ART - The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast

How can we design and adapt for the uncertainties of the 21st century? How do emotions shape our decisions and the way we design the world around us?

Scott Doorley is the Creative Director at Stanford's d. school and coauthor of Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration. He teaches design communication and his work has been featured in museums and in publications such as Architecture + Urbanism and The New York Times. Carissa Carter is the Academic Director at Stanford's d. school and author of The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data. She teaches courses on emerging technologies and data visualization and received Fast Company Innovation and Core 77 awards for her work on designing with machine learning and blockchain. Together, they coauthored Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future.

Today, someone is putting the finishing touches on a machine-­ learning algorithm that will change the way you relate to your family. Someone is trying to design a way to communicate with animals in their own language. Someone is designing a gene that alters bacteria to turn your poop bright blue when it’s time to see the doctor. Someone is cleaning up the mess someone else left behind seventy years ago yesterday. Today, someone just had an idea that will end up saving one thing while it harms another…

To be a maker in this moment—­ to be a human today—­ is to collaborate with the world. It is to create and be created, to work and be worked on, to make and be made. To be human is to tinker, create, fix, care, and bring new things into the world. It is to design. You—­ yes, you!—­ might design products or policy, services or sermons, production lines or preschool programs. You might run a business, make art, or participate in passing out meals to the poor. You may write code or pour concrete, lobby for endangered species legislation or craft cocktails. Wherever you fit in, you are part of shaping the world. This is design work.

– Assembling Tomorrow
A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You both teach at universities at a time when educational silos are in flux. Young people are living in this kind of giant laboratory of possibilities, innovation, inspiration, and experimentation, and things around us are changing so fast. The rapid advances of AI are challenging many norms, and Assembling Tomorrow really helps us put this into context. It's playful, imaginative, and thought-provoking, and it inspired me to consider: What’s the future that I want to live in? And how I can be a part of that design process? So, what made you write Assembling Tomorrow at this moment in time?

CARISSA CARTER

This moment feels really overwhelming. Like we're overwhelmed with the technology, our climate's on the fritz, and it can feel really unsettling. Yet at the same time, as people that craft learning experiences, we know how much agency each of us has as individuals. And so we wanted to write the book to call attention to the complexity and the feeling of overwhelm of this moment and then also to share things that anybody can do to launch ourselves into that better future.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

How important are emotions in the design process? And what are the emotional impacts of design?

SCOTT DOORLEY

So if you look at the internet and the creation of the internet, the idea was to move information quickly. And that has been great, but there have been a lot of things where they didn't take into account the fact that, well, there are people attached to all that information, and those people are experiencing emotions. The things that we're designing are actually exciting and aggravating our emotions. So you take something like social media, which is really about the speedy spread of information. And what you see is it also brought along with it teen depression and body image issues. It also led to political polarization.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Carissa, you teach data visualization. How important is this in helping us understand, adapt and take action on climate change?

CARTER

One thing to know is that every single climate visualization that we see out in the world, whether that is a map of rising temperatures around the country or the globe or rising sea levels or wildfires, all of that has design decisions behind it. I am also with you that we need to get more people understanding the impacts of their own actions on climate change and being aware of what's happening to the planet. So one is to be able to interpret that work and really interrogate it for what it is. To be able to read any infographic and what we call deconstruct it, understand what emotions it is evoking in you, your gut reaction, why those are happening, and literally what the designer has done to make you feel that way. Literacy in reading infographics is one piece. And to give you very specific examples, in one of the classes that I teach and co-teach with a geoscientist, Kate Maher, and an infographic designer, Catherine Madden, we have students visualize what is known as the climate swerve. So this idea that humans, and the idea that we can't have agency over shifting climate, was coined the climate swerve by Jay Lifton a number of years ago. That concept is one that the more that we have people sourcing what the information is and how to present it, we feel gets that climate literacy in our brains and gets that message across. You can see it in really interesting ways. For example, we have students visualize climate anxiety and where it is cropping up, overlaid with where people should feel anxious about climate. We have even had a student group that visualized the themes of major Marvel movies throughout the past 20 plus years. They looked at what those themes were and how they changed and how some of the themes have started to be much more climate-related, kind of showing how these topics are ingrained in popular culture too.

Speculative Legislation: Preparing for the Future

DOORLEY

We have an assumption that technological innovation outpaces government regulation. That's a very well-founded assumption because that's how it goes. It's always been that way. However, I think we need to start thinking differently, and we should be able to imagine that we can create legislation that precedes the impacts of the things we're creating. If we see a potential effect coming, we should be able to put in a sort of preemptive law to address it prior to the effect actually happening, which we do in a lot of ways. There are tons of examples of that, but I think the pace of legislation needs to accelerate so that it can really grapple with the pace of technological innovation. But then if you do that, you have to be ready for the fact that the legislation might be off. It's speculative, it's anticipatory, and you're not necessarily going to get it right. I think we also need to build in mechanisms into the laws that make them responsive and changeable. So let's have speculative legislation. We'll put a law out there, a regulation that's speculative, but let's have built-in checks that are constantly checking if this is working the way we wanted it to, and it needs to be easy to change if it's not. Which is also not built into the system. We need to be able to imagine things working in ways in which we aren't used to them working. One, I think, is legislation being quick and responsive when generally it's sort of slow and hard to change. That's one thing that I think could really help.

CARTER

Scott and I like to kick around imaginative ideas for types of legislation. One idea is like a 'look both ways' technology where, let's say, we have a big new social media technology that's about to be launched, and AI and all sorts of algorithms that would fit within that bucket. Is there a moment where there's a trial period with technologies like that, where we have some ideas as to how they might need to be governed? We could put those in place and then use that, say, two-year period of time when that technology is learning how it's going to actually work once it's in place. We both look historically and see how similar technologies have affected our world. What should we be looking for in terms of the effects it might have both on our individual persons and our societies? Also, sort of look forward, do some visioning as to what might come to pass 10, 20, 30 years down the road.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

One of the things you write about are understanding the intangibles.

CARTER

Understanding the intangibles is really about knowing the forces that are coming together that are making this moment feel quite unsettling. These include the fact that everything is interconnected and flows between each other and the feelings that you were talking about before, as well as our human propensity to make stories and come up with narratives to connect ideas, whether they exist or not. Human characteristics and actionables are like: what are ways to notice those forces that are happening, to see the unseen so that each one of us can be more aware of what's happening and build the world for the better.

The Concept of Umwelt: Perception and Reality

DOORLEY

The way our brains work is not really indicative of how the world works. There's a reason for that. Us being able to pay attention to certain things and ignore others allows us to navigate, but it shouldn't be mistaken for an understanding of our holistic view of the world. There's a concept that we talk about in the book called the umwelt. The idea of an umwelt is what your senses can take in, and different species have different senses. As an example, cockroaches sense movement in ways that we don't. Butterflies can see infrared light, and we can't. Butterflies can actually taste with their feet, which is kind of an amazing thing, and I'm kind of glad that we don't. The point is that even through our senses, my understanding of a situation is going to be different from your understanding of the situation. The way I think of a story of what happens is going to be different from the way you thought of a story. There's a man named Gregory Bateson (author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind), who was an environmentalist, and he talks about how most of the problems in the world are actually a problem between the way people think and how the world works. They are not the same thing. The way we understand the world and how the world actually works is just not mapped perfectly. That kind of leads to problems because we don't know exactly what we're doing in the world. We can't see all the repercussions of the things we create until later on.

AI and the Future: Opportunities and Concerns

One silver lining about the technologies we're creating is that technologies like AI could be used to help us with this issue, with the fact that our mental models aren't exactly in line with how the world works. AI is actually very good at predicting and modeling outcomes. It could be used to understand climate change better so that we're able to understand it in a way that allows us to act. It could also help us predict the impacts of the things that we're making. So there's a bit of a silver lining in here, even though it can feel scary to be in a situation where your mental model and how the world works are not in line.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

As you reflect on AI, how do you feel it's going to change the future of education, the future of work, the way we communicate with ourselves, and our imaginations? We have been living in a digital smog for a long time, now combined with the manic pace of AI. So as our technologies change, how is it changing our sense of self?

CARISSA CARTER

Well, one is it's absolutely going to change us. I think the sooner that we can be very proactive, the better. I don't know if I want to be changed, and I think a lot of people are feeling that too. But it is going to change us, so it's not going to help to pretend like it's not happening. But we can all be proactive in noticing the changes it's having on us, on our children, on our planet, from every scale—from that large system-wide energy footprint scale all the way down to the minuscule. Maybe I won't even call it minuscule, but I worry that AI is changing my thoughts and can control my thoughts, and that used to sound really far-fetched and now seems sort of middle of the road. I guarantee in a year's time that will sound like a very normal concern. Social listening is very sophisticated. All of the data in the websites that we visit, the data trails that we leave out in the world, are tracking us—our locations, our behaviors, and our habits such that there are many sites out there that can predict exactly what we're thinking and feeling and feed us advertising content or things that aren't even advertising content that can change what our next behaviors are.

I think that's getting more and more sophisticated. We have already seen our political elections affected by mass attacks on our social media. When that comes down to our individual agency and behavior, I think that's something we do need to be concerned about. The way that we as individuals can combat it is to be aware that it's happening. Really start to notice the unnoticed, and I still feel optimistic amongst this concern.

When we are prototyping new design ideas with students, we love this mantra that the prototype should never be more resolved than the idea. So if you want to make a new chair and you're concerned with how much space it should take up, you make that thing out of cardboard so that you just get an idea of space. You don't make it at its final beautiful wood and leather resolution because then you're going to be looking at whether this texture feels right. You're not going to be thinking about the amount of space it's taking up. But with AI, you're right. The manicness, the hallucinations, when they appear exactly the same as something that we are used to as just a representation of search, etc., that's confusing. That is confusing to our brains, and if you're working quickly, you can miss it.

The Media Landscape: Protecting Our Imagination

DOORLEY

You mentioned digital smog, Mia, and something Carissa and I have been talking about lately is as you move from the industrial era to the media era, the landscape of what we're working with changes. In a media landscape, the environment is not just the trees and the water and the air. It's actually our minds—our emotions, our feelings, our mental models, and our imagination. So our brains are kind of the environment in which all these new media updates and designs are playing out. Where does pollution show up? Pollution shows up in political polarization, it shows up in difficulties with mental health. We need to think of our imagination in the media space as a public resource that needs to be protected. Our collective imagination, the sum total of our individual imaginations and how they affect each other, is really important to start thinking about with a conservation mindset. This is kind of a silent spring moment of the media era.

Creativity, Innovation and the Importance of a Holistic Design Process

DOORLEY

When you're thinking about a creative field or just bringing creativity to whatever field you have, creativity is often about finding the hidden thing, finding the thing that nobody else is seeing and taking it to reality. Don't think that make believe or imagination or weird ideas are not worth it. I had some mentors in my life that allowed me to understand how you should take make believe seriously, because if you go down this kind of wild path, you find something beyond what's going on, and eventually the world is going to normalize it and integrate it. Otherwise, it just won't work. So don't worry about being out there. We need people to be thinking beyond what is toward what could be. I think that's number one. The second thing is that the way you do things is as important as the things you do. It's not just about the product; it's about how you do it because how you do it actually has more repercussions sometimes than the product. You might create a great product, but if everyone working on it is angry and the people you're trying to serve aren't excited about it or they've been taken advantage of to make it come into the world, that leaves more bad stuff that's harder to see but has an equal or bigger impact. Just how you make it is as important as what you make.

How can we design and adapt for the uncertainties of the 21st century? How do emotions shape our decisions and the way we design the world around us?

Scott Doorley is the Creative Director at Stanford's d. school and coauthor of Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration. He teaches design communication and his work has been featured in museums and in publications such as Architecture + Urbanism and The New York Times. Carissa Carter is the Academic Director at Stanford's d. school and author of The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data. She teaches courses on emerging technologies and data visualization and received Fast Company Innovation and Core 77 awards for her work on designing with machine learning and blockchain. Together, they coauthored Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future.

Today, someone is putting the finishing touches on a machine-­ learning algorithm that will change the way you relate to your family. Someone is trying to design a way to communicate with animals in their own language. Someone is designing a gene that alters bacteria to turn your poop bright blue when it’s time to see the doctor. Someone is cleaning up the mess someone else left behind seventy years ago yesterday. Today, someone just had an idea that will end up saving one thing while it harms another…

To be a maker in this moment—­ to be a human today—­ is to collaborate with the world. It is to create and be created, to work and be worked on, to make and be made. To be human is to tinker, create, fix, care, and bring new things into the world. It is to design. You—­ yes, you!—­ might design products or policy, services or sermons, production lines or preschool programs. You might run a business, make art, or participate in passing out meals to the poor. You may write code or pour concrete, lobby for endangered species legislation or craft cocktails. Wherever you fit in, you are part of shaping the world. This is design work.

– Assembling Tomorrow
A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You both teach at universities at a time when educational silos are in flux. Young people are living in this kind of giant laboratory of possibilities, innovation, inspiration, and experimentation, and things around us are changing so fast. The rapid advances of AI are challenging many norms, and Assembling Tomorrow really helps us put this into context. It's playful, imaginative, and thought-provoking, and it inspired me to consider: What’s the future that I want to live in? And how I can be a part of that design process? So, what made you write Assembling Tomorrow at this moment in time?

CARISSA CARTER

This moment feels really overwhelming. Like we're overwhelmed with the technology, our climate's on the fritz, and it can feel really unsettling. Yet at the same time, as people that craft learning experiences, we know how much agency each of us has as individuals. And so we wanted to write the book to call attention to the complexity and the feeling of overwhelm of this moment and then also to share things that anybody can do to launch ourselves into that better future.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

How important are emotions in the design process? And what are the emotional impacts of design?

SCOTT DOORLEY

So if you look at the internet and the creation of the internet, the idea was to move information quickly. And that has been great, but there have been a lot of things where they didn't take into account the fact that, well, there are people attached to all that information, and those people are experiencing emotions. The things that we're designing are actually exciting and aggravating our emotions. So you take something like social media, which is really about the speedy spread of information. And what you see is it also brought along with it teen depression and body image issues. It also led to political polarization.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Carissa, you teach data visualization. How important is this in helping us understand, adapt and take action on climate change?

CARTER

One thing to know is that every single climate visualization that we see out in the world, whether that is a map of rising temperatures around the country or the globe or rising sea levels or wildfires, all of that has design decisions behind it. I am also with you that we need to get more people understanding the impacts of their own actions on climate change and being aware of what's happening to the planet. So one is to be able to interpret that work and really interrogate it for what it is. To be able to read any infographic and what we call deconstruct it, understand what emotions it is evoking in you, your gut reaction, why those are happening, and literally what the designer has done to make you feel that way. Literacy in reading infographics is one piece. And to give you very specific examples, in one of the classes that I teach and co-teach with a geoscientist, Kate Maher, and an infographic designer, Catherine Madden, we have students visualize what is known as the climate swerve. So this idea that humans, and the idea that we can't have agency over shifting climate, was coined the climate swerve by Jay Lifton a number of years ago. That concept is one that the more that we have people sourcing what the information is and how to present it, we feel gets that climate literacy in our brains and gets that message across. You can see it in really interesting ways. For example, we have students visualize climate anxiety and where it is cropping up, overlaid with where people should feel anxious about climate. We have even had a student group that visualized the themes of major Marvel movies throughout the past 20 plus years. They looked at what those themes were and how they changed and how some of the themes have started to be much more climate-related, kind of showing how these topics are ingrained in popular culture too.

Speculative Legislation: Preparing for the Future

DOORLEY

We have an assumption that technological innovation outpaces government regulation. That's a very well-founded assumption because that's how it goes. It's always been that way. However, I think we need to start thinking differently, and we should be able to imagine that we can create legislation that precedes the impacts of the things we're creating. If we see a potential effect coming, we should be able to put in a sort of preemptive law to address it prior to the effect actually happening, which we do in a lot of ways. There are tons of examples of that, but I think the pace of legislation needs to accelerate so that it can really grapple with the pace of technological innovation. But then if you do that, you have to be ready for the fact that the legislation might be off. It's speculative, it's anticipatory, and you're not necessarily going to get it right. I think we also need to build in mechanisms into the laws that make them responsive and changeable. So let's have speculative legislation. We'll put a law out there, a regulation that's speculative, but let's have built-in checks that are constantly checking if this is working the way we wanted it to, and it needs to be easy to change if it's not. Which is also not built into the system. We need to be able to imagine things working in ways in which we aren't used to them working. One, I think, is legislation being quick and responsive when generally it's sort of slow and hard to change. That's one thing that I think could really help.

CARTER

Scott and I like to kick around imaginative ideas for types of legislation. One idea is like a 'look both ways' technology where, let's say, we have a big new social media technology that's about to be launched, and AI and all sorts of algorithms that would fit within that bucket. Is there a moment where there's a trial period with technologies like that, where we have some ideas as to how they might need to be governed? We could put those in place and then use that, say, two-year period of time when that technology is learning how it's going to actually work once it's in place. We both look historically and see how similar technologies have affected our world. What should we be looking for in terms of the effects it might have both on our individual persons and our societies? Also, sort of look forward, do some visioning as to what might come to pass 10, 20, 30 years down the road.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

One of the things you write about are understanding the intangibles.

CARTER

Understanding the intangibles is really about knowing the forces that are coming together that are making this moment feel quite unsettling. These include the fact that everything is interconnected and flows between each other and the feelings that you were talking about before, as well as our human propensity to make stories and come up with narratives to connect ideas, whether they exist or not. Human characteristics and actionables are like: what are ways to notice those forces that are happening, to see the unseen so that each one of us can be more aware of what's happening and build the world for the better.

The Concept of Umwelt: Perception and Reality

DOORLEY

The way our brains work is not really indicative of how the world works. There's a reason for that. Us being able to pay attention to certain things and ignore others allows us to navigate, but it shouldn't be mistaken for an understanding of our holistic view of the world. There's a concept that we talk about in the book called the umwelt. The idea of an umwelt is what your senses can take in, and different species have different senses. As an example, cockroaches sense movement in ways that we don't. Butterflies can see infrared light, and we can't. Butterflies can actually taste with their feet, which is kind of an amazing thing, and I'm kind of glad that we don't. The point is that even through our senses, my understanding of a situation is going to be different from your understanding of the situation. The way I think of a story of what happens is going to be different from the way you thought of a story. There's a man named Gregory Bateson (author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind), who was an environmentalist, and he talks about how most of the problems in the world are actually a problem between the way people think and how the world works. They are not the same thing. The way we understand the world and how the world actually works is just not mapped perfectly. That kind of leads to problems because we don't know exactly what we're doing in the world. We can't see all the repercussions of the things we create until later on.

AI and the Future: Opportunities and Concerns

One silver lining about the technologies we're creating is that technologies like AI could be used to help us with this issue, with the fact that our mental models aren't exactly in line with how the world works. AI is actually very good at predicting and modeling outcomes. It could be used to understand climate change better so that we're able to understand it in a way that allows us to act. It could also help us predict the impacts of the things that we're making. So there's a bit of a silver lining in here, even though it can feel scary to be in a situation where your mental model and how the world works are not in line.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

As you reflect on AI, how do you feel it's going to change the future of education, the future of work, the way we communicate with ourselves, and our imaginations? We have been living in a digital smog for a long time, now combined with the manic pace of AI. So as our technologies change, how is it changing our sense of self?

CARISSA CARTER

Well, one is it's absolutely going to change us. I think the sooner that we can be very proactive, the better. I don't know if I want to be changed, and I think a lot of people are feeling that too. But it is going to change us, so it's not going to help to pretend like it's not happening. But we can all be proactive in noticing the changes it's having on us, on our children, on our planet, from every scale—from that large system-wide energy footprint scale all the way down to the minuscule. Maybe I won't even call it minuscule, but I worry that AI is changing my thoughts and can control my thoughts, and that used to sound really far-fetched and now seems sort of middle of the road. I guarantee in a year's time that will sound like a very normal concern. Social listening is very sophisticated. All of the data in the websites that we visit, the data trails that we leave out in the world, are tracking us—our locations, our behaviors, and our habits such that there are many sites out there that can predict exactly what we're thinking and feeling and feed us advertising content or things that aren't even advertising content that can change what our next behaviors are.

I think that's getting more and more sophisticated. We have already seen our political elections affected by mass attacks on our social media. When that comes down to our individual agency and behavior, I think that's something we do need to be concerned about. The way that we as individuals can combat it is to be aware that it's happening. Really start to notice the unnoticed, and I still feel optimistic amongst this concern.

When we are prototyping new design ideas with students, we love this mantra that the prototype should never be more resolved than the idea. So if you want to make a new chair and you're concerned with how much space it should take up, you make that thing out of cardboard so that you just get an idea of space. You don't make it at its final beautiful wood and leather resolution because then you're going to be looking at whether this texture feels right. You're not going to be thinking about the amount of space it's taking up. But with AI, you're right. The manicness, the hallucinations, when they appear exactly the same as something that we are used to as just a representation of search, etc., that's confusing. That is confusing to our brains, and if you're working quickly, you can miss it.

The Media Landscape: Protecting Our Imagination

DOORLEY

You mentioned digital smog, Mia, and something Carissa and I have been talking about lately is as you move from the industrial era to the media era, the landscape of what we're working with changes. In a media landscape, the environment is not just the trees and the water and the air. It's actually our minds—our emotions, our feelings, our mental models, and our imagination. So our brains are kind of the environment in which all these new media updates and designs are playing out. Where does pollution show up? Pollution shows up in political polarization, it shows up in difficulties with mental health. We need to think of our imagination in the media space as a public resource that needs to be protected. Our collective imagination, the sum total of our individual imaginations and how they affect each other, is really important to start thinking about with a conservation mindset. This is kind of a silent spring moment of the media era.

Creativity, Innovation and the Importance of a Holistic Design Process

DOORLEY

When you're thinking about a creative field or just bringing creativity to whatever field you have, creativity is often about finding the hidden thing, finding the thing that nobody else is seeing and taking it to reality. Don't think that make believe or imagination or weird ideas are not worth it. I had some mentors in my life that allowed me to understand how you should take make believe seriously, because if you go down this kind of wild path, you find something beyond what's going on, and eventually the world is going to normalize it and integrate it. Otherwise, it just won't work. So don't worry about being out there. We need people to be thinking beyond what is toward what could be. I think that's number one. The second thing is that the way you do things is as important as the things you do. It's not just about the product; it's about how you do it because how you do it actually has more repercussions sometimes than the product. You might create a great product, but if everyone working on it is angry and the people you're trying to serve aren't excited about it or they've been taken advantage of to make it come into the world, that leaves more bad stuff that's harder to see but has an equal or bigger impact. Just how you make it is as important as what you make.

How can museums remain relevant in the digital age, where visual imagery is more accessible than ever? What role do museums play in fostering creativity and innovation in their communities?

Stephen Reily is the Founding Director of Remuseum, an independent research project housed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Funded by arts patron David Booth with additional support by the Ford Foundation, Remuseum focuses on advancing relevance and governance in museums across the U.S. He works with museums to create a financially sustainable strategy that is human-focused, centering on inclusion, diversity, and important causes like climate change. During his time as director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, Reily presented Promise, Witness, Remembrance, an exhibition in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor and a year of protests in Louisville. In 2022, he co-wrote a book documenting the exhibition. A Yale and Stanford Law graduate, Reily clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens before launching a successful entrepreneurial career, experiences he draws upon for public engagement initiatives.Stephen Reily is the Founding Director of Remuseum, an independent research project housed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Funded by arts patron David Booth with additional support by the Ford Foundation, Remuseum focuses on advancing relevance, governance, and sustainability in museums across the U.S. During his time as director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, Reily presented Promise, Witness, Remembrance, an exhibition in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor and a year of protests in Louisville. In 2022, he co-wrote a book documenting the exhibition. As an active civic leader, Reily has been a part of numerous community organizations and boards, like the Reily Reentry Project, supporting expungement programs for Kentucky citizens, Creative Capital, offering grants for the arts, and founded Seed Capital Kentucky, a non-profit that aims to improve the food economy in the area. A Yale and Stanford Law graduate, Reily clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens before launching a successful entrepreneurial career, experiences he draws upon for public engagement initiatives.

STEPHEN REILY

When I left the Speed Museum after an orderly succession in 2021, I spent a lot of time thinking about the challenges of museums, how it's so hard to cover their budgets and their expenses outpace their revenues, how their assets often act like liabilities and how their own rules have sometimes made it hard for them to innovate. What I didn't know was how Alice Walton, with a great entrepreneur and philanthropist named David Booth, was having similar conversations at that time. 20 years ago, Alice Walton began with a crazy, bold vision, much like her father had when he began Walmart, although hers was in the arts. And she envisioned this place called Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened a little over a decade ago, and today attracts over 800, 000 visitors a year in a region, Northwest Arkansas, with only 500,000 citizens and in a town with only 40,000 residents.

So Alice thinks big, and she thinks differently. And she and David Booth started talking about why is it so hard for other museums to think differently. And they came up with the idea of putting together a project, which became Remuseum, which I run, in their words, “to help museums break out of these legacy systems and become more innovative.” So I joined the project early last year, gave it a name, and now I'm trying to figure out how we help museums in that effort of becoming more creative and more innovative, how to break out of their legacy systems, matter to more people, and thrive.

Transparency and Accountability in Museums

So, 30 to 40 years ago, the average American art museum said that its purpose, its mission, was to preserve objects for the benefit of the public. The public in a very passive role in that formulation. Today, it has dramatically shifted and our own research has documented that 90 percent of American art museums now center the public in their mission statements, not the object. They say that their purpose and mission is to serve and engage the public with art. Sixty percent of them don't even mention objects or collections. And yet, are they really doing the things to reflect and serve these new missions? In fact, when you look at them, they're often, their policies, their norms, their degree of transparency, which you mentioned, and their budgets seem to be much more anchored and aligned with their past missions than with their current missions. And as transparency itself goes, what we showed in a research project we released earlier this summer was that while the missions may center the public in the art museums per stated purpose, the transparency and the information they share do not center the public. And only 17 percent of American art museums share both their number of visitors and their consolidated financial statements. Something that's really kind of a base level of information. They all have this information. They all share it with their boards, but they don't yet share it with the public. So part of Remuseum's work is not just to promote innovation but to ask museums, and boards in particular, to hold themselves accountable to the missions and the public that they serve.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It's a strange time because museums are fighting for eyeballs. There's all this digital distraction. At no other time, I think, has the average person felt so empowered, even without having art training, to create something. I think that, in some ways, this period of flourishing creativity outside the museum makes it so people aren’t necessarily drawn in to see the physical works of art with fresh eyes.

STEPHEN REILY

I think you've caught exactly the challenge and the opportunity for museums. The opportunity is that we have never had a public that is more passionate and obsessed with visual imagery. If the owners of the best original imagery in the world can't figure out how to take advantage of the fact that the world has now become obsessed with exactly these treasures that we have to offer as museums, then shame on us. You know, this is the opportunity to say that if you're spending all day scrolling on Instagram or other apps looking for amazing imagery, come and see the original source. Come and see the real work. Let us figure out how to make that connection.

At the same time, we need to be learning from them because there is a threat and there's a lot more innovation, frankly, going on in the visual world outside of museums. Whether it's apps like Instagram or Pinterest or whether it's commercial art enterprises. You know, many people are finding these immersive art experiences are a wonderful way to get to know and love the art of mainstream artists like Van Gogh or Monet. And the museum field generally looks down on that.

And I understand it's not necessarily deeply art-historical. It's not trying to transmit a deeper degree of knowledge. And yet, how can we learn from them? How can we learn from the Sphere in Las Vegas, which is employing artists to connect with musicians and give thousands, tens of thousands of people a day a way to experience visual art in a new way. The question is not, you know, museums might say, well, I don't want to sell out. That's not the question. The question is, how do you tap into that energy that the visual imagery is creating for humans all across the country that museums are failing and are not feeling like the places where the public can come experience. There are exceptions. I mean, I think that in the world of AI, museums are really doing interesting work. The Museum of Modern Art last year worked with the great artist Refik Anadol to create a work really grounded in the permanent collection of MoMA in a revolving, mutating kind of explosive giant screen of AI art. And I saw people sitting in the lobby at MoMA transfixed for hours by this work. It was a great new entry point. For young people, for people who might not have felt that the art at the Museum of Modern Art was for them to feel that, yes, this place was leaning into them. Many art critics scoffed at that, whether that was real art or not. But if you looked at the eyes of the visitors, it was becoming…it was art in their eyes. And that's why we have to be a little more expansive in what we share for audiences whose minds may be growing faster than museums are.

I certainly don't want to sound like the role of the curator is diminished in a reimagined role for the museum with its community. I think it asks curators, educators, and museum leaders to really lean deeply into their own missions and the communities they serve without fear. That's another thing. Artists don't have much fear, right? That's the amazing thing about them. And I think museums would do well to copy artists in that respect as well.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

As you think about the future and the importance of the arts, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

REILY

What I tell my children is to embrace the future and be prepared for the new ways of work, engagement, and citizenship that it may require because the only thing about the future is it shows us that many of the ways that we've been doing things are deeply flawed. And we have to always have the capacity to unthink the things we've been taught and the systems that we've adopted and embraced, which continue to create a lot of good, but also figure out how to balance them with better practices for the future.

How can museums remain relevant in the digital age, where visual imagery is more accessible than ever? What role do museums play in fostering creativity and innovation in their communities?

Stephen Reily is the Founding Director of Remuseum, an independent research project housed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Funded by arts patron David Booth with additional support by the Ford Foundation, Remuseum focuses on advancing relevance and governance in museums across the U.S. He works with museums to create a financially sustainable strategy that is human-focused, centering on inclusion, diversity, and important causes like climate change. During his time as director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, Reily presented Promise, Witness, Remembrance, an exhibition in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor and a year of protests in Louisville. In 2022, he co-wrote a book documenting the exhibition. A Yale and Stanford Law graduate, Reily clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens before launching a successful entrepreneurial career, experiences he draws upon for public engagement initiatives.Stephen Reily is the Founding Director of Remuseum, an independent research project housed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Funded by arts patron David Booth with additional support by the Ford Foundation, Remuseum focuses on advancing relevance, governance, and sustainability in museums across the U.S. During his time as director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, Reily presented Promise, Witness, Remembrance, an exhibition in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor and a year of protests in Louisville. In 2022, he co-wrote a book documenting the exhibition. As an active civic leader, Reily has been a part of numerous community organizations and boards, like the Reily Reentry Project, supporting expungement programs for Kentucky citizens, Creative Capital, offering grants for the arts, and founded Seed Capital Kentucky, a non-profit that aims to improve the food economy in the area. A Yale and Stanford Law graduate, Reily clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens before launching a successful entrepreneurial career, experiences he draws upon for public engagement initiatives.

STEPHEN REILY

When I left the Speed Museum after an orderly succession in 2021, I spent a lot of time thinking about the challenges of museums, how it's so hard to cover their budgets and their expenses outpace their revenues, how their assets often act like liabilities and how their own rules have sometimes made it hard for them to innovate. What I didn't know was how Alice Walton, with a great entrepreneur and philanthropist named David Booth, was having similar conversations at that time. 20 years ago, Alice Walton began with a crazy, bold vision, much like her father had when he began Walmart, although hers was in the arts. And she envisioned this place called Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened a little over a decade ago, and today attracts over 800, 000 visitors a year in a region, Northwest Arkansas, with only 500,000 citizens and in a town with only 40,000 residents.

So Alice thinks big, and she thinks differently. And she and David Booth started talking about why is it so hard for other museums to think differently. And they came up with the idea of putting together a project, which became Remuseum, which I run, in their words, “to help museums break out of these legacy systems and become more innovative.” So I joined the project early last year, gave it a name, and now I'm trying to figure out how we help museums in that effort of becoming more creative and more innovative, how to break out of their legacy systems, matter to more people, and thrive.

Transparency and Accountability in Museums

So, 30 to 40 years ago, the average American art museum said that its purpose, its mission, was to preserve objects for the benefit of the public. The public in a very passive role in that formulation. Today, it has dramatically shifted and our own research has documented that 90 percent of American art museums now center the public in their mission statements, not the object. They say that their purpose and mission is to serve and engage the public with art. Sixty percent of them don't even mention objects or collections. And yet, are they really doing the things to reflect and serve these new missions? In fact, when you look at them, they're often, their policies, their norms, their degree of transparency, which you mentioned, and their budgets seem to be much more anchored and aligned with their past missions than with their current missions. And as transparency itself goes, what we showed in a research project we released earlier this summer was that while the missions may center the public in the art museums per stated purpose, the transparency and the information they share do not center the public. And only 17 percent of American art museums share both their number of visitors and their consolidated financial statements. Something that's really kind of a base level of information. They all have this information. They all share it with their boards, but they don't yet share it with the public. So part of Remuseum's work is not just to promote innovation but to ask museums, and boards in particular, to hold themselves accountable to the missions and the public that they serve.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It's a strange time because museums are fighting for eyeballs. There's all this digital distraction. At no other time, I think, has the average person felt so empowered, even without having art training, to create something. I think that, in some ways, this period of flourishing creativity outside the museum makes it so people aren’t necessarily drawn in to see the physical works of art with fresh eyes.

STEPHEN REILY

I think you've caught exactly the challenge and the opportunity for museums. The opportunity is that we have never had a public that is more passionate and obsessed with visual imagery. If the owners of the best original imagery in the world can't figure out how to take advantage of the fact that the world has now become obsessed with exactly these treasures that we have to offer as museums, then shame on us. You know, this is the opportunity to say that if you're spending all day scrolling on Instagram or other apps looking for amazing imagery, come and see the original source. Come and see the real work. Let us figure out how to make that connection.

At the same time, we need to be learning from them because there is a threat and there's a lot more innovation, frankly, going on in the visual world outside of museums. Whether it's apps like Instagram or Pinterest or whether it's commercial art enterprises. You know, many people are finding these immersive art experiences are a wonderful way to get to know and love the art of mainstream artists like Van Gogh or Monet. And the museum field generally looks down on that.

And I understand it's not necessarily deeply art-historical. It's not trying to transmit a deeper degree of knowledge. And yet, how can we learn from them? How can we learn from the Sphere in Las Vegas, which is employing artists to connect with musicians and give thousands, tens of thousands of people a day a way to experience visual art in a new way. The question is not, you know, museums might say, well, I don't want to sell out. That's not the question. The question is, how do you tap into that energy that the visual imagery is creating for humans all across the country that museums are failing and are not feeling like the places where the public can come experience. There are exceptions. I mean, I think that in the world of AI, museums are really doing interesting work. The Museum of Modern Art last year worked with the great artist Refik Anadol to create a work really grounded in the permanent collection of MoMA in a revolving, mutating kind of explosive giant screen of AI art. And I saw people sitting in the lobby at MoMA transfixed for hours by this work. It was a great new entry point. For young people, for people who might not have felt that the art at the Museum of Modern Art was for them to feel that, yes, this place was leaning into them. Many art critics scoffed at that, whether that was real art or not. But if you looked at the eyes of the visitors, it was becoming…it was art in their eyes. And that's why we have to be a little more expansive in what we share for audiences whose minds may be growing faster than museums are.

I certainly don't want to sound like the role of the curator is diminished in a reimagined role for the museum with its community. I think it asks curators, educators, and museum leaders to really lean deeply into their own missions and the communities they serve without fear. That's another thing. Artists don't have much fear, right? That's the amazing thing about them. And I think museums would do well to copy artists in that respect as well.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

As you think about the future and the importance of the arts, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

REILY

What I tell my children is to embrace the future and be prepared for the new ways of work, engagement, and citizenship that it may require because the only thing about the future is it shows us that many of the ways that we've been doing things are deeply flawed. And we have to always have the capacity to unthink the things we've been taught and the systems that we've adopted and embraced, which continue to create a lot of good, but also figure out how to balance them with better practices for the future.

As Surrealism turns 100, what can it teach us about the importance of dreaming and creating a better society? Will we wake up from the consumerist dream sold to us by capitalism and how would that change our ideas of utopia?

S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Canada. She is the author of several books, among them Permission, The Eyelid, A Cage for Every Child, and, most recently, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Culture, Telos, Boundary 2, and The Hedgehog Review. She also coedits the French surrealist review Alcheringa and is curator of the 19th International Exhibition of Surrealism, Marvellous Utopia, which runs from July to September 2024 in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France.

S. D. CHROSTOWSKA

Utopia and the Age of Survival was really an axiological intervention, a reminder of certain values that unite the left. In the book, I focus on two things: Utopia as a myth -- not as a political myth, but as a social myth, in the sense that it goes beyond politics -- and I also communicate my preference for utopias that are not state-based. I use the term “body utopias,” because they’re really anchored in the individual rather than the collective. They arise from individual bodily needs, desires, and how the two interact. From there, they also take into account our individual differences.

Utopias really began as and are anchored in myths; of the golden age, of paradise, and, more recently, of revolution. Utopia is a speculative myth of where society is headed. I think that left-wing thought and socialism -- within which we find anarchism -- can be united around this idea. On the other hand, of course, capitalism also uses utopia, and refers back to ulterior myths to put our critical capacity to sleep. In our capitalistic culture, utopia is used to sell a vision of a better body, a better society, and a better future for the “techno-utopian” crowd. The earlier myth is Thomas More’s city of Utopia; More is the originator of modern Utopianism as we know it, this idea of a utopian island reserved for just some. With my book, I try to take back the term of utopia, and to also rehabilitate a bit this idea of myth, which has been tarnished by 20th century ideologies. I try to do this in order to find the broadest possible common ground for left-wing thinking.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

We as a society have been talking about utopia for a long time, but what does it actually look like to put that into action?

CHROSTOWSKA

I like to think of utopianism as “effective social daydreaming” -- the expression “effective dreaming” comes from Ursula Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven. My novella, The Eyelid, is where I first put some of these ideas into images -- ideas which later I developed in Utopia and the Age of Survival. I like the definition of effective social daydreaming because utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies, but I also want to bring daydreaming back to dreaming, because our night dreams are wish fulfillments. In The Eyelid, I explored night dreams and their utopian potential. But going back to effective social daydreaming -- utopian ideas are embodied in our actions. The 19th century French liberal Lamartine said utopias are often only premature truths. Another way of putting it is that what is imaginary tends to become real -- that’s a quote from the founder of Surrealism, André Breton. We daydream of a better world, and this could be a very vague daydream. The idea of utopianism that I'm putting forward in the book is not a detailed, orderly, rational model of the city utopia. It’s this free floating, desirous model of the body utopia, which is unfinished and imperfect. It's always in transformation. These dreams and daydreams that we have are guiding our actions, influencing our day-to-day behavior if we let them. Our imagination is always involved in creating reality. The opposition between the two, reality and the imaginary, is not a stark one; they're porous.

The Techno-utopian Dream of AI

There’s the existing AI and the dream of artificial general intelligence that is aligned with our values and will make our lives better. Certainly, the techno-utopian dream is that it will lead us towards utopia. It is the means of organizing human collectivities, human societies, in a way that would reconcile all the variables, all the things that we can't reconcile because we don't have enough of a fine-grained understanding of how people interact, the different motivations of their psychologies and of societies, of groups of people. Of course, that's another kind of psychology that we're talking about. So I think the dream of AI is a utopian dream that stands correcting, but it is itself being corrected by those who are the curators of that technology. Now you asked me about the changing role of artists in this landscape. I would say, first of all, that I'm for virtuosity. And this makes me think of AI and a higher level AI, it would be virtuous before it becomes super intelligence.

Surrealism as a Framework for Utopia

In recent years, I’ve turned to Surrealism. I found in it something like a mirror of aspects of my sensibility, and a history with which I remain in dialogue. Most people mistake Surrealism for an aesthetic movement, but Surrealism's emphasis is on the unconscious workings of thought. I find it a very important piece of the puzzle of what attitude we should take in order to live in a more “utopianizing” fashion, as I call it in my book. We can daydream of a better society, one that includes not just us or our family, but everyone, because a utopia worthy of the name today is universal, it's all-inclusive. So surrealism is not just an aesthetics, it's also an ethics, and that ethics is utopian. It's an impulse to refashion one’s life, to create a world, and to transform the world into a desirable one. We want the imagination to be empowered. I talk about Surrealism in the book, but it has since taken on even greater importance in my day to day life. I am actively involved in the French Surrealist Movement in an effort to keep it alive, and to remind the public that it is still very much an international movement staying true to its principles. I've co-curated a major exhibition of Surrealism, reflecting on the 100 years since the Manifesto of Surrealism, so I'm very much in this moment where I'm trying to explain to the public the value of this movement.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Tell us a little bit about your upbringing in Poland at the end of the Cold War, and how that shaped your visions of utopia in the modern age.

CHROSTOWSKA

I grew up in Poland in the 80s and the very early 90s. I left when I was 19, and I also spent a couple of years in the States. As a child and adolescent, I had a taste of both worlds; I experienced the cultural contrast between the West and the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. I was in the US when Chernobyl happened, and the West left an indelible impression on me. I was first amazed by the sheer abundance of commodity culture; that constant stimulation of the desire for the bigger and the better contributed in more ways than I can even name to the education of my sensibility. There also was the freedom of expression that, even though I was very young, I felt to be different from what I was used to in Poland. This was a brief period [of my life], but it was very important. And then, in 1989, we had the first parliamentary elections in Poland, and we were the first country to do so in the Eastern Bloc. It was the end of the so-called communist era, and my family rejoiced because they supported the Solidarity movement and they distributed samizdat literature. My aunt was a librarian, and she would show me this clandestine literature. I understood the fear of surveillance, the regime of fear that the adults around me lived through, and the breath of fresh air when the elections happened and the transition began. And in 1990, my father took me to Berlin, and this was as the Wall was coming down, demolished with bulldozers and hammers and pickaxes by ordinary people in the street. I thought this was very symbolic. Witnessing these two very rapid transitions made me think that change, even in apparently prohibitive circumstances, remained a real possibility. Maybe that's what made me a natural candidate for utopian thinking, for embracing utopian thought.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

How do you reconcile visions of utopia with living in harmony with our planet, especially considering that the concept of utopia implies a man-made design or a return to an original equilibrium with a pristine nature that may no longer exist?

CHROSTOWSKA

I think that we should not be under any illusion that we can return to some pristine Earth. We have to do the best we can with the Earth that we have inherited for our generation and for those of our children, but we should not, therefore, say, well, it's all lost. Species are becoming extinct as never before. We should not become pessimists because there is no other alternative, because we've been robbed of this idea of pristine nature.

I think nature has not been pristine. People speak about the Anthropocene. I don't quite like this term, but the idea that humans have been transforming nature and have been altering it, adulterating it, something to put into perspective this nostalgia for pristine nature. And utopianism actually goes hand in hand with nostalgia, in the sense that nostalgic longings have long fed into utopian imaginaries, right? I mentioned the myth of the Golden Age. This was something that used to exist, the Golden Age, right? Or paradise, an idea of nature, again, pure nature in harmony with human beings. These nostalgic imaginaries that feed into and can reactivate utopian thinking in our day. We should by no means let go of an idea of pristine nature. And I also don't think – just to return to this idea of species extinction – I don't think that the de-extinction efforts are particularly utopian, even though they may seem this way. How do we compensate for the material loss of biodiversity? I think no amount of technological ingenuity will actually fulfill this desire for a return to the pristine nature that we have lost. 

Reflections for the Next Generation

I'd like young people not to limit their world to content they can find on the internet. I think that's a real danger. Many of my students say, “well, I haven't thought about this. I haven't read this because I didn't find it online for free.” I want them to remember that not all knowledge is digitized, that much remains elusive to the nets of the internet even in its effort to make knowledge accessible on one platform, to create this kind of enormous encyclopedia. And in this quest, we also reduce the past to the present. The past is more virtually present in our lives than for any other generation, because it's available online in the form of textual and audiovisual archives. This proximity actually affects the past's pastness. The appearance of distance is lost in the digital reproduction, whether it's paintings, or archival documents, or photographs. I think it's erroneous to think that everything that is extant from the past is at our fingertips and that we don't have to go out and look for it. So what I would like to pass on is curiosity; curiosity about the past shouldn't stop at the digital. It's tempting to think that all the answers are already there online because it's so vast, this web we are spinning, but that’s not the case.

As Surrealism turns 100, what can it teach us about the importance of dreaming and creating a better society? Will we wake up from the consumerist dream sold to us by capitalism and how would that change our ideas of utopia?

S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Canada. She is the author of several books, among them Permission, The Eyelid, A Cage for Every Child, and, most recently, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Culture, Telos, Boundary 2, and The Hedgehog Review. She also coedits the French surrealist review Alcheringa and is curator of the 19th International Exhibition of Surrealism, Marvellous Utopia, which runs from July to September 2024 in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France.

S. D. CHROSTOWSKA

Utopia and the Age of Survival was really an axiological intervention, a reminder of certain values that unite the left. In the book, I focus on two things: Utopia as a myth -- not as a political myth, but as a social myth, in the sense that it goes beyond politics -- and I also communicate my preference for utopias that are not state-based. I use the term “body utopias,” because they’re really anchored in the individual rather than the collective. They arise from individual bodily needs, desires, and how the two interact. From there, they also take into account our individual differences.

Utopias really began as and are anchored in myths; of the golden age, of paradise, and, more recently, of revolution. Utopia is a speculative myth of where society is headed. I think that left-wing thought and socialism -- within which we find anarchism -- can be united around this idea. On the other hand, of course, capitalism also uses utopia, and refers back to ulterior myths to put our critical capacity to sleep. In our capitalistic culture, utopia is used to sell a vision of a better body, a better society, and a better future for the “techno-utopian” crowd. The earlier myth is Thomas More’s city of Utopia; More is the originator of modern Utopianism as we know it, this idea of a utopian island reserved for just some. With my book, I try to take back the term of utopia, and to also rehabilitate a bit this idea of myth, which has been tarnished by 20th century ideologies. I try to do this in order to find the broadest possible common ground for left-wing thinking.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

We as a society have been talking about utopia for a long time, but what does it actually look like to put that into action?

CHROSTOWSKA

I like to think of utopianism as “effective social daydreaming” -- the expression “effective dreaming” comes from Ursula Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven. My novella, The Eyelid, is where I first put some of these ideas into images -- ideas which later I developed in Utopia and the Age of Survival. I like the definition of effective social daydreaming because utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies, but I also want to bring daydreaming back to dreaming, because our night dreams are wish fulfillments. In The Eyelid, I explored night dreams and their utopian potential. But going back to effective social daydreaming -- utopian ideas are embodied in our actions. The 19th century French liberal Lamartine said utopias are often only premature truths. Another way of putting it is that what is imaginary tends to become real -- that’s a quote from the founder of Surrealism, André Breton. We daydream of a better world, and this could be a very vague daydream. The idea of utopianism that I'm putting forward in the book is not a detailed, orderly, rational model of the city utopia. It’s this free floating, desirous model of the body utopia, which is unfinished and imperfect. It's always in transformation. These dreams and daydreams that we have are guiding our actions, influencing our day-to-day behavior if we let them. Our imagination is always involved in creating reality. The opposition between the two, reality and the imaginary, is not a stark one; they're porous.

The Techno-utopian Dream of AI

There’s the existing AI and the dream of artificial general intelligence that is aligned with our values and will make our lives better. Certainly, the techno-utopian dream is that it will lead us towards utopia. It is the means of organizing human collectivities, human societies, in a way that would reconcile all the variables, all the things that we can't reconcile because we don't have enough of a fine-grained understanding of how people interact, the different motivations of their psychologies and of societies, of groups of people. Of course, that's another kind of psychology that we're talking about. So I think the dream of AI is a utopian dream that stands correcting, but it is itself being corrected by those who are the curators of that technology. Now you asked me about the changing role of artists in this landscape. I would say, first of all, that I'm for virtuosity. And this makes me think of AI and a higher level AI, it would be virtuous before it becomes super intelligence.

Surrealism as a Framework for Utopia

In recent years, I’ve turned to Surrealism. I found in it something like a mirror of aspects of my sensibility, and a history with which I remain in dialogue. Most people mistake Surrealism for an aesthetic movement, but Surrealism's emphasis is on the unconscious workings of thought. I find it a very important piece of the puzzle of what attitude we should take in order to live in a more “utopianizing” fashion, as I call it in my book. We can daydream of a better society, one that includes not just us or our family, but everyone, because a utopia worthy of the name today is universal, it's all-inclusive. So surrealism is not just an aesthetics, it's also an ethics, and that ethics is utopian. It's an impulse to refashion one’s life, to create a world, and to transform the world into a desirable one. We want the imagination to be empowered. I talk about Surrealism in the book, but it has since taken on even greater importance in my day to day life. I am actively involved in the French Surrealist Movement in an effort to keep it alive, and to remind the public that it is still very much an international movement staying true to its principles. I've co-curated a major exhibition of Surrealism, reflecting on the 100 years since the Manifesto of Surrealism, so I'm very much in this moment where I'm trying to explain to the public the value of this movement.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Tell us a little bit about your upbringing in Poland at the end of the Cold War, and how that shaped your visions of utopia in the modern age.

CHROSTOWSKA

I grew up in Poland in the 80s and the very early 90s. I left when I was 19, and I also spent a couple of years in the States. As a child and adolescent, I had a taste of both worlds; I experienced the cultural contrast between the West and the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. I was in the US when Chernobyl happened, and the West left an indelible impression on me. I was first amazed by the sheer abundance of commodity culture; that constant stimulation of the desire for the bigger and the better contributed in more ways than I can even name to the education of my sensibility. There also was the freedom of expression that, even though I was very young, I felt to be different from what I was used to in Poland. This was a brief period [of my life], but it was very important. And then, in 1989, we had the first parliamentary elections in Poland, and we were the first country to do so in the Eastern Bloc. It was the end of the so-called communist era, and my family rejoiced because they supported the Solidarity movement and they distributed samizdat literature. My aunt was a librarian, and she would show me this clandestine literature. I understood the fear of surveillance, the regime of fear that the adults around me lived through, and the breath of fresh air when the elections happened and the transition began. And in 1990, my father took me to Berlin, and this was as the Wall was coming down, demolished with bulldozers and hammers and pickaxes by ordinary people in the street. I thought this was very symbolic. Witnessing these two very rapid transitions made me think that change, even in apparently prohibitive circumstances, remained a real possibility. Maybe that's what made me a natural candidate for utopian thinking, for embracing utopian thought.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

How do you reconcile visions of utopia with living in harmony with our planet, especially considering that the concept of utopia implies a man-made design or a return to an original equilibrium with a pristine nature that may no longer exist?

CHROSTOWSKA

I think that we should not be under any illusion that we can return to some pristine Earth. We have to do the best we can with the Earth that we have inherited for our generation and for those of our children, but we should not, therefore, say, well, it's all lost. Species are becoming extinct as never before. We should not become pessimists because there is no other alternative, because we've been robbed of this idea of pristine nature.

I think nature has not been pristine. People speak about the Anthropocene. I don't quite like this term, but the idea that humans have been transforming nature and have been altering it, adulterating it, something to put into perspective this nostalgia for pristine nature. And utopianism actually goes hand in hand with nostalgia, in the sense that nostalgic longings have long fed into utopian imaginaries, right? I mentioned the myth of the Golden Age. This was something that used to exist, the Golden Age, right? Or paradise, an idea of nature, again, pure nature in harmony with human beings. These nostalgic imaginaries that feed into and can reactivate utopian thinking in our day. We should by no means let go of an idea of pristine nature. And I also don't think – just to return to this idea of species extinction – I don't think that the de-extinction efforts are particularly utopian, even though they may seem this way. How do we compensate for the material loss of biodiversity? I think no amount of technological ingenuity will actually fulfill this desire for a return to the pristine nature that we have lost. 

Reflections for the Next Generation

I'd like young people not to limit their world to content they can find on the internet. I think that's a real danger. Many of my students say, “well, I haven't thought about this. I haven't read this because I didn't find it online for free.” I want them to remember that not all knowledge is digitized, that much remains elusive to the nets of the internet even in its effort to make knowledge accessible on one platform, to create this kind of enormous encyclopedia. And in this quest, we also reduce the past to the present. The past is more virtually present in our lives than for any other generation, because it's available online in the form of textual and audiovisual archives. This proximity actually affects the past's pastness. The appearance of distance is lost in the digital reproduction, whether it's paintings, or archival documents, or photographs. I think it's erroneous to think that everything that is extant from the past is at our fingertips and that we don't have to go out and look for it. So what I would like to pass on is curiosity; curiosity about the past shouldn't stop at the digital. It's tempting to think that all the answers are already there online because it's so vast, this web we are spinning, but that’s not the case.

Can silence be painted? How can artists capture interior states, solitude, and the passing of time? How are the homes we live in a reflection of the people who inhabit them? How can we read a painting to piece together the life of the artist?

From 1 June to 13 July 2024, Hauser & Wirth presents Vilhelm Hammershøi: Silence in its new gallery location in Basel. This exhibition celebrates the renowned Danish artist, Vilhelm Hammershøi, for its first solo exhibition, and presents 16 works from private collections curated by art historian Felix Krämer.

Double Portrait of the Artist and His Wife, Seen through a Mirror. The Cottage Spurveskjul 1911
Oil on canvas
55 x 76 cm / 21 5/8 x 29 7/8 in

A painter of the 19th and early 20th century, Hammershøi is best known for his interior paintings. In the sixteen works featured for this exhibition, covering the artist’s career from 1883 to 1914, Hammershøi depicts empty interiors of his own home or shows household objects placed in unusual positions. In some, he portrays his wife Ida inhabiting these interiors, facing away from the viewers. Hammershøi also demonstrates his interest in photography in his early farmstead paintings through unique angles and the cropping of motifs, emphasizing qualities of these sceneries that often go unnoticed. In many of his work, Hammershøi utilizes a minimal palette of mostly grey, white, and brown to evoke melancholic and contemplative emotions. In addition, the stillness, disconnections, and lack of interactions amongst figures, objects, and spaces in his works position him as precursor to conceptual art. 

Krämer discusses arranging the artworks within the exhibition: “The beautiful thing working on Hammershøi is that the works talk to each other. They communicate. And there is no formula for doing the right hand, you have to be there, and you have to take your time, and the paintings will tell you where they go.”

In Hammershøi’s later works, which are also featured in the exhibition, the artist became more experimental with perspectives and composition, the change reveals his understanding of modernist apporaches, and inspires audiences with new insights of the artist and his career. 

Art historian and writer Florian Illies commented on Hammershøi's work: “One often forgets that Hammershøi, despite this self-restraint, was an artist who had traveled a lot…who knew the artists of his time. But its effect was completely different…He does the exact opposite to everyone else. And it is precisely this difference that makes him so special. This mystery is what makes him so compelling to us today.” Hammershøi’s works defy genre or movements, utilizing elements inspired by the Old Master in combination with his present, private sphere, and speak to contemporary viewers with timeless motifs, yet communicate profound meanings between themselves.

–––

Grace Notes
I first encountered Hammershøi's work by thinking about sound, not silence. Or perhaps I should say "the notes between the notes." Hammershøi's "Interior with Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30" was used for the cover of Bernard MacLaverty's novel Grace Notes. The book centers around the life of Catherine McKenna, a music teacher and composer living in Scotland as she experiences postpartum depression. We enter into Catherine's interior world as she prepares for her father's funeral and has troubling visions of her recently born daughter, Anna. Music and the act of composition helps her rise above her depression and the restrictions imposed on her by the Catholic Church and her family. She begins to compose a master symphony and the novel ends with a live radio broadcast of her music.

The power of art to help us understand and overcome crises is a theme of that novel. What I appreciate in Hammershoi's work is his capacity to communicate calm reflection and solitude, not crises. But then again, we never know. Other people will always remain a mystery. We can only imagine what goes on in their minds, and Hammershøi's interiors hint at something unspoken.

As much as he depicts his wife Ida's world, his paintings are also a kind of biography or self-portrait. After all, we are not so much the skin we inhabit. As the writer Neil Gaiman told me, "We are not our faces." What is essential in the artist is not the lines on their face but their imagination, what they see, feel, think, and love. I rarely look at myself in the mirror. Who I am is what I see, and life moves at such an accelerated pace these days that sometimes we're sleepwalking through our lives.

Love is a kind of noticing.

Hammershøi has also given us a self-portrait by sharing the years he has spent in his homes in the old mercantile quarter of Copenhagen and painting what he has seen and loved.

Above all the gift that Hammershøi gives is showing that seeing can be a kind of meditation and take on an almost spiritual dimension. For meditation can happen anywhere. Alone in nature, as Caspar David Friedrich at the edge of a cliff contemplating the vast beyond in "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog." Or in these small interior moments looking upon the back of the head of the woman you love. The fall of light upon a wall - seemingly mundane scenes but somehow the paintings vibrate with life and meaning. I stop in my tracks and without ever seeing her face, I can feel the air she breathes and imagine the dreams that take shape behind her closed eyes. I can almost hear the soft tick of the grandfather clock, the slow metronome sway of hours passing, that suspension of time in that precious absence of work as experienced on Sunday afternoons in homes all around the world.

Or not.

Reflect on how crowded our world is today. With technology, distraction, and the amount of data being collected and stored doubling every two years, how often do we experience true stillness, serenity, and the chance to be alone with our thoughts?

Interior with a Writing Desk 1900
Oil on canvas
47 x 48 cm / 18/2 x 18 7/8 in
Photo: Annik Wetter Photographie

By giving us the grace notes of his life, Hammershøi invites us to reflect on our own lives and see them anew. Take a moment. Breathe. Close your eyes. Now open them.

What beauty in your life will you notice today?

– MIA FUNK

How can we free ourselves from fear and social barriers to live more fulfilling and meaningful lives? What does it take to overcome trauma and turn it into triumph, and failure into reinvention? How can we shine a light on the marginalized and misunderstood to create social change that transforms the lives of women?

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is an Oscar and Emmy award-winning Canadian-Pakistani filmmaker whose work highlights extraordinary women and their stories. She earned her first Academy Award in 2012 for her documentary Saving Face, about the Pakistani women targeted by brutal acid attacks. Today, Obaid-Chinoy is the first female film director to have won two Oscars by the age of 37. In 2023, it was announced that Obaid-Chinoy will direct the next Star Wars film starring Daisy Ridley. Her most recent project, co-directed alongside Trish Dalton, is the new documentary Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman in Charge, about the trailblazing Belgian fashion designer who invented the wrap dress 50 years ago. The film had its world premiere as the opening night selection at the 2024 Tribeca Festival on June 5th and premiered on June 25th on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. A product of Obaid-Chinoy's incredibly talented female filmmaking team, Woman in Charge provides an intimate look into Diane von Fürstenberg’s life and accomplishments and chronicles the trajectory of her signature dress from an innovative fashion statement to a powerful symbol of feminism.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You tell the story of Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman in Charge, and it's truly fascinating because it's not just one story but many. It encompasses 50 years since the creation of the wrap dress. It’s the story of Diane, but it’s also her mother’s history as a Holocaust survivor and how she instilled in Diane resilience, imagination, and drive. You tell so many layered interesting stories, 1950s and 60s in Europe, 1970s in America in the era of sexual freedom and the hedonistic New York scene. It's the story of a businesswoman, a princess, a marriage, reinvention, and a dress that became a symbol of women's empowerment and liberation. In the way that Diane Von Furstenberg created a timeless dress that became a symbol of freedom for women worldwide, you present us with the beautiful life of a single working mother, allowing us to see ourselves in her vulnerabilities and struggles, inspiring us to chart our own path and find our voice on the journey to becoming women in charge. With all these intricate stories, how did you find your way into her story?

SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY

As a filmmaker, I've always made films about extraordinary women whose lives are faced with extenuating circumstances who've had adversity thrown at them and who've risen to the occasion. And when I began to look at Diane's story, for me, Diane is a fashion designer, but she's so much more. Her central ethos is woman before fashion, and we felt it was very important to take that ethos and weave it into the spine of our film, and make it about the woman. 

The Making of Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge

From the first time we sat down with Diane, she's such a natural storyteller that she began at her birth, which was a triumph because her mother had come out of Auschwitz only 18 months before she was born. As we began to tell Diane's story, we realized that it was so intrinsically linked with the history, politics, culture of the world, whether it was Europe in the 1950s and 60s, or America in the 70s and 80s. We felt that while we were telling Diane's story, we also wanted to tell the bigger story of what was happening in the world at that time. And so you see that when you watch the film, there are many layers, whether it's graphics, or music, or archival footage, or photographs that we’ve used. Together, they weave a story of what it was like to live at that time. And that is a very conscious decision that Trish Dalton, my co-director, and I made when we were designing the film.

Towards the end of our filming, Diane took us on a walk, and as we walked through the woods, we ended up at a flat ground that had a stone wall around it. And Diane looked at me and said, “This is my resting place.” We knew that in telling Dan's story, we had a beginning, middle, and end, and that had been clearly defined by Diane herself. And that was the natural arc of the film that we chose to tell. 

Once Diane was ready to tell her story, we spent a lot of time talking with the camera off, and spending time with her, traveling with her, having meals with her and really peeling the onion to get to the heart of Diane. At its core, it is also a film about four generations of women. It's about Diane's mother, it's about Diane, it's about Diane's daughter, and her granddaughter. We wanted all those voices in the film, and her family was incredible in that they allowed us into the inner sanctum of their lives.

Trish and I were really spoiled for choice because Diane has, unlike so many other people, documented every single minute of her life. In the basement of her house, there is a long room that has all her diaries, photographs, videos, mementos, letters from her children, and scrapbooks. And so when we began telling this story, we really went deep into her personal archives. That is why the film is so rich; that is why you see Diane when she's two, three, four years old, you hear from her mother. That is why, as Diane goes on a journey from Europe to America, you go through her scrapbooks and you see her own personal journey and her children's journey. 

And I think in making this film, every single person who we called whose voice we wanted to include wanted to contribute. They wanted to say something about Diane, because she had left such a mark on their lives. Our producers’ jobs, Tracy and Fabiola, was to juggle those schedules. How do you juggle the schedule of secretary Hillary Clinton with Oprah Winfrey? How do you make sure that Anderson Cooper and Mark Jacobs, you know, in the filming time that we had, that we could put all of these people together? But Diane's friendships run deep with people, and people made sure to make time.

You know, she was a single mother, and I think that young single mothers watching this film will feel for Diane, especially single mothers who are trying to be entrepreneurs, and creating businesses, and trying to find their way into the world to be able to raise a family. To do that as an immigrant in a new country is challenging, and Diane shows you just how challenging it is. In making choices about living her life, in being with her children or expanding her business, there were sacrifices that were made, and those sacrifices are boldly put on the screen for viewers to watch.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You've told the stories of marginalized communities in Pakistan and women who have risen above their personal circumstances to highlight issues such as honor killings and acid attacks, or challenging stories in war zones, like children of the Taliban. As a storyteller, you’ve been at the front lines of trauma and injustice, and during this process, you've been threatened and harassed at times. How do you overcome your own fears and find the courage to ask those important questions and tell these important stories that are not often told?

OBAID-CHINOY

When I was young, I think empathy and the fact that I wanted to create characters, or tell the stories of people who had been on hero's journeys and who had been faced with extraordinary circumstances - that is something that has always driven me. The spine of the body of my work has been about the hero's journeys. And sometimes, when you are telling stories, and holding up a mirror, there are reverberations that take place. And I think that for me, the question is if I am bringing to screen the stories of people who will inspire others, move others to think about other people in a different light. If I feel like I've been able to do that, then I think the price to pay to tell those stories is worth it.

I realized very young and very early on in my career that film does more than just inform and inspire and entertain. It can move people into action, whether it's personal or collective action.  The first time I realized that was in 2006, when I did a film in the Philippines, which was about women who did not have access to contraceptives and were being forced into a life of constant pregnancies. The organization that I was profiling as part of that film used the film to lobby the local government to rethink its decisions. Suddenly, my film went from just being a film to  something bigger than that. And that's when I realized that there could be certain films that I create that could impact the lives of other people. 

In 2015, with A Girl in the River, I created a film that was about a young girl who had been shot by her father and her uncle because she had decided to get married on her own free will. They left her to die in a gunny sack in the river, and she survived. Sabah's story was deeply inspiring, because she wanted to send her father and uncle to jail, but in the end, she forgave them using a lacuna in the law. And when it was nominated for an Academy Award, we wrote a letter to the prime minister of Pakistan, and we used the film to educate and inform the government about the impact of the lacuna in that law, and how it was being misused. The film played a role in closing that and changing the law, which ensured that men who killed women in the name of honor would go to prison.

As a filmmaker, when I go into a project, I go in with a very open mind, because I'm there to learn and to understand the protagonist and their struggles. But as we're filming, we begin to piece together what the story is, what is the start of the story, what moves them, what are the pivotal moments in their life, and I think that we begin to put the building blocks off that. And then, towards the end of the filming, that's when we really realize what the arc of the story is. Oftentimes, it's not the arc that we originally envisioned it was going to be. As a filmmaker, I like to be surprised. I like to think that what I came into the film with has changed, because that's the real “aha moment” when you're a filmmaker.

On Embracing Technology and the Future Impact of AI on Film

I think it's very early for us to see how AI is going to impact us all, especially documentary filmmakers. And so I embrace technology, and I encourage everyone as filmmakers to do so. We're looking at how AI is facilitating filmmakers to tell stories, create more visual worlds. I think that right now we're in the play phase of AI, where there's a lot of new tools and you're playing in a sandbox with them to see how they will develop.

I don't think that AI has developed to the extent that it is in some way dramatically changing the film industry as we speak, but in the next two years, it will. We have yet to see how it will. As someone who creates films, I always experiment, and then I see what it is that I'd like to take from that technology as I move forward.

Reflections on Climate Change and Connecting with Mother Nature

My production company SOC Films, which works out of Pakistan, has created more than 15 short films about climate change in the region, and created a book for children to talk about climate change heroes. Pakistan is one of the top 10 countries in the world most affected by climate change. And so at the heart of everything that I do, climate change matters greatly to me because I have a personal connection to it.

I love to hike and I seek out mountains and quiet places where one can be in solitude with nature. I think that in the desire to expand and consume, we have really shaken the core of that connection that we have with Mother Earth — and I think that it's important. It's incumbent upon us to make sure that our children's generation and their children's generation have that same connection, where they can be in parts of the world where Mother Nature has been left to be in the state that it's meant to be in.

How can we free ourselves from fear and social barriers to live more fulfilling and meaningful lives? What does it take to overcome trauma and turn it into triumph, and failure into reinvention? How can we shine a light on the marginalized and misunderstood to create social change that transforms the lives of women?

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is an Oscar and Emmy award-winning Canadian-Pakistani filmmaker whose work highlights extraordinary women and their stories. She earned her first Academy Award in 2012 for her documentary Saving Face, about the Pakistani women targeted by brutal acid attacks. Today, Obaid-Chinoy is the first female film director to have won two Oscars by the age of 37. In 2023, it was announced that Obaid-Chinoy will direct the next Star Wars film starring Daisy Ridley. Her most recent project, co-directed alongside Trish Dalton, is the new documentary Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge, about the trailblazing Belgian fashion designer who invented the wrap dress 50 years ago. The film had its world premiere as the opening night selection at the 2024 Tribeca Festival on June 5th and premiered on June 25th on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. A product of Obaid-Chinoy's incredibly talented female filmmaking team, Woman in Charge provides an intimate look into Diane von Furstenberg’s life and accomplishments and chronicles the trajectory of her signature dress from an innovative fashion statement to a powerful symbol of feminism.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You tell the story of Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman in Charge, and it's truly fascinating because it's not just one story but many. It encompasses 50 years since the creation of the wrap dress. It’s the story of Diane, but it’s also her mother’s history as a Holocaust survivor and how she instilled in Diane resilience, imagination, and drive. You tell so many layered interesting stories, 1950s and 60s in Europe, 1970s in America in the era of sexual freedom and the hedonistic New York scene. It's the story of a businesswoman, a princess, a marriage, reinvention, and a dress that became a symbol of women's empowerment and liberation. In the way that Diane Von Furstenberg created a timeless dress that became a symbol of freedom for women worldwide, you present us with the beautiful life of a single working mother, allowing us to see ourselves in her vulnerabilities and struggles, inspiring us to chart our own path and find our voice on the journey to becoming women in charge. With all these intricate stories, how did you find your way into her story?

SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY

As a filmmaker, I've always made films about extraordinary women whose lives are faced with extenuating circumstances who've had adversity thrown at them and who've risen to the occasion. And when I began to look at Diane's story, for me, Diane is a fashion designer, but she's so much more. Her central ethos is woman before fashion, and we felt it was very important to take that ethos and weave it into the spine of our film, and make it about the woman. 

The Making of Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge

From the first time we sat down with Diane, she's such a natural storyteller that she began at her birth, which was a triumph because her mother had come out of Auschwitz only 18 months before she was born. As we began to tell Diane's story, we realized that it was so intrinsically linked with the history, politics, culture of the world, whether it was Europe in the 1950s and 60s, or America in the 70s and 80s. We felt that while we were telling Diane's story, we also wanted to tell the bigger story of what was happening in the world at that time. And so you see that when you watch the film, there are many layers, whether it's graphics, or music, or archival footage, or photographs that we’ve used. Together, they weave a story of what it was like to live at that time. And that is a very conscious decision that Trish Dalton, my co-director, and I made when we were designing the film.

Towards the end of our filming, Diane took us on a walk, and as we walked through the woods, we ended up at a flat ground that had a stone wall around it. And Diane looked at me and said, “This is my resting place.” We knew that in telling Dan's story, we had a beginning, middle, and end, and that had been clearly defined by Diane herself. And that was the natural arc of the film that we chose to tell. 

Once Diane was ready to tell her story, we spent a lot of time talking with the camera off, and spending time with her, traveling with her, having meals with her and really peeling the onion to get to the heart of Diane. At its core, it is also a film about four generations of women. It's about Diane's mother, it's about Diane, it's about Diane's daughter, and her granddaughter. We wanted all those voices in the film, and her family was incredible in that they allowed us into the inner sanctum of their lives.

Trish and I were really spoiled for choice because Diane has, unlike so many other people, documented every single minute of her life. In the basement of her house, there is a long room that has all her diaries, photographs, videos, mementos, letters from her children, and scrapbooks. And so when we began telling this story, we really went deep into her personal archives. That is why the film is so rich; that is why you see Diane when she's two, three, four years old, you hear from her mother. That is why, as Diane goes on a journey from Europe to America, you go through her scrapbooks and you see her own personal journey and her children's journey. 

And I think in making this film, every single person who we called whose voice we wanted to include wanted to contribute. They wanted to say something about Diane, because she had left such a mark on their lives. Our producers’ jobs, Tracy and Fabiola, was to juggle those schedules. How do you juggle the schedule of secretary Hillary Clinton with Oprah Winfrey? How do you make sure that Anderson Cooper and Mark Jacobs, you know, in the filming time that we had, that we could put all of these people together? But Diane's friendships run deep with people, and people made sure to make time.

You know, she was a single mother, and I think that young single mothers watching this film will feel for Diane, especially single mothers who are trying to be entrepreneurs, and creating businesses, and trying to find their way into the world to be able to raise a family. To do that as an immigrant in a new country is challenging, and Diane shows you just how challenging it is. In making choices about living her life, in being with her children or expanding her business, there were sacrifices that were made, and those sacrifices are boldly put on the screen for viewers to watch.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You've told the stories of marginalized communities in Pakistan and women who have risen above their personal circumstances to highlight issues such as honor killings and acid attacks, or challenging stories in war zones, like children of the Taliban. As a storyteller, you’ve been at the front lines of trauma and injustice, and during this process, you've been threatened and harassed at times. How do you overcome your own fears and find the courage to ask those important questions and tell these important stories that are not often told?

OBAID-CHINOY

When I was young, I think empathy and the fact that I wanted to create characters, or tell the stories of people who had been on hero's journeys and who had been faced with extraordinary circumstances - that is something that has always driven me. The spine of the body of my work has been about the hero's journeys. And sometimes, when you are telling stories, and holding up a mirror, there are reverberations that take place. And I think that for me, the question is if I am bringing to screen the stories of people who will inspire others, move others to think about other people in a different light. If I feel like I've been able to do that, then I think the price to pay to tell those stories is worth it.

I realized very young and very early on in my career that film does more than just inform and inspire and entertain. It can move people into action, whether it's personal or collective action.  The first time I realized that was in 2006, when I did a film in the Philippines, which was about women who did not have access to contraceptives and were being forced into a life of constant pregnancies. The organization that I was profiling as part of that film used the film to lobby the local government to rethink its decisions. Suddenly, my film went from just being a film to  something bigger than that. And that's when I realized that there could be certain films that I create that could impact the lives of other people. 

In 2015, with A Girl in the River, I created a film that was about a young girl who had been shot by her father and her uncle because she had decided to get married on her own free will. They left her to die in a gunny sack in the river, and she survived. Sabah's story was deeply inspiring, because she wanted to send her father and uncle to jail, but in the end, she forgave them using a lacuna in the law. And when it was nominated for an Academy Award, we wrote a letter to the prime minister of Pakistan, and we used the film to educate and inform the government about the impact of the lacuna in that law, and how it was being misused. The film played a role in closing that and changing the law, which ensured that men who killed women in the name of honor would go to prison.

As a filmmaker, when I go into a project, I go in with a very open mind, because I'm there to learn and to understand the protagonist and their struggles. But as we're filming, we begin to piece together what the story is, what is the start of the story, what moves them, what are the pivotal moments in their life, and I think that we begin to put the building blocks off that. And then, towards the end of the filming, that's when we really realize what the arc of the story is. Oftentimes, it's not the arc that we originally envisioned it was going to be. As a filmmaker, I like to be surprised. I like to think that what I came into the film with has changed, because that's the real “aha moment” when you're a filmmaker.

On Embracing Technology and the Future Impact of AI on Film

I think it's very early for us to see how AI is going to impact us all, especially documentary filmmakers. And so I embrace technology, and I encourage everyone as filmmakers to do so. We're looking at how AI is facilitating filmmakers to tell stories, create more visual worlds. I think that right now we're in the play phase of AI, where there's a lot of new tools and you're playing in a sandbox with them to see how they will develop.

I don't think that AI has developed to the extent that it is in some way dramatically changing the film industry as we speak, but in the next two years, it will. We have yet to see how it will. As someone who creates films, I always experiment, and then I see what it is that I'd like to take from that technology as I move forward.

Reflections on Climate Change and Connecting with Mother Nature

My production company SOC Films, which works out of Pakistan, has created more than 15 short films about climate change in the region, and created a book for children to talk about climate change heroes. Pakistan is one of the top 10 countries in the world most affected by climate change. And so at the heart of everything that I do, climate change matters greatly to me because I have a personal connection to it.

I love to hike and I seek out mountains and quiet places where one can be in solitude with nature. I think that in the desire to expand and consume, we have really shaken the core of that connection that we have with Mother Earth — and I think that it's important. It's incumbent upon us to make sure that our children's generation and their children's generation have that same connection, where they can be in parts of the world where Mother Nature has been left to be in the state that it's meant to be in.

Is consciousness an illusion? Is it just a complex set of cognitive processes without a central, subjective experience? How can we better integrate philosophy with everyday life and the arts?

Keith Frankish is an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme in Neurosciences at the University of Crete. Frankish mainly works in the philosophy of mind and has published widely about topics such as human consciousness and cognition. Profoundly inspired by Daniel Dennett, Frankish is best known for defending an “illusionist” view of consciousness. He is also editor of the journal Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness and co-edits, in addition to others, The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science.

KEITH FRANKISH

Daniel Dennett didn't see philosophy as a specialism remote from everyday life or distinct from the work of scientists. He saw it as an attempt to see how science and everyday reality fit together, how the same world could be a world of subatomic particles, obeying strict physical laws, and a world of free conscious agents with thoughts and hopes and dreams.

Some said he was an eliminativist who denied the reality of belief, consciousness, and free will, but he wasn't. He would say that, of course, thoughts and experiences and choices are real, as real as threats and opportunities and dances and jokes and cuteness and love and all the other things that populate our everyday ontology, our manifest image of the world... Dan had the mind of an engineer. He wanted to understand how things work, had no sympathy for those who prefer embracing mysteries to solving puzzles. That was just lazy, Dan felt, wasn't it? Dan was never lazy. Dan was many other things as well as a philosopher – a devoted husband and father, a farmer, a sailor, a sculptor, a cider maker, and an inveterate tinkerer.

He could turn his hand to pretty much anything, and he approached philosophical problems in the same practical spirit, devising thinking tools that would help us crack difficult problems. Some people felt that his practical outlook blinded him to the magic of the world, but this couldn't be further from the truth. He saw the world as full of magic, real magic, he would say, the sort that is not really magic, but a natural effect so finely crafted as to be wondrous to us.

*

There is magic everywhere. There's wonder everywhere. There's wondrous complexity that is so complex, so difficult to conceptualize, to grasp, to articulate that it might as well be magic for all intents and purposes, but we can gradually start to unpick how the tricks are done, how nature learned to do these wonderful tricks. And that's the wonder of science, gradually learning what's happening behind the scenes and how these marvelous effects are produced.

I'm probably best known for my work on consciousness. My view about this is often caricatured, I think, as a kind of heartless, materialist one, because I'm resistant to all forms of dualism about the mind. I think that's a very unhelpful way of thinking.

Some people think that I do that because I have a sort of crass materialist attitude to the world, that there's only things you can measure and weigh and bump into and everything else is just nonsense and fancy and different. What I like about the sort of view I have is that it represents us as fully part of the world, fully part of the same world. We're not sealed off into little private mental bubbles, Cartesian theaters, where all the real action is happening in here, not out there. No, I think we're much more engaged with the world.

*

It's not all happening in some private mental world. It's happening in our engagement with the shared world, and that seems to me a vision that I find much more uplifting, comforting, and rewarding. Another one of my heroes is Daniel Dennett's great friend, Nicholas Humphrey, who has a wonderfully rich range of experience. He's been described as a scientific humanist. What he does is he knows his science, including cognitive neuroscience and psychology, but he's also steeped in literature, art, music, and painting, and he brings all this together in his wonderful book on consciousness Soul Dust, published in 2011, suggests the idea that the soul is actually made of dust, which is a fantastic concept.

AI, Communication and The Game of Language

Generative AI, particularly Large Language Models, they seem to be engaging in conversation with us. We ask questions, and they reply. It seems like they're talking to us. I don't think they are. I think they're playing a game very much like a game of chess. You make a move and your chess computer makes an appropriate response to that move. It doesn't have any other interest in the game whatsoever. That's what I think Large Language Models are doing. They're just making communicative moves in this game of language that they've learned through training on vast quantities of human-produced text.

*

Imagination has a central role in teaching philosophical thinking because it's only imagination that can get us out of our biases and out of the fixating on the patterns that we've been tuned to.

Reflections on Living in Crete

One thing I love about living in Crete is that the sense of the presence of nature is always here. I walk out the door and I can see the mountains around the city. I can see the White Mountains (Lefka Ori), which for half the year are covered in snow. I can see the sea. If you walk out in the summer, you're immediately aware of your physicality. You become dehydrated very quickly. It's not necessarily a kind environment for humans. It's not if you engage in any vigorous activity, but it's one that makes you feel vividly alive, I think. Compared to the area where I grew up, which is a very low-lying area, in a river valley, it was a landscape where nature felt very dormant. The skies would be gray. The landscape would be flat. There was also a lot of human activity in it. Canals, railway lines, coal mines. It was a land that felt as if it had been depressed, as if it had not been allowed to express itself somehow. And it's been carved up into fields and so on by humans.

And so now here, it's the opposite. Although there is a lot of building in the particularly tourist areas, drive five minutes out of the city, and you're in a land of rugged land with almost desert in places. A land where you couldn't survive very long without proper water, in particular. It's a land where you feel the presence. And, also, another thing you feel here is periods of frequent earthquakes, and that again, is quite a salutary thing. When the Earth shakes like that, and you suddenly realize that this building, which seems wonderfully strong and well-equipped, is suddenly moving from side to side under Poseidon's influence. It makes you see how people could animate this landscape. It's a landscape that feels animated with presences, with gods, with non-human entities. There's a way of living, which involves engaging more deeply with the meaning of things, engaging not just living life on the surface, but trying to look for the deeper, for the real patterns, and living with that, not without pleasure, not without relishing life, but with relishing it for its complexity.