It's Fantastic
A video, metalogue and collaboration
It’s Fantastic Stochastic Metalogue
This multimedia metalogue is part of Unpsychology Magazine’s second Imaginings issue – number 9.2 - available FREE from HERE.
It was created by a team of Warm Data hosts, together with Nora Bateson, whose 2022 essay, It’s Fantastic, provides the starting point and inspiration. The Warm Soup team is made up of Rachel Hentsch, Leslie Thulin and Vivien Leung.
You can find Nora’s original ‘It’s Fantastic’ essay HERE and it is also republished in her new book, Combinings, available from Triarchy Press HERE.
We are excited to present Warm Soup Productions alongside one of our first Warm Soup Projects— the multimedia experience inspired by Nora’s essay 'It's Fantastic.’
As we released this piece, we were invited to write about the confluence of our creation processes. Over the past few years, we (Leslie Thulin, Rachel Hentsch, and Vivien Leung) have come together to work on numerous projects creating nourishing stochastic processes related to Warm Data with Nora Bateson. After multiple invitations to talk about the stochastic ways we have worked together, we began an attempt to assemble an assemblage that resembled what was happening. What could we articulate, share, express, or point to… What could we make legible, recognizable, or translatable?
We noticed separately and together that we were experiencing a sense of wonder, delight, and surprise in working together while also finding ourselves at unbelievably fantastic junctions together. All this was happening with no project plans, no budgets, on seemingly tight and unclear time frames, with very little experience in the project's content nor history of working together. New ideas, possibilities, and curiosities were emerging through our relationships that felt different. Don’t get us wrong, there have been plenty of stumbles.
The inspiration from Nora and her writing in ‘It’s Fantastic’ was contagious. Oh my, how we love how the essay is dreaming us into life, rocking us to a new asymmetrical beat, and waking us from the numb slumber of industrialized belief.
Upon reading ‘It’s Fantastic’ for the first time, I (Leslie) noticed a faint irregular pulse developing into an odd beating drum as each sentence unfolded in my head, then a bass accompaniment began illuminating the asymmetrical beat wandering underfoot. My mind bent in time, thresholds passing under my feet at the speed of light, and suddenly I am floating into another world of ethereal grace meeting sharp edges in its travel. Arriving with cuts on hands mending an internal wound never seen. Not a repair, not healing—a release needed when the stitches were too tight, one cut is all it took to let loose, tearing the space between, underneath my tissues, deep inside my belly. Finding a dark silence stirring an eternity of grooves with sunlight, from form to formlessness, round and round, revealing the illusion of the ‘real’ in new time.
I sat and read again, and in the blinking of my eyes, the written words on the paper disappeared, leaving only the idea of the sound of Nora reading out loud to me. I could hear her voice in the silence. Listening allows my eyes to rest as the sounds fall over me and the combinings and repetition shake the ground beneath. That was the yearning, and we were calling on it. The next week Nora read the essay in our Reading Salon.
Months later, we came together in person, and more of the idea sprouted—an animation, elaboration, and exploration. We had been simmering this soup for some time on the back burner. We said ‘yes’ with no clear vision of how it would come to be. It was quite fantastic. New modes of being were arising through our work together. The patterns and learnings were difficult to describe and more difficult to name, yet they had a magnetism attracting our attention.
Without a conversation or list of what to do, the ripple of inspiration moved us.
We began with recording Nora; there was no soundproof room or quiet place; instead, we recorded amongst the chatter and laughter from another room, not efforting to perfect anything; life was life-ing. Yet the idea of the background sound filtered through our industrial lens, and the critique came from within and through layers of history, culture, and more—the seemingly unwanted background noise disturbing the pristineness of our programmed view of needing a ‘quiet’ that is stripped of life. Illusions running rampant. Nothing else ‘should’ touch the sound. Ha, what a trickster.
Moving on and the life around us fell into the simmering pot with irony at just the right time, engulfing the industrial judge into the belly of the beast and beginning the digestion process. Can you hear the distant laugh as it’s laughing the belly of the beast? A deep belly-laugh shaking from the center breaking down the scripts and rules, giving rise to the dough of possibilities…meeting the moment in the journey pairing perfectly with the timing in the story—re-pairing the errors of our layers with our love of life. How could we have known or planned ‘perfect’ timing? As if we could plan distant ripples in an ocean that will later carry us to the other shore? We could not have scripted it.
Before making time to improvise on the visuals together, we scattered to other parts of the world. And the random yet not-so-random unfoldings continued. The three of us love playing on our ipads with brushes and palettes into the swirling, curling, jagged, messy, stirred, beautiful and ugly, unexpected and disturbed, disoriented and flowing. Slow cooking the lies of ‘this is real.’ Tenderizing our attachments while laying the sinew aside to tie fabrics together later. We envisioned our dancing canvases with stirred colors and asymmetrical movement in harmony as they alchemize with Nora’s voice. A joy ride around mountains and hills revealing unchartable landscapes and melting frozen soundscapes bringing the beat back with life.
We dithered, and one, then two of us, fell ill. The reminder that catastrophes are necessary in evolution relaxed our expectations. And now being geographically disbursed, we relied on the magic of improvisation, each drawing on our own, at different rhythms, across oceans and time zones yet held by Nora’s ideas and voice and our friendship and trust with one another as well as a trust in life itself, feeling something preparing to move through our hands and fingers untamed—yearning for the movement of life unexpected.
Rachel collected our drawings and layered our art and animations into a moving collage, using transparencies and swirls, clipping, adding, multiplying, and sprinkling—at the playground, feeling the joy as the combinings coalesce nth order life affirming intricacies. And the coalescing will continue as you lay your eyes and ears upon this experience, continuing in its own transformation with and through you.
The beginning of the beginning…
After working on our first big projects together in 2021, we began to search for a beginning of sorts. How did we know we could work together so well? Because we did know—maybe not explicitly—but we knew, somehow. Where did it all begin? We searched and searched to find where the beginning of that was. But where did what begin? What was ‘it’? How do we even know what we are looking for? Is there an ‘it’ at all?
We soon discovered there were beginnings everywhere. We met the beginning again and again in different ways—and the beginning met us. We found the beginning in the middle and the middle in the end, crossing our senses.
The magic of the stochastic and synesthesia floating us down the river of no return did not go unnoticed—we found our way through the white water and rapids, in and out of the eddies, and onto shore again and again. We detected changing drafts, lines, currents, paths, temperatures, pace, rhythms, and timing. Yet it wasn’t clear what elements and conditions were influencing it all. The stochastic is not random—it is random with brackets—directionality, and movement. The stochastic needs time. What is underfoot?
With Warm Data, we continuously explore new ways of being together that support our care for one another and life itself. How are we caring together? What are we tending? What are the hidden losses and dangers in the quagmire of capitalism, imperialism, and the supposed efficiencies of the industrial machine? How is our tending and caring shaped and used in this ensemble? As Nora says quite often, it is not about what is said but what is possible to say. You will not know what happened at the gathering by reading the transcript.
The work is not what is central; the people and relationships are central, yet our work is shaped by the people and our relationships while also being shaped and directed in dangerous ways by the structures we are held by like an invisible prison. We are not looking for answers or opportunities to repair these systems. We are looking for each other and the possibilities that arise when we are learning together with a love for life. while noticing the myriad of ways our systems and structures mold our subjectivity toward particular particularities that reinforce our systems and limit our ability to find one another.
The challenge in describing and naming our experience requires remembering that the describing and naming shapes and changes what we are describing and naming and trying to understand. We are never seeing or understanding the direct experience upon reflection—the reflection is a new experience combining with all that is in-between. Every description is filtering through those which came before and shaping those that come after. It is inescapable.
As Nora says often, ‘Your story changes my story.” Our perceptions are molded by our past experiences, including our family, culture, our sense of identity, political and economic circumstances, and our broader collective history. And they change, continuing to shape our perceptions moving in and through time. Our responses are shaped and created by our choices collectively—the individual does not have quite the choices assumed. ‘It’s Fantastic’ points to these ideas in many ways—the possibilities are shaping the possibilities, and the possibilities are rooted in what is possible.
Stochastic magic requests a kind of respect beyond understanding. Our reflections took us down a river where we found ourselves moving across time into memories and places that seemed off the river altogether. Yet as we shared and continued our conversation, the similarities, and differences amongst the memories next to other memories began revealing evidence of tributaries in confluence deep below the riverbeds feeding and meeting one another.
Human beings have been bombarded, cut, tormented, twisted, and drowned by the mechanistic, imperialistic, and capitalistic ideas that are the foundation of the systems and world around us. Systems that are predicated on exploitation and limit our ability to find one another. We are forced to fit ourselves in and explain why we can’t when we don’t. It's a one size fits all illusion. We internalize rules, habits, processes, and structures that are always guiding, shaping, and moving us—we point to the push and pull, hoping for freedom. The ways information is received, and interpreted changes as our attention learns to move us transcontextually. It matters who and what we put together and next to each other. We had sudden recognitions that the conversation was not at all about what we thought, and jumps were made possible that were once improbable, maybe even impossible, and backdoors were illuminated out of nowhere. There are understandings we can’t explain, and the not knowing changed how we responded to each other. The information expressed and received in any moment is infinitely beyond our wildest sense of sensitivities and sensibilities.
Through our work, we discovered a coalescing of invitations to explore our curiosity and allow our sensitivities to play untamed. What unfolded were new paths revealing bridges over water and tunnels under. The rigor, flexibility, integrity, humility, generosity, and curiosity that transpired in our togetherness was recognized in hindsight as infinitely necessary—yet these words hardly touch what we are pointing to. Our ideas around success, failure, and mistakes arrived in costume repeatedly. We settled on the idea that there’s nowhere to settle. Our refuge is each other. So the questions shifts from what is happening together to who is it possible to be together. The answers will never be the same.
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