Imaginary Ecologies:
Free-thinking laboratory for collective imagination, three days in the woods.
Notes:
Not ecology as subject matter.
Ecology as method.
Three days in the woods.
In nature.
Woods, fire, the river, the long days and short nights near midsummer.
So… What do you bring to the woods?
What protocols do you want to propose?
The Imaginary Institute is a meta-game.
A game that makes games.
It does not exist yet.
It is imagined into being each time, by whoever turns up.
Collective imagination is imagination that’s more than the sum of its parts.
Something none of us could imagine alone.
A mycelium of imagination.
Running underground.
Imaginary infrastructure is the infrastructure future imagination needs: infrastructure that has itself to be imagined and played into being by those who live in it.
A series of protocols for consulting different intelligences.
Consult a creature.
Consult the forest.
Consult an object.
Consult a dream.
Consult the collective imagination.
Consult the body.
Consult the future.
Consult the wind.
Consult the fire.
Consult the stream.
Consult the earth.
And whatever lies between.
Rubbish into creature.
In a wood the rubbish is sticks, leaves, a dead branch that already looks like a leg.
Make the creatures.
Stand them in a constellation.
What do they feel?
What do they know?
A constellation is an ecosystem you coconstitute.
The family is a forest is a policy is a wood.
A mask worn long enough starts to wear you.
Trance.
There’s something more than mere imitation.
Possession as a craft.
We take what comes back and turn it into characters.
Creatures.
The creatures are the vessels into which all protocols pour.
We develop them across the three days.
On the last day the creatures meet.
That meeting is the performance.
Day 1: emergence.
Day 2: development.
Day 3: encounters.
An ecology of creatures.
An ecology of stories.
An ecology of attention.
An ecology of futures.
An ecology of protocols.
Protocols generate relations.
Relations generate creatures.
Creatures generate stories and movements and songs.
Stories and movements and songs generate performances.
Performances generate new protocols.
Each creature contained in its own niche, in its own Umwelt.
The tick waits on a blade of grass for the smell of butyric acid and the warmth of a mammal and nothing else exists for it.
Termites.
Stigmergy? But with physical objects this time.
Ovid called it metamorphosis.
Kafka called it metamorphosis.
We called it imaginal cells.
The caterpillar dissolves into soup before it is a moth.
Somewhere in there it is neither and both.
A moth meets a bee in the forest at night.
Confused, the moth asks the bee: "Wait, are you a day bee or a night bee?"
"Why choose when you can Bee Both!?"
An imaginary soup:
Whatever you think is the soup is the soup.
Someone still has to do the shopping.
The girl from Dublin danced through the forest in pink ballerina slippers.
We should keep that bit.
Find a thing in the wood that tells you the future.
Talk to it.
Forty minutes.
This is augury.
A bird’s flight.
A liver.
A stone at the foot of a tree.
Foresight is the clean word for it.
What’s the dirty version? Divination?
The Foresight Theatre Lab has been reading entrails in a suit.
Here it can read them in the leaves.
Eight definitions of an ecosystem as a score.
Eight constraints.
Eight films of the same wood.
The constraint is freedom.
The wood affords.
So do protocols.
A shamanic walk.
A trance.
Maybe someone asks for the way out.
A quieter station.
A hand on the back.
Shiatsu to come back to for the ones who go too deep into the woods.
Who holds the space when a person breaks open in a wood?
The manual does not say.
The consent protocol is not written.
The care team stands by.
Ritual.
A protocol for entering.
A protocol for leaving.
A protocol for saying no.
A protocol for witnessing.
A protocol for care.
Sing.
A circle song.
Sung again across the days, changed each time, evolves.
Copy.
Change.
Select.
Copy change.
Copy.
Copy.
Change.
Reset.
Rebirthing.
Discharge.
The nervous system needs an exit it can see from where it is standing.
The same thread continues. Oliveros’ deep listening, carried out at Ecologies of Listening and into the trees.
Do not cut it.
The camera is extraction.
Warm life, cold footage, towards an autumn show.
Rules for recording. How and when.
A trail camera in the woods.
Night vision.
A costumed creature shuffles into frame at 2am and shuffles out.
Nobody pressed record.
Animals with smartphones.
What kinds of creatures emerge when imagination is treated as an ecosystem rather than an individual act?
The fire.
The dance around it.
Coffee in the morning, before anyone has decided anything.
Hours with nothing in them.
Play.
Empty space.
Cathy opens her private house to a thing that does not exist.
Hold that boundary loosely.
Between order and chaos
is where the fertility is.
Imagine nature.
Or let nature imagine.
Or just stop deciding which.
Take your shoes off.
No don’t.
There’s ticks.
Sticks.
Sing.
Tsing.
The forest contains several species of theorist:
One believes everything important happens underground.
One believes forests cooperate.
One suspects every creature is actually many creatures.
One insists joy is practical.
One claims culture begins in play.
One keeps asking why anyone would do any of this if it wasn’t fun.
The moth was always a committee.
Sing.
Dance.
Sing again.
Dance again.