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Andrea, Yogi and Marcus are forming Paradoxis. This is one of the conversations towards that, a Third Space episode of Love & Philosophy. You can find Part Two on the ZoNE here.

Andrea Hiott sits down with artist and facilitator Marcus Neustetter and biologist-philosopher Johannes “Yogi” Jaeger for a wide-ranging conversation about working in the space between art and science. The two have collaborated for about six years as part of The ZoNE, a transdisciplinary collective they run in Vienna alongside artist Bronwyn Lace and curator Başak Şenova.

Marcus and Yogi introduce each other, then talk through how their collaboration actually works: not illustration-for-hire, but a genuine co-production where a text and a drawing “wrap themselves around each other” into something neither could have made alone. From there the conversation moves through constraints and “staying alive,” productive tension, performance and vulnerability, the trickster, space and context, institutions and gatekeeping, conflict and tolerance, and finally care and love.

The episode also introduces the paradox project (referred to in the audio as “Paradoxis”), a shared piece of writing on treating paradox as a practice and performance, and the idea of building offline “circles of trust,” a concept drawn from Andrea’s earlier conversation with Parker Palmer.

Read PARADOXIS here.

Watch the ZoNE talks here.

Link to Zone talks Andrea mentions on the Zone channel with one of her favorite philosophers. And the one with Julian Gough on Egg and Rock.

Topics covered

How Marcus and Yogi met and why they were both looking for a “third space” between art and science
The Perspective Studio methodology and collective co-creation
Constraints, co-construction and “staying alive” as an organizing principle drawn from evolutionary biology
Productive tension vs. problem-solving; adaptation over optimization
Finite games vs. infinite play, and “serious play”
Performance, persona, authenticity and vulnerability
The trickster figure and the danger of putting narcissists “in charge”
Space, context and embodiment (including a 10-second listening exercise)
Institutions, gatekeeping, decolonizing spaces, and the “plastic mushroom in the Pompidou”
Conflict, tolerance, “overlapping consensus” and “coherence from difference”
Care, love, and the shadow — seeing “the person behind the persona”

People, projects and references mentioned

Love & Philosophy — Project, Channel, podcast, blog, etc.
The ZoNE — the art/science collective (Lace, Neustetter, Jaeger, Şenova); see also the Makers page and Actions/notation log
The emerging book Beyond the Age of Machines / Expanding Possibilities — the manifesto and chapters referenced throughout, published chapter by chapter
Perspective Studio — the workshop/facilitation methodology
Andrea Hiott’s Holding Paradox and her Embracing Paradox guide
Andrea talking with Parker Palmer — “circles of trust”
James Carse — Finite and Infinite Games
Hanzi Freinacht — “serious/existential play”
Tyson Yunkaporta — Sand Talk (the trickster)
Ludwig Wittgenstein — “whereof we cannot speak…”
Plato — the allegory of the cave
Michael Schmidt-Salomon — the paradox of tolerance
John Rawls — “overlapping consensus”
Carl Sagan — the gas-giant “blobs” thought experiment
Patricia Martin — Will the Future Like You?
Declan Donnellan and Sophie Fiennes — on performance and theatre (episodes Andrea mentions are forthcoming)
Anathi Konjwa and Micca Manganye — performers in Marcus’s Johannesburg short-film anecdote
Steven Hobbs — Marcus’s longtime South African collaborator

Full intro and notes here.

Care is not the opposite of love. It is the very urge of life. ‘Caring for what?’ is the primary question. That we have a choice about what we care for and how is what makes us human, but it’s quite the challenge and responsibility. Let’s help one another handle it. —Andrea

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Some Quotes that are connected to the ZoNE:

“I love messiness and tension and understanding that this is life.” — Andrea
“Evolution rarely solves the problem. It reframes it.” — Yogi
“It’s not a dialectic like that. It never resolves anything. It just spirals on and on and on.” — Yogi
“The beauty of it is when… this piece of text and the sculpture somehow wrap themselves around each other and they become a nice mess — something that you cannot define anymore.” — Marcus
“The point of infinite play is not to win a game, to be the best… but it is to stay in the game.” — Yogi
“We call it coherence from difference.” — Yogi
“We do need to sometimes burrow ourselves into the very things that have conquered us… eat it up from the inside like termites, reappropriate it and transform it.” — Marcus
“Let me reveal how I’m doing it so that you and I can learn together — as opposed to just protecting myself from that which could shatter my little world.” — Marcus

on care, love, vulnerability, & the shadow

“Love is a labor of love… trying to see the person behind the persona, and still accepting them after you’ve seen all the ugly parts, the shadow.” — Yogi
“It’s how we go about with that which we don’t understand.” — Marcus, on love and care
“Care… that’s the currency of what we’re doing.” — Andrea
“You cannot go back into the cave and pretend that you’ve never seen the light.” — Yogi
“Wittgenstein was right about philosophy, but he was wrong about life.” — Yogi
“I don’t want the last word, because I would never want to assume that there is a last word in this kind of process — because it goes beyond the words.” — Marcus

Concerning navigational / way-making approach (paths, orientation, situations over problems)

“The authenticity is in going your way, in way-making — in finding your journey in a way that is really good for you in the circumstances that you’re in.” — Yogi
“If you do that alone, the grass is not gonna get trampled — so let’s trample the grass together.” — Yogi
“Living is having problems more than solving problems… and always having new problems.” — Yogi
“It’s learning that this is not a struggle, but this is life.” — Yogi
“Instead of always rushing towards the most optimized path to a solution… what we need to do right now is reformulate the problems.” — Yogi
“It’s better to draw the lines around actions or character traits than around people.” — Yogi

transcript:

Marcus Neustetter

Yeah, it’s okay. You know, and I think this is what we, what one needs to learn, that the ego that tells you that you have to be in control of it and that you are number one, and that you’re competing with other artists or other philosophers, and that you have to look good in the room, and that you have to try and understand everything or not look stupid in a gallery.

Whatever those things are that drive you to fit those social norms, you have to leave that at the door. You know, you cannot let that, influence the way that you go about a process. Otherwise, you’re just doing it for show, and you’re just performing another role. I love messiness and tension and understanding that this is life.

This tension is life. And, but I also understand that so many of us want to resolve that because it’s a precarious place. It’s a vulnerable place. It’s a difficult place. We can have a performative vulnerability. So we’re open to others’ idea. We’re humble in public. But you know these kind of people who are humble all the time, but they’re really not.

I mean, we have a society now where everybody’s supposed to be an influencer or something, and that’s... It’s not gonna be a very functional society. So this is also in a bigger context, our performance, our artwork is about recognizing roles rather than saying that we should all be authentic. You don’t want most people around you to be authentic with you, to be quite honest.

You wanna carefully choose those.

Andrea Hiott

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. Today, I’m talking to Artist and facilitator Marcus Neustetter and Biologist and philosopher, Johannes Jaeger, otherwise known as Yogi.

They will be introducing one another soon, so stay tuned. You’ve probably seen both of them around on the Love and Philosophy Substack, or part of the project in different ways. And we’re also working on something called Paradoxus, which, I would love to introduce you to.

There’s an article that we wrote, which you can read. It’s, in the show notes. You’ll find the link, or it’s on the blog. But we’re trying to think about paradox as a practice and a performance and how might we approach paradox in our science and our philosophy, but also just in our everyday lives.

More importantly, however, is how might we come together offline, in private, together in groups of trust or circles of trust. We got the idea after I talked to Parker Palmer. I’ll also link to that conversation. But philosopher Parker Palmer talks about circles of trust, coming together with people that you can be honest and open with to talk about what you care about and what’s hard for you in your academic life, your work life, your personal life, whatever.

There would be so much more to say about that, but I think I’m just gonna let you go into it through this conversation because it’s part of what this conversation is. Although we talk about a lot of other things, for example, The Zone, which is a project that Yogi and Marcus have been doing for about six years, which we’ve talked about before, and which Fotis and Yogi talked about in a previous episode.

And we talk about this as a sort of third space, which is another theme that comes up a lot here. We talk about developing this methodology that, is part of already both of our, or all three of our work in different ways. And we talk about staying alive, how that’s about working with constraints, embracing tension, adapting rather than trying to solve problems, linking that to other ideas that have come up quite often here Also vulnerability, trust, performance. That’s a very big word, performance, which, I talked to others about which I haven’t published those podcasts yet, for example, with Sophie Fiennes and Declan Donnellan, but those will come at some point too.

So there’s a lot of themes here resonating past, present, and future. The trickster comes in, embodied practice, of course, context, space. We talk about space and gatekeeping and institutions and Just on a kind of personal note, I know, some of you have, even noted that you’re surprised that Johannes and I get along and work so well together because we’re such different sorts of people.

I don’t really know what that means, but I actually do get it. I mean, just to caricature it, I’m a bit overly, what? Yep, optimistic, and I’m talking about love, and I’m a little breathless. And Yogi’s more of a punk mentality, you know, not afraid to kind of, ruffle some feathers, And it’s not that he and I agree on everything. Certainly not. We’re not 100% on the same side of anything, but that’s actually the point. And we do care about similar things, and we have a really easy connection because we’re coming to our discussions through care, and this is one of them. I’m just really thankful to have met Marcus and Yogi and to have this relationship with them.

We’ve been talking a lot over the past year or two, but we haven’t really made those conversations public, so this is the first time we’re making a couple of them public. There’s one here on Love and Philosophy today, and if you just can’t get enough, you can get even more hours, more me talking and them kind of asking me questions about navigational mind and way-making and so on in the caring aspect, on The Zone podcast.

But even if you don’t listen to me on The Zone, I really recommend The Zone. Some of my favorite thinkers and writers and, philosophers are already on there. So if you don’t know about it, check it out. But, this is just a real demonstration of what I think Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy is at its best, bringing people together who might not have otherwise come together towards really exciting, transformative things, ideas, movements, actions, or even just conversations.

I’m really thankful, again, I know I keep saying that, but I am. I’m thankful for you all too, and I would love to hear what you think about this. Please read the piece if you are interested in this practice and paradox. Let us know what you think. Let us know what ideas you have. Reach out anytime, even though I’m completely overwhelmed with emails, but I do get to them eventually.

Speaking of that, I’m also thinking to try to hire someone else. If you are a student out there and you’re looking for a very mini sort of job helping with some administrative stuff, then also reach out. But mostly, I just wanna say that I hope you’re having a good summer I hope you’re finding some practices in your own life that are opening you to ways of seeing the world beyond traditional either/or dichotomies, but also just maybe opening you to the magic and the wonder that’s there when we start to notice the frames with which we see the world, and we start to open them up a bit, no matter who we are, because we all have them.

And there’s so much waiting for us to discover if we can sit in the tension and let ourselves open up. That’s part of what we talk about here So instead of a poem today, I want to share with you a little bit of the beginning of this document that Marcus and Johannes and I are sharing with you on the blogs, on both of our blogs. So I’ll just read the first part of this, but if you wanna find the full thing, go to our blogs, either one of our blogs, which are linked below Life is paradox.

In every cell of our body since the beginning of life, metabolism simultaneously builds up and breaks down. At every moment of your lived experience, thoughts tussle for dominance and attention in your mind, constructing and deconstructing a turbulent stream of ideas. Every love we’ll ever have must die.

Species come and go in the perennial dance of evolution. Every ecosystem on Earth complexifies and then simplifies. Every civilization rises and falls. Life renews itself. This is its meaning. Some of the most destructive acts force healing.

Some of the best-intentioned art is patronizing. None of these are opposites. The opposite of each can also be true. Paradoxical is the logic of life.

So we’ll just start and let you both introduce one another or introduce yourselves. How would you like to do it?

Johannes Jaeger

We would like to introduce one another, if that’s okay.

Andrea Hiott

Okay. Good. I was hoping you’d say that.

Marcus Neustetter

Well, we could... We’re gonna start with introduction of one another and the other one’s gonna interrupt to say, “But that’s not me. I’m actually me.”

Andrea Hiott

So then we just have an hour and a half of you fighting about who you are. That’s also

Marcus Neustetter

Kind of interesting.

Johannes Jaeger

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Performance art. Yeah.

Andrea Hiott

All right.

Johannes Jaeger

Marcus, great.

Andrea Hiott

Hello Marcus, hello Yogi. I’m so happy you’re here on Love and Philosophy. Thanks for being with us today.

Johannes Jaeger

Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.

Andrea Hiott

Let’s see how we negotiate who talks first. Who’s gonna introduce who first? I want you to introduce each other, so

Marcus Neustetter

So Yogi, do you want to kick it off or should I?

Johannes Jaeger

Oh, I can do it if you insist. So this is Marcus over there, and he’s an artist I met six years ago, and he does crazy stuff with live projections, performance, somewhere between performance and visual art. So he, for example, can do, projections outside live to some sort of event while, you know, he’s drawing at a speed that you can’t believe, and that makes you really depressed if you are like me and you like to scribble yourself every once in a while.

So I’ve given up on that completely because I’m just too impressed. And we met, about six years ago, being frustrated about, art and science, and immediately clicked together because we are looking for that third space between art and science. Marcus?

Marcus Neustetter

And so while I’m looking for that third space between art and science, Yogi’s standing there with a flag saying, “I’m here.

I’ve moved out of my silo and I’m looking for another space to occupy too.”, but genuinely, that’s how we kind of, intersected., and Yogi’s background is quite an impressive one from an academic side in terms of his, evolutionary biology work that he’s done over many years, and his shift into philosophy, and kind of combining the experiential knowledge of both fields in an interesting way, and subverting both fields by working with an artist.

I love it. So the relationship of, has been a really interesting one because if I had to describe Yogi or introduce Yogi to you, I would say that, primarily he’s a person that’s curious about all that which he doesn’t know, and he immerses himself headfirst into a world which I as an artist have often invited people to join me in, but they’ve really struggled because, it’s the space of not knowing that, causes anxiety.

And, dearest Johannes Jäger is a thinker and a writer and a doer that, is willing to take that step. And in that sense makes him a unique individual for all kinds of wonderful collaborations. Good enough, Yogi?

Johannes Jaeger

I think so, and we can say one or two things about our ways of collaborating. The important thing Mm-hmm Our art/science collaboration is not that, I employ Marcus to do the drawings for my papers, although I also do that sometimes. But, he does that voluntarily. The main thing is that we actually produce, work together. So the point is to get to know the world and ourselves at the same time because you cannot ever do one without the other.

And the amazing thing about combining art and science is I think we think of it, these two ways of getting to know the world as the two most divergent ways that you can possibly do this, right? And so it’s just amazingly challenging and interesting to see when we do some work, how we bounce ideas back and forth, how Marcus goes about, something influences how I write things.

So he’s not the illustrator of my writing and I’m not the caption writer of his art, but this is a true co-production and it’s sort of hard to describe. Which, we also have now put into a sort of a methodology for working with other people in a collective. Marcus, you wanna say something about that quickly?

Marcus Neustetter

Yeah., the realization that actually we have something to offer beyond our conversation, is manifest in this openness to developing a studio space or a creative space in which conversations are welcome and people are welcome to join, and, I guess afford them the possibility to do what we do.

And that is be open and collaborative in a common space. We call it the Perspective Studio, and it’s a space that harnesses, I guess, your own creative impulse, even if it’s very deeply hidden. But also matching that with the current reflections on what you want to deal with in life and how you want to connect to each other by finding the common human, issues or ideas or concepts to deal with.

And, it comes from... And I’m wearing the T-shirt here, so it’s worth mentioning it. A collaboration for, with, a group that we founded, kind of just as I moved to Austria, and, we met six years ago, called The Zone. And The Zone is exactly this art-science collaboration where we look at the space between the two disciplines and between the two silos and saying, “What is The Zone?

What is that space that sits between?” And so working with Bronwyn Lace and Vasyukhinova, a curator and artist, that we formed this project together, we very quickly realized that there’s a lot of curiosity about this topic. I mean, both of us have also worked long before that with other, scientists and artists, et cetera, and realized that this space of curiosity is really something that we have found a way to not only inspire us, but become very productive in the way that we see the world and start to make sense of it.

And it’s about opening up those doors and asking others to join us, and see whether they don’t bring other inspirations into the mix, but also how we can then impact other people’s lives, and then how we can collectively see, if this doesn’t propose alternatives for framing what currently might be a crisis or, a challenge.

Andrea Hiott

You both said something about third space, or one of you did, and the zone, of course. And all this interdisciplinary, experience and research that you’re both bringing. I mean, gosh, that’s like art and science. I mean, Yogi alone has, like, a huge kind of thing going.

But then Marcus, you too. I mean, you’re quite the intellectual. I mean, even though you’re... You seem like a bit of a speaker and stuff. So, between all of you, or both of you seem to have a lot of things covered, but also just a lot of potentials. And I wonder, you know, these third spaces can become really chaotic or, ungovernable quite quickly in my experience if you don’t have certain constraints.

And yet you also don’t wanna have constraints that kind of keep it in the boxes that we’re coming from, because I know you’re trying to get somewhere new, as you said, and address issues in a different way. So I’m wondering if both of you could talk about that. You know my thing is this holding paradox, moving beyond dichotomies, and I wonder how you’ve been able to kind of, hold an interdisciplinary space in a way that’s staying alive and not, collapsing into one side or the other.

You know, getting this kind of field force that makes you have to define yourself in opposition to something else. Maybe you could tell me how that’s been going or how that feels for both of you.

Johannes Jaeger

Can I pick up on the staying alive with that you just said? Sure. It stays alive literally, because I study, the organization of life.

And one really important part of that is it’s based on constraints. So the physical processes that make up our bodies are being they mutually constrain each other to produce what is a living being. And to do that, they have to constantly co-construct each other. So they constantly change what they are, and the organization is constantly changing.

That is a prerequisite for staying alive for an organism. And so this is what we’re doing. We’re playing with these constraints. We’re recombining them. We’re building them in ways that are, supportive of our journey, but we never want to get anywhere, in that zone., it’s not like we’re mapping the zone out and, with a little, measuring tape and then, publish it as a paper.

We’re exploring it, and we will always keep exploring it, because there’s always new gaps between the disciplines that we can, explore, and new, constraints that we can, move around or, construct ourselves. So that’s the kind of game we are playing in the zone. I,

Marcus Neustetter

I think the, The process part of it is very important to me, that on the one hand, the co-constructing and the, I guess the reframing and the remeasuring and, or constant-- not ever being in a state of, accepted comfort. You know, it’s as soon as there’s something that we feel, becomes too defined, we say, “Well, you know, this is not the space.

The zone is not the space to define it. It’s the space to stay within that murky territory and actually enjoy that as the quality that it offers us.” And in the same way, I think it’s about trusting the process, and it’s-- it seems like a quite a bold thing to try and do when you’ve got a group of people in a room together.

You say, “Let’s just trust the process and see what happens,” and then chaos comes., but it’s in that- honest, uncertainty and I like to use the word vulnerability that I feel trying to hold a space or that Yogi feels trying to make sense of the space, that we offer that into the room.

So we offer into the room the fact that we ourselves are not coming with the solutions. We are also just making the next line in the drawing or the next expressive mark, or the next move or whatever the case might be, with the hope that it will be met by someone else’s. And so what happens is a kind of a little dance of ideas that funny enough, don’t explode into one chaotic moment, but very quickly find some kind of, harmony in the way that they exist in the room.

It’s not to say that they’re resolved, it’s just a coexistence that then doesn’t try to trample the other one. So even sometimes having opposing views in the room about very touchy subjects, I think by, creating this cradle of safety or this space that says we have a certain amount of respect for each other, that isn’t necessarily always said.

It’s sometimes just a gesture or an opening moment or a, or a little exercise or something., I think very often just gets received with a sense of empathy, in the room. And so I think we do play not only with the, with, trying to guide a process, but actually also realizing that sometimes the process to guide us or the people in the room have to give us a nudge in the right direction.

It’s a very difficult space to be in especially if you are making art or you coming up with an argument, a philosophical argument, or you have a scientific pursuit in mind., but that’s exactly the point, that we are in this system at the moment where everything has to have a particular outcome and has to have a certain methodology to it.

And sometimes the methodology is about just trusting the next step.

Johannes Jaeger

I mean, the point about the tension is that in this organization of the living as well, and especially in evolution, you have all these different strategies that are being applied to... So evolution rarely solves the problem. It sort of, it reframes it, right?

And in the process of a population of, organisms experiencing a problem, they themselves change and this is what we’re applying quite literally., this is the kind of evolutionary thinking that we’re applying to our own practice, that we are not in the business of solving problems anymore because that just gets us to over-optimized singular, sort of solutions and liabilities and long supply chains and whatnot, a brittle world.

But instead, we have to sort of, acknowledge the tensions that the oppositions, that are in the room and sort of try and find, when we work or we work with a group that- What are the tensions that are productive, right? I mean, this is what life does. It sort of doesn’t, it’s not a, you know, thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

It’s not a dialectic like that. It never resolves anything. It just spirals on and on and on and on. And, all these opposing, processes are used in a way that is, in the end somehow flowing into whatever’s happening, which is not a straightforward problem solution, but sort of adaptation. Like in evolutionary biology, we adapt to the problems at hand, and we can be quite diverse.

And we don’t have to agree. So I don’t want to turn, Marcus into a bad scientist. He doesn’t want to turn me into a bad artist. But, we want to, profit from the kind of differences in the approach that we have. And this is exactly difficult because there’s so much, opposition. There’s so much tension.

And you have to let go of this idea. I’m sure you like this idea, of a dichotomy. And just, when you go with that flow, you don’t have to resolve the tension, but you productively use it. That’s the basic idea.

Andrea Hiott

Oh, I love what you both said. And it brings up a lot of things., the idea that we’re not trying to get rid of the opposites and the contrasts.

Also you said evolution..., you said something that made me think, Yogi, it sounded like, we’re outside of evolution, and I know you don’t think that.

But it sounds what both of you are saying is sort of being this, ongoing process. And, like, when you’re attentive to it, you have more agency over, or some agency over, or some even, agency over is a weird word, but, or a weird phrase, but you have some different kind of power, in this, development, if that makes sense.

That’s a thought that was coming to mind. And also within that, the contrast, because you know, you would get labeled as a scientist, Yogi, and an artist, Marcus, but actually you’re both doing both of those, in different ways, but never at the same time, right? So there seems like something about your relationship that would be able to bring out the kind of attention that helps that orientation in a way.

Or, I mean, I’m just thinking about Marcus, what do you do? Do you read Yogi’s work and then you kind of respond to it? Or is it more immediate? Or Yogi, do you say like, “Oh, here, I have these ideas and this is my idea of what I’m thinking”?, because those are such different contrasts of visual element and a writing element, and yet they’re never separate.

This is kind of messy, but do you see what I’m saying a bit? And what comes up for you when I say all this?

Marcus Neustetter

The first thing that I wrote down on a note here while you were talking, I’m always drawing and writing, so forgive me if I’m looking down and not in your... At you. The, is the acknowledgement that- We ultimately as humans, we all are doing similar things all the time., but it’s just the language that we use that’s different.

So yeah, I tend to use my expressive language is my drawing. You know, Yogi’s is to write. And I would say that even the disciplines, the way they’ve been categorized, over time has caused a rift between that which we should be able to recognize it from each other. So the fact that, I might have to read some of Yogi’s text 10 times to get it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have to look at my picture 1,000 times just to understand what I was really feeling in that moment.

Yeah, it’s just a-- it’s okay. You know, and I think this is what we, what one needs to learn. That, the ego that tells you that you have to be in control of it and that you are, you know, you’re number one, and that you’re competing with other artists or other philosophers, and that you have to look good in the room, and that you have to try and understand everything or not look stupid in a gallery.

Whatever those things are that drive you to fit those social norms, you have to leave that at the door. You know, you cannot let that, influence the way that you go about a process, otherwise you’re just doing it for show and you’re just performing another role. And so what’s been so interesting to, in response to what you’re saying, in interesting in trying to match our media that we work with, is that yes, this first spark somewhere along the line is an idea or an expression or a moment that tickles you that you go, “Oh, there’s something about this that I want to respond to.”

It could be good or bad. It doesn’t matter. And naturally, one person then goes and reads 1,000 books and writes 1,000 words, and the other one goes and explores the world in another way, puts his hand in the mud and makes a sculpture. And so the beauty of it is when the two things happen simultaneously, and then they meet each other, and they look at each other, this piece of text and the sculpture, and somehow they wrap themselves around each other and they become a nice mess where it’s something that you cannot define anymore.

And for me, that’s when the artistic work is enriched by that which someone else has thought about, and it’s what happens in our minds. We look at an artwork, and we come with all of our stuff that we’re thinking about, and we impose it onto this work. This is not my role as an artist. I just made this work for myself so I can make sense of the world.

You’re the one that’s reading it differently. And I would say it’s very similar to when I read Yogi’s text, and I don’t have the philosophical background that he has or the scientific one, and I read it with completely new eyes. And I go, “Well, let me bring my baggage to this, and now let me throw it back at you and see what you do with that.”

Because why is your way the right one and not mine? Just because you call yourself something, why is my reading of your text incorrect? And The first, I’d like to do the anecdote, Yogi, when the first time you sent me a text, and you said, “Oh, just, you know, started with this, you know, I’m gonna send you my first chapter to the book.

I’d like you to respond to this, if you feel like it. You know, whatever you want to do, just think about it.” And it was interesting because I’d been thinking about similar things in my practice, not, or not that far away from what he was doing. I mean, I think there’s some synergy in looking at the world, as a, in a certain way.

And so when I read this, I was a, very enthusiastic about it. So I naturally, as I do, took a massive sheet of paper, put it up on the wall, and started to draw as I was reading this, and I would add some more, and I’d think. And so these three, I mean, there were probably about three meters by two meters, somewhat kind of massive drawings evolved out of this.

And, Yogi came to the studio thinking he might get to see a little drawing that he could put into his chapter as a kind of illustration or reference or something like that, and he stood in front of this work going, “Okay, now we’re in trouble.” And I think that is-- Yeah, it-- I was amused by that because that was my natural response.

And what’s been beautiful since then is the evolution of this, that I’ve intentionally not stuck, and this is what’s interesting for me, is I’ve not stuck with that medium in further conversations. I’ve decided I’m gonna try and find the medium that most represents that which I’m reading. So rather than trying to stick with one format that then becomes the language between Yogi and Marcus, it was about saying, “Well, you’re coming with different approaches to your texts.

You’re coming with different influences and different references and quotes, et cetera. I would like to do the same so that these things can meet each other with other influences and references.” And so the medium that’s chosen is everything from short films all the way through to sculptures and clay, to performances, to projections, to sound pieces and it is about breaking away from the stereotypical idea of we have to respond in the following language that we know and rather saying, “I know a bit of this language.

I know a bit of that. Let my practice also mix it up just like it does in Yogi’s texts.”, yeah, that is a

Johannes Jaeger

Very long

Marcus Neustetter

Answer

Johannes Jaeger

So I see these big paintings, drawings, they’re just monstrous drawings in the studio, and I think, “Okay, so we have to...” This is the manifesto of the book that we can link, below in the show notes, and we have pictures of those in the manifesto part of the book now.

And so then the next time I come into the studio, Marcus has cut up all three pieces and made a big puzzle out of all of them. And so the whole, this was a starting point for this inquiry in the book where we said we’re gonna reframe, everything we think about science and have a new science for a time in which we no longer think about the world as a machine.

So to do that, we have to draw the windmill and machines, the gears, and we sort of, destroyed it., not really, because it’s now a piece that we also show, have shown in exhibitions. But the nice thing about this book and the exhibitions that we’re doing is that we’re no longer producing art for the gallery or for the website, but that the website and the gallery become a sort of a footprint, of the journey that we’ve gone through.

And that’s why we also published the book chapter by chapter, a bit slower, lately for various reasons. But that’s important because writing a book is such a bizarre thing. At some point you have to stop. While explaining the world is, as you said before, we’re part of the evolution, we’re part of, the process that adopts us to the world and adopts the world to us.

This is what doing science is really about for me as an evolutionary biologist. It’s not, about a theory of everything a sort of an optimal solution to some kind of problem, but it’s about, the process of adapting, right? And continuing to adapt, to our environment in better and better ways.

And better is always defined by the current situation. It’s never gonna-- We’re never gonna arrive at a point and say, “We have learned everything about the world that we should ever learn about.” I mean, that’s the end of humanity. I mean, what will we do? I mean, and not just as scientists and artists, but as creative human beings, we would just not have anything to do anymore.

We would lose all our purpose. And so we’re trying to both visualize this, the very nature of this process. That’s-- that is our existence, right? And what more beautiful, way to do this, than through these tensions? I mean, another tension is the, this tension of play. I just wanna very briefly mention two, ways in which play creates tension.

One is this James Carse’s old, tension between finite games and infinite play, right? I mean, evolution is an infinite play. Think about Calvinball in Calvin and Hobbes, that, the only rule is that you can never play it by the same rule twice. So the point of infinite play is not to win a game, to be the best, like some people, some very powerful people on Earth think at the moment, but it is to stay in the game.

So we have to sort of change the rules themselves., and in the city of Wittgenstein in Vienna, this is also appropriate because that was Wittgenstein’s idea of how rules are made: by doing. So we’re creating new constraints, new rules, by which we do whatever it is we’re doing, right? And so that’s a lot of fun, but it’s also not completely structureless because we have-- our play is not just play, it’s serious play.

So this is a term that, introduced by meta modern philosopher Hanszy Freinacht. It’s existential play. It’s like it’s not, we’re not just, you know, fooling around. We’re, actually using important concepts and insights, and we’re just trying to deal with them in a more, appropriate way for human beings by playing with them instead of just, immediately going for some kind of solution that isn’t even there to a problem that’s not well-defined.

And that seems to be a picture of the human existence much more than this idea that we’re sort of machines in a machine world that need to, act in an optimal way, and everything at some point will be perfectly, oiled and optimized, the gears of the machine. That is a, it’s a, it’s a anti-human world.

And so this is our vision of science, and this is our way of working, and this is how we do workshops with people for collective co-creation.

Andrea Hiott

I love that. I love messiness and tension and understanding that this is life. This tension is life, and but I also understand that so many of us want to resolve that because it’s a precarious place, it’s a vulnerable place, it’s a difficult place.

I mean, we can get pushed to our limits in these when we, let ourselves feel what really is, which is that tension. It’s so generative, and there’s a flow that you can get in, which is really, exciting. But a lot of the time, you know, you’re sort of dancing and learning, and that’s that serious play, I think, idea that comes up a lot, on this podcast.

But I’m thinking about the, your relation... I’m thinking about two things. I’m thinking about your relationship, which I’ll talk about first for a second, but I’m also thinking about space, because you both brought up, you know, names of cities or the studio itself, which can be a physical place, but also kind of an activity.

I wanna get into the space, ‘cause you know I’m obsessed with space, spatial ideas. But first, I was thinking about your relationship, and I was wondering if that’s helped you hold the vulnerability or if it’s also been challenging in the same way, because as Marcus was talking about sort of challenging you a bit, Yogi, and you were talking about, a similar sort of notion in the way that you were responding both to him but also in environment.

Has it helped to have a long relationship with someone who does come from a different place but still shares, you know, similar views that you can be in that tension with? I’m wondering about how that’s sort of evolved. So maybe we can start there with what that has meant, if this is new for you or if this is something you’ve been doing your whole life, you know, for the listeners, because this isn’t something that a lot of people have.

I just wanna know about that sort of relationship, and also maybe opening that up into kind of other spaces that you are both in together.

Marcus Neustetter

Mm-hmm. Good question. I think the natural tendency of trying to find someone that can mirror some of your thoughts, and respond appropriately or inappropriately, doesn’t really matter, but respond, full stop, to what you’re putting out there and makes the effort to respond, I think that’s part of it, has some kind of form of empathy that what you’ve actually done is take the first step and it comes back, with or without the same rigor, doesn’t matter, but it comes back and then there’s a kind of a ping pong, a back and forth that’s always present, is I think a very important component to any relationship or conversation or exchange.

And, I mean, I’ve been very fortunate, just on a personal note, that I’ve grown up in the context of South Africa, born and bred there, and tried to find my way around in kind of my own artistic career in the kind of post-apartheid South Africa that’s supposed to bring people together. And I realized very early on in my own as an artist, even though I trained to be a visual artist, my parents are artists, so I always had this notion that this is what I’m going to do.

And I realized how the Western commercial world of art has really, continued to colonialize the notion of what art means in these contexts, and really separate people out from the collective agency that they have by creating these superheroes, these artistic, visionaries that- that are obviously feeding the commercial market, and that we need to kind of consider each artist a, an important individual.

And that within that, it did not refer to context and place, and did not react to what the people needed in the context and place. And so very early on already as a white South African is one component, but also as an artist, I said, “What is my role in society if it’s not trying to take that first step towards someone that doesn’t even understand who I am?”

And if I want to get to know the world, there has to be a reciprocal way of doing this. And so what I as an artist have learned very early on is that I need to take my work to people and hope that something comes back, and not the other way around. And come with it with a certain humility and I guess, respect, and as I said before, kind of leave that imposed ego that’s created for us somewhere else, because that- that is the one thing that’s going to cut it down.

And why I’m saying this whole thing is that, yes, I’ve come across many people in that environment, including a collaborator of mine for many years, Steven Hobbs, who I started an organization with in South Africa that did exactly this kind of collective work in public space, very effectively for many years, is that my tendency is always to work with others.

But to find individuals that are able to be in it, be in it for the long haul is a completely different thing. So you go in and you do a project together, and then you move on, and everyone finds their way. But somehow working outside of the artistic discipline becomes really exciting for me because I’m realizing that the amount of, stigma attached to that which we do within the world of art, for example, in the side of art that I mentioned before, or in this industry, Makes it more difficult to find an ongoing dialogue with someone that’s, shares similar views, but from another point of view.

And, so I think it’s been really rich in not only on a personal note, getting along well. I mean, we are friends. You know, we’re not just working together, but we actually share more than that. Yogi and I kind of, we understand each other in other ways, and we’ve helped each other through our own difficult times, through reflecting on things and sharing things, and we’re able to be vulnerable in the same space, and I think that’s very important.

But more than that, over and above that, it’s,... I do think that people have these counterpound points in their life. They just can’t take that first step to reach them. I often come across this, that someone will come up to me and say, “I don’t know why, but we need to talk, and I’ve got no idea what the relationship is between us or why, but there’s something there, and, let’s figure it out.”

And it... That is very rare, and, I almost think that I need to take the first step very often to do that., and somehow I think we’ve done it so many times, Yogi. You and I keep on bumping into each other going, “Oh, there was this one other thing that we have never spoken about that would be really interesting to address.”

Or, “Why do you talking to that person? This is a strange other person. This Andrea person, who’s she? What’s going on here? Is this a threat to our friendship?” No, quite the contrary. I think that, and it opens up, and that’s the point. It’s being open enough for it to grow, you know., anyway, that’s just an immediate response to your question.

It’s quite a complex question and will require a bit more thought. Yeah.

Johannes Jaeger

Well, wherever Marcus goes, he makes friends immediately. He’s really annoying. And, you know, you stand there in the corner and you think, “Okay, so he’s just got this sort of ability.” So, and I think that’s also important. Again, the tension, I come, from a place of utter alienation.

I grew up in a non-academic family. I mean, my dad was the first person in the family to go to university from a small village in Switzerland, where I just thought everybody was really weird. I do appreciate the people and the place much more now. But when you’re a teenager in such a rural, conservative place with very well privileged and everything, but just, like, not your people, then you move away and you move on and on and on, and it’s so easy nowadays to do that and, adopt some sort of, performativity that we talked about.

I know, Andrea, that you’re very, fascinated by the role of performance, and I think one sort of performance that has come to become so important in today’s society is this sort of presenting yourself, the persona that we sort of project on other, on, you know, in different, areas. And now with online social media and everything, we have, these sort of, different, performances that we’re playing all the time, and they are in a weird way now coming back into our actual lives So for me, it was always sort of finding my way this way as a sort of a person who felt a little alienated.

And the thing that we have with, the collaboration with Marcus is that we were both interested in what the other was doing, and it wasn’t,... So the point of our art, and this is very important, this is what I want to mention here, is not to sort of make that into a performance, right? So when we say we wanna document the process of what we’re doing, we wanna put that to work with people for their purposes.

But we don’t want to do what other artists have done and make their private life, especially, in recent times, a sort of a show online or on a stage or something like that., that’s a very old tradition, in the arts., and I think it’s not real because it’s a performance, and it’s deliberately so.

So what we’re talking about here is a, sort of a form of trust and openness that can only be, had in private. And it’s sort of funny to talk about it on the podcast now, of course, but we’re only talking about it. We’re not performing it out. And we would also like, to continue, talking, to you, Andrea, about these possible, circles that we could have in more private settings where people...

So the idea is the following. If you pretend to be someone that you would like to be in public all the time, your actual needs get blurred out, get, fuzzy, get, hidden away. And the kind of, vulnerability that Marcus is talking about is not the sort of openness. We can have a performative vulnerability, so we’re open to others’ idea, we’re humble in public.

But you know these kind of people who are humble all the time, but they’re really not. And so, it’s when you’re really not in charge of your, you know, in control of your projection to other people. That’s when you’re vulnerable. This is, this can be... It doesn’t necessarily mean to be weak, right?

It means to be unpleasant sometimes or grumpy or angry. Nowadays we have all kinds of reasons to be in a state that’s not very presentable. But we’re sort of also at the same time forced by our setup in society to perform in those. I mean, there’s no way around this. This has always been the case.

Humans have evolved to do this. We’re highly social animals, so we have to do this So that’s another tension that you discover, between having to do this performance to actually exist in this world and be seen by other people, and at the same time finding your niches where you can actually, open up and say, “What is the real problem here?”

Because if we have only this performative, sort of openness and vulnerability, we start to really see the wrong kind of problems and tackle, the wrong kind of problems. You know, do I get enough likes, on social media instead of, do I get enough appreciation where it really matters? And, so these are super complex minefields that, I have been really-- I mean, this is a recent thing for me.

Unlike Marcus, I don’t make friends easily, and so it’s easy-- It’s really beautiful to see the contrast of when you go weird places and you have really weird interests and it’s hard to explain those to other people., you find other people on the way. I think this is where I discovered your way making philosophy and find that really beautiful because we make, these ways.

We walk through these parks, and then the path become where we walk together, not alone. If you do that alone, the grass is not gonna get trampled, and so let’s trample the grass together. And but you have to really find the right pe-people and have the right, sort of social norms to do that, know when you should, dump your inner emotional life on others and when not.

Please, do not do that all over the place in public. That would be terrible, and it’s part of the problem of what we have today, right?

Andrea Hiott

Yeah, Yogi, gosh, there’s so many things. Both of you, I mean, this is... It’s hard not to jump in and say things when you’re both talking. But I’m doing okay so far. But yeah, I think, yeah, we’re all weird, right?

Us three, and that’s a great thing. I think everyone’s weird in different ways and, but we don’t like to show it, and it’s just hard, right? I mean, I... It’s, the performance and the vulnerability and the space and, all of these themes I feel like I wanna get into a little bit because Do you feel like performance is a bad thing, both of you? Because I’m starting to realize that so I’ve always, I was really shy as a kid, and I’ve had to like learn how to perform in order to feel into myself being able to be myself, and I didn’t realize I was doing that actually. But, and the performance isn’t, false.

It’s just more like getting on the stage part of it, like letting yourself be seen part of it, if that makes sense. Mm. Because that’s part of performance too, is just actually getting on the stage and letting yourself be seen. And so I just wanna bring that up because I feel that in what you were saying, Yogi, about that being harder for you or at least it was always really harder for me.

And then Marcus, it feels like you started from a early age thinking of that almost as a service to show people they could do that or to be the one who initiates the contact, which we all need. So those are interesting contrasts for me that I wonder, I feel in our work, in your work, especially together.

And I guess I should say that we had talked about, after I talked to Parker, us three had talked about, “Oh, maybe we should do something like a circle of trust,” because that’s what Parker Palmer does. So we have been talking about that a bit too and trying to figure out what does that mean, what is the space of a circle of trust, how private is it, how public, how performative?

So just for the audience, like maybe that’s coming into the conversation a bit because that is something we’re doing together. But I guess I wanna ask you both about this performative thing and what I just said about being seen, and if that’s, if there’s something positive about performing. Even you, Marcus, you’re performing when you’re...

You often do a lot of art in the moment, And then also you, Yogi, I think you’ve, You’re doing something as a scientist, by becoming a philosopher. A lot of people just think of you as a philosopher now.

That’s... Is that a performance, or is that a switch? Is that... Are you still both? And also the public aspect. I just put all that out. You can say whatever comes. You don’t have to answer to all of it.

Johannes Jaeger

I will give a very short answer because I wanna give the answer, about performance to the artist here.

But for me, I’m the least diplomatic person I know. But then that’s also performance, at the same... You know, you’re the joker, you’re the mischief-maker, and you’re performing that as well. So no, performance isn’t a bad thing. Performance is something you have to do. What’s a bad thing is when we mistake, performance for that inner life that we also have that is not perfect, and when it takes over our online and private life completely.

And online, this is transparent, this is being discussed everywhere, but the sort of seeping. There’s a bunch of things., Patricia Martin just, wrote a book called, Will the Future Like You?, that’s sort of about this seeping into our private lives. So we have to perform for... Am I a philosopher? I actually was always a philosopher.

I performed as a scientist for a while, and I still do that. But my questions are more, philosophical and have always been. But, yeah, where is the... There is no strict line, right, to draw. And I also don’t believe in this authenticity cult that you have some sort of essential self somewhere.

The authenticity is in going your way, in way making. Is in finding your journey, in a way that is really, good for you in the circumstances that you’re in. And it’s a balance, right? So a performance is important, but I think it’s gone overboard, and it’s invaded places of our lives that are not appropriate.

Marcus.

Marcus Neustetter

Yeah., I mean, the question of whether I’m performing has always been sitting there because I am not a performer, in the artistic sense of it. I, have never regarded myself as someone that does performance. And very often when it comes to, you know, people writing about my work or I have to go and put a label up somewhere or kind of give something a credit or whatever, I will put a line through the word performance, and I’ll just kind of consider it you’re watching me doing what I’m doing.

It’s not,... It’s what I need to do. So if I’m gonna wear a white overall and go and do a drawing in a public, against a public wall, and it happens to be expressive because I want to, like, really get myself into it, and I go and I pick up the mud and I squeeze it into the wall and I scribble over it and I scream at the wall because I’m upset with it’s because that’s what I need to do, not because you’re watching me.

And I think that is, that I really... And it’s a fine line because sometimes I find myself doing it and then going, “Ooh, did I do this because I’m doing it for the sake of an audience, because I’m trying to get a rise out of them, or am I doing it because I genuinely feel this way?” And it’s, very difficult to separate the two out.

There’s no... And I think we perform, as you said, we perform every day in life., you know, we behave a certain way towards one. In one scenario, you go to a shop and you do one thing. You’re sitting at home in front of the TV, you do something completely different. And so you even in these small micro-moments in life, you put on a different personality in order to attain something or feel comfortable in that.

But I wouldn’t say that it isn’t, at least most of the time, I think, being untrue to that which you need to be doing. So if I am trying to get the woman at the counter in the local shop down the road here, who for the last years I’ve been trying to get into a conversation with just ‘cause I’m used to in South Africa talking to everyone, and this person does not wanna talk to me.

She wants to check me out, beep, so much, goodbye. And I keep on coming to her and asking her how her day was., I’m completely putting a performance because I want her to answer me how her day was and I want her to ask me how my day was because I see her every day and I want to make a human connection.

And so sometimes I need to perform for that. But I’m not doing it with the intention of playing the clown or playing the silly one or, yeah, coming in dressed up as something else just in order to make that stand. But if my efforts as an individual doing this cannot be met eventually, and I have to resort to putting on a clown outfit and doing a performance so that she looks at me, maybe that’s what I have to do.

But then it comes from my need to do something, not, servicing her need. Yeah. And I think there’s a very, it’s a very complex thing in my brain in terms of why I make art in the first place. And it’s, Yeah. We sit and draw, and we make, and we perform, and we make films and whatever else happens in the art world that’s, that gets put out there.

And I often look at this, and I genuinely ask the question, is this because the art world expects it or because I genuinely want to make it? And I think society’s no different., and so I think that is, for me, where the word performance is just such a bumpy kind of a complex term that I struggle with.

And sometimes in the studio, funny enough, when I’m by myself and I’m drawing, here’s a vulnerable moment. I will, I will do things that are not natural to me because I’m testing my own boundaries. Because I think if I did it this way, it will make me feel very uncomfortable, but I need to try this because I won’t know how far I can go, and it’s a very complex and difficult thing to do.

If I do that in public, it becomes even more difficult, but you kind of need to fall into that meditation of the world is not out there, and I’m just making what I have to make. But, there are sometimes things, sometimes I perform more for myself than I do for others. It’s an interesting concept

Johannes Jaeger

I, if I can just Yeah.

One thing that I would like to add is that I come from the mirror world of that. I was a group leader, I had a research group, and I was thinking I was in a performance, right? I was, performing the management role, and, it... I was really stressed about the future of my career because I had to come up with these new problems that I needed to study scientifically, and what I really wanted to do is question the way we study, these problems in the first place, and that, there was no place for that in that role that I had.

And then I realized that this thing that I wanted to do more than anything else my entire life, this was the most authentic thing that I... The path that I had chosen had changed now, and I wanted to do something completely different. And funnily enough, I didn’t, go that way on my own. I got kicked out of a academic position, and that kicked me into that new direction.

So I needed help from the outside to do that, and I think we are questioning ourselves. Maybe the younger generation now is more, finally waking up to that and is sort of questioning more and more. But I mean, our generation was probably questioning ourselves a little bit too little in these, career paths we, that we were in, even absurdly in the creative, businesses like science and art, and we were, getting into this rut.

And what we’re doing every day now is, un-rutting our lives and that’s not easy to do because you are always, encountering resistance, but, it’s so gratifying., it’s just amazing.

Marcus Neustetter

Yeah, and can I add? Sorry, it’s just, burning., the thing that’s so difficult is that you need the measuring device, or what do you call it?

The bullshit monitor, yeah, to tell you, yeah, there’s something going on here, and sometimes it’s a good conversation between us, you know, that helps that, or with a, with your life partner, or with your daughter, or whatever it might be. You know, there’s always these influences that’ll tell you, “Eh, you’re going, you’re going somewhere where, I can smell it.”

But funnily enough, just again in context- Being within, for example, a situation in South Africa in a kind of, again, in a kind of poorer neighborhood doing a public artwork or a community engaged process and asking critical questions about life on the streets, et cetera. If you go in there and you perform, you get taken down.

I’m sorry, that’s... There is a monitor for whether you’re serving your honest truth or something wrong that can... Society has learned, society that needs it, has learned to read whether you’re being honest or not. And it’s not, you know, a little white lie here or there is not the issue. It’s what intention you come to a process with.

And I think coming to your questions of space, I really would like to go there, because context and space, and acknowledgement of context and space is really important in that you cannot even begin to think about whether you’re performing or not if you don’t consider where you are and the environment that you’re in, and the people that are around you, and having empathy for them.

Because, yeah, it is a symbiotic relationship. You’re coexisting in a space. Something has to, inform you and the other way around. So yeah.

Andrea Hiott

Both of you brought up a couple words there. I, Clown maybe, and sort of, a jokester kind of sense.

Also the idea of performing for yourself. I think that’s really important. Marc, I think you said that about... That’s kinda what I meant about letting yourself be seen. You sort of first have to be able to see yourself, which is very hard. It’s very hard to, like, really see who you are. And of course, other people will see you differently, but that’s still all connected.

It’s all nested. And Yogi, I really appreciate what you said about, like being in a university sense, because I hear that a lot from people, of feeling like they have to perform, and indeed we do. We’re in high pressured environments with, like, real deadlines and our livelihood on the line. And, you know, also we’re just teaching, and teaching is a kind of you are standing in front of people and you are trying to present something to a lot of different diverse people in a way they will understand, and there’s an element in that of A kind of performance, but not really too.

The... So I really think this is something, this is an example actually of holding tension. The very word performance and how it never can’t, we can’t actually ever decide if that’s good or bad, is the kind of tension I think we were talking about at the beginning. And I just wanna link that to the playfulness, the serious play, and the jokester, and the clown in my life, I don’t know about in both of you, but I’ve found that’s very helpful for being able to see yourself. Mm... To be able to see, like, “Okay, I failed,” or, “Okay, I succeeded,” or, “Okay, I’m not what I thought I was,” which is wonderful stuff, right? That’s rich tensions to kind of grow from.

I think there’s a, that playfulness or that trickster sort of quality, is part of that space of getting out of trying to put things in either/or. So I just wanna put that out there a minute before we go into kind of actual space context related subjects. I don’t know if you have any feeling about that

Marcus Neustetter

So the either or intentional relationship, there’s so many examples and case studies that I can talk about play and performing as a way of breaking that down. You know, I mean, the amounts of role-playing exercises and experimental, joke telling, you know, like, or making fun of a situation that becomes a really interesting way of breaking down these, like a polar opposite positions or yes or nos, you know, these either-or situations, to be in that space in between.

I think the performing component that, the acknowledging that you are a trickster in that moment, whether you’re teaching or you’re facilitating a workshop or,... And, but doing it with a sense of self-iron- irony, humor, and acknowledging it to everyone that we all know, really breaks all boundaries down.

Yeah, because the moment that the pers- the other people in the room recognize that you are playing with them, and that the whole thing is an experimental performance in one form or another, magic happens. And I think we-- some people do it naturally every day, you know, in the way they engage with the world, and others need to do it within a structured environment.

But either way, I think it’s, again, the honesty about it is to say, “Hey, I’m playing this role now because I need to play it in order to disrupt something.” And it’s especially today, I mean, I think we’ve got the biggest town in the world at the moment doing performances every day for us., knowing full well that it’s, that’s, that play is about a kind of,...

It doesn’t have cons-, it’s void of the consequences that make for a better society. And I think that’s where it’s on us to play very carefully, and to play very consciously, and to understand the either-or scenarios also exist because of people’s conditioning, and because of context, and because of experience.

And to be in-- a trickster in that environment, takes a or should come with a huge amount of responsibility and, acknowledgement., and that’s where it gets difficult, because so quickly it can be abused. And so I’m, yeah, it’s, I feel uncomfortable sometimes in that role because I know that there’s another person next to me who’s got the same approach, but is doing it for completely different reasons, and doesn’t take responsibility for it.

Because it unlocks something deeply problematic in society and with individuals when you do it, and people recognize, and they can laugh at themselves, and they can laugh with you, and they can unpack something. And then what? You have to hold that, because if you don’t hold it’s going to fall even harder.

And this is, yeah. Anyway, an interesting point. Yeah.

Johannes Jaeger

I would love to follow up on that because the trickster, Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk, which I dearly love, writes this, a thesis about Western society from an, a Australian Aboriginal point of view, and says basically every indigenous society had the trickster god, Loki, the emu in Australia, to warn you of the narcissism, to not put, them in charge.

And what we’ve done, especially in the last 50 years in the West, is we’ve put the narcissists in charge. So this is a wrong way to go about the trickster. The trickster in a traditional village, it then becomes the shaman, of course, or someone who is leading you through crisis moments, or who has to also, was a traditional role of shamans to negotiate between tribes.

Because that person is slightly outside and can reframe, your role in society. And so we have to sort of almost take that, once-removed view of the trickster itself nowadays, and say how can we, put the trickster back to where the trickster belongs? That is, to entertain us, to shock us, and to maybe, sometimes make us think about, what we, are doing ourselves, but not, definitely not to run the world.

And so this is also another thing we can do. And in a way we’re both, have, we have to be trickster figures in our jobs. And, we have to, provoke, in art and in philosophy and get people to think differently about things. And that always includes a certain amount of, narcissism.

If you don’t like to be that, like you’re in the spotlight somehow, right? And that’s not necessarily, again, that’s not a bad thing. But it’s just like the recognition that should be there. And if we don’t recognize this anymore we, demand of everybody to fulfill this certain role. I mean, we have a society now where everybody’s supposed to be an influencer or something, and that’s, it’s not gonna be a very functional society.

So this is also in a bigger context our performance, our artwork is about recognizing roles rather than saying, “Oh, we should all be...” I don’t think this idea that we should all be authentic, you don’t want most people around you to be authentic with you, to be quite honest. You wanna carefully choose those.

Andrea Hiott

Or maybe- And only, yeah... Maybe authentic but not fully always all of the roles they are Yeah... All things. Or fully one role. I think that’s really important what you’re bringing up about, I mean, I think of it as the multiplicities that we are but that we pretend we’re not. So we try Mm... Kind of always be consistently one thing, which none of us can ever be.

And so that already becomes a kind of an illness. And the trickster, we all have that in us, but no one is supposed to make that the whole role and everything- Mm... Like we’ve done. And to see that as, I mean it is powerful, but to see that as That it can be a whole thing, that we just only become tricksters and therefore that is the power, is such a perversion of the power of it.

And actually you know, in all kinds of teachings you do find, okay, when you tap into this source, there’s always a warning. You know, because it’s very hard not to, identify as that power and want more and more of it.

But you’re gonna go off a cliff, not only in your own ability to be sensual and in your space, but also just off a cliff in terms of where you’re gonna be leading whoever’s following. So I think that’s a really important idea of that multiplicity and that being careful not to abuse. You both keep bringing us back to just you have to be attentive of what you’re doing and where you are, and that you are part of, something, a self that is multiple and a social self that is multiple and a space that is multiple. Maybe that leads us into space and context a bit. You can say whatever you want, because I’m also thinking about how you’ve both been in many spaces, often at the same time.

Maybe that’s a mental space and also a geographical space, a studio, an artwork, a text that you’re reading, a text that you’re writing. All of these I think of as spatial and contextual, and you’re doing all of that, in the zone when you’re bringing people together too. So

Marcus Neustetter

Can I try a little exercise for a second as part of this? This also goes to the listeners, that it’s usually an acknowledgement of the space that’s around us. So, I think we can spare 10 seconds. Can we have 10 seconds of a time where you are just taking in the space that currently connects us through sound?

So just listen to each other’s space for 10 seconds, whatever that is. So we’re gonna stop talking for 10 seconds, and we’re just gonna enjoy the silence and really listen to the space that you’re in. Let it speak to you. And we are now currently connected by a microphone and speaker, so we’re listening to each other’s spaces, so it’s an extension of where we are.

Here we go. 10 seconds starts now I will stop it even though I don’t want it to. It’s so beautiful. Anyway

Andrea Hiott

It is. We could just do that for, you know, a while, but-

Marcus Neustetter

Exactly. But I think that’s, that’that for me very often is the, acknowledging the room, acknowledging the space, physical and mental or the communing.

The sense that we’re together, is, yeah, kind of as I’ve mentioned before, kind of my practice, my being, my... Is all always related to context and my question of why am I here, and what is my role, and how do I fit in? And the moment you do that, you look around you, and then you start making sense of what’s around.

And that’s why a lot of the work that we also do when we go into different environments, for example, the studio, is we respond to the local materials, to the stories, to the physicalities of the people. You know, the bodies and the space, and that these... We are bodies. You know, we... Embodied experiences are just important to us one form or another.

Whether it’s performance or not, it doesn’t matter, we’re still there. And, the inspiration I personally get from the corner behind you there, that kind of nice angle, and the lines that create the architecture under the blurry background of Yogi’s screen, and the drawing that’s behind me.

You know, we’ve just... Just that alone, if we just all ducked away out of our screens and we just saw that as our backdrop and these were the things that we’re speaking to each other, it already says so much. What more do you want to say? And so it’s the acknowledgement of that, and then we invade it as people, and we come in with our noise, and our ideas, and our own positions, and our arguments.

Or our silence, and our quietness, and our breath, and our... I could hear my heartbeat funnily enough while we were being quiet in my ear because it’s so silent over here, and your spaces were so quiet. And you just become more conscious of that which matters., and so if you really, acknowledge that And working in complex cons-, contexts, in places where survival, in extreme conditions, et cetera, it amplifies that, and you really have to watch where you step literally., when you’re in a more safe environment, you occasionally need to be reminded about how safe it is, and that the comfort zone that you’re in has stunted your ability to relate to the context because you’re not reminded that you’re in a place.

You’re just reminded that you’re in your head, and you lose this relationship to what could influence you physically, in this space. So I... Yeah, that’s just one, response to your thing around space, and context, and upbringing, and connections.

Johannes Jaeger

As a scientist, I mean, you see why I had problems connecting to Marcus in the beginning.

But, I got used to this kind of stuff. And it’s actually an interesting exercise for, from a scientific point of view as well, because Marcus asked us to not look at the pictures behind, us, but to listen. And we’re such visual animals, right? So we’re... As a philosopher, I’m interested in how do we get to know the world, and we are so dependent, not just on words and concepts, but on visual metaphors.

These meta- visual metaphors are based on our own history on, sharp edges, on triangle- our geometry is based on triangles. I think it was Carl Sagan who made us imagine these blobs that float around a gas, giant, and their intelligence. They would develop a completely different geometry because they never see a sharp line in their lives.

They wouldn’t have maybe the concept of a line. And so even if we try to interpret sounds or smells or, I mean, if we try to describe them immediately, we need to fall back on visual metaphors. We’re such strongly visual animals. And so, these are the kind of, phenomenological exercises that I always hated as a student as well, when people say, “Okay, just sit in the woods and be the tree.”

And so, there is this tension again between anthropomorphizing, nature and actually, you know, Being with the problem or the situation that you’re in, and we have taken ourselves so much out. So this is the other thing that we’re doing, where Marcus, the first thing he gets when, he does when we do a workshop, he gets us out of our heads, right?

And you may actually find that really annoying. We did this with 30 philosophers last summer, and it was really funny to watch all their, faces when Marcus came in the room and said, “Now we have to go play.” And so half of them were excited, and the other ones clearly not in the beginning. And so it’s so hard because they’re philosophers.

They’re the worst. Their philosophy has trapped itself since, Wittgenstein follows us around everywhere., since Wittgenstein’s time in the domain of language. So we wanna reconnect out of that cage, and we can only do that by going beyond whereof we cannot speak, thereof we shall be silent. Yes, if we are scientists and philosophers, because what we cannot express in words and rigorously in concepts is not our subject.

But then we can go and play with Marcus and perform things and experience things in a different way. And doing this in a non-- I mean, immediately people will go, that are scientists or philosophers, “This is completely flaky,” right? And this is such a big warning flag because this is, we’re still animals, and we still experience the world through a lot of, different channels than our visual and conceptual channels.

And what we could call hyper-modernity, this complete detachment from reality that we have in tech cycles, circles and other people that think, they can program the world in one way or other are a symptom of being, trapped like that. So, can we introduce a practice that is not, that is grounded, right?

Literally grounded, and, at the same time gets us out of our heads is something that I find extremely fascinating. So this is one of the other really gratifying, ways, of working with artists, is you have to perform sometimes in ways that you don’t like to. And as we said before, this allows you to discover new avenues of experience that you would not have gone down otherwise.

Andrea Hiott

I think that relates also to the noticing of the context and space and that you’re in many at once. I really love that you just linked that Coming into your body to the visual kind of, the overemphasis that we naturally have on the visual. I hadn’t really thought of it like that’s very uncomfortable, and I know exactly what you mean. I mean, this podcast sometimes is a perfect example of making philosophers and scientists uncomfortable because of things like what Marcus just did, you know, or talking about the heart or whatever. I’ve come to see that as a practice for myself, too.

It’s not always easy for me, frankly, in both directions. But I like that link that the two of you made together there of when we do something, when we it’s almost like you kind of you have to kind of give in to doing something a way you’re not used to doing it, you know?

Marcus Neustetter

Mm-hmm.

Andrea Hiott

Which then shifts what you’re gonna understand as the space you’re in.

I find that is connected to that attention and that noticing that we were talking about earlier, too. And also, I think to the, what you bring up a lot, Yogi, and, Marcus, what you’ve done a lot of work trying to help or resolve, not resolve, smooth into buttery, more buttery air, is the urgency of the times and the troubles, the very real problems and pathologies, that we’re faced with now that we were talking about a bit about, you know, how we’ve put narcissism, into some kind of power box we’re, we are very confused about what success is.

We think it’s metrics, and we think we all want them, and then we get there, and we’re, like, neurotic and have no way to relate to our bodies. And there’s all kinds of confusions going on now relative to this, I think both of you kind of end up grounding those in something like what we were just talking about, this relational aspect that kind of takes first coming into the body in a different way and what the senses are in a different way.

So I don’t know. I’m just thinking about the relationality of it, what relationship is on a different scale than we’ve been talking about, and the activism, the action orientation of it. You know, you’re active, both of you, in ways that people with your titles, aren’t always. How do you feel about that, I guess? I

Johannes Jaeger

Mean, if you do something that is stuck in your head, stuck in the ivory tower right now, then you’re doing something wrong. This is not a time to do that. You have to get out there, and you can’t do that alone. You have to engage, with other people, and if you’re engaged with other people, you have a practice, because you have to act together with them.

That is very simple, and if we don’t take that serious and we, if we dismiss it as woo and we’re just gonna go on in academia or in art as we’ve done before, it’s not working. Because this time, it, that where this very heady way of dealing with the world, was successful is coming to an end because we have manipulated, the complex world we live in so many ways that the unintended consequences are accumulating faster than the corrective measures, that we can put in there.

The other thing that getting out of your head will do is slow you down. So I teach high school students nowadays, and I tell them, “You can’t use PowerPoint slides just for one simple reason. If you have to write on the board, it slows you down, and people can actually follow you, and they interact with you.

The process is a completely different one.” And you have to actually prepare more to be engaged and present in that process. And the students are completely focused on the content at the age of 12 to 15 years already. So what have we done, right? I mean, we... It’s sort of the point of teaching is to engage in a process between teacher and student that gets, insight across, that transforms both in the best case.

And this is, not new, and it’s not our work to say that. There’s plenty of people and literature out there that says that. But again, literature, so you have to go and read it. No, you just go and do it, right? I mean, so this, it’s stuff that we just have to, do in a playful... So we can’t do it alone, and we can only do it in a playful way because we’re not experts in everything.

So we cannot... If we do it in a too serious way, by the way, then it’s also not, interesting anymore. So instead of becoming expert in whatever we’re doing, we’re sometimes just playing, being aware that we’re just playing, and not sort of arrogating that we know everything about what we’re doing. But it always gets you in, into interesting, and sometimes tight spots, but that’s also, interesting.

So that you have to then grow to the-- you have to stand up to the challenge and grow. So this is the, even in Plato’s, allegory of the cave that we’ve used as a very early subject of our art, the important part is the one where the philosopher gets out of the cave, right? This journey is important because when the philosopher gets back into the cave and tries to explain to the other people that what they’re seeing is just shadows, they don’t have the experience, and that is actually in the original allegory, but it’s never told to people that they can’t relate to that.

They’re not to blame because they’re, they haven’t, simply haven’t had the experience. And again, that’s an active experience, so that’s something we have to have these sort of experiences that allow us to reframe how we see the world. This you can’t do by reading a book or just thinking, you know, sitting in a corner and thinking

Marcus Neustetter

I guess that’s part of the artistic process being revealed is that what you’re doing is you are sharing the experience of the making, and by doing that, making the work more accessible, which goes against all concepts of what art, how art should be revered. Don’t tell people how it’s done.

It’s like a magic show. Once you know the trick, it’s not interesting anymore. And it’s not true. It’s actually very interesting once you know the trick. But I think the idea that we, The, you know, that we hold onto the process in such a way or that we, that we, hide it means that there’s little progress.

So the moment you do something and you actually share what you’re doing, you’re, you are opening up your own process to the most amazing things. And I would say that majority of my work is collaborative. I love my studio practice alone, but the majority is doing it with others because if I do it with others, I have...

Not only have I got an immediate mirror because I’m constantly looking over my shoulder thinking what’s going on, or a philosopher who’s commenting, but I have a, I have a need to be open enough to receive and give, and to receive and give, and to receive and give. And that just, poof, it just breeds new, most amazing new ideas that then just feed me that I don’t have enough capacity to deal with afterwards, which is the other frustrating part.

But, so if one takes that into, a societal structure and you think, again, places in need for survival that rely on their neighbors, that need to pull together to make something work, that have to, kind of break the system in order to make it work for them, you know, it could be very it could be infrastructural stuff, you know.

How do you get to the water if the tap has been turned off? You know, you have to dig up and then hack the thing and then put two pipes and then suddenly you’re building your own contraption around cleansing water that you wouldn’t naturally get from the state or whatever. And you, and you come up with the most amazing things, and then that thing gets marketed on a market somewhere and it’s sold internationally for millions, and suddenly there’s an industry that comes out of a need.

You know, and the, and this is just many, there’s so many stories like this that come up in industry, but, and we celebrate those there. What we don’t celebrate is how we got to those processes. You know, we forget that it comes out of complexity, it comes out of survival. And, I mean, hello, we’re living in a context where we’re around the corner from a lot of, a lot more than we’re, than we can imagine, in terms of questions around survival.

And yet, we have so much difficult, such a difficult time revealing our processes for them to change because we are so guarded. And so the doing part is, I think, a shift in that lifestyle to say, “Let me reveal how I’m doing it so that you and I can learn together,” as opposed to just protecting myself from that which could shatter my little world, you know?

Yeah.

Johannes Jaeger

If we take the process as a transformative journey as well, then, you have to give people enough framing. So if, you know, if you’re not into art and you go into a contemporary art museum and, that... This is a real, example. There’s a plastic mushroom in the Pompidou and I came back from Paris and told Marcus, “You know what?

There’s a plastic mushroom in the Pompidou. What the... What is the plastic mushroom doing in the Pompidou?” And he said, “This is an artist whose work I know, and this is the process behind the whole thing,” and I could actually understand it. But the museum doesn’t do that. There’s just a little plaque.

It has the name of a famous contemporary art artist with a plastic mushroom. And this is not a useful way to engage the public, in our, opinion, because I mean, if you assume that the average public is as dumb about art as I am, because it doesn’t,... It’s true that art is about the engagement of the public with the art, whatever you make out of the plastic mushroom.

But what do I make out of a plastic mushroom, you know? I mean, not many useful things in that very moment. So I... Can we not help, this sort of process along? And this is exactly one of the things we are probably finding in the zone between art and science is sort of new framings that make the art, tangible, make it have an impact, and at the same time also the other way around.

Why do we learn so much about, all the problems that we have from science, but we don’t act on it, right? That’s not a problem of science. That’s a problem of reframing how we deal with the insights that science gives us.

Marcus Neustetter

So I’d argue that mushroom is super important for many other reasons, whether you understand it or not.

But it’s, like so many works within a system, let it be. It can exist, and it’ll feed that group and that knowledge system, and they will inform each other, and, that should evolve. I’m perfectly fine with that, just like the international art market, just like the scientific research that’s happening in various corners of the world.

Let that happen, but let it not be the only thing., you know, that shouldn’t... It shouldn’t get..., that mushroom in the Pompidou shouldn’t be given the status, the money, the recognition that it gets just because it’s a plastic mushroom. It should be put next to something or acknowledged for the other thing that gives it life.

So what are the thousands of millions of community projects that have been in our existence that have changed lives through the arts, where you can actually say that should also be put onto a pedestal and celebrated for what it is? Or where an incredible collaboration between an artist and scientist, I’m not talking about ours, now others, making incredible strides in innovation.

Why is that not standing on a pedestal? And I think, again, the ecosystems that exist can continue to exist. They serve a certain network. They generate a lot of money for people. They feed people. They build something. But the problem is that we are focusing, at the moment, all of our attention on that, and I’m really interested at the underbelly, the alternative stuff coming and the real mushrooms popping up next to the plastic mushroom saying, “Hello, we’re also here.

What does that mean?”, you know, you can’t see the one without the other. And so, I’m more and more interested in how do we present ourselves in these institutions, because up until now, we have not been too concerned about invading the institution. We’ve just said we’re the zone between these spaces.

You know, we are the, we are the, we are the space where we want to explore. But sometimes you need to kind of place the fungi into the storerooms of the museum for it to spore, and then let’s see what happens., which most paper conservationists have chased me out of museums for that reason.

But the, idea behind it As we take the next steps in creating these trust relationships, in these shared studio spaces, we need to also manifest these spaces in the institutions, in the Pompidous of the world, where people can come to a space that is usually considered a certain kind of space, coming back to context and space, and break out that the walls and open it up for make it more permeable, not only in the physical sense of it, but actually in how we approach it.

And again, it’s a reference I can’t help, being in an urban transforming Johannesburg for thirty years. The amazing relationship people have with buildings and walking past a museum and saying, “I thought it was a prison.” Or, kind of not having, access to spaces because they are squatted illegally, and then once you realize the ecosystem that exists inside there for a matter of survival, it’s been about a very ingenious way of redesigning architecture that was imposed as a colonial instrument, and then has become appropriated, but in such an incredible way that you realize that we as humans do need to sometimes burrow ourselves into the very things that have conquered us in order to kind of eat it up from the inside like termites, you know, reappropriate it and transform it.

Maybe it has to collapse. I mean, coming to this idea of teaching, Yogi mentioned earlier, I mean, I was at a... Giving a lecture series in a university in Port Elizabeth in South Africa, in Gqeberha, and, the, students in front of me turned around and said, “You’re lucky you’re an artist and you’re coming to us creatively and you want to talk openly because if you’re a professor, we must tell you must stop professing because you’re coming from the wrong place.”

As in, you know. And once you acknowledge that and you recognize that and you... Obviously, this is a very complex, space, you know, the decolo- decolonizing the institutions, trying to figure out what it means. But it’s amazing it’s happening. The students are doing it. The, you know, people in the institutions are asking these critical questions.

I would say the museums are also doing it. Curators are thinking of alternative shows and et cetera. So it is happening. I would just love to see these trust relationships of process being much more integrated into these, spaces. So I’m hoping that through our, and just Yogi’s nodding, but I think we’ve always had this.

We’re working outside the silos between these two spaces, but actually sometimes we have to slip into the silos, rub shoulders with the wrong people to get them agitated, and see what happens when they come into a circle or into a studio and what, yeah, what that could give., just a nice provocation.

Andrea Hiott

Yeah, maybe not always only between the silos, but there’s a whole space holding them. There’s a whole surrounding context that you are too, and that already includes the silos even though you don’t have to smoosh them into each other. I mean, that’s part of that idea too. And what I hear in both of you is this communal, that kind of communal space, exploration, which doesn’t necessarily have a beginning or end, but is always a zone.

I mean, there’s only so much, like, your sensory kind of cone or whatever. Like, your sensory kind of way of being is gonna be the zone together., it doesn’t necessarily have to be between, does it? Or I guess I’m also thinking about, like, in the essay on love and philosophy, you talk about, when you’re talking about the zone and about different These projects, there’s, like, this idea of doing that we’ve been talking about a lot, which is kind of... Like, I think we’re sort of demonstrating the vulnerability becoming power actually in a way here in this conversation. But within all of that, there’s also, like, the having and the being, which none of these are separate, but that feels part of this urgency too of, and this, like, communal thing that you are doing.

I mean, even with the art itself and the mushroom and the museum and the space, these are multiplicities too. I really like the idea that they can be what they are, but we should also have a way to go into different nested multiplicities of them. You know? Yogi should have a way to... And I guess he does, it’s Marcus, of saying, “What the hell is this mushroom doing in the museum?”

Like, explain it. -

Marcus Neustetter

Oh.

Andrea Hiott

Yeah. So,

Marcus Neustetter

Yeah He says it without... He does it, he says it directly to the museum. I’ve experienced this. So it’s not always the same thing.

Andrea Hiott

I believe it. But I like that. I mean, that’s... I think that it’s part of the tension too of, saying things as they are and figuring out how you can do that without alienating those who’ve made them.

Or take, or taking responsibility for them as they are. Mm. I think that’s a hard thing to do.

Marcus Neustetter

That’s

Johannes Jaeger

Extremely-

Marcus Neustetter

But it’s the gatekeepers that- Yeah. Yeah... That it’s the very people that are, that need X amount of papers that they have to publish, that need X amount of, large ticket item names, that in order to protect their positions.

And that’s where it gets complex. Because at the end of the day, the system has been built to protect those that are already in it. And, you know, you will naturally step on someone’s toes, and somebody will have to be defensive, otherwise they’re giving over their wealth and their accumulation of whatever they’ve got in terms of power.

And we will always in society have that. How do we go about convincing those people, and I don’t have to even look at the politics of what’s happening today, but, you know, to give up any of their power is almost impossible. So what do we do? Do we, generate new power next to it that builds itself up that they have no claim to in order to create a society and a community that finds an alternative value system where the powers are shared and differently, accessed differently?

Maybe that’s a utopia, but either way, that’s always what I come up against, is still the gatekeepers that need to protect their own environment by offering that which they know is accepted as a status symbol. Papers in... I mean, Yogi, you can talk about that in the scientific and philosophical space.

You know, the academics that have to prove themselves over and over again through the amount of papers they produce

Johannes Jaeger

I was for a second thinking, are we, beneath, you know? We’re under the radar. We’re undermining the systems. We’re not between the systems. But that’s... I think the systems are undermining themselves, so we’re not doing that.

So, I think the systems are undermining them because of their closed nature, and their inflexible nature, and the, and things changing really fast in the world of today. What I find a much more useful framing is to... I agree with Mark, is it’s not useful to go against, the oligarchs in a oligarchy frontally, right?

That’s just gonna get you in trouble, but without you getting anywhere. But, there are ways around this, so,... And one of them is simply, to rediscover that we can refuse, to participate, and that’s a form of peaceful, sabotage of the system. Because a lot of these systems, do, assume that you play by the rules of the finite, very finite games that they’re playing, right?

So actually stepping outside those games is hard to do in practice, and, much harder than people imagine. But it’s a very effective form if more and more people do it, I think. Also, I’m really hopeful about the new generations doing, the young generations doing that more and more, after at least two generations of complacent people, we have to say.

Complacency was very, strong in, you know, 10, 20 years ago. And now we’re in a situation where things have to come out. And so then you can quote Milton Friedman and say, you know, when the crisis comes, you have to be ready with the right kind of ideas. But you also have to be ready with the kind, right kind of community and practice.

So what we’re building now is much more than just ideas. It’s practices that we want to... People... We want to see people play, and that’s important. They have to play in their own way, right? I mean, so we’re not coming out with the Perspective Studio TM., this is our brochure. Read it and you’ll, be this new person.

But we are, encouraging people to play seriously in their own way, because nobody can predict what’s gonna happen next, and so we have to be ready with this diversity. Again, that’s extremely important. And these diversities of approaches are gonna contradict each other. So this means embracing the friction again, and again.

So this is something... That doesn’t mean that if over there is a community growing that’s against all my deepest convictions, that I have to just go and embrace them. I can say, “No, these people are bad people.”, I can use worse words for that, but I won’t here in the podcast. And so on and so forth.

But we have to acknowledge they’re there, and we have to acknowledge, and this is the practice that we’re trying to implement in the Perspective Studio, that we may have to collaborate with them if we want to have collective action work at scale And so then we have to think, “How can I do that without selling my soul?

How can I actually keep my convictions and still work with people who I found literally intolerable in some aspects, but maybe not in this specific aspect?” A very specific example here is climate change. We have large majorities of people being worried about climate change in every poll, that’s ever been done in every country on Earth the last 10 years.

And yet people keep on voting for politicians that do not act or deliberately act against, useful measures in that sense. And what’s happening here is that we have a disunified, group of people. They don’t see how they can work together, and they don’t see the usefulness of working together.

So this is something where these sort of methods of getting out of your heads, don’t discuss every... You don’t have to agree on everything You can even be angry with each other, a lot of the time. But do something useful right now. And, do something useful together if you can agree on that. It’s called, John Rawls called this, overlapping consensus.

You find these patterns of overlapping consensus. And then you can take the evolutionary, metaphor again and say, “This is exactly how populations evolve.” You know? They all do, the individuals in the population do different things and sometimes they, compete with each other and they do opposing things and yet the population can evolve in very coherent ways out of that incoherence.

So, we call it, coherence from difference., which is something that is often, preached but, we don’t see it, actually happen. So that we learn how to be in conflict with each other again, in the sense that we can actually have the conflict. I, it was very helpful for me. I lived in Spain for seven years and the funny thing about Spanish culture is it’s extremely rude.

If you move there, it’s amazingly rude. And if, you know, you’re a bit put off in the beginning if you come especially from a very sort of, repressed country culture like Switzerland. But then you realize that, you know, if somebody just cut you off, they shouted you, just so you don’t think you were, had the right of way.

But the thing is the steam is out. So there’s actually statistically, I believe, I looked that up at some point but I’m not so sure anymore., there is less road rage in Spain than anywhere else because people shout at each other. But then, so imagine you do this, in US or, you know, then you get shot.

Or you do it in Switzerland and then you realize the person you shouted at is your work colleague. It would take you about three months to get over the embarrassment of that, right? So this is a sort of a valve of... I don’t like advocate everybody becoming Spanish in this particular way.

But it’s an example of where maybe we have to learn how to have these conflicts openly again. And, cherish integrity over, good manners., because what’s gonna come for humanity is gonna be rough. And we’re not always gonna be at our best, and that’s bringing us back to the original topic.

How can we have- these circles of trust if we believe that even being vulnerable is this good way of being vulnerable. It’s being open to others. It’s being, you know, letting your ego go. How many, Vipassana retreats can you do? And that’s not being vulnerable. That’s actually being strong.

That’s, like, a, an easy practice compared to actually accepting when you are vulnerable in the sense of being not like what you want to be. You are not your best self. And you’re not a machine, so that’s gonna happen over and over and over again, and we have to walk a fine line between just accepting, “Oh, yeah, I am just a bad person, and that I’m gonna I’m gonna be a bad person.

I embrace that.” That’s not what I’m saying. But sort of embracing that’s gonna happen, and yet being able to move forward and also embracing it in other people, that they’re not always gonna be at their best, right? I mean, I think it’s a very fine line, and it can only be explored. We can talk about it until the cows come home, or we can go and try and do something together.

But the practical way of doing it, something together is just so much more useful in this, and

Andrea Hiott

Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s this trickster kind of energy again, too, of being able to dance- Yes... Or be in, understand the multiplicity of everything. I wanna push it a little bit because you said, “I can say people are bad,” but I...

Can you? Because no person is one person, and so you can say what they did is bad, and I know that’s a kind of that can seem like a cop-out, but actually it’s very hard to say that clearly and from a place of, r-really meaning it and not just trying to take down this person. Because we don’t know who the person is.

I mean, the person is many different persons, and the way we treat them is gonna bring out more of one of those persons. I don’t know. I’m trying to think, you know, of it even more multiple in the sense of, we want co-presence, but we’re also creating the co-presence. We want respect, mutual respect, even with the things we don’t understand.

I love your example of Spain because I think this is a good example of how often we misunderstand each other because we’re all coming from different paths and we’ve all had different regularities, but we seem to, we are in the same real space, and we just assume everyone else sees it the same way and that if they’re reacting a way we would react, they mean what we would mean making that reaction.

Mm-hmm. And that’s rarely the case, especially, Mm... When you’re trying to do what we’re trying to do here which is, you know, be in that space of tension which means you’re usually in a space that you’re not used to. You said you felt like you’re underneath, and I know what you mean by that. But I think we’re all kind of underneath because we are this. So what we’re, what we’re being together is changing all that we’re encountering with. So there is a kind of subliminal or sublating or something happening there.

Does that sound fair to you, or do you think I’m being too sweet to say we’re all, we have to think of the multiplicities in one another? What do you think?

Johannes Jaeger

When I’m at my best, then I would have said it like you did. But, you know, I’m not. So I said, “These are bad people,” but they’re not.

They’re actually just behaving in a way that I don’t like. I do see that in my good moments.

Andrea Hiott

But sometimes you need to say they’re bad people to yourself maybe in the way Marcus is saying. I mean, there are...

Johannes Jaeger

Yeah. Marcus

Marcus Neustetter

Well, that there is, there’s something else there though that, everyone’s has got some thread that you can pull and go, “Ah, that’s where that comes from.”

You know, we all have something that someone else doesn’t like. And yes, we need to give each other the benefit of the doubt and pull that thread and say, “Oh, that person went through this in their life. You know, they can behave that way for once. I can forgive them, or, I can understand it. I might not forgive them, I can understand it.”

You know? So we can justify it, but it shouldn’t be, and this is a kind of coexistence, it shouldn’t be an imposed thing onto you that they justify their behavior based on their background by damaging yours, or by impeding. And that’s a very difficult thing. I know culturally we spoke about people shouting each other because that’s just part of their culture.

That’s one thing. I’m saying it’s very quick, the step is very quick to say, “Well, I’m allowed to because of...”, you know, it’s a kind of justification of, to other things. And the, and coming back to our conversation on space and context and understanding where you are and how you’re performing, that yes, if you go to Spain and that’s what happens to you, well, you’re in that territory.

That’s what’s gonna happen, and you have to, you know, you’ll find your way. But if that same person comes into Vienna and does that, I can understand the Viennese not liking that person. Of course, it’s a completely different culture. You cannot then justifiably say, “Well, I’m Spanish, so you gotta deal with that.”

Well, there’s a, it’s a tricky moment because then, you could start justifying all kinds of ill doings to others. And so I think there is, and this is what we have to learn as humans again and again and again, that we need to read our context in a little bit more careful a way, and understand empathy for others in that context in a different way.

It’s the same as a white South African walking into a township saying, “Let’s make public art together.” Huh, interesting concept. But how do you do that? You go and you find your language for doing it, and that you can... I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a clear rule to this, but, I’d be very careful to say that just acknowledging people’s multiplicity, justifies their actions.

Andrea Hiott

This is an important point Yeah. No I need to, I need to say something because, I really think that’s great that you said that because I don’t that, I mean, I don’t mean this in an offensive way, but that’s a kind of, you just kind of framed it in a either/or, like it’s good or bad, and I’m trying to kind of pop that open.

Mm-hmm. Like, let’s not even talk about good or bad. Let’s talk about here we are together co-creating this space, and how do we best understand it? You’re annoying me, and I’m, I don’t like it that you’re screaming at me about this. I’m not used to that. It’s not gonna work You know, I mean, that’s not good or bad.

That’s a kind of in the moment expression. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? No, that makes sense. So I’m even- I mean-... I’m trying to constellate it even more.

Marcus Neustetter

That’s, that makes complete sense. If we had an openness to talk like that to each other, which usually happens in the studio, funnily enough.

You know, if in the studio you can say to each other, “ You know, what you’re saying there, I understand what you’re saying it, but I don’t like it.” You know? That’s okay. I have no issue with that. Quite the contrary. You’re right. That’s the space in between Just don’t, in my opinion, when you’re in that safe space, don’t justify your behavior to me based on, that you have a sort of right to be a certain way because of your background.

And that’s what happens so quickly. You know, and that’s what happens when you’ve got hierarchies in a room. You know, when one person- Mm... Is the teacher, the other one’s the student, suddenly there’s a particular relationship between them. When we start coming, and then maybe that’s again this ego conversation, when we bring that stuff that just, that gives us the right to behave in a certain way with us, that’s a wrong start.

And all I’m saying is at the, in that space of being context and people-specific and sensitive to the environment, I genuinely agree we need to express ourselves about dissatisfaction, but not in an, in a way that, imposes your ill feelings for someone else because of what they stand for in your baggage that you bring.

That’s a different way. It’s forgetting that person’s also human and has a relationship with you or with the space.

Andrea Hiott

And also from what we said at the beginning about tension being life, you know? Mm. That’s why we’re alive- Yeah... Is the tension. So I think It’s what we do with it If... Yeah, if we start in that-... If we recognize that together, then we can have these discussions that you just said. Yeah. So it’s really like that’s what I meant about when, Yogi was talking about evolution or the what I was talking about the orientation that we’re sort of, we’re orienting as we’re coming together into a space.

Mm-hmm. And if we have this understanding that it’s tense, we’re not gonna get away from it, but, like, how do we help each other hold that and how do we flow maybe together? Because that happens, Mm... As that kind of needful freedom or that generative stuff. So yeah, I mean, I’m agreeing with you, but I’m also saying I’m agreeing also that it really matters where we’ve come together and how we’ve noticed the space we’re Yeah As already gonna be, you know, there’s gonna be tension. It... That’s what we are.

Johannes Jaeger

I mean, you may have And it’s so exciting

Marcus Neustetter

Because the same trick that covered-

Johannes Jaeger

Yeah. You may have to draw some lines, but you... It’s better to draw them around, actions or, character traits than around people, right?

So that’s one thing. And so there’s no contradiction there and you probably like this because it busts another dichotomy. There’s, this philosopher, we wrote, about this in the essay, for the Love and Philosophy blog., Michael, Schmidt-Salomon, a German philosopher, says the paradox of tolerance is really just, the distinction between two lines and that is people you dislike but you have to tolerate, and then people you cannot tolerate because they’re in some way, bigoted against you or against other people because they’re these kind of people.

They... This is just... These are unacceptable, intolerable, views in a society, and these exist. I mean, we, it, we can’t just be nice with everybody. There are just people you can’t work with. But I think it’s quite a small percentage if we find out... If... You know, most people are still at some point-, actually united in some of the aims and the worries that they have about the world, and if we focus on that, and then we can find this overlapping consensus.

But we can only do that, and that’s the other thing of, the other way of busting the dichotomy is to actually act on it, right? That’s what we just said. There’s so many ways. And funnily enough, the example of Vienna for the Spanish person is a really bad, is neither good nor bad that Marcus brought up before.

Because obviously Viennese are the second most grumpy people on earth after the Spanish. And so it’s like completely normal. It’s okay to be Spanish, just a bit less loud., you just mumble your insults instead of shouting them. But the cultures, maybe that’s the shared- Yes... Ups and downs that- We apologize

Marcus Neustetter

To all Aust- all, we apologize to all Viennese and Spanish people listening to us right now.

Johannes Jaeger

I think it’s a Stereotyping... Stereotyping but not too much., and again, we don’t wanna stereotype people. Yeah. But let’s say these cultures have tendencies like that. And, Yeah... Overcoming it is not to quibble now for the next 15 minutes whether those things are black and white categories, but, to say, “Okay, so how can the Viennese and the Spanish do something useful together,” right?

I mean, that’s the, that’s the idea.

Marcus Neustetter

And Andrea, what excites me about what you were saying and immediately, kind of my brain’s always very practically focused on how that rolls itself out in a room, for example, or in a situation. And one of the tricks that one often does in kind of holding, collaborative conversations where these things come up, you know, where I just don’t like what you do.

You know, how do you deal with that? You know, is to find the thing that’s not in the room, to reflect on. And it’s, you know, the absence of something that you can then share your frustration with, or frustration, but your tension with., so kind of that third element if you’re having a two-way conversation.

And it’s not about a common enemy. It’s very careful not to make the other thing an enemy, but make the other thing the focus. And very quickly, in this, in the strategy of kind of facilitation, you find that the thing that irritated you about that other person, or thing that you vehemently disagreed with and you want to scream and shout about, becomes secondary because we’re focusing on something that we have in common.

And in the long way around, and this comes back to the workshop with the philosophers that we did, Yogi. In a long way around, by the end of the five days of working with people like that, where there’s always something else to reflect on, always something else to reflect on, finding more common threads, these people all end up getting along really well and actually enjoy what you’re doing as an artist and actually participate, and feel that there’s a gain to be had because we constantly played this game of, reorientating and reshifting that aggression or that anger or that frustration or that opposition or that tension that was in the room.

And it’s constructive because it’s focusing it on making something, on creating something, on that other thing in the room that needs to be developed. And again, very often the space feeds you that. So you’re next to a forest, you go into the forest. Wow, we’re out of context. Now, if we talk to each other in this way, it changes things because we’re dealing with a larger world and not this little world of our little conference, but the natural environment.

And taking people out of this finite and small world, of their constraints that make them feel or engage with certain situations in a way that they need to, express themselves in that way and show them that they’re part of a bigger picture is, for me, also the strategy for The relationship with the gatekeepers that sit in these different institutions is to say, yeah, so institutions, as you said, the silo sits there, but it sits within an environment.

You still need to engage with it. You still have to breathe in and out. And you walk every day from your home where you brush your teeth and kiss your children in the morning to your office where you then go into your little academic silo, and there’s 1,001 interactions there that you should be focusing on rather than on the one that’s you’re doing in the office.

And the moment you shift that perspective, all of that ugh that’s in there that wants to challenge you goes, “Ah, yes, there’s that other life.” And the moment we acknowledge the other life, something opens. So there’s beauty in harnessing that, whatever that is that’s needed to express how dissatisfied we are with each other.

Andrea Hiott

I love the spatial switch of attention. I found myself at a workshop this weekend sort of saying to someone who was expressing an issue, like a coupling kind of issue, you know, “Well, have you thought about just, like, putting your attention on the space that’s around you, in these moments?”

And I went in a little bit further, but I realized that had come from, Declan Donnellan’s idea, who was a playwright who I’d talked to Sophie about, Sophie Fines in New York recently, because he has this thing. He’s doing Shakespeare plays, and he talks about the pressure that’s outside the room that’s actually creating the room that you’re in.

That’s a beautiful, switch of thought, right? That... And you see that in Shakespeare so much. You don’t... The stuff offstage is actually what’s creating the pressure that’s onstage. And in our lives it’s often like that, and in our conversations. It’s this pressure that’s around us that’s creating the way we’re acting in that conversation, but we don’t even notice it or switch our attention to it.

And there’s something almost, I don’t know what, like, alchemical in switching, the attention and noticing that and noticing how the pressures of other spaces are affecting the ones we’re in. And I think that also speaks to this idea that there are divisions. There are different rooms, and yet it is still the shared space at the same time.

Also just in that theater metaphor when you were talking- Yeah... I was thinking of the wings, you know, and needing space to rest too. And in all this action and activity and process, we also, we wanna understand there’s different roles and spaces at different places in the environment.

Johannes Jaeger

I’m philosophically I’m sort of skeptical about huge generalizations. But one thing that really characterizes this modern age is a focus, away from the framing, right, from the context. I mean, the whole nature of the reductionist, scientific method is, and it’s necessary, the analytic- it’s the analytical method, is to take something apart and then look at the parts and how they interact because otherwise you can’t.

You literally can’t explain, how it works in the first place, and you can’t come up with a scientific explanation. So again, just like performance, being a reductionist to a certain degree is not a bad thing. But then forgetting, throwing out the context of in which these parts work, and then forgetting about that is the bad thing.

And then when that becomes your worldview instead of just the method to do, to make progress in science, then it’s a really bad thing. And I think this has invaded so much of our thinking, and what it’s done is made the framing, invisible. And then we don’t see that instead of always rushing towards a solution, trying to find the most optimized path to a solution of a problem that we’ve clearly formulated, what we need to do right now is reformulate the problems.

Or the same if you’re in a situation that’s not a problem, like the current situation of humanity is not a problem, it’s a situation. It is something that we have to deal with, but there’s no solution to it. So, we have to deal with the situation, with interpersonal situations not as if we’re optimizing, problem-solving, but, sometimes in reframing, what we see as problems and working around them, and that’s much more common than, actually finding a solution to a well-defined problem, which is something that basically only happens in philosophy and science, I think.

And We do this naturally, but then we get educated away from it very early on and this is exactly what you can only do through practice. You can read so many books about having to focus on the context, but you can’t do it, necessarily. It’s learning how to ride a bike, you can read a lot of books about that.

You can’t ride a bike. You have to practice it. And so because it’s not a computational analytical activity, we value it less., we find it less rigorous, to, sometimes, you know, last century the positivists called it metaphysics and wanted to throw it out completely as a bad thing. But, the framing of how we see the world is everywhere, right?

Because we’re limited beings in a large world, and acknowledging this and then seeing those frames again and much more, focusing much more away, again, that’s a, it’s an active practice. It’s not something that you do in your head necessarily, is to completely work around not solving the problems that you have, but, you evolve.

So they, you become a different, sort of individual and you have different kind of problems in the future., but you don’t solve-- I mean, living is having problems more than solving problems really, and always having new problems actually. And I think you, were in an earlier conversation asking me about the struggle.

That’s what we perceive as a struggle, and we perceive it as uncomfortable. We want to be somehow in a controlled environment very often, to feel comfortable. And I think being human is not that. It’s learning that this is not a struggle, but this is life This is, you know, you always create new problems.

And in fact, science is, the point of science is to create new problems. If you solve all the problems in your field and then you publish a paper, it’s not gonna get cited by anyone because nobody’s gonna be in that field anymore. So if you have created 10 new interesting problems in your field, you’re gonna get lots of citations, and people know that intuitively.

But we’re never told that it’s like this. And we are when we you know, express or discuss explicitly how this works, then we are discussing as if science was solving, you know, problems and then putting them away., I mean, so this is again Caers’s, infinite versus, infinite play versus finite life.

Finite, game. Life is a finite game, but the, to be a part of this process of understanding the world and to be a part of evolution is an infinite play, so you’re part of that. And then you also become much more comfortable, and this whole psychopathology of trying to live forever and, you know, preserving the individual forever and being afraid of dying that we have, as a sort of a pandemic in the tech, you know, intellectual people that should know better, should grow out of that.

Then, you understand where that comes from. It comes from that having focus away completely from the whole context that we live in, that we have to experience. We can’t just think about it. We have to actually live it. And that’s a practice. Yeah? And if people then think that’s woo because it’s practical and it’s not expressible in words, that’s just how you learn how to ride a bike, you know?

Nobody can tell you how to ride a bike. You need to learn it yourself.

Andrea Hiott

Mm-hmm.

Johannes Jaeger

So there’s nothing not, that’s not rigorous about that. It’s just a different kind of thing. And that’s what being caught in the cage of language means, right? So we have to, we have to speak about these things we cannot speak about.

Wittgenstein was right about philosophy, but he was wrong about life. And he knew that because the late-- he contradicts himself, of course, at the later stages of his life

Marcus Neustetter

And I wanna point out that I think, often these,... Holding these spaces or processes that deal with the doing or the action and the, and the practicing, creates incredible agency, just generally, in society now.

You know, so given the, my background’s also a lot in the digital art space and, you know, all the electronic artists, from the ‘90s kind of going, “Okay, now let’s find a new way of net art,” and this and that, going into the virtual space, and we now are very deep in that space with AI and everything.

It’s all very exciting. But how many people have shifted back into a space of making physically is really interesting for me, of that same community. Is this recognition that there is, a need to show that you can make, not just with code, but actually with your hands, to yourself in order to reflect on something.

Now, there’s many things we can talk about here, but the one thing that really interests me is how many people are turning to each other to say, “Hold me and show me., let me experience that. What... How do I do this? How do I do this? How do I reintegrate myself into a life off the screen? How do I play with it?”

We go to farmers to help us plant things. We go to, crafters to help us, show us how to draw again. You know, whatever it is. Cooking becoming this thing that why do people cook now? It’s just because they want to feel like they’re achieving something, that they complete in one, you know, in one session and have made something that gives them success and happiness, off the screen.

And I think these are wonderful things. And what’s... A new economy is evolving for me that I find so interesting., like, an economy of agencies to help people do that, to kind of shift that attention into a way that, there is... I don’t know. Always, there are always these parallel worlds that emerge when something, shifts.

And I, and coming back to what we are doing, I’m saying all three of us, not just the Perspective Studio, but it’s drawing attention to these spaces, to these encounters, these ways of doing things. And I really think that this is a, not just something to make us feel good and find a tribe and connect with each other and feel vulnerable together, but it’s, but it’s about a form of shaping, as Yogi said, a language of doing, which is very different to a language of speaking and contemplating.

It’s maybe something that, one day will be in a dictionary of a different sort.

Johannes Jaeger

And in a way orthogonal to the, from, you know, having and being, -

Marcus Neustetter

Yes...

Johannes Jaeger

Yeah, which is another problem, but it’s sort of a you know, it’s aligned, but it’s sort of orthogonal to that.

So, that’s interesting, yes.

Andrea Hiott

I really feel this too. I really see this happening more and more, I mean, with our collaborations over the past year or whatever, and but also around me, people really moving towards very different ways of thinking about what economy is, what, success is, what we can do together, even what we are as people in the way we’ve been talking about here.

And that’s why I feel it’s really important to kind of, you know, stay with this, right? To commit, because we’ve talked a lot about moving around in different spaces and so on, but before we go, I wanna get to the... There’s a commitment to this too, right? There’s a commitment and a kind of, intimacy that’s Maybe not as easy as it might sound here, even though we’ve been talking about how difficult it is, that, you know, you’re still yourself having to deal with yourself.

And we all have things that are hard, these darker things in our life that are hard for us to look at, which we did talk about, and trying to put light on that. And I think what I was hearing in both of you just then is that we can, once we can understand that as part of the tension, we can help each other feel comfortable enough to look at that space.

And that’s part of what these new groups are. A lot of our hangups about money and success really come back to not being able to look at the dark stuff, So I was kind of seeing that connection, and also the skillfulness, that we’re practicing. And it’s not woo, it’s actually a development of skills that are different than the ones that have gotten us to where we are right now in the wider picture.

And that, what’s more important or more scientific really than trying to do that kind of experimentation. So I just wanna bring that up at the end, and I also wanna get to this, these words which, like care. I’ve been talking about caring, and that’s one of those words that people immediately kind of shut off when they hear in certain contexts because they think it’s so soft and sweet.

And love is another word. But it’s tied up with what I’m was just saying about the commitment and the intimacy and the darkness, and I’d like to hear what you think about all this I’m saying, but also kinda to get to those harder words of care and love., I know you talked about tough love on this podcast before, Yogi, and people really like that.

I think we’ve gotten into that a bit, but I mean, I wanna go even deeper. You know, even... I’m thinking of how this actually feels in your real everyday interactions with yourself even. But go wherever you want with it, but I just wanna bring up those words.

Johannes Jaeger

I’ll give, Marcus the last word, but for me, this is, sort of a, you cannot go back.

So the question of commitment is very simple because if you, once you see these frames shifting, and they shift for you, this is, like this philosopher in Plato’s cave. You’ve gone up, I mean, not into the abstract world like in Plato’s cave, in the cave allegory, but in, into a different space, right?

That’s the most important thing that we can still take out of that 2,500-year-old example. And Say, you cannot go back into the cave and pretend that you’ve never seen the light. And of course, this is also an, an allegory for all kinds of conversion examples that are of a spiritual or religious manner.

But it is this sort of experiential. You don’t have to be a religious person to have such sort of experiences. This is simply transformative learning, and this is what at the core transformative learning means, that you see the world literally with different eyes because you’re this sort of organism, and we have a scientific theory, and that closes the loop to what I said at the very beginning, that it’s constantly changing its organization, and otherwise you wouldn’t be alive.

So it’s absolutely part of your identity, paradoxically almost, that you constantly change that way, and that you change as much as the environment you’re in the adaptation process., otherwise we wouldn’t have any evolution in the first place. And so for me, this sort of... If you actually embrace this, if you are unafraid, it takes a lot of courage to embrace this fully, then you can sort of flourish in a very old style, Aristotelian way a lot more because you are developing not just more but also in different directions than if you wouldn’t do this.

So it’s sort of like cultivating a garden. You cultivate yourself. And again, a lot of this kind of stuff, if you hear me talk, it’s these words are used in circles that are very performative that way, right? So these kind of self-improvement seminars you can take and things like that have completely, perverted this sort of, essential human task and made a joke out of it, and a very sad joke.

And I think, we have to rediscover what it really means. You don’t have to turn religious or become a Vipassana meditator or whatever, but you just have to pay attention like Marcus says. And for me, this is a work of love and then to come back, we have to mention love, I know., is, as I said, expressed in the essay, the other essay that we wrote for your blog.

Love is, it’s labor of love. So basically, doing this and appreciating this in other people, that’s what love is. That’s, sort of, trying to see the person behind the persona, right? And still accepting them after, you’ve seen all the ugly parts, the shadow.

Then you can start going on your journey and develop together. But not before that

Marcus Neustetter

Hmm

Johannes Jaeger

Marcus

Marcus Neustetter

Yeah., you said, giving me the last word. That’s exactly what it’s not about. So I don’t want the last word because I would never want to assume that there is a last word in this kind of process because the, yeah, because it goes beyond the words.

Anyway, the care part is really interesting for me because the relationship of empathy, I often use that as... And vulnerability, and care are so intertwined for me that- The anecdote of, receiving some-- Oh, sorry. The experience of receiving something I can-- I would like to share as a kind of a, an anecdote.

We’re working on a short film, and I’m in Johannesburg with, Anathi Konjwa and, Mika Manganya, two performers that we-- that Bronwyn, our partner-- my partner often works with, and has done a lot of work with us as well. And they, -- And I come to them with an idea, and I say, “Here are some objects, and I-- maybe can we just together in a studio space just think about what these objects mean to you and rearrange them in a way and kind of create this landscape out of them?”

And all I’m trying to do is have a conversation with people that come from a very different background, who I hold very dear. They’re very wonderful people., they’re gentle in the way that they engage with the world, but they’ve been through really tough times. And I just wanted to open the con-- non-verbal conversation through these objects.

They’re a bunch of rusted objects I’ve collected over the years, just things. And I’d filmed these objects, and I’d put my camera up to do a stop-frame animation while I was moving them around. And Mika picks up this piece of metal and takes the other one and starts tapping the one against the other and starts playing, percussing, and making the most amazing soundscape of percussive performance.

Anathi, who’s got an incredible voice, looks at the situation, hears him, and starts picking up these objects and singing to them. And next thing, I’m standing there completely disempowered. I’m a visual artist. I’ve got no voice to speak of, and my sense of r-rhythm is so-so. And here I am completely flooded with tears of this incredibly immersive experience that they’ve given me as a gift, as an answer to a question, to a provocation I gave them, where they went as far-- I mean, this went on for quite a long time, and we went into kind of a-- or they went into this incredible trance-like space, in their music, which I found out afterwards had no particular meaning.

You know, it had no particular thing other than a response to these objects. And we spoke about it afterwards, what these objects meant, et cetera. And we then used the sound in one of the films that we made, as the zone and in our project. But that care that I got in that moment for that emotional state I was in, you cannot put, anything to that.

The fact that someone went deep into themselves, brought out whatever history, memory, feeling, emotion, et cetera, and their craft that they do, and give it back to me, whether I understand it or not. And we completely gelled in this world that I... Yeah, it was one of those moments.

So coming to this space of love and care, I think it’s how we go about with that which we don’t understand. They didn’t know what I really wanted. I didn’t understand the world that they’re in, and they were able to transform it in their own way into something that’s meaningful to them, and gave it back to me, and offered it back to me.

And that offering, that holding of this something, this gesture, was just completely moving. And, it’s nice to remember this now in relation to this conversation, because so much of what we’re dealing with at the moment are these crises, and these tensions, and this that. But we forget that everyone takes this stuff on and still molds something beautiful out of it, whether it’s in the form of a text, food, whatever it might be.

A smile, or not, or a tear. It doesn’t matter, but it gets molded into something. And I think the best thing we can do is care for that transaction and that which comes out of it. And that’s what I feel is, I guess, the currency of what we’re doing., and of this, of the state that we’re in, where it becomes intimate because we’re willing to share something in a language that we don’t necessarily understand, and therefore tap into something very deep inside us that we can’t articulate.

And when you’re in a room with people that from different disciplines, you cannot but try find that other language to connect because, yeah, a lot of words that the philosophers say, I interpret completely differently. I hear the sound, but I might not understand the same words. And similarly, Anathi and Mika saw these objects that I thought would be amazing installation, and did something to them that I could never imagine otherwise.

And yeah. Anyway, I think that’s the love and care in this transaction. And I think what happened today in this podcast, I’ve like to share. I mean, I’ll... Ah, okay, no. I’ll do this ‘cause of my stupid background. But anyway, I’ll share it later. That this, the drawing that you see behind me is manifest into a new drawing, and notes that I can look back at and just remember the feeling of this conversation and the essence of what it meant.

And I feel that in itself, is a, is I guess the space that we’re occupying. I don’t know if that answered your question, but I just had to share that. It was

Andrea Hiott

Important. Oh, thank you so much. That’s really wonderful. Beautiful. For different reasons. One, that it shows what we’ve been talking about in the sense that these are the same objects, but they saw them and felt them in completely different ways, and that sharing of it with you opened you, it opened you, right, out of your- Yeah Habitual ways. And it’s funny you mentioned the drawing behind you, because I was sitting here thinking as you were telling the story about... So we all talked recently. I was driving. I pulled over the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we had this, like, no video kind of Zoom audio conversation together about some things.

And, you know, it was just one of those moments where we were just kind of, I don’t know, letting the conversation happen. And it had been a long day for me and a long weekend, not in a bad way. But I got home later that night. Not home. I got to my next place, stopped later that night, and, there was an email, you know, from both of you saying it was a great conversation.

And there was this drawing, which is behind you now, Marcus, that kind of popped up on the screen. And I was kind of exhausted, you know, and it’d been this long day of driving and a lot of things. But something about seeing that you had been drawing that while we were talking, and that you then shared it with us, and not really getting it in the way that you just spoke about, your friends.

But it just did something to me, and it was a kind of emotional... I even told you that. Like, it was this, I had this kind of emotional reaction to it, and I don’t know what that is, but it did, show me that there’s so much going on in us when we’re conversing and when we’re relating that we don’t get that is getting us, becoming us, and that we can’t maybe put into words or we don’t need to fully understand.

But, so yeah, those are the moments of care that we are just being ourselves and taking the risk to talk and to share and things like that. They seem so small, but I think maybe they’re changing, much more than we think. Yeah. Much more than we can even put into words. So I just wanna thank both of you for being here, and if there’s anything else you wanna share about your work, whatever, before we go, now is the time to do so.

But I’m sure we’ll have more conversations in the future, but anything that comes up before we go that we didn’t cover or anything about any of these topics?

Marcus Neustetter

I think it, I think it, I think it just should be an acknowledgement of this wonderful conversation and the fact that I cannot wait to have you and whichever listeners are keen to join us in a studio together and explore these ideas in person, because I think that takes it to a whole ‘nother level.

Johannes Jaeger

Yeah, there’s not much I can add to that., just thank you so much for engaging with us over the last few months and now, in this conversation. And I hope this is to be continued very much. Yeah. Transforming us all.

Andrea Hiott

Yeah, me too. It’ll be fun to share all this with other people and do some things in person, together.

Yeah. And also for the two of you to continue on in your projects, as well, and I’m happy to be part of this. And yeah, till next time then, everybody. And thank you.

Marcus Neustetter

Thank you. Thanks so much.

Johannes Jaeger

Thanks a lot.

Marcus Neustetter

And Andrea, what I would

Love & Philosophy

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