Atlas of Weak Signals

I found narrative speculation to be an engaging exercise in imaging possible futures. However, due to the short time frames we had to develop them, I found the speculations lacking in providing tangible learning outcomes or informing further design actions. In certain cases, it seemed to me that we are trivializing serious issues because of the lack of thorough analysis.

Strong weak signals

Before this course started, I have expected that the students are going to be the ones creating a repository of weak signals, so I was surprised to find out they were under the direction of the course tutors for the most part.

Looking at the list of the topics I was left slightly underwhelmed. Firstly, I was already familiar with many of the themes presented to us and did not consider them to be genuine weak signals. Many of the themes were widely medialized and have been discussed in the public realm in recent years, decades and even centuries in some cases. They were strong signals phrased using pompous wording.

Fields of critical theory, feminist studies, epistemology, semiotics, ecology, philosophy and many others have been addressing these issues for a long time now. That does not mean we should not continue the discussions with a fresh perspective informed with newly generated knowledge. Yes, the climate crisis is very real, and it has been real for the past 70 or so years. Yes, the issues seem more pressing than ever and require unprecedented systemic changes for humanity to even have a chance of saving itself and the planet Earth. But the fact that people are just now waking up to the fact does not make it a weak signal – it makes a strong signal that has been willfully ignored for too long.

I would like to reiterate that all the themes presented in the course are undeniably the most important questions of our times and they merit deep conversations. But I was hoping that we would go beyond what the whole world is talking about and explore the depths of emerging underground obscure streams of thought.

I would argue that many of the areas of interest that the students from the course are exploring are the actual weak signals of our time. Through research they are starting to uncover people and communities that are working on truly novel ways of being and living. Yet these groups and their ideas are virtually unheard of beyond the confines of tiny social bubbles.

People growing furniture out of mycelium, writing eco-speculative solarpunk stories, exploring the possibilities of urban farming and hydroponics, playing with metamaterials – these are just of the themes that we have been researching in our class and they are the actual weak signals that will likely eventually turn into planetary trends.

Interspecies what?

The theme most clearly related to my intervention was that of interspecies solidarity, that our group decided to rename as interspecies collaboration because we found the term solidarity to evoke somehow unappealing, overly dogmatic connotations.

I have been struggling with terminology related to this topic myself. I would go beyond rather business-sounding collaboration and lean more towards ethereal terms such as synergies and symbiosis.

In our presentation, a pigeon is narrating various news stories. It had a great crowd-pleasing effect but it epitomizes the main struggle I have been experiencing while researching this area – and that is that of anthropomorphistic world view inherently present in all our discussions about non-human living organisms.

In my own project, I have been exploring the possibilities of giving voice and legal rights to plants. It might sound reasonable on a pragmatic level, but on a deeper epistemological dimension, it represents a very limited and reductionist perspective of the biological world. After some deliberation and research, I have learned that since these ideas are being generated by humans being, they will always by definition be anthropomorphistic. The only way to move beyond it is to merge our minds with other organisms and experience non-humans forms of being. From where we currently stand there are two principal ways to do this.

The first method is to escape the confines of our bodies and egos through a closer engagement with indigenous ways of knowing or the synesthesia-atic experiences induced by psychedelics or mind-altering techniques such as holotropic breathwork, which have a long-standing historical tradition with different cultures around the globe. I have deliberately avoided this angle up to this point, but based on the discussions I had during the second term presentations I have decided to openly address this rather obvious connection to my project. Coming back to this particular course, a major resurgence of academic research into psychedelics and its potential therapeutic effects, can be seen as a weak signal.

Secondly, on a more speculative note, the exponential advances in the field of synthetic biology suggest that we might be able to merge with plants and other non-human organisms through techno-scientific means in relatively near futures. Rather than a cyberpunk android-like aesthetic, I’m imagining something akin to the direct planetary link to the nature that the Na’vi tribe has with its planet in the movie Avatar. Or developing a language that would let us effectively communicate with plants as explored in the sci-fi book Semiosis. Again, relating it back to the course, such imagery falls under the umbrella of eco-speculation and solarpunk – a term I have recently discovered and coincidentally listened to a talk about it on this year’s IAM weekend – another weak signal.

What is your symbiotic real

To conclude, I would briefly like to explore the term symbiotic real used by Timothy Morton to describe the inseparable connection and participation of humans in the context of the wider ecosphere; it stems from the critique of the use of word ‘nature’ which arbitrarily separates humans from the rest of the living systems surrounding us. In other words, there is no separate nature somewhere out there, we are nature, nature is us. The dire state of nature implies a dire state of humanity. By fixing ourselves and our relationships with others we will fix our planet as well.