Mind & Life Europe Podcast

Stephen Nachmanovitch, improvisational violinist and author who blends music, Zen, and systems thinking. He discusses how improvisation shapes perception and ethics. Short reflections range from relearning the violin and babies as natural improvisers to creativity as worldmaking, the limits of play, technology’s role, and how small acts and discernment tune our openness to others.

[A note to listeners] We'd like to ask for your support in making the podcast more visible for future listeners: if you're enjoying these long-form conversations and would like to hear more of them, please take a minute to rate, review, follow, and download episodes of the podcast on any of the major platforms. Much as we are loathe to participate in the algorithm economy, we recognise that this is one of the main ways of spreading the word, allowing listeners to find us who might not otherwise happen upon our work. And if you have recommendations for future guests, we'd invite you to write to us at: programs@mindandlife-europe.org. Thank you all so much for your continued support and enthusiasm!Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser are forces to behold. As they describe themselves, they are “an artist duo whose work combines poetry and music to conjure speculative futures and multiverses.” Their collective, which you’ll hear more about in our conversation, is “Hylozoic/Desires,” or H/D. H/D “aspires toward a flat ontological ether in which all forms of life—stone, spirit, machine or human—are equal. They skew the linear imagination of time and space to produce divergences that elicit critical wonder. H/D’s research orbits around (non)place and histories of migration, transnationalism and environmental cosmism to learn from the multiple materialities of contemporary existence. They are concerned with the (poly)rhythms of love and the bea(s)t of belonging. Hylozoic/Desires use metaphor as an event, as a force of attraction that holds otherwise distant entities together.”Although we didn’t have the benefit of being immersed in the materiality of their art, speaking to Himali and David nonetheless revealed the dizzying scope and depth of their art-making, and the ethical-epistemological questions that drive much of their work. One could call their work multimodal and polychronological, a collaboration of disciplines and a commingling of scales; but perhaps more to the point, it strikes one as eminently enactive. Through the unusual forms it inhabits - whether performance, installation, or both - it manages to probe such archetypal matters as presence, love, doubt, mutuality, materiality, subjectivity, reenchantment, climate grief, futurity, anticoloniality, truth, and the archive—but in ways that subtly upend our usual affordances and habits of mind. Our conversation was similarly wide-ranging: we discussed how a serious consideration of something as simple as salt reveals unbidden layers of colonial history and power relations; how “sitting with the drift,” or embracing illegibility and doubt, can constitute viable epistemologies; how archival history is never really a depoliticized affair; how past, present, and future can work in ways that are completely nonlinear; how love can be a powerful technology of knowing that helps us think about regenerative futures; and how art can occasion important perceptual shifts, when other modes of communication fail. The conversation was nothing short of an anthem for the necessity of art in times such as these, and a speculative ode to futures we’ve yet to imagine. Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences and entanglements. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. david soin tappeser is an artist, drummer and composer based between London and New Delhi. his practice explores socio-eco-spiritual-tempo-somatic dimensions of sound. his performances and compositions use rhythm as their primary medium. they explore intercultural entanglements, parallel histories and extra-human frames of reference while thinking about environmental destruction and sociopolitical fissures.Full recordings of Subcontinenment are available here and here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kilian Jörg, philosopher-artist-activist working on ecological catastrophe, ritual, and affect. He explores plural reason and sensing beyond sight. He examines affective attachments that sustain harm and how ritual can rework desire. He imagines art, theory, and action braided together and casts hope as an active stance for wider political transformation.

[A note to listeners] We'd like to ask for your support in making the podcast more visible for future listeners: if you're enjoying these long-form conversations and would like to hear more of them, please take a minute to rate, review, follow, and download episodes of the podcast on any of the major platforms. Much as we are loathe to participate in the algorithm economy, we recognise that this is one of the main ways of spreading the word, allowing listeners to find us who might not otherwise happen upon our work. And if you have recommendations for future guests, we'd invite you to write to us at: programs@mindandlife-europe.org. Thank you all so much for your continued support and enthusiasm!In the highly regulated spaces of most museums today, is it possible to enact a different type of experience, one that is relational, participatory, and even aspirational? Can the public be just as important as the artist and curator in the process of making an aesthetic experience meaningful? Museum director Karen Grøn believes so. And she has made it her mission to make the Trapholt Museum of Art and Design a refreshingly novel site of co-creation, where the visitors and guards are just as instrumental as all the other moving parts. She sees art as a moving rhizome of relations and materialities — an “infrastructure of meanings” — and the museum as offering a frame which opens a piece of art to the question of why. Far from being simplistic, her process is always theoretically informed, whether by enaction itself or Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance, and it coaxes the visitor into experience itself, rather than telling them about the experience they ought to have. The result is a space in which the community feels a strong personal tie to the museum, almost as a second home, in which they can “unfold their potential for participating in the world.” And that, if anything, is what Karen aspires to, and why she thinks this enterprise remains as vital and relevant as ever. Karen Grøn is Museum director and curator of collaborative art projects at the Trapholt Museum of Modern Art, Craft and Design in Kolding, Denmark. She explores and researches how to make the arts accessible and relevant to multiple citizens through engagement and exchange. Karen has a master’s degree in Aesthetics and Culture from the University of Aarhus and a master’s in public management from the University of Southern Denmark. In 2005-2006, Karen was a guest researcher at the University College London, and then in 2018-2019, at the Tate Museum.If you’d like to read a bit more about her unique approach, you can peruse an article she contributed to the Tate Museum website: The Art Museum and Psychological Well-being. You can also hear her speak at the 2020 EU Presidency Museum Conference, on “Museums and Social Responsibility - Values revisited”. Finally, we'd encourage you to have a look at the fourth semester of Core Enaction, in which Karen was in dialogue with enactive researcher and artist Shay Welch. For more information about Trapholt’s current exhibition, “Feel Me,” which Karen mentions in our conversation, you can visit the Trapholt Museum Website.  *Please follow our work and consider donating to Mind & Life Europe or joining our MLE Friends community! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jane Hirshfield, an acclaimed poet and longtime Soto Zen practitioner, explores the interplay between poetry, science, and ethics. She emphasizes how poems answer life's unanswerable questions, delving into her unique creative process and the influence of Zen teachings on her work. Jane discusses the political role of poetry in times of crisis, drawing parallels between poetry and the natural world. She also shares insights on the 'ethics of poetry,' highlighting its capacity to promote kindness and interconnection, culminating in readings that capture her profound reflections.

This trailer dives into the enactive approach to mind and experience, exploring how cognition emerges from organism-environment interactions. It emphasizes the ethical implications of viewing the mind as interconnected rather than separate, warning against extraction and control. The podcast introduces the concept of 5E cognition, which encompasses embodied, enacted, extended, embedded, and ecological perspectives. Season three promises diverse guests and an arts theme, fostering long-form discussions that deepen understanding of these crucial concepts.

What does enacting the world look like for organisms who are not thriving, but merely surviving? What happens when we don’t have access to the activities that are organism-defining? How to curate a life from the edge, when one is cast out of the relational web because of illness or disability? These are questions that Professor Shay Welch is asking herself today, and not because the questions have a theoretical draw, but because, as she shares in this candid conversation, these questions have become the throbbing centrepiece of her daily life. At the time we spoke, Shay was facing a diagnosis of an incredibly rare neurodegenerative disease (3 in one million), and a possible diagnosis of other conditions, and in one year’s time, she saw her life get turned on its head. Exploring this journey together, we discussed the epistemic injustices facing women and marginalized persons in medicine and academia, what is needed to sustain a minimal integrity of the organism when the body breaks down, the necessary conditions for participatory sense-making to happen well between two people, the deeply political nature of any epistemological framework, not least the enactive framework, and the ‘somatic dance,’ as Shay puts it, of trying to figure out how much of the world is moving you and how much of you is moving with the world when the world seems to be moving against you. Shay’s cutting wit and unflinching realism was a refreshing antidote to many of the world’s harrowing displays of sophistry, authoritarianism, and bigotry at the moment, and her observations helped to shed light on how trust in the body, and in first-person experience more broadly, is a powerful seed of resistance for these times. It was not a conversation that attempted to enact any illusion of a happy ending, but where we ended seemed a robust and generous teaching about how to begin making sense with the world, moving closer to solidarity. More about our guest here.TW: There is a mention of suicide near the end of this episode. ***Please follow our work and consider donating to Mind & Life Europe or joining our MLE Friends community! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join Barbara Bogatin, a mindfulness-oriented cellist, Luc Petton, a choreographer blending dance and nature, Stephen Scott Brewer, a teacher exploring language and creativity, and psychologist Letícia Renault as they dive into the world of improvisation. They explore its profound connections to ethical interactions, emotional expression, and collective creativity. The group discusses how mistakes can spark growth, the interplay of individual agency and group dynamics, and the significance of presence in artistic expression. Discover how creativity can thrive through disruption!

“Transversal operations for the creation of ways of knowing emerge from the ground up. They are singular and speculative at once, emboldened by the creativity of the everyday. The mistake is to assume that what education needs is a model. What education needs is an opening for learning, an operative interstice for seeing beyond the map.” –Erin Manning, “Radical Pedagogies and Metamodelings of Knowledge in the Making” in Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 8, Sep 2020.This was a conversation that felt like many different fingers pointing to the same moon — whether we call it “engaged pedagogy,” “transversality,” “enabling constraints,” “situations of encounter” or “rich learning contexts,” Prof Erin Manning and Prof Emeritus Joëlle Aden brought us into contact with their radical approaches to pedagogy, within two very different cultural, educational contexts. Rather than asking the question of how to teach and learn better, we took a few steps back to first consider the conditions that either facilitate or thwart our natural curiosity and inclination to pose “proto-philosophical questions,” as Erin Manning put it. The conversation traveled through a wide landscape of interlocking questions, beginning with the following question that undergirded the entire exchange: How might we talk about teaching and learning beyond the concepts we have about them? And then, more specifically: How do institutions frame what it means to value knowledge? Is there a margin for evaluating learners differently, valuing process over product? How can we get over the habit of simply applying theories and concepts in the classroom, and instead generate theories and concepts from experience? How can we create a context in which thinking can be its most precise and generative? Is there a way of languaging together that doesn’t suppose a pre-given meaning in encounters of learning? How do we write new narratives for an ecological-relational approach, which disrupt the currently prevailing narratives of whiteness, coloniality, and neurotypicality? How can we think with complexity as a society, rather than resisting it, and learn to engage systemically with change? To find out more about our guests: Joëlle Aden & Erin Manning. Additional references:Hélène Trocmé-Fabre, L’Arbre du savoir-apprendre. The art of learning and the knowledge tree. Editions Le manuscrit, 2022 (édition bilingue). We’ve just learned that Hélène Trocmé-Fabre has passed away and we would like to dedicate this episode to her work, which profoundly influenced the work of Joëlle Aden. Erin Manning, “Radical Pedagogies and Metamodelings of Knowledge in the Making,” in Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 8, Sep 2020.Please follow our work and consider donating to Mind & Life Europe or joining our MLE Friends community! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Luc Steels is a Professor Emeritus of Artificial Intelligence with a focus on enactive approaches, while Takashi Ikegami is a Professor at the University of Tokyo specializing in complex systems. They explore the intricacies of AI versus human cognition. Questions arise about participatory sense-making and the potential for enactive AI. The discussion critiques data-driven models, emphasizing the ethical dangers of AI and the human misuse of technology. They also highlight creativity's connection to humanity and reflect on experimental robotics that encourage interaction and understanding.