, like VR truck simulator with like a live chat where she's like obsessed with everyone she's playing the game with so, it was like, yeah, it was sick. And Tim had based that off of like a set of signals we had surfaced, one of which was the kind of rise of like slow simulators, including truck simulators.
And I was like, I never would've anticipated it would've taken shape in this way. Around like, Brexit, like post Brexit tensions.
Amanda Reeves: But that's where you get some of the most powerful scenarios, right? When you are looking at what's something that is surprising but then also has that sort of human or emotive element where you connect to it and you can really, you know, it's not just an intellectual exercise anymore. Now we're really emotionally engaged in that story.
Alex Quicho: Absolutely. And I think that's something that is still like a tenuous thing in the futures practice, so to speak. Like obviously scenarios are part of the structure, right? The scenario is like a normative approach within futuring, and a lot of people associate narrative with scenario because you kind of, you develop a persona, you develop all these kind of different factors.
But oftentimes when you retell a scenario, it's not literary, right? Like it is a kind of somewhat creative, but like straightforward, like plainly told digestion of this stimuli and what we really value about collaborating with this kind of like, you know, Canvas8 has like a huge breadth of writers that it has collaborated with over the years, is introducing that kind of poetic sensibility to this work because like you said, that kind of emotional dimension you can kind of take for granted that will appear there. If you're not a writer, often you will not invoke that emotional dimension in your scenario. And I'm sure all of us have kind of sat through some, you know, some dry decks in our time.
Amanda Reeves: I think I've written a dry deck or two at, you know, from time to time. But you know, we try and better.
Alex Quicho: It's part of the practice.
Amanda Reeves: So I can see this different approach to building a world that people can, you know, emotionally and mentally inhabit in the way that you're approaching this. Can you tell me a bit more about the way that you approach world building?
Alex Quicho: Yeah, totally. Again, it's the kind of, it's the dream I think for like an organization to be able to invest money in and time into world building. We obviously see really successful aspects of that, but mostly in the media and entertainment industry where world building is, you know, has value ascribed to it.
But we're also seeing world building sort of applied more broadly as part of these imaginative exercises as a kind of advancement or deepening of things like speculative design practice or those like narratives and scenarios that we just touched on. I think that there's a lot of interest in world building because obviously, you know, there's cinematic paradigm shifts. There's like highly developed and kind of almost like autonomous fantasy worlds at this point, like Multiverses, franchises. We've had science fiction and fantasy literature for a long time. World buildings kind of part of literature 1 0 1 to begin with. And obviously we have things like open world games and the kind of newfound interest in like, the metaverse and like what it means to actually have these like constructed playable realities and what it means to like, appear in them as people or non people.
But world building also is part of things like political organization. I always bring it back to that too because there's an interesting paper by the scholar Jonathan C. Ong that looks at disinformation, particularly in the Philippines and how it has worked so well basically. And I was really interested in what he had to say there because, not just because I'm from the Philippines, but because there is, you know, he was kind of making this argument that the political sphere right now because of how sumptuously mediated it is through what he calls turbocharged folklore and this
Amanda Reeves: Oh, what a great phrase.
Alex Quicho: it's such a great phrase, and this kind of like stylistic, like hyper montage almost of these like historical events that essentially have crafted divergent realities.
Like he essentially is making an argument that to be politically aligned in the Philippines, whether you are a kind of progressive or whether you're kind of in favor of what is now a resurgence of our authoritarian dynasty, you are engaging in a reality split. And he's like, it's more, it's closer to a fandom behavior and the construction of these particular mythologies. Whether it's the mythology of how the Philippines became democratic through this kind of peaceful mass revolution or the mythology of the Philippines developing its identity as a powerful nation under a strong, like an iron rule. You are sort of participating in this like, like built world around those like revisionist histories.
And he was kind of saying that the sort of middle arena of where those worlds may meet and start to perhaps reflect realism, at least through discourse and debate and fact checking and the kind of, you know, institute of like media and journalism and stuff, seeing that is sort of essentially dissolved or like fallen out the bottom of the country.
Which is all to say that world building isn't just an exercise in entertainment. It's like quickly becoming an interesting paradigm by which a, we can make our own reality seem a bit more digestible if you start to think about our world as something that has, you know, mechanics of governance or a kinda, you know, the way that someone builds a science fiction world is always trying to simulate or model a version of our world.
So how can we use that to reflect back into quite a chaotic and incomprehensible moment? But also like where are we seeing that already being used for? Instrumental ends that are beyond mere entertainment. Like we're seeing that in commerce, we're seeing it in politics. So it's definitely worth keeping an eye on and perhaps developing as a methodology itself within the futures space, whether you're working kind of academically or commercially or indeed within policy.
Amanda Reeves: So world building sits at this intersection of arts practice and foresight. Can you give us some examples more from that the arts practice side to help us see the real potential of world building?
Alex Quicho: Yeah, totally. I mean, there was a great exhibition put on by Curatorial Superstar Hans Ulrich Obrist that was just called World Building, and I think that was like a big kind of like essentially like flagship, like stake in the ground about like the potentialities of not only like world building as a practice, but like where gaming sits in creative practice as well.
I think it was like a nice concise and like cohesive approach to that. Someone would argue a bit too simplistic, but I thought it is such a like complex idea that I think the show is effective in that it sort of was like video games and art have always sort of been bedfellows, so to speak. This is kind of how we've arrived at the mutation that we're currently in.
But within the art world itself, I mean, there's like an incredible variety of provocations, like especially contemporary ones that use world building, I suppose, as a way of I guess you know, Artists are crafting visions of the future along a variety of vectors, right? So re-imagining how the world might be reordered along these vectors.
So whether that is kind of geopolitical, whether that is community or justice based, whether that's a fantasy of decolonization or simply an alternative path to power. We've seen kind of people using, especially using like game engines themselves, to create these almost like cohesively imagined worlds that are so intensely layered to think about, you know, what would a world look like?
If it was organized around an alternative ontology or if our priorities were simply different, for example I really like and have written extensively around the artist Stephanie Comilang and her collaborator, Simon Speiser, who really use Indigenous lifeways that have been, you know, violently suppressed or like erased, but are now sort of institutionally being preserved or even fetishized. So they're kind of using this as the basis of developing these like beautiful filmic and VR worlds that like really explore like what would technology, what would artificial intelligence and engagement with nature and machine look like along an indigenous life way as opposed to in this kind of binary opposition perhaps that we take for granted in the narrative of Western progress.
There's another artist that, a good friend of mine who I write about also quite often is Lawrence Lek, who I guess he's one of the kind of like, first or like leading figures in the art world who has like really deployed unreal engine to like sophisticated ends and really considered virtuality and virtual environments in all the ways.
Amanda Reeves: So I'm interested in hearing a bit more about the futures that you see emerging from the present and what's catching your attention about what could come next.
Alex Quicho: Yeah, that is a great question. I've been doing quite a bit of research into the idea of tropical futures, which I always need to foreground is not my concept.
Tropical Futures Institute was founded by an artist, gallerist designer, and now someone who works in the Web three space, Chris Fussner.
But it has really like, decentralized and grown of its own accord. I think it's such a provocative way of understanding a lot of things that are attached to the tropics and futurity. So I really was inspired by it because you know where I'm from, I didn't historically associate the tropics with futurity. We have some hyper developed mega cities, but often when people outside the tropics think about the tropics, it's just almost like timeless or like underdeveloped space of a kind of fantasy of like leisure and chaos and intensity, but also complete indolence and I don't know, coconuts and charcoal barbecues and stuff.
And I just really love this idea of like, what is, what is the tropical future? And started having some, a lot of conversations with Chris and like a lot of his collaborators and thinking through like, what actually is - the dreaded word - a framework for understanding a tropical future. So, You know, is it about climate extremity?
Is it about majority world perspectives? Is it actually about challenging and redefining ideas of things like behind things like progress and innovation and development? It's about adding like new lenses to quite a lot of assumptions that we might have around essentially innovation and design.
And as a kind of offshoot of that, things like progress, quality, addressing things with urgency and governance. And it just turned into that kind of exploration. So in terms of like what a tropical future, why it matters. Cuz sometimes people are like, that seems kind of niche and you're like, depends on the climate science.
Like you could say that the climate extremity associated with the tropics is actually a much earlier signal for like what a lot of the more temperate world might end up facing if we allow climate change to continue on unmitigated. At Canvas8, we always talk about climate change as a force multiplier. You definitely sense that in the tropics, right? How vulnerability to flooding things like food insecurity, extreme heat, even things like climate refugees or like population displacement, all exacerbate things like corruption crime, violence, access to resources, poverty, access to education, like gendered violence. All these vulnerabilities that might already exist in a system are then multiplied by the sort of intensification of climate change.
And again, tropical features became a really potent way of almost defamiliarizing yourself with the discourse around climate change in order to kind of see it at the I guess microcosmic and macrocosmic scales again, where that fantasy brushes up against that precarity, where these failures in governance and infrastructure kind of meet up with you know, unpredictable chaos and like what that actually, you know, how do you actually challenge that?
How do you address that problem? And well, so how do you see climate change as something that's not a singular problem, it's not an apocalypse, it is something that is already here and it is already changing human ecological interactions.
Another thing within the tropical futures question is, I guess like these two things are quite closely related, but this idea, I know this term is very contested, but I just like, if I'm in the west, I'm gonna use it. Right?
Like majority world perspectives often. In this context, especially as like an English speaker who is educated in the West, it is just a nice shortcut to help people understand that the paradigm that we live in here is very much anomalous. And you know, these economies of extraction that sustain the lifestyles that we may be used to out here are not, should not be seen as the necessary conditions for development. And these should be seen as significant problems to solve and not the sort of price to pay for continued growth. So, you know, there's so many stats out there about. How much the west consumes in comparison to the rest of the world and how majority world strategies should not be seen as things that are like ad hoc or vernacular, but are actually, you know, increasingly useful survival tactics, especially in an ultra hot and unpredictable planet.
Like, is this, are there things that we can draw out of? How people are contending with climate change on the ground right now that can actually go on to inform I don't like the word solutions, but like, go on to inform ways of dealing with and living alongside these changes. Right. And there's some really great projects again that Chris and his collaborators have focused on.
I think there's an artist called Ronyel Compra who has started kind of cataloging these like, you know, sort of everyday innovations he's seen kind of riding around in like non-urban places in the Philippines. So, there's a lot packed in there, I guess. But I guess that's, you know, a really important point to consider.
Amanda Reeves: And I think that documenting piece is really important as well because look, you know, we've all done it, we've all tried to search for, give me an image that represents the future. And the predominant theme is very, it's very shiny, it's very cold, it's very, you know, it's this new technology.
Those are kind of the three sort of things that stand out to me when I look at the visuals that we, that are offered when we think about the future. And then if we contrast that with, well, what is a tropical future that's such a different, you know, how do we imagine the future if we start to put a tropical lens over it?
It gives rise to very different images of what does that look like? What does it feel like? What is it like to live in that kind of space?
Alex Quicho: Yeah, absolutely. And it's sort of, again, going back to the artist Lawrence Lek, he created a kind of satirical essay film called Sino Futurism at a time when obviously now we're seeing a huge boom in especially hard science fiction translated and coming out of China. But Lawrence had created this film when there's a real dearth of science fiction arising out of China, and he sort of like created yeah, like I said, a kind of satirical video that he was like, I just want to.
Stretch the proverbial data set. Like if a future AI has to go back and it has to scrape out, you know, things like Afrofuturism, Italian futurismo, like all these kinds of futurist movements, what happens if it doesn't really, if it doesn't scan like futurism in the context of like, China's particular history and industrialization.
So he's like, what if I just like made a film about that? But I like this idea of like, stretching that data set or like adding to it or like whatever metaphor you wanna use, whatever operative word works there. And I think that the Tropical Futures group are also doing that, right? They're really shifting the Overton window of like what the possibility or like how we can imagine a future of the world that isn't just in like Metaverse purple and chrome.
And I think that's also really important.
Amanda Reeves: Yeah.
Now, Alex, I'm mindful that you've got quite a broad background and work in quite a transdisciplinary way. So when it comes to that moment when you meet someone new, say a dinner party, and they ask, what is it you do? How do you explain what you do to someone who doesn't necessarily understand what that might be?
Alex Quicho: I wish I knew. It depends on who I'm talking to. I say that I really don't like the term futurist. I often say that I like work and teach in speculative futures, and that opens up a way of talking about things like how futures relate to art, how they relate to politics, how they relate to the commercial sphere. And if I haven't bored them by then we'll usually get into it in terms of like, why does it matter?
Like how, how do you imagine the future that is different from the one we feel like that has been handed to us? Like I'm kind of an esoteric person and I like to think the writer, Chris Kraus, also polarizing writer, but I did, I do enjoy her books. And she wrote at one point about how certain conditions that are social, political, environmental, whatever, conspire to feel like fate.
And I always thought that was like a nice truism, right, in that certain things feel immutable, especially when you get into stuff like vectors of class, vectors of racialization, vectors of extraction and like where you kind of end up in the global order. Of course, again, the more you endure these like force multipliers, the more stuck in that fate you may feel.
I think that beyond, you know, helping businesses stay profitable or like, you know, a lot of ways that futures can be used in a practical sense, I think that what I like to talk to with people about is how you actually imagine and shift the parameters of like what that fate is. Like, how do you open up new keyholes or like windows into a future that doesn't make you feel paralyzed with inaction or like nihilism. I'm a bit of a doomer anyway, but I think it's important to engage in these exercises because it's all, like, to me, it's all connected. Like you cannot have effective political organization without, you know, narratives and without future worlds to kind of build something towards. If you're gonna construct a system, including a societal system in good faith of something, you kind of need to imagine, you know, what is that thing that you're working towards?
How is it in fact better? Like what problems does it address? And I think futures are important because they help you kind of a, perceive things at a planetary scale. B, understand relations between systems, but c not lose sight of things like political will collective organization, I guess, what you could call modernist projects that do require vast mobilization of resources to like change, to like move the needle in the direction you want it to move and that's sort of what I end up telling people because often futuring can feel a bit abstract or frivolous. There's a lot of bad futures practices out there, like poor quality or conservative, simply not imaginative, or just, you know, fetishized because some dude likes sci-fi and works at a company and, you know, there's so much more to it than that.
And and I do stand by that.
Amanda Reeves: Yep. And I think there's something there about the, around this sort of tension and that aspect of, to have a really successful future s piece, it needs to be grounded in the reality while also exploring the potential. And it's really about navigating that tension between the two.
Alex Quicho: Yeah, you put it much better than I did.
Amanda Reeves: I had the benefit of being able to listen to you talk it through.
Alex, before you go, I wanted to ask you more about this idea of being post-world or without world. Can you tell us what you've been thinking about in this phase?
Alex Quicho: Yeah, totally. It's a very nascent idea for me. Or rather, I've been writing this piece for like a year and deleting it and writing it again, because I don't think, the argument I'm trying to make is that we are like, beyond world building. I think that our conversation today has really pointed to the utility of it and the importance of it and also the dangers of it.
If we start to think about these I guess split political realities or political fandoms. But I, what I wanted to address with without world, I guess links into what we were talking about with poetic and also crisis, like climate apocalypse.
I think there's a lot of fetishization of apocalypse, A lot of kind of, like I said, doomerism, you know, the very idea that we, even in the commercial world, everyone's like poly crisis, perma crisis.
This kind of idea that we are constantly having this adrenal response to something bad happening. I think that's one thing, but a question I always had in my head was like, what happens if we cease to recognize like the contours of what is happening to us? I think we're beginning to feel that way.
Like I said, there's this kind of, I think the reason why world building and kind of systems thinking and this kind of, I guess, modernist impulse is really taking off right now is because there is this simultaneous rise of you know, any sort of trend forecaster, anyone working in the fashion and music worlds will also have seen this simultaneous turn towards like, Medievalism and saints and like Catholicism and all these weird ways of engaging with like vast sublime experiences of the unknown that essentially like break your world and like stupify you again.
And I really wanted to think about like, we can't just ignore that. Even if you're in a commercial setting or an academic setting where like to know, to gather information, is obviously of vast importance and utility. What does it mean when that information ends? Or what does that mean when that information just ends up feeling like a lot of like, like loose wires in your hand?
And I guess the without world concept, I really just wanted to write about like, I was starting to read a lot of sci-fi that was really quite, it was like sci-fi without a world. Like there's this book by Olga Ravn called The Employees, which is just, it's written in the form of like an HR testimonial of all these like spaceship entities trying to reconstruct a like insane thing that had happened on board that spaceship but none of them really have the language for like what they encountered, or like what they experienced, or like even who they are because it kind of emerges that only some of them are people in the way that like we would define people. Yeah.
So it's like, and I'm just sort of thinking about that and like what it, yeah. How will we find language or how will we actually experience, or like what will, what is the equivalent artifact, cultural artifact? What is the equivalent, you know, whatever it is that we do within a kind of creative practice or research practice or features practice? What is the equivalent of that when we start to experience something that feels a bit more like pre-history of something that we won't recognize versus the end times of something we've always recognized, like when that overlaps, like how do you begin to make that legible again?
And I think that, to me, is like the exciting, I guess you could call like weak signal or like emerging development in the world building or world space. So, yeah, watch for my piece on that, which I hope will come out eventually if I don't delete it again.
Amanda Reeves: It sounds so interesting and listening to you talk, I, it's making me think about some other things I've been reading. I've been diving back into Margaret Wheatley's work at the moment, and it feels. It feels like this is also coming up in response to sort of that, that increasing fragmentation that we're seeing that there's, it feels like our knowledge and understanding and grasp on the world is sort of, falling apart at the seams and how do we respond to that?
Alex Quicho: Yeah, totally. Have you read the book, death By Landscape, by Elvia Wilk?
Amanda Reeves: No, but I'm gonna put it on my reading list.
Alex Quicho: Yeah, I feel like if you're interested in that, it's like a non-fiction book. She wrote a speculative fiction also and it feels like a nice companion piece cuz she actually starts to think about, I guess you had Venkatesh Rao as a guest on your podcast before. Right? And like his concept of like the permaweird, Elvia Wilk explores the new weird or like, I guess the new weird is what people started calling this kind of genre of like horror X climate fiction that everyone was starting to see, and it's just like a really nice book that explores those ideas of both the like saintly stupification and the obsession with like modernist systems that will help us like mitigate this kind of looming terror.
Amanda Reeves: Oh, that sounds so great.
Alex Quicho: Yeah, I feel like you'd vibe it.
Amanda Reeves: So we've got this sense of everything weirding, what, do you have any ideas about? What, how do we respond to that and how do we navigate around this shift?
Alex Quicho: That is a great question. So thinking about those concepts like Venkatesh Rao's permaweird, Elvia Wilk's exploration of the literary genre called the New Weird, any number of kind of future facing or strategic writing that has kind of cottoned onto this incongruency. Like we've like emerged out of a time of excessive disinformation and like context collapse. We understand the sort of end and like mixing of these information streams, but I think that the way that people saw that was that they were still quite rational. You could kind of sort them into, okay, this is, you know, this is aligned with a particular part of the political compass, and that's why these particular conspiracies are happening there. But we're still, you know, there's still a shape of a social system around that.
This kind of weirding is a, again, I love the word mutation because I feel like this is something we're experiencing in real time. We're seeing a kind of, at risk of sounding entirely insane, we're seeing a kind of like overturning of like symbolic orders in a really, like basic sense. If you look at fashion and stuff, we're seeing a lot of you know, things that look like they were like pre landfilled and then dredged up and like put on people's bodies.
Like we're seeing, like this is like a fun example of how, I guess people are perceiving and responding to the fact that perhaps the contours of our world are getting a little blurry or they've accelerated or we've come out of a kind of strange traumatic event that no one wants to acknowledge, and now we're sort of living with that within us.
But not only that, but we've actually experienced all kinds of like insane changes and because human beings are the way that they are, they've sort of absorbed them and perhaps haven't fully processed them. So from a kind of firmer grasp of climate change to this whole turn towards alternate reality, you know, we touched on the metaverse earlier.
There's also a crazily popular understanding of quantum physics that everyone takes for granted.
This rise of non-human intelligence and the mania around things like Chat GPT, and the kind of hallucinations that are arising from these like generative intelligence systems, like all on the tail of what has all you know, for decades already been an exercise in like post-modern deconstruction exploding of those like grand modernist narratives and seeing what comes up next.
I think what we're experiencing now is a sense of both like stasis and transformation, but as a result there's this kind of Yeah, like I said, there's a bit of a, you know, we're all sort of dumb animals in the face of the mushroom cloud kind of vibe. So at Canvas8 we are exploring a new macro behavior that actually addresses those, I guess, an everyday response to planetary weirding. Like how that affects people's relationships to their identities, to their communities, to their like political alignment, but also to their desire for things like clarity and stability, how they may look to organizations to like deweird the world for them, and what that actually means for like, you know, how is power distributed? Who is kind of taking control of these new narratives? Can narrative even be reestablished in that way? Like what is the utility of that? So that's another thing to watch, I guess. That we, yeah, we've been sort of developing with our analysts for a few months now and are looking to roll out.
So again, yeah. Deweird the World is the new slogan.
Amanda Reeves: I gotta say, Alex, that sounds dangerously like a framework.
Alex Quicho: Oh no. It's a trap.
Amanda Reeves: So Alex, I just really wanna thank you for taking the time to chat with me today. This has been such an enjoyable conversation. I love how broad and how deep it's gone. And it's been a real pleasure getting to know you and to become more familiar with your work.
Alex Quicho: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me here. Like I said, it's been a massive honor and yeah, I really appreciate the kind of sensitivity and generosity you've given our conversation today.
Amanda Reeves: Our guest today was Alex Quicho. If you've enjoyed today's discussion, you might like to check out Alex's first book, Small Gods which explores the violent and spiritual dimensions of drone technology.
FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you'd like to support the pod, please check out our Patreon link on the website. I'm Amanda Reeves. Thanks for joining us today.