I'm a wild experimenter, trying to be as responsible as possible.
I'm very inspired by the talks/writings of John Cage, but when I listen to some of his music I wonder if it's the same person. But these interests shift from time to time, I remember being very inspired by the work of Oskar Fischinger(abstract animator), I still find his work beautiful, but now I feel that beauty is not enough. My all time favorite fiction books are all books by Boris Vian and Master and Margharita by Bulgakov. Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas and most works of Douglas Adams(the later the better), especially Starship Titanic. I'm very much inspired by Marvin Minsky, often referred to as the father of artificial intelligence. One of his most famous books is Society of Mind. But what I like most about him is that he used to shift his research wildy, for example it's not well known that he's the inventor of confocal microscope, or a leg with joints controlled by Furrier series and few strings instead of bunch of servo motors. In one talk he mentioned that he likes to see where we're not doing very well and fours his research on that subject. I also like his quote: You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way. Could go on about these forever…
Resilience is for me just another word with hints of dogma and ideology. I decided to use it as less as possible.
Personal resilience is about enduring the crisis. Social resilience is about enduring the crisis. Planetary resilience is a human concept.
Well, I'm extremely naive, and I see 'hope' for the future everywhere. I mean hope is for sissies, forget about the hope. I see better future everywhere, especially in what some plants and other natural systems do. I can't say I like how nature looks, but I certainly like what it does. I see the signs of Luminous Green in scattered networks of all kinds. What I like about Luminous Green is that it is not just Green, Green can mean both good and bad. Can't remember who said: don't worry about the future, it will come for sure - the problem is will we be in it!
I really appreciated the wide diversity of minds and ways of thinking stuffed in such a small space. You could see the small groups of two-three people sharing similar viewpoints, and then one of those was sharing the idea space with someone else etc etc. This created beautiful decentralized network, where nodes where not fully aware of what the whole network was doing. But the best part of human nodes is that they can become aware, and then this network feedbacks into another iteration… amazing. I was gladly surprised that I didn't know who was artist, scientist, engineer. I assumed wrong for most of the people and was pleasantly surprised!
I don't know if this was offered as a separate project, but my interest shifted very much to possibilities of bio-computing. I mentioned slime moulds as example, and regretted immediately after seeing what it turns into(clumsy dogma). It became a hype and I had to shut up. But what those systems do still amazes me, and I certainly want to continue researching them. Apart from slime moulds, ant colonies are also very good computers, and there are numerous other examples, yet to be found. After talking to Wietske Maas in a train to Belgium, she remarked that in the case of slime moulds we are not programming it - it can execute only one function. Later Angelo mentioned that the whole issue then is in rephrasing the question. These two remarks became the main guidelines in my future research:
And if you think of ant colony as one subsystem and slime mould as another, then there is one more interesting issue: how to connect such 'modules' and build an easy to use framework. Then my childish side awakens and I can see the nice little forest which actually computes all the digits of PI or does internet searching. Don't know if you would trust it with managing your bank account though, but perhaps that's the beauty of it(did you know that George Booles book is only 1/3 about the strict binary logic he became famous for). This is the kind of work I'm interested in now, I think that the first outcome would be an artwork. I'd certainly like to collaborate on this with others from the retreat but it's a bit difficult to decide who to exclude:) You have Angelo with his interests in biology and technology, then Cocky and Theun for their incredible skills on/in the field and very open philosophy! Don't know - can it be everybody? Too expensive!
Networking I guess, but what do you offer? I can only offer my skills. If I had some money, I'd offer that as well. I'd certainly like to offer long lasting friendship, but for that we have to get to know each other better, no?
Chirstina Agapakis, she writes excellent inspirational blog posts related to synthetic biology. From her site: 'I'm a fifth year grad student at the Harvard Medical School interested in synthetic biology, bioenergy, social studies of science, and fiber arts. Are you?' Please check out her blog for more info: http://scienceblogs.com/oscillator/
Would let him watch some old ninja movies! I remember a scene where ninja throws a gas granade, and disappears. When his enemies left, it turns out ninja dug himself under the ground in a few seconds, held his breath and got out undamaged. Awesome, but it needs great skills!
Itself, just like any other bureaucratic kludge.
Lumi Green looks like any other tram driver, that being his day job. But he's not human at all, he's a giant network of amoebas capable of taking any form. What looks like a cigarette bud thrown by a grumpy tram driver is actually a small subnetwork of amoebas ready to share information with yet another network. Then a japi like guy passes by and steps on the cigarette bud, carries it on his shoe. Ofcourse, he is another part of Lumi network… Their life span is huge, so they seem inert to others but they perceive time on much bigger scale. And they just love to hang out with us.