Sem Devillart on Observation & Translation

Sem Devillart is a cultural analyst at Harmony Labs in New York and co-founder of Popular Operations, her cultural trend practice. She is founding faculty at the School of Visual Arts’ MPS Branding program. She began her career with Li Edelkoort and later worked for Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve. Fluent in seven languages and trained in semiotics, design, and comparative religion, she has advised Christian Dior, Camper, PepsiCo, L’Oréal, Philips Design, and Deepak Chopra.

So I start all these conversations the same way. I’m not sure if you know this, but it’s a question I borrow from a friend of mine and a neighbor who helps people tell their story. And I learned this question from her and I haven’t really found a better way of getting into a strange conversation than this question, but it’s so big, I over explain it the way that I’m doing right now.

So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And it’s impossible to make a mistake. And the question is, where do you come from?

It’s a deep question. The way you ask it sounds very deep. And if you forgive me, I will answer it in a superficial manner.

Or maybe you could almost say a deep manner. I was thinking about this question, it was coming. And the sincere answer is that I feel I don’t come from anywhere because there is a reason, because I moved a lot.

So if you’re a nomad, you ask the nomad, where’s your home? You might say, my suitcase, or my tent, or my rug. But in the short, officially, I was born in Lima, Peru.

All my four grandparents come from different cultures, different backgrounds, different nationalities. So alone, just genetically, very mixed. And when I was about four years old, I moved to East Africa, Tanzania, where I spent most of my childhood.

And from then on, there was a three-year rhythm, more or less, of moving, mainly across Europe, Switzerland, Spain, etc. But let’s say the formative educational years, let’s say high school, I spent in Germany. So probably Germany got the most of me.

And then, yeah, my professional career, I worked in Milan, I worked in London, I worked in Paris. Yeah, so, and currently, I live in New Jersey in a place called Montclair, which I find, by the way, very exotic. So yeah.

I love how you said Germany got the most of me. Yeah.

And I got the most of Germany. Yeah, well, the formative, that means the information, the software system, right? The poems, the literature, the culture, the love of the language, definitely the music.

And it started from the classics, like Beethoven, Mozart, the classic stuff, to the techno stuff, to the modern stuff. So I spent these formative years where I delved into music, dance culture, that was very much, very influenced by the German, let’s say, techno movement in the 90s. So I would say that that is still resonating inside of me, very much so, and also the German language, which I love.

Oh, wow. And do you have a recollection of being young in Germany, what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Well, the biggest recollection, probably the Tanzania, well, it depends on the age, right? But the childhood, let’s say before hitting puberty, was in East Africa. And I wanted, I think, to be between a spy and an archaeologist.

Oh, wow.

So I lived pretty much, this is really, I think this is really interesting, very isolated in the years in Tanzania and Dar es Salaam, no TV, no phone, hardly any neighbours, very, in deep isolation. So, yeah.

What explained all the travel?

Parents, jobs. So, yeah, my stepfather, my German stepfather, travelled a lot for his job. And later on, I really, I think, it was also already my constitution.

So it’s not just the way I was brought up, but I think it’s, I have a tendency to being a little bit restless. And FOMO is my favourite. It’s probably my state of being.

I want to be everywhere and I want to know everything. And I think I’m excessively curious. So, yeah.

Well, I identify with that a bunch. Often I describe myself as omnivorous, in a way, and I identify with your FOMO as a state of being. I want to go back to your, you were in Tanzania, you wanted to be a spy and an archaeologist or an archaeologist.

I think first, yeah. Well, let’s say archaeologist. I had a few books on ancient Egypt and there was not that much stimulation around me.

But so probably, I don’t know, I wonder, I wonder, this is pure interpretation, whether I thought that beneath the surface there was something to be discovered. I was fascinated by pirates and treasures that you had to dig out. So I often used to dig, dig around, make holes all over the place.

Oh, I lived also on a cliff upon the Indian Ocean. So there was a lot of beach, very lonely beach, no people. So that captured my infantile imagination.

Wow. Can you tell a story?

I’ve never thought about these questions. Yes. So it’s good to being asked. Thank you.

The image of being a child on an empty beach is quite powerful for some reason.

Yes. Yes. It was probably my main playground.

What I used to do, and actually, sometimes I share this, well, I used to collect shells. So that was something I loved doing. And luckily, my mother was very hands-off.

So I could do whatever I wanted. So I had a lot of freedom. And my room was, I had such a huge shell collection.

And one of my favorite activities was to sort them, organize them. So I would constantly reshuffle the order. So the pointy shells in one box, then I would classify them by their color.

And so I would keep moving the shells around by classifying by their characteristics. And I think I still do somehow with information the same.

And the spy part of the grown-up dream, what was the spy?

Well, I think I always found invisibility pretty amazing. I always wanted to be invisible because you find out more about what people are talking about, what they’re thinking. And I think that also goes hand in hand with my introverted character.

I’d rather listen in order to find out more. And I also believe this might be, I hope I’m not forcing here an interpretation, but because I moved so much and was constantly exposed to different environments and to different languages, I had to figure out how things work. So you stand on the side, imagine a playground, kids are playing in the playground and I probably would be at the periphery and figuring out how things function.

So that’s a way of looking at. So spy is not, I don’t mean in the dubious way of stealing information or lying, but much more the passive observer and recording everything that the awareness that information is valuable, that every information bit counts. I think maybe that has been, that was a, I wonder, I mean, I’m just maybe over-interpreting.

I appreciate how cautious you are of your own interpretation. You mentioned now that you’re, my usual question at this point is like, catch us up, where are you now? You mentioned Montclair, New Jersey, and you described it as exotic.

Well, first of all, I have my Manhattan studio where I’m talking right now. And so I commute, right? I go between Manhattan and Montclair, but Montclair, I mean, I did not grow up in the American suburbs.

I just knew the world of the suburbs through movies like American Beauty, example, or in the several chain of horror movies, right? And how should I explain this without being offensive? I find it very exotic because it’s, I never, I mean, if you consider that I grew up in Tanzania and that was my home, now imagine fast forward, like the contrast of a lonely beach and on a cliff to American suburbia.

What is the suburbs like for you?

It’s very interesting. I find in particular as a mother, right? The mother scene, very interesting. Luckily, many creatives picked up on the themes and wrote fantastic novels and wrote incredible horror movie scripts and a whole. I mean, it’s interesting. I think it’s interesting.

So, and for those who don’t know you, what do you do for work? Talk a little bit about what the work that you do and what keeps you busy?

Okay. So what keeps me busy is just recording everything I can get my hands to. I read a lot.

I read a lot that keeps me busy and it’s a full-time activity, right? Like taking an information. So there is no real work.

I mean, it’s not really work. It’s just basically the way I breathe and everything is my work is my life. I don’t see much distinction, but let’s say that if I had to nail it, I’ll say I do three things.

I advise clients on what’s coming next in culture, especially aesthetic and psychological trends or shifts. That’s one area. The another area I do is I teach people also how to spot patterns in society, if it’s zeitgeist or trends in particular areas.

I teach at the School of Visual Arts. I teach at the University of the Arts in Zurich, also in Poland and Warsaw, a place called School of Form. So internationally, I also give these workshops on how to sense the zeitgeist to companies.

So the teaching aspect. Then the third one is I really love theory, like theory or trend theory and building models and speculate on the nature of trends a lot. I have never published anything in that respect, but that’s my plan of working on a book.

Can you say more about that, about the theories and what you’re working on or what interests you about? I guess I’m not even sure what that means. What are the current theories about trends and patterns?

That’s a very big question. I would not know where to even start.

It’s too big. What’s the work that you’re doing that you’re comfortable sharing on theory?

One of the, let’s start with the most macro, like the clumpy part, aspect of what I do. Let’s look at the macro part because it gets really, it can get into a very, almost very molecular level of how observation works. But I started with art history, right?

That’s what I studied and noticed, which it’s no secret, that particular periods of time have particular styles, right? A Baroque, you just imagine, you can just get a sense of the Baroque style or the 50s or the 40s. This is, of course, artificial to set this time frame, right?

But just to get the concept. So I noticed that the style of a particular era permeates absolutely all areas of culture, right? So it will permeate, if you think about the 80s, you will feel and identify that there’s a particular style that manifests in the way people dress.

And that style is similar to the hairstyle, is similar to the music, is similar to the political movements, is similar to the dancing styles, is similar to the drug consumption, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s a similarity, almost as if particular periods of time had a code, a stylistic code, a tuning fork, you could almost say, that defines multiple aspects in culture at once. I think that’s really interesting.

Because if you identify these codes, then you can translate them. And if you identify these codes really early on, before people take big consciousness of these codes, then you can, I would not say forecast, but you are a little bit ahead of the curve. So that’s in a very abstract manner.

That’s the very macro aspect. Now, let’s go more to the micro aspect, okay? Just imagine upside down pyramid, or triangle.

When in the trend world, we talk about signals, right? And signals of change signals. And if you take a signal, and you go really deep into the signal, you will see, imagine it was an entity, okay?

A molecule, or an entity. Just give it a corpus, yeah? In any form.

And you dive deep into it, you will see that this signal has many aspects. Yeah? We tend to say, oh, this signal.

Signal A, signal B, signal C. And that’s how we twitch through the information.

But if you take one signal, and you look deep into the signal, you will identify that there are many parts of the signal. It’s a bit like, you will see different qualities that you could, I mean, you can take the analogy of genetics and different traits. So the question is, it’s not about the signal itself.

Just imagine signal is a Trojan horse. What is inside the signal that might be the seed for the next? So that’s a very microscopic perspective. So I work with seeing things in the very big movements. What are the big shapes?

What are the big stylistic codes, you could say, that live in many types of bodies in culture? With types of bodies, I mean different categories, music, fashion, politics, architecture, etc, etc. To the very molecular, zoom into the signal itself that contains many traits.

And identify what the traits are. And now something that I find particularly interesting, and maybe differentiates me from maybe from most of my colleagues is that my colleagues and it’s a talk about the niche. Let’s all look at the little niche, right?

Are the things that are not mainstream. I do the opposite. I look, what I’m more fascinated with is the mainstream.

And which makes my work easier, right? Because the new always grows out of what’s already dominant. So it never appears from nowhere. And when I deconstruct it, I will look at all these aspects of the mainstream signal.

And then I try to identify what aspect in this mainstream signal is the freshest, the most alive aspect. So it’s not saying signal, aspect. And that’s normally where the next thing comes from.

That’s where the next sprouts out of that, that aspect. So it’s not rejecting the mainstream, it’s isolating a part of the mainstream that has momentum. So, yeah. I know it’s abstract.

No, I know exactly what you mean. And it’s, it just is abstract. So I wanted to ask a question that makes it concrete for people. Your work shows up in different forms, right? Curriculum and you work with clients when you, as an example, not that you need to share anything, but what do you deliver to a client? How does this work appear or, yeah, what do you deliver when people engage with you?

So there are, because I do three things, right? I advise what’s next in culture. And that’s traditional what I deliver.

I deliver then intel on, oh, I think this is next or bet on this, on A, don’t bet on B. I will give very complete feedback on what type of shapes I think are going to be on Vogue, what type of color. So that’s very concrete advice, right?

And often it goes hand in hand with identifying shifts, which normally, you’ve got certain terminology signals, shifts, hey, guys, you’re doing A, but culture is moving to B, right? And so that’s one part. I can say a little bit about that before I move then to the next part, which is a teaching aspect, right?

Yeah. It used to be, so I started out doing this, then it was transporting in the 90s. And that was before the internet was very, active with information, right?

So just having common knowledge, being good education, knowing how to look things up was a plus. Because Google images didn’t exist. So the what was really important to identify what is trending, right?

And then in the old days, I would be sent to beautiful places Tokyo to figure out what was happening in Tokyo, or what’s happening in the club culture, what’s happening in fashion. I used to work for an American futurist, and I was then in London, and I was checking, it was the what that was important, right?

Then it shifted to the why. Once, you had the internet, and it was so easy to get access. Suddenly, people in my field were much more concentrating on why is this happening?

We understand what is happening, why is it happening? So that has been, I think, the more traditional way of talking. But what I believe is happening next is the sensation and the feelings that these phenomena evoke, these new signals.

So how do you associate the culture, the changes in culture with the sensations, not only the rationale, not only the what, not only the why, but the feel, the vibe? That’s where things, I think, in our category are moving.

Can we spend time on that for a little bit? Because I can track the, because I was there, in the 90s, you know what I mean? You had to go and find the things, and that was a lot of the work was the what, as you said.

I haven’t heard it articulated the way that you did there, that when all the what is, everybody has access to the what, then you’re talking about the why, it’s about the why.

Yeah, the good people.

What’s that final shift from the what? What explains the shift to vibe from why?

Yeah. So definitely, I mean, OK, the what, the why, and now the emotion, the motion. It’s less about explaining culture, the why explains culture, but it’s more about sensing how it feels.

OK, and now why that is, right? You’re asking about why we’re moving there? I think there are many reasons.

First of all, let me share with you that when I used to talk about Zeitgeist before Covid, people would look at me and think I was crazy, like what? Maybe art historians or people in the arts or in fashion, but Zeitgeist feels so abracadabra, spirit of the times.

But then we spoke all about vibes, vibrations, vibes, what’s the vibe of this? What’s the vibe of that? And that is very interesting because it shows us a certain sophistication.

Yeah, when you perceive the vibe, it’s not just the flesh, the thing itself, but the vibe, the vibe is something subtle. And that subtlety is, again, you can talk about a vibration, a type of energy, you can call it the way you want, but it’s something that permeates everything. And that’s not something that we can analyze with our computing mind.

It’s something that we feel with our bodies. So vibes, it’s something that we feel. And we’ve talked, people talk vibes this, vibes that.

It’s not something that we really analyze. It’s something that we feel.

So that is one dimension. Another reason I think that the feeling is turning so important is because, I mean, this might sound a little bit obvious, I don’t know, but we had beautiful brains, right? And the beautiful brains created beautiful machines and our beautiful machines and large language model technologies and AI is magnificent in pattern recognition.

Many things that our cognitive faculties used to do, we are actually outsourcing maybe a certain degree of this thinking more and more. So I think as a result, the competitive edge is moving away from this pure rational processing and towards something much more human, which is the sensorial intelligence, emotional depth, or you could say almost an embodied understanding. So two elements, I think, are drivers.

The vibe, the sense of vibration, which I think has to do with us sitting on our computers in our bubbles, isolated, because it coincides also with our time when people started to talk about the vibe shift, the vibe, vibe, vibe. I mean, we had also that term in the 70s, not a coincidence, apparently. We talked about the vibes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please, what’s the resonance with the 70s, the 70s vibe? And you’re pointing at this coincidence of vibe being around in the 70s. What do you make of that? Are you just saying that it’s a word that we’ve just picked up?

I think that there is a similar sensitivity in the 70s, but it was completely, I believe, I’m not a classic historian, that it had to do with new age, right?

That you were tapping into alternate modes of interpreting the world, which were beyond the classic materialistic, fleshy way of looking at the world.

Yeah. I don’t want to interrupt, but I was going to ask a question. So I want to go back. When did you first discover that you could do this for a living? Where did this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was specifically in the 90s in Berlin. I was an art historian and I applied methods from art history, specifically speaking, iconological methods.

And then I started to see, and I was very immersed in the 16th century, and then I started to apply that way of looking at the world, this analyzing the world to my contemporary life. So the way I would look at and interpret a baroque painting, and the outfits of the queens or the monks, whomever, whatever I analyzed, I applied the same method onto my friends in the club. The sensations evoked through the consumption of particular drugs, etc.

And as I was living life to the fullest, and experiencing life, and observing life to the fullest, and trying out everything I could get my hands onto, and every book that crossed my path, with such a hunger, which by the way, not anymore. I don’t feel that. I realized, I thought, I don’t want to be in academia.

I don’t want to be in academia. I just want to do this for a living. I want to go to clubs for a living.

I want to read books for a living. I want to go to theater for a living, watch movies for a living, and talk to people, observe people for a living. Why can’t I do this?

And then I heard, oh, in the fashion industry, there are these people who are called trend analysts, and they spot trends, and they travel through the world and need to be really, really well informed. And I thought, oh gosh, fashion? And I looked down at it, right?

I looked down a little bit. I thought, this is superficial, right? Here was somebody who was into Baroque art.

And funnily enough, I thought, oh, okay, let’s go for it. And I realized that all this accumulated knowledge I had was actually useful for this type of activity, because you had a bigger box of references, right? And I must say that the fashion industry is probably, I’ve gone through many industries through my long life, and fashion industry is probably one of the least superficial industries you could think of.

And it’s very interesting, because fashion, it’s called not fashion for fashion’s sake, it’s cycles. So in the old days, the fact that you had to bring out four collections a year was very fast. I mean, now we can laugh about it.

But in the 90s, it was the fastest industry. Fashion industry was really fast. So with the prediction, it’s as if you had lots of mice or hamsters, the cycles are faster.

So therefore, the prediction work was just extremely gratifying, because you could see, oh, s**t, sorry for the word, red did not go that well. We were expecting red to sell better, but actually, it’s blue. And the fact that you had sales numbers attached to it, it gives you real time feedback, but it gave you some feedback.

And you could then course correct your method. So that’s wonderful. That’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.

I’m struck by two things. One, it occurred to me that we now say fast fashion, which is sort of redundant. And we also have FedEx Express, I think, also. Things have gotten so fast, we’re sort of, we have redundancy built into the name.

Exactly. And that’s probably one of the main problems right now when people say, oh, there is so much uncertainty. There is so much uncertainty.

There’s hardly any presentation that doesn’t start with in these uncertain times. And it’s because things have always been uncertain. But the fact is, it’s, I don’t know how to explain this.

It’s the scale that has changed, the scale, we look at time. So it’s almost as if we had a rough scale in our minds. But the reality is so molecular more and more.

So we have an old way, or most of us have systems or apparati that are a little bit, I will not say plump, but plump, is that the right word? A little bit wide, big. And we’re dealing with a reality that is actually molecular. So that freaks us out.

Yes.

I don’t know how to express this very well. I’ve never expressed this actually. So I’m grateful that you asked these questions because you’re taking me to places that I never really thought about.

I never was forced to articulate. So yeah, the velocity of the world. Oh, this is interesting. The velocity of the world. You asked me before about why we were shifting from the what to the why to the feel, right?

Yes. Yep.

So I mentioned the vibe, the thing of the vibe, then I mentioned AI, right? That we are outsourcing rationality, so therefore the body has. But there is another element, if I may add this, a third one, which is, I mean, this is a strange analogy, OK?

But if you are in the rainforest, have you ever been in a dense environment? It’s 300, you’re 360 degrees enveloped by high information changing rate, rate, rate, rate, change, change, change, because there’s so much life around you. And when you are in these environments, you think less with your brain. Your body, your physicality, you’re more dependent on your physicality than on your brain.

And so are you, it’s, when you say that, it makes me think that modern life is dense, is stimulus dense like that.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

So it engages, we’re in a vigilant embodied state.

Well, we need to. The problem is that because we’re not very embodied and we live really operating system, computer systems on two legs.

And we can’t escape that metaphor no matter how hard we try, right? The computer, the machine, the thinking.

Yeah, yeah, that’s the problem. We have to be very careful because I think that there are lots of, I don’t want to say, I don’t want to sound dark, dark forces, but instincts pushing that, forces that are pushing us to equate ourselves to computing machines.

And that’s, and this is a moment really where we have to double down on the body. And because I travel a lot, right? And I perceive and spy and observe people who live in the Amazonas.

In what?

And how, in the Amazonas rainforest and the Amazon, Amazon you say? Amazon. There is a different, there is more body, more feel, more feel, more body.

Yeah. I wanted to go back to the moment you talked about fashion and you had an impression of fashion as being superficial. And then you changed and I had a recent experience, Leland Mashmire, does that name ring a bell?

He’s at Collins and he’s, I saw him talk and he said, I hadn’t heard anybody really say it so explicitly, but he just said fashion. He’s like, I pay attention to fashion because it’s where all the cultural production comes from. And it was just, I had never really heard anybody really just point at fashion.

I mean, I think I knew it theoretically, but I had my own biases against it, which I think you were also confessing. So what is, what is going, what are we doing in fashion? What makes fashion meaningful to somebody who doesn’t really care about the clothes? I guess is the thing. Or clothes is even a narrow read at all. Do you understand what I’m asking?

Yeah, but I’m curious about this person, Leland what?

Leland Maschmeyer. He was the head of, he was chief marketing officer at Chobani. He turned Chobani around and then he opened Collins, which is a design firm with Brian Collins.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

And I saw, I saw and I’m just referencing this moment because it’s stuck in my head. He just said very clearly, I pay attention to fashion because fashion is where all, is the origin of cultural production, I think is the way that he was paraphrasing. And it seems like you’re pointing at too, that you, at first your thought was nothing is produced in fashion. It’s all superficial, but you awaken to the fact that it is something. And I’m just curious, I want to hear you talk about what is it when you see it for what it is?

Well, it’s a primary form of self-expression, right? And you signal that self-expression every morning when you wake up and get dressed, you’re making an active choice. So you can see it from the expression perspective.

And I wonder whether Maschmeyer meant it that way. So it’s a wonderful way of reading what people feel and want is just by seeing how they dress, right?

That’s one aspect. The other aspect, so the expression, what people wear. And then the other aspect is the people who work in the fashion industry in the background and make choices.

Yes. It’s almost the industrial side is the part that I’m tempted to dismiss because it feels like, oh, it’s just fashion industry, blah, blah, blah. But I feel like what he was saying is that there’s meaning there too. I understand the self-expression thing. I get it that the choices we make express ourselves. We need to be attuned to it.\ But what is it about?

I think it has to do a lot. We can get molecular. And again, I love your questions.

The color, the colors, the shapes and the textures. We don’t think about it. But if I wanted to read, for example, an era, just by seeing, looking at the composition of the pieces that are being combined, the fabrics, the colors, the shapes, I can deduce out of that what the furniture is going to look like.

I do a lot of color forecasting and also for interior brands, paint brands, coating and paint. And one of the, Pantone, for example, we’ll have specialists that look at also at fashion, what’s been just on the runway. And so the expression part, but then apart from fashion, I look at art and it’s not a coincidence.

There are fine people, there are people who are specialized in developing their antennas. And artists, musicians, the fashion folks are certainly, I would consider them as the finest writers as well.

That perceive and translate. And if you really want to go energy and translating this vibe or energy in their metiers, in whatever the materials are that they work with, if it sounds, musicians, composers, fashion, artists, writers. We are all enveloped in this information soup that we all swim in vegetable peas in a soup, right?

We’re swimming in this brew, which is constantly changing. And some elements, some people are susceptible to understanding the flavor before others understand the flavor and modify and accommodate to the flavor. And the creators, the cultural creators are probably the finest antennas we have.

Yeah. Beautiful. I want to get to how you work and how you talk about your work. But first I’m curious about the joy. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?

Well, the joy, the freedom. Because in my work, first of all, it’s not real work. It’s just the way I breathe and take in the world.

There are particular states, psychological states that I need to be in in order to see things. And the main state that I try to be in, in order to see things, is to free myself from the entrapments of my own preconceptions and judgments. And that creates freedom.

And I want to go as far to say happiness. Happiness can be overrated, just in the way. Why does happy sound so superficial in English? In German, it sounds deeper.

How does it sound in German?

Yeah, in German, it’s glücklich. It’s just different than the flavor of happy. It’s a deep sense of freedom through the letting go of preconceptions.

If you have too many preconceptions and judgments, you don’t see things clearly, and seeing things clearly is the ultimate expression of freedom. And it’s wonderful to have the job I have because it forces me to try to see things clearly. So, and I would say that most people’s problems, most clients’ problems revolve around being entrapped in one’s own preconceptions.

We love preconceptions. We love labeling things, labeling ourselves, labeling others. And it has a good place.

It has a raison d’être. But excessive attachment to labels or preconceptions can distort the perception of reality and makes the reality hard to read.

So that is what really gives me joy in my work, is that I’ve been forced to, I know I’m doing good work when I feel free and vice versa, which means less sadness, less depression, etc.

And now, last time we talked, you taught, you have a very particular way of describing, well, we’ve ended up right here. You were talking about artists and these people, they’re more sensitive. They’re attuned to the soup, to use your metaphor.

So can you talk a little bit about how you, and it was the first thing you mentioned at the first question, what do you do? You’re documenting, you’re collecting, you’re observing all the time. How do you talk about the practice of noticing or collecting?

Yeah. This sounds a bit, maybe it sounds childish, but I like talking about it, different states of being that run parallel, that I equate to animals. So when I talk about this radical openness, the sense of trying to being as open as I can, I equate it with the jellyfish, which is an animal that basically has no brain.

It floats. It has no eyes. When it goes somewhere, you don’t know if it’s going intentionally or if it’s floating because it has no eyes.

You don’t know where it’s going. 360 degrees. And the neurons are distributed all over the body.

So there is no real brain. It’s just a being. And I like saying that that is the ideal state to identify things.

Kids are often in that place, and as we enter schools, it’s whipped out of our being, because it’s good to have opinions and classify the world. But we notice the fresh and the new and the peculiar and what some people would say weak signals by being very, very, very open. And if you have a judgment, you won’t see.

So that is the jellyfish part.

What’s an example of the application of the jellyfish? Can you tell a story? Do you choose to become jellyfish in moments?

I think that we’ve been always jellyfishes, when babies are, I think, jellyfishes. Children are often jellyfishes. And I would not equate it with innocence.

I would not go that far. But with a very, very, very, very, with a radical openness that enables you to see patterns easier.

I equate it sometimes also with an example when you go to a club and there is music playing and then the music transitions into the next tune. You will notice that some people, they go, they transfer faster than others from one tune to the other. You will see some people that are still stiff in the old melody when the next melody is playing.

So a good jellyfish is just imagine a dancer who feels the music. You’re in the space, and you float. As a change happens, you float, you go with the change because you perceive the change.

Beautiful.

It’s interesting, now that one gets older, one starts to understand also the stiffness of the body and the stiffness of the mind. I find that very interesting. Yeah, very aware of that process.

Octopus or jellyfish. Sorry.

Yeah, yeah. And then, well, then there is the classic state that we practice by analyzing, labeling, comparing, et cetera, which I call it the squirrel state. And I mean, it sounds childish, but ultimately it has shown that my students really get it when you make these differentiations.

Yeah. I mean, I don’t consider this, I mean, not that you need to hear me say this, it’s not childish at all. I think this stuff is the serious stuff. Honestly, metaphors and imagery like this, I feel like now you’re talking about something.

So AI is really, really an amazing squirrel. And our educational system has been very, very much a squirrel, the brain, the analysis, the labeling, the tagging information, the counting, counting, tagging and count, tag and count. The jellyfish part is different.

It’s interesting because I grew up in Tanzania and I grew up in Germany. I spent many years in different, very different places. And what’s peculiar, think about an intersection in Mumbai, a traffic intersection, which is deeply, deeply chaotic.

And there is no traffic light. That really works. If you put in a traffic light, there might be accidents.

Because you have to be 360 degrees aware if there are no traffic lights. Now imagine Switzerland, imagine a traffic intersection in Switzerland. If you pulled out the traffic light, you likely would have accidents. So that’s a very coarse way of describing the difference between both states.

We’ve had that. I think we have that experience here in the States with rotaries. And that conversation is happening where, I mean, if you put a rotary in an American town where there was an intersection before that was mediated by traffic lights, all of a sudden, you see American drivers thrown into the soup and they have no idea how to communicate.

They’re resentful that they have to pick up these signals of other people. Do you know what I mean? And the transition is very visible. And it’s completely, I’ve thought too much about this, but I agree with you on that.

That’s interesting.

And it happens all over the country. Rotaries are better, but they force us to be resonating or whatever language you want to use, you need to be communicating or responding to the signals from other drivers. And that’s a participatory way of being in the world that is new for most American drivers.

Yeah, that’s a good example.

Jellyfish, squirrel, are there other animals?

Well, yes. Well, if you come to the translation part. So, for example, imagine an artist working or a fashion designer, anybody, we all transform things, bring one thing into, bring things into being, right?

So, if you capture what is the fresh, the energy, the signals, the things that break the routine, in a jellyfish, and then you identify, you analyze them, you find the why, right? With a squirrel, you will have some sort of information in your hand. It can be a term, it can be a concept, but then comes the moment where you translate it.

And you can talk, then you can go then from a particular concept, a vibration, a vibe, a code, anything, and you can turn it into, you transform it into a product. That act of transformation, I call it, I mean this once again, the caterpillar-butterfly mode, where you transform something, you transform information into something through, if it’s through fabrics, paints, sounds, and bring it then, therefore, into being. You bring it, you turn it into a product, right?

Into an output.

Yeah. That’s great. I wanted to go back to something you differentiated yourself from colleagues, and you hear this a lot, that there’s the, you have to go to the fringe, you have to go to the subculture or the niche in order to discover where culture happens, but you describe your own process as being focused on the mainstream, and I think, I hope I’m not mischaracterizing that. Can you speak more about that difference?

Because I feel like it is, you run into it a lot, that you have to go to the fringe in order to find what’s happening, or what’s, but you’re saying that what’s happening is right in front of us, in the mainstream.

Well, it’s not yes and no.

I said it too strongly.

Yes, okay, think about the ecology, just dig into the mainstream, go deep into it.

Sometimes we look at signals as if they were little props, petals, but if you go deep into it, you go, imagine, you open it up. The real information, the deep, the real fuel is deep inside, just fossils, right, that turn into energy, petroleum, it’s deep inside the earth, and it’s the energy, it’s what gives the energy, it’s inside of it, it’s not the surface.

And the more people consume, by the way, I think that people are talking all out, talking about, oh, we are getting more into a mini, mini bubble, that’s true, but therefore the mainstream is going to be more important than ever.

I think for example, if you think about this movie, The Devil Wears Prada, it’s going to come out on May 1st, about every woman I meet wants to watch the movie.

There is also a desire for where are the commons? You still continue with your niche activities and interests, but the commons, I think, are going to be even more and more important. But yeah, so the new has to happen, it has to hatch out of a common understanding, otherwise it will not be a force in culture.

Right. I guess it’s a difference between, and maybe I’m over or under thinking this, where the mainstream is the point of consumption, it’s the penultimate act, and the origin is in the fringe. That’s one model, right?

No, the origin can also be inside, just on a deeper layer of the mainstream. So imagine the mainstream, again, it’s a phenomenon. I mean, imagine the signal, you can label the signal, but then you can analyze the signal, and when you go deeper into the analysis of the signal, you identify what, that there are elements in there that are fresh.

Now, I don’t only look at the mainstream, I also look at niche, but niche alone will never bring forth anything, unless it connects to an element that is inside the mainstream.

Therefore, I don’t get crazy by looking and freaking out of everything that is new, everything that is new, everything that is new. I follow or observe mainly the world of the arts and the world of music, what sounds are strange, different, what type of artists are out there that are doing interesting things that I’ve never heard of, and then I will notice, oh yeah, there is a connection between this particular technique or this particular artistic expression, and the depth of, I don’t know, the Devil Wears Prada, or a particular current event. I also look at current events. Yeah.

I mean, I hope this doesn’t sound too abstract. I wish I could, I normally think with pen and paper, which is easier.

No, it’s wonderful. I appreciate it very much, and yeah, we’ve come to the end of time. I want to thank you so much for accepting the invitation. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation, and I thank you so much.

And thank you so much for forcing me to articulate things that I’m normally not used to articulate. Thank you.