The Messenger

07/01/2024

Our project Climates Recipes in the news today

An evolving archive of lived experiences, whose debut edition focuses on Goa, offers climate solutions from cooks, poets, farmers and other experts who tell us

28/08/2022

The Messenger - Issue #9 The Ethics of Immersion

This issue is largely based on the ethical implications of what may we do under this confirmation of a rapidly advancing climate challenge with the looming threat of our planet becoming inhabitable. This issue outlines the six Ethical Maxims for a marginally inhabitable planet as outlined in an essay on bioethics by David Schenck and Larry R. Churchill.

Also continuing from the previous issue of experimental auto-generation of images using the ai platform - Dall-E, the images in the later part of this issue are also ai-generated, throwing a real situation into the mix, with what is going to be the future of work, with ai becoming more and more competent?

Read the complete issue online www.themessenger.space

28/08/2022

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The Messenger - Immersion #8 -- Artificial Immersion

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The Messenger - Immersion #8 -- Artificial Immersion

By Socratus • Issue #52 • View online

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you must have heard that artificial intelligence is revolutionizing everything. If you have ever taken an Ola or Uber, you have experienced mechanical matchmaking.

Perhaps one day - and a day not too far away? - AIs will decide our life partners too.

We have been spending time with DALL-E to turn our imaginations into images. Here are some of our imagined images. You too can use AI to realize future utopias and dystopias.

In case there’s any doubt: all these images were artificially generated….

18/08/2022

The Messenger - Immersion #7: Collective Immersion

Life at times may seem like a random customised individual experience with its own design, sometimes thick and sometimes thin. In these intense periods of personal experience, we sometimes forget to be aware of the fact that we are completely immersed in a collective immersion of the worldly kind. All that we do and will do, stands on all that has been done before. And hence it must follow that the quality of our personal experience actually depends on a collaborative collective immersion that we all have emerged from and will enable.

Read the full issue at www.themessenger.space

13/08/2022

The Messenger - Immersion #6: Form, Medium and Tools

As the pace of life slows down a bit across the country, due to the beautiful and mighty monsoons, this edition will take this time and invite you all to an exercise in immersion. Grab a cup of hot beverage, a pencil and some paper, and kick back to imagine all the ways in which immersive experiences can be put to interesting uses.

Read full newsletter online www.theMessenger.space

09/08/2022

The Messenger - Immersion #5: Gender and Immersion

We are used to thinking of gender identities as fixed: once you’re born in a woman’s body you’re going to stay a woman your entire life. In contrast, gender fluidity is a new concept for most of us: technology and society are changing in ways in which it’s becoming possible to choose one’s gender rather than accept it.

Even if you don’t want to become a different gender from what you’re now, you might be able to inhabit another gender’s body for a bit using immersive technologies.

Read the complete newsletter at www.themessenger.space

04/07/2022

30/06/2022

The Messenger - Immersion #3: I Contain Multitudes

By 

‘I contain multitudes’ sang a famous poet. Hypernarad agrees. He’s always ferrying messages from one corner of the cosmic self to another. These days he’s an emissary for the Divine Octopus, each one whose infinite tentacles has its own complete view of the universe.

Am I one or am I many? Turing asks these difficult questions for which we humans don’t have good answers. There’s also the person I am and the person I want to be, and sadly, there’s a gap between the two...

Read the complete version on www.themessenger.space

27/06/2022

The Messenger - Immersion #2

By Socratus • read complete version online at www.themessenger.space

If there’s one phrase that captures the idea of immersion, it’s ‘Being There.’ Witnesses are important in criminal cases because ‘they were there.’ Surveillance cameras are all over the place because they help us be there without being there.

Moral of the story: space and place are huge parts of the human understanding of the world and the more we expand our spatial capacities, the more we are there. Even if the there is a virtual world.

27/06/2022

The Messenger - Immersion #1

By 

We are back! For the new readers coming from our Wicked Code course, welcome. Everyone else, welcome back. Over the past two months, we have been reflecting on the next phase of the Messenger. We have always been interested in graphic storytelling and in solving wicked problems, but can we step it up a notch? Without further ado:

Step I: The Messenger will take on an overarching theme for a substantial period of time (we call it a ‘season’) and cover wicked problems using that theme as a framing device. The inaugural theme (which I will explain in a bit below) is Immersion.

Step II: We are going to be STREAMing our thoughts and images on this theme. STREAM = Science, Technology, Reflection, Ethics, Arts & Making. So expect to see more coding experiments, field visits, storytelling and other streaming devices.

Read complete version www.themessenger.space

29/04/2022

We are looking for guest artists/illustrators/storytellers, who would like to contribute to the dialogue around "a flourishing planet in the era of climate change".

Please reach out to us with any ideas, illustrations, stories, comments. We would love to feature your work.

Contact: [email protected] or just send us a message on instagram.

25/04/2022

The Messenger - Issue #28: The Appetite for War

When you think of Putin, the first image that comes to your mind isn’t an Indian farmer. Yet, the fortunes of the kisan might be tied to the ongoing war in Ukraine, as this week’s messenger explains.

PS: we will be taking a breather for a couple of weeks and we will be back with a new and improved messenger after the break.

19/04/2022

The Messenger - Issue #27: Cooking with Code

Continuing our exploration of Wicked Code and using data and programming to address wicked problems….. Programming is a lot like cooking - you need good ingredients, creativity and a wave of a magic wand later, there’s a mouth watering dish to be had.

11/04/2022

The Messenger - Issue #26: Forest Fires and Climate Change

In preparation for our Wicked Code course, we are looking at data sets that help us understand how climate change is going to impact India. This week’s messenger looks at forest fire data from a study by CEEW.

04/04/2022

The Messenger - Issue #25 From data to stories

Today’s Messenger is as much about climate change as much it is about storytelling. The world of data has exploded and is exploding at an exponential rate. It is becoming increasingly expensive and practically impossible to reconcile such large amounts of information and make any clear sense out it, let alone make it interesting for someone else understand it. So how can common folk grapple with issues that are afflicting them? Is the onus on us to deal with such complexities at scale or be left out? How then can wicked problems like climate change become real for us and and that we can realise that it is only us who can stop this catastrophic change if not reverse it?

Storytelling is at the heart of all initiatives, from scientific enquiry to statistics. And the personal stories brought to life out of the data is what makes it real for everybody. A common man might not understand the environmental impact of a fossil fuel, but might understand the fundamental rights of all children to breathe clean air. This messenger issue delves into the process of telling stories with data on air pollution.

30/03/2022

We will be sharing inspiring artworks that help us in our imagination of a flourishing planet.

This artwork is by Surendra Rao from Jabalpur 🙏

28/03/2022

The Messenger - Issue #24: Bottom Up Governance

Between power and governance, power is easier - we have mechanisms such as elections that get us to the hot seat. It’s much harder to govern a village, let alone a city or a state. What if we inverted the usual logic of power: instead of flowing down from up high, what if it flowed upwards?

21/03/2022

The Messenger - Issue #23 “Modelling the Mente”

We have been talking about the various dimensions of wicked problems, but how do we create systems that address these problems? How can we respond to the world appropriately without being determined by it? How can we do so by being fair and just?

There are three levels of understanding (1)Model (2)Represent (3)Implement. Of these, the first feels the “softest” but is perhaps the most crucial step before we get into irreversible decisions.

This issue is about mental models, and how a deeper understanding of various models we can use in different situations and building a vocabulary, can help us deal with the wickedness of a situation.

14/03/2022

The Messenger - Issue #22: Wicked Code

We are about to get wicked with code today (register here if you haven’t). This week’s messenger is a glimpse of what the class will chew on.

10/03/2022

The Messenger - Special Issue: Wicked Code

Socratus is organising a free online course: “wicked code” where creative coding meets climate change. The course starts on the 14th. No experience with code or data required. We would love to see participation from the readers of the Messenger and from your networks so please forward this message widely!

Interested?: Registration link in profile

Creative Coding meets Climate Change

Climate change can’t be understood as a standalone ‘scientific’ phenomenon that can be solved with renewable energy technologies. It’s a wicked problem that combines moral and material complexity. At the same time, we can’t address India’s climate challenges if we can’t measure them, and so we will likely need a comprehensive method of measuring and pricing carbon emissions (a carbon GST in colloquial terms). 

So how do we get a grip on the problem of measuring carbon emissions at source?

We need to be able to combine an understanding of India’s climate scenario with a creative mindset: code, data and visualisation. That’s the focus of this two week course on creative coding for the climate. In this module we will develop a practice of the arts where code is your tool to tell stories, understand and visualise data, build interactive experiences, and measure the physical world. We will learn how to think computationally about carbon emissions in a local and global setting.

We will gain a foundation in how to play in code, with a focus on interactivity, data, visualisation, and experimentation. We will learn how to create sketches, generate sounds and images, create animations and installations, visualise data, and interact with machines. Through the course of the module, we will ideate, conceptualise, and design original creative works in code to better understand and reason about carbon emissions in the context of India’s needs. It will be conducted in the JavaScript P5. js library. 

Who is it for?

It’s for anyone who wants to use computational thinking and creative practices to grasp the climate crisis in the Indian context. No prior experience with coding or data analysis is required.

Link in profile for details.

07/03/2022

10 years ago, Fields of View .in was created to build tools to cope with wicked problems. But what are wicked problems?

Fly back to 1959. Three years ago, the concept ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was used for the first time in a college on the east coast of the United States. Everyone was abuzz – can computers think like human beings? Some thought so. In 1959 two of the high priests of Artificial Intelligence created a computer program called ‘General Problem Solver’ which they believed could solve any problem.

Of course, like any miracle cure, it did not work. Why?

If the world was neatly ordered, where each part had a specific role to play, and the sum of the parts was the whole, repairing the world’s problems would be like fixing a bicycle. But, the world has a component that makes it all messy – people.

Yet, the question haunts the minds of researchers, policymakers, designers and people – why can’t we solve the problems in real world like we do in classical science?

Now, whether the apple fell in Kathmandu or Kinshasa, Isaac Newton will not change his mind about gravity. Classical scientists assumed that the world was well-ordered, all variables are clear, and you can predict where the apple will fall.

Real world is messy, for real world is made of people. Folks in Kinshasa may prefer to throw mangosteens.

So what is the nature of real-world problems? Context matters. What people want, their desires, their needs, biases, preferences, politics, cultural forces, oppressive ideas, environment, economics – they all intertwine to make the context. 

 And so, real-world problems are complex. Interestingly, the roots of the word complex are ‘com’ (together) and plectere(to weave), which is the same as context.

In other words, real-life problems are wicked – they cannot be clearly defined; they have no stopping rule; there are no true or false solutions to it, and it is connected to many other problems.

 And so, how do we cope with these wicked problems? You play with a model of the world. It is as simple as that. As you play, you can try different strategies to tackle a problem, examine trade-offs of your choices, and learn from failure.

07/03/2022

The Messenger - Issue #10 years ago, Fields of View .in was created to build tools to cope with wicked problems. But what are wicked problems?

Fly back to 1959. Three years ago, the concept ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was used for the first time in a college on the east coast of the United States. Everyone was abuzz – can computers think like human beings? Some thought so. In 1959 two of the high priests of Artificial Intelligence created a computer program called ‘General Problem Solver’ which they believed could solve any problem.

Of course, like any miracle cure, it did not work. Why?

If the world was neatly ordered, where each part had a specific role to play, and the sum of the parts was the whole, repairing the world’s problems would be like fixing a bicycle. But, the world has a component that makes it all messy – people.

Yet, the question haunts the minds of researchers, policymakers, designers and people – why can’t we solve the problems in real world like we do in classical science?

Now, whether the apple fell in Kathmandu or Kinshasa, Isaac Newton will not change his mind about gravity. Classical scientists assumed that the world was well-ordered, all variables are clear, and you can predict where the apple will fall.

Real world is messy, for real world is made of people. Folks in Kinshasa may prefer to throw mangosteens.

So what is the nature of real-world problems? Context matters. What people want, their desires, their needs, biases, preferences, politics, cultural forces, oppressive ideas, environment, economics – they all intertwine to make the context. 

 And so, real-world problems are complex. Interestingly, the roots of the word complex are ‘com’ (together) and plectere(to weave), which is the same as context.

In other words, real-life problems are wicked – they cannot be clearly defined; they have no stopping rule; there are no true or false solutions to it, and it is connected to many other problems.

 And so, how do we cope with these wicked problems? You play with a model of the world. It is as simple as that. As you play, you can try different strategies to tackle a problem, examine trade-offs of your choices, an

28/02/2022

The Messenger - Issue #20

As we keep saying ‘only wicked minds solve wicked problems’ but then the question arises: what’s a wicked mind? One answer is that to be ‘wicked’ in this special sense is to combine moral and material complexity and have an eye for political solutions.

So what do ‘moral complexity,’ ‘material complexity,’ ‘political solution’ mean?

This week’s messenger is an attempt to illustrate those concepts with an experience we are all familiar with: traffic jams.

1. No one wants to be stuck in a traffic jam
2. We still keep adding vehicles to our roads
3. Who doesn't like being prosperous? Cars are a sign of prosperity
4. Politics is the art of bringing contrary positions to the table
5. Be the change you want to see in the world