Virtually Real: Writing Transmedia Spaces

In this episode we talk to Lara Lesmes + Fredrik Hellberg of Space Popular, Pierre Christophe Gam, and Brooklyn J. Pakathi about spaces - private, public, real, virtual, but most importantly transmedia spaces that confuse these definitions and open us to different ways of inhabiting spaces, interacting with one another, performing rituals, or building communities. 

Resources:

The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space and Time by Rasheedah Phillips
The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast is part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport. Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

Transcript

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Welcome to The Digital Deal Podcast, the series where we talk about how new technologies reshape our democracies and how artists and critical thinkers can help us make sense of these changes. My name is Ana Carabelea, and today I am joined by Space Popular, Pierre Christophe Gam, and Brooklyn J. Pakathi. 

Space Popular (Lara Lesmes + Fredrik Hellberg) is an art and architecture studio that explores spatial media experiences and their impact on everyday life through research, design, and artworks. Their work has been commissioned or exhibited at institutions such as MAK, Vienna; MAXXI, Rome or Sir John Soane Museum, London, among others. Lara and Fredrik are also professors of architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and were previously visiting professors at UCLA in Los Angeles. 

Trained in interior architecture at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris and Central Saint Martin’s in London, Pierre-Christophe is a polymath artist, architectural designer, and researcher. Drawing inspiration from West Africa’s Griots tradition, he breathes new life into ancient myths rooted in Africa’s pre-colonial heritage. A recipient of the esteemed Unity for Humanity award, Gam’s work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao, Vitra Design Museum, among others. 

Pierre Christophe, Lara and Fredrik are artists-in-residence in the European Digital Deal project. 

Brooklyn is a Vienna-based, media artist, curator and cultural producer. Their curatorial work is shaped by an interest in decolonial curatorial practices that can be used to embed cultural equity. Brooklyn works in actioning cultures of technology, developing inclusive and alternative definitions of the technological and using virtual space to deploy artistic practice and discourse outside of the modern colonial world system. 

As a media artist, their most recent work concerns itself with the language and materiality of emotion, connecting and abstracting the underlying architecture of these profound and complex psychological forces through objects, images and virtual spaces. 

Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining me. It's great to have you. 

Lara Lesmes: Hello. 

Brooklyn J. Pakathi: Hey. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Today we're going to talk about spaces - private, public, real, virtual, but most importantly, transmedia spaces that sort of confuse these definitions and open us to different ways of inhabiting space, of interacting with one another, performing rituals, building communities, and so on. I thought perhaps the best place to start would be to ask all of you to tell us about the understanding of space that you work with or that is activated in your practice, and perhaps the definition of virtual space that follows from that. 

Lara Lesmes: I mean, in our case, we are trying to look quite broadly at the impact of media on the built environment. So, that can happen in many ways and, while we are often more focused on issues of gatherings, gatherings that involve remote participants or gatherings that involve different forms of media and different forms of representation, we also look at this on a much broader scale where we might often be looking at the way in which different kinds of media allow us to live differently and relate to territory in different ways. We feel like this has the potential to allow us to live very different lives, although it also comes with a lot of concerns. 
Then, we go from there to the ways in which we would define the virtual. We always try to go to a definition that takes it outside of technology and very much from the point of view of representation. 
So, the virtual [as] that which is something in its essence, but not in its entirety. Your avatar is virtually you, because it represents enough of you and is something that you experience virtually, something that gives you enough cues to be the thing without being the actual thing. What we like about that is that it always implies the existence of another, and that is something that we really like working with: the fact that everything is referential when you're speaking about the virtual, at least in our interpretation of it, and that everything is language. 

Brooklyn J. Pakathi: In my understanding of space, it is really shaped by the lived experience of other people. I think of Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds and this concept of black geography, where space is never neutral, it's always contested, reimagined, but also alive with different forms of possibility. I think within my own curatorial practice, I'm constantly engaging with these notions, notions of practicing refusal, creating spaces that reject traditional Western hegemonic architectures of display, while also proposing alternative ways of seeing and being seen. Then when I think about virtual space, especially in this context, I think of what Saidiya Hartman called wayward space, a space that allows for different forms of being and becoming, where the boundaries between presence and absence or visibility and invisibility could be reconstructed on terms of the work in which I'm representing or the communities that I'm focused on, which is predominantly artists of colour from the diaspora, but also from the global majority who are working within virtual space. This is also how I became familiar with Pierre’s work and how we developed this relationship, because he's working in a similar fashion. 

Pierre Christophe Gam: So, this is a sideline for me now. [...] I will start by saying that my practice is essentially community-centric, human-centric. And when I think about physical space, I'm interested in the way that public space can be designed [...] to separate people or to bring people together, and how the way we design space enables or can support the ability of people to come in contact with each other, to connect with each other in a meaningful way. And so, what I do with my work is very much about creating space - I would say agora space in a sense - space where people can have meaningful exchange, meaningful conversation, especially in the context of speculative visions of desirable futures. 
That's what led me into the virtual sector. Initially, I started building a physical installation, and I started to look at the tools that were available in the context of digital new media, and how this could be used to facilitate meaningful connection, meaningful experiences. [...] Maybe for context for the listeners, my project is called Toguna World. The Toguna is the gathering place of the Dogon people in Mali, West Africa. It's a space where the members of the community gather to have meaningful, deeply intimate conversations, [a space] that connects the physical and the invisible, the visible world and the invisible realm. Essentially, what I attempt to do in my practice is [to see] how I can use the digital realm in that context. I've designed a space called the Sanctuary of Dreams that functions as a temple and within that space, participants are invited to take part in a ritual which I call the future dreaming ritual. The goal of this ritual is to enable them to collectively envision desirable futures. 
In this context, I see virtual space very much as a gathering space [...] designed to foster community and to help people commune in a deeper way. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Great. That's so cool to hear. I was wondering if you can maybe go a bit deeper into this relation that the virtual can have in relation to the material/the physical, whether that's an extension, an augmentation? It's often described in different ways, and it has different ways of being placed in relation to physical space. How do you see that relationship in your practice? 

Fredrik Hellberg: One thing that we constantly get asked about and even confronted with is the fact that a lot of the things that we have created - like artworks, even gathering spaces that are designed for a festival or something, the virtual spaces that we create - [...] are very referential, meaning that they look like spaces that you might have seen before. Obviously, to some degree, many of these spaces might be similar to a space where you might see something like a facade or a staircase, or it looks like a square or something like that. For us, the relationship between the virtual and the built and the physical environment is that of language. [...]. No matter if you're experiencing a virtual environment with a headset or on a screen, your body is somewhere. But if we just think about the virtual environment, like Lara was saying, it's a world made of language. There's nothing inside a virtual environment that has to be there. Everything is placed there consciously by someone. In some cases, some of those things are accidental, but in our case, basically everything you can look at has been placed there consciously, which means that it's meant to communicate something to the person that's experiencing it. And we're really interested in this communication. 
In our experience, the more referential or the richer the language is, the more meaningful the experience. Obviously, for something to be part of a linguistic system, it needs to be known, or it needs to trigger a code for something that you know before. That's one strong relationship that we have between the physical and the virtual. It's funny that usually this critique - we've been very heavily criticized for this - comes from people 40 or older, or [I would even say] 50 or older. A lot of older people are like, [if] it's all virtual, why isn't it completely abstract? It could look like anything. Why [are] we again bored with something we've seen before? Never heard this from a younger person who probably understands [more] the importance in a virtual environment of things being usable.  

Lara Lesmes: More legible.  

Fredrik Hellberg: Yeah, exactly. 

Pierre Christophe Gam: Maybe I can tell a story about how I got into dabbling with virtual reality in the first place. This was during COVID. I started doing the project and the ritual at the end of 2019. Initially, the plan was for the ritual, so the physical, immersive installation was to scale and to travel in different parts across the world. Then Covid came about, we had the lockdown. Obviously, it was no longer possible to have an exhibition touring and for people to gather. During that time, which was in the early lockdown, I was invited to participate in an online forum. [It] was interesting, [that] I was able to notice it was possible for people to have meaningful and deep conversations in that context. This led me to start exploring more the digital space [...] because what I was starting to see [was] that a lot of the content and conversations [...] happening online were driven by an algorithm. And I started to think: how could I subvert the virtual realm to bring something that will function in the same way [as] when you go into a church, [...] a temple, a synagogue, mosque? These are spaces that are designed to facilitate a ritual of transcendence, essentially to help you tune within yourself and from that place to be able to kind of transcend to something beyond. That's what I was interested [in]. You have all these rituals in the commercial space, and these rituals are about to put you out of yourself to shop, to consume. And so, to me it was like: Okay, how can I transform and use this space [...] to bring something deeper, something more meaningful, [...] with the understanding that we might be pushed to spend more time in the digital space? You know, to bring the way that we exist and interact with one another in a physical realm and intentionally design a virtual environment with the same kind of ethics and values. 

Brooklyn J. Pakathi: I think that for me, going back to what Fredrik said about referencing, a lot of my work is very referential. When I consider the relationship between the virtual and the material world or these ideas, I think about the social, cultural, and socio-political logics that are embedded in the physical world and how they manifest across different lived experiences, but also across different media. I'm often looking at writers, theorists, authors, political activists, and people who are working in social fields, and how they engage with these topics through various perspectives. And I reference these lived experiences in order to guide my own curatorial practice. So, my approach really draws deeply on this concept of black visual intonation, where the virtual isn't separate from, but rather deeply intertwined with the material reality, creating what Arthur Jaffa calls this spooky entanglement. I think that's super insightful because there is something sinister about this entanglement and not understanding something that is a lived experience. This framework really allows me, personally, as a curator, to develop interventions, exhibitions, and written work that recognizes how digital spaces carry the weight and texture of embodied experiences rather than existing as abstract realms divorced from physical reality. This tension, which I quite like in my work, really creates the type of productive rupture that Fred Moten identifies as central to the Black aesthetic tradition. It's something that's neither fully material nor completely virtual, but sort of vibrating between these two states in ways that generate new modes of perception. And I think that perception is so crucial to how we engage or how we consider the relationship between the virtual and the physical. 
I also think about the idea of opacity, where virtual space offers the possibility for a presence that resists complete transparency, transparency through the form of capture. This idea of opacity represents the right to remain partially unknowable and to resist the kind of totalizing gaze that demands legibility. And again, when we're considering this relationship, we're dealing with reference, legibility, who that legibility belongs to and who owns that. I'm working with constructing those spaces for different individuals or artistic practices that engage with communities that they're referencing. 
Throughout my practice, these frameworks aren't just references, but they're tools that shape how I approach the relationship between the material and the virtual. Whether that's commissioning new digital works that incorporate elements of black visual intonation, designing exhibition spaces that create breaks between the physical and the virtual, or developing strategies that preserve opacity rather than demanding complete transparency. I think that this relationship is about embeddedness. It's about knowing and unknowing. And really, it's about reference, right? Referencing lived experience. 

Lara Lesmes: I wanted to linger a little bit on the word reference and how one of the most exciting things that happened for us when we started working with virtual spaces that were highly referential is [the realisation of] how much of the codes, behaviours came attached to certain spaces. Suddenly, virtual space was teaching us all the things that the architecture was doing beyond shelter by putting it in a place where shelter is not necessary. We were seeing all the other things that it was doing, seeing [man-built] virtual spaces and the decisions that they made [and understanding] that [...] if you arrange the space in that way, or if you use these pieces of furniture that are completely unnecessary because the avatars don't need to sit down or they don't need to use this furniture, [...] you are hinting at a certain type of gathering or a certain type of ritual. Even with things that are enclosures or envelopes, like architecture, realizing how much [they are] embedded was [...] a big learning. And somehow, calling these things references feels almost strange, [...] because it [doesn’t] feel like you are referencing it, you are trying to be it, or you are being that thing just not in its entirety. It's not a reference in the sense that you do something else with it, or something that you keep in a mood board. But you are embodying that thing. The way that you [Brooklyn] were talking about your work and the way you curate, I find that really provoking, [in the sense of] what does it mean to say that social code or a ritual is a reference versus it is the thing being sort of reproduced? What conceptual framework would we use there? 

Fredrik Hellberg: What you were saying about references, [also makes me think] that we have a background in architecture where there is this strange tendency to create universal solutions. And we realized that this is such a clash when you're building virtual spaces that are referential and you have somehow in your training, an idea that you're creating something that would work for everybody. We've realized many times in our work that we are referencing things from a very narrow point of view. And very often also in the design of virtual spaces, there's a lot of colonial language: you sail across the virtual space; discovery, there's somehow an undiscovered land that you're going to. 

Brooklyn J. Pakathi: That's a really great provocation. Because when I think about the modern technological system or big data, big tech, a lot of these codes, algorithms, data sets, data centers, are also realistically referencing indigenous knowledge production systems, but then are being shifted through the lens of capitalist profit agendas. So, referencing, I think, could also be a very tricky slope to work with. I love the idea of referencing as a form of representation that honours, but at the same time being aware of the sort of problematics associated with how referencing can also be [...] incorrect in the sense that it doesn't really encapsulate the full picture, or it doesn't come from a place of authenticity or a place of really centring itself from where the reference is meant to be, but rather is just something in which you're just trying to reproduce for the sake of a visual aesthetic or an idea that isn't genuine to its source. Working between those two modes of production can also be a responsibility for us as cultural producers and creatives: how we approach making virtual space or working with the material world, and then reproducing our references? 

Pierre Christophe Gam: What I will say for myself is that, in the design of the Sanctuary of Dreams I was very intentional. It's very much about looking at the way spiritual space exists in the physical realm and the value that they provide and the way that they enable individuals to transcend, commune, and participate in the ritual. It was about looking at that and trying to see how it would be possible to recreate the same type of experience. In the making of the Sanctuary of Dreams, I spent about six months in Benin. I had a spiritual advisor who is an Ifa practitioner, because [...] the future dreaming ritual is informed in part by a spiritual tradition called Ifa. So, in designing the space, [and] in the finalization of the ritual, I wanted to make sure that, as much as possible, obviously, in the context of physical disembodied experience, some of the key tenets of the traditions were explicitly [...] centred, and that the tradition was explicitly present throughout the experience. I think I was listening to the comments around this idea of reference and the disconnection between the reference and what it represents. To me, it's very much about [...] the fact that the digital realm is not remote, [...] separated from the reality of our physical world and [about] being intentional in that the kind of reality, values and agenda that exist in a digital realm exist outside of [...] binary, capitalist, extractive agenda. And that in the real world, we exist beyond that. So, as we create this virtual space, which is not on the same level in the physical realm, but [...] can provide value in regards to connectivity, enabling people to expand the scope of the imagination and so forth, [we need to make] sure that other agendas are part of these spaces. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: That's great. So many things I can pick up on now, and I do not know what to start with. Maybe I can go to the next question that kind of ties into the initial idea that Fredrik put forth that older people tend to see this division between the virtual and the physical as much clearer than it is, and imagine the virtual as that space that has no hooks in the physical space but rather is a space where everything is possible. And then what Brooklyn was saying, that there's actually a continuous tension within virtual spaces that is much more worth exploring than a complete break away from the physical. 
I was wondering, in that line of thought, can you tell us a bit about how you envision a transmedia space that can hold communities and can also become a politically imaginative and generative space in ways that perhaps physical spaces are not? 

Fredrik Hellberg: The first time we worked with this technology was in 2014, when there was still no way to actually connect a headset with another headset. Or it was rare, you didn't see it. There weren't any virtual meeting places. In the beginning it was much more of a dead end. You went in, and the experience was ideally incredible in some way, and then you went back out the same way you came. In our work, we've created a lot of virtual spaces that are designed for people to gather and to meet. But I think for us [...], rather than thinking about our own work that we have done, spending time inside of these virtual places, [helped us realise] they are very much not dead ends anymore where we go in regularly to meet strangers. Just as if you're literally taking the metro to the centre of the city and you just walk around. That's something that people usually don't do. I occasionally go out dancing on my own, but by and large you interact and meet new people through other people that you already know and your networks. But in these virtual spaces, very often you emerge either with a new friend or encounter some culture or some way of living that you couldn't imagine, like the furry communities in VRChat or the sleeper communities in VRChat. Often, specifically in VRChat, in the last four or five years, is where the most progressive cultures are building strong communities. As you were saying, mainly young people, very, very young people, teenagers down to 10 years old. You can blend in as an older person. 

Lara Lesmes: You cannot blend in. 

Fredrik Hellberg: Maybe that's true. I have actually been ousted as an old person. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: What gave you away?  

Fredrik Hellberg: Yeah, mainly through the language that you use, body language or the language that you use, whatever that happens to be. But regardless, [I am] learning so much. That speaks obviously to the way that the newer generation thinks about these spaces. You meet a 15-year-old who has a very advanced full-body tracking system that's completely integral to their social life in virtual spaces where gatherings are often about dance or sex or the way that you sit together, where the body is more important than what you talk about. We realized [...] in our work, [it] just feels like we're trying to keep up. And that's why we are recently pivoting more to a recent project that's called Sit, which is more of a documentary, basically talking about these new phenomena of intimacy and these new cultures. 

Lara Lesmes: In that I see a little bit the hope for an escape from the shackles of the real estate market, [from] having to live in a certain place that implies certain demands for you [...] to literally be able to afford it. That [...] is one of the things that occupies my mind most of the time. Why [are] our lives dictated in a certain way through our location and type of work, but also where those opportunities happen to be located? 

Pierre Christophe Gam: I started by saying several times that I do not see virtual space as having the same strength or power as physical space. I very much look at it in the same way that right now we're using a device to connect with each other. We use social media, we learn about people through the Internet, podcasts, YouTube, Twitter and so forth. All these tools enable us to be able to connect with people beyond the limitation of our physical reality, of our class, of our gender, of our culture, whatever. It allows you to be able to connect, to be inspired, to learn from people in other parts of the world with very different experience, and to grow through that process. And so, being able to build 3D environments in the digital space, because [...] we are already so much intellectually and emotionally invested already in the digital, just feels like a natural extension, right? [...] I was listening to Lara and Fredrik talking about the way that people are trying to reproduce very physical experiences like dancing, sexual satisfaction, gratification and so forth in the virtual realm. I don't know if it's a question of generation, [if] it's a question of references, because I am very embedded in the real world. In the same way that in my environment, for example, in the Sanctuary of Dreams, I designed this temple within a garden, a virtual garden, but I made the garden intentionally abstract. I made it look like fantasy. I thought it would have been wrong [to try] to just reproduce what exists, [...] what you see in the real world. I wanted to intentionally make it look like a fantasy, just to kind of signify the fact that there's an idea of a garden, and this is just the possibility of the garden, but not trying to replace and trying to put itself as a replacement just as great or just as valuable [as] nature. I think there is a desire by some corporations for a big part of our life to exist virtually. [...] I was in Kenya and I was visiting a friend the other day, and she was showing me a correspondence letter that a mother used to have in the ‘60s and ‘70s. From Kenya she was communicating with people in the Netherlands, people in Germany, people in the UK and beyond. They have this long letter correspondence over many years, and eventually, after some years, she was able to meet some of these people. In the same way that through the device of the letter, you were able to have this emotional, intellectual, spiritual attachment to people that you have never physically met, I think that social media provides the same thing. But at that time, there was never the idea that exchanging by letter would replace physically meeting. It was just a way to connect with one another, but this is not the end in itself. That's how I tend to prefer to look at the virtual realm. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: It seems like there's a pendulum. Initially the shackles were connected to the territory, like Lara was saying, and physical space seemed to be deterministic and limiting. So, virtual space offered an escape from that. Whereas what Pierre Christophe was now mentioning is flipping that coin and seeing [that] physical space is the one space where you can escape being seen as a consumer. So physical space becomes the space where you're freer than you would be in a virtual space online, whatever that might be. 

Pierre Christophe Gam: I think it's more nuanced, because I agree with what Lara was saying [...] that for her, moving, changing space was the opportunity to build a career and try to access opportunities that would have been more difficult to have where she was from. The digital realm as well, [the] online allows you access to opportunities, to knowledge, to life experiences that are very different from where you are. It really allows us to connect. There is the agenda of the corporation, this is just a matter of server. But I think [in terms of] the technology [...] we could totally imagine a future where there would be private servers, open-source servers [and so] the issue of the algorithm and the technology control will be removed. They really could serve as a value [...] to expand the limitation of the physical space. 

Brooklyn J. Pakathi: I definitely think about the kind of contradictions that we're actually addressing here, about the possibilities, but also about the enrapture or the containment of one's being through existing online. I do think that there needs to be a nuanced perspective on how we approach and engage with technology because again, we are under "control”, there's a lack of agency, but there is also a push towards open source, decentralized, server-hosted kind of work. And again, in my referencing of lived experience, I can think of this concept of homeplace by bell hooks or how Legacy Russell thinks about Glitch Feminism. hooks’ theorization of homeplace as a site of resistance and healing within oppressive systems provides a crucial framework for developing virtual environments and virtual spaces that also function as protective yet generative spaces. There is this sort of intervening or intercepting that happens in which social work, creative practice, artistic research finds ways to disrupt our definitions of the technological, so these digital spaces become what bell hooks describes as spaces of care or spaces of nurturing where our spirits are renewed, while simultaneously embodying Russell's understanding of the glitch as a productive disruption that opens new newness for embodiment and identity beyond the limitations of the binary. I think within these nuances we can find ways to intercept or to entangle with while still being rooted in the physical. Because at the end of the day, the physical world is the world [...] we rely on and it's the world which is heavily under endangerment. I think that there are ways in which people are using the technological to confront their realities within the physical world. 

Lara Lesmes: Yes. Basically, using the technological to sustain new lifestyles that free them from at least some of those shackles. It's really good what you're bringing up because the structures, the thoughts and the theories are there. And I think experimentation in the technological is so important because it's maybe the space where we might be able to apply or make possible the theories.  

Fredrik Hellberg: What you were saying, Brooklyn [about] the terminology of the glitch or the disruption more generally. Coming back to what we were talking about before [about] corporations and is the freedom in the virtual or in the physical (depending on what you're concerned with)? We had a little bit of a breakthrough with the project, Filandon. [...] We've been very focused on collaborating with governments, mainly smaller local governments, and tried to talk to small councils about how they are thinking about their public spaces or the businesses operating in their neighbourhood where that might rely 90% on the services of one - in most cases American - corporation. We've often tried to argue, not for nationalization, but [for] the equivalent of the street and the sidewalk of public transport. We ended up rethinking this. Instead of thinking [of] another platform that is not commercial, we replicated the street, including the shops and all the other commercial things. So, we built these virtual platforms for gatherings where we are using some parts of services from up to 10 different companies. We're like routing little bits of very useful services into a new thing where if [the companies] were to monitor how you're using the service, it wouldn't make any sense. The purpose is not to camouflage necessarily, but it's building something new that's actually useful, [and] a meaningful way to gather. It wouldn't have any purpose for any of those companies to monitor or collect data because it's so fragmented. That was something interesting that we discovered and something that we're trying to continue developing. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Thank you so much, everyone, for contributing with great ideas. Unfortunately, we have to stop, otherwise we could continue for ages, and it'll be a very long episode. But before we do, I just wanted to ask you if you have any recommendations for articles, research pieces, artworks, anything that could be of interest to those who have listened to this episode and want to dig deeper into this topic. 

Fredrik Hellberg: It's not super new, but I recently read Amitav Ghosh’s book The Nutmeg's Curse, which I am still processing. It’s about pre-colonial practices of storytelling and their role in the climate crisis. I don't think I've learned that much from a book in a long time. 

Brooklyn J. Pakathi: A book that I could highly recommend is Rasheedah Phillips's Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space and Time in which the author tries to unpack time, non-linearity, quantum physics and racial justice, and really thinking about these connections and how embedded they are in lived experience that is often cloaked and exists as the precipice of uncertainty and how we try to engage with this uncertainty. 

Pierre Christophe Gam: Some of the things I've been reading and looking at quite a lot over the last few months started more specifically with a paper called TESCREAL, which is an acronym coined by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres. It's a paper that was published; people can find it online. Essentially, they try to articulate the different philosophies that sustain the kind of tech-feudalism, transhumanist agenda, also long-termism, post-humanism and so forth – all these different types of philosophies and the way in which there is right now a competition for the future of our societies. This led me to read other books on social Darwinism, eugenic ideology, and even on some esoteric traditions. I recommend that people become familiar with TESCREAL and then go down a rabbit hole and explore these different philosophies and ideologies. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Great. Thank you so much for all of that. Thank you again for being on this episode and for the wonderful conversation. It was great to have you all. 

Fredrik Hellberg: Thank you so much, really. 

Brooklyn J. Pakathi: Thank you, everyone.  

Pierre Christophe Gam: Thank you for this conversation, Ana.  

Ana-Maria Carabelea: That's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I hope you enjoyed it. The Digital Deal Podcast is part of the European Digital Deal, a three-year project co-funded by Creative Europe. If you want to find out more about the project, check out our website, www.ars.electronica.art/eudigitaldeal.