Originally posted on my Instagram, as part of my research for a commission from the province of Zeeland about the future of land-ownership and algae farming.
Through the ages, people have sought to know the future. First, through ritual and fortune-telling, and in our current rational age, through science and forecasting. We've reached out to the future to feel safe in the present. But in the process we've outsourced our authority to those who "know", isolating ourselves from our inner knowing and the natural world.
Algae, these swirling slimy creates of the deep, give us a mirror of how we could access a deeper wisdom of time, and know the future by just being present.
They have evolved not into single individuals but into relational networks that sustain their operational ecosystem (OES) through storms and environmental shocks. They know, not by standing out and perfecting their individual intelligence or identity, but by swarming into the relational, by existing as one consisting of many. They are an amorphous being, a resonant biocosmic soup that since day and time breathe in the very CO2 that we and our industries breathe out. Algae are our mother; without them we would not exist. Green algae, the segment of algae that engage in a continuous photosynthetic genesis, produce more oxygen than all trees on Earth, together with marine plants about 70% of the oxygen that you and I breathe in every day. I am absorbed by the wonders of this primordial species, and they inspire my way of knowing the future. No longer interested in all things transhuman or even saving 'team human', I am practicing to become transspecies, to embrace my capacity to shapeshift in and out of the more-than-human world, to embody the intelligence of relationality and resilience that human animals seem to have forgotten.
And it changes the woman. Morphing in and out of a kelpforest, becoming the spiraling pulsation of spirulina bouncing through walls of water, devours all linear concepts of time, and eats my fear of death alive. My tears become rain, tomorrow. My breath was breathed by you, before. I am not I, not an individual, intelligence, identity. I am amor ❤, a relationship with my true nature, an ecologically entangled, amorphous being, and my body exists in the One Mind we share. This is how I know the future, by practicing to feel safe with not knowing, to feel OK about death (and dying a thousand times before I go), to spread the wings of time on a continuum of being, and to breathe algae as they breathe me.
What is the continuum on which time lives? It is consciousness. Consciousness is the fabric of our future. We weave 'then' from waves we cannot pick up from our radio station now. First, we have to let go of our old selves, throw the scraps of our current story on a compost heap, and let it ferment by the source of all creation, into something worthwhile to live for, again. Ascending to the source goes hand in hand with a descent into the underworld of our fluid bodies. We engage un a continuous regenesis, renewed, as a unique expression of the whole, in an entangled web of resonance. Just like the algae.
Expect more algae galore on this feed. I really feel that algae are the new fungi. I am sensing a wave of micro algae and seaweed adoption coming through our food, fuel, and fabric industries.
X Li
📸 @annesarahdijkhorst
About the author
Lisanne Buik is a speculative artist and futures designer operating at the intersection of ecology, technology, spirituality and somatics. In her speculative installations, films, lectures and publications she combines emerging science with ancient wisdom to explore the shift from the age of the machine to a new age of symbiosis between living systems, the human bodymind, and technology.
︎︎︎Comments/say hi :)
︎︎︎Comments/say hi :)
March 2022