Collective Responses from Members of Level Ground

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 0:08
Hello beloved listeners and welcome to No Future No Cry. My name is Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware and I’ll be your host as we deep dive into the wild imaginings of leading artists, activists and thinkers, who are all dreaming us into future worlds, while reckoning with the reverberations of the one that we all collectively inhabit and have inherited. Join us as we explore a series of short stories and speculative interpretations that engage with all that could be, and all that has been. All of these stories are set within a century from now. And these stories offer us a way of surviving and growing into something not yet created: the apocalyptic, the beautiful, the hopeful, the sacred. Today’s story is a collective response to the questions: What are you dreaming into? What is alive for you right now? Where do you think we’re headed? Written by members of Level Ground. Helmed by creative partners, Chase Joynt and Samantha Curley, the director- producer team behind the Sundance-swimming Framing Agnes, Level Ground Productions is a collaboratively run production company invested in documentary projects that push the boundaries of form and address urgent socio-political issues. We exist, in part, to support the Level Ground Collective – a 501(c)3 nonprofit artist collective and incubator that centers queer, trans and POC artist-led projects and initiatives in Los Angeles. Both the Level Ground nonprofit and the production company reflect the same values and mission, including a commitment to experimentation, collaboration, and empathy. Stay tuned after the story for a conversation between Samantha, Chase and I, where we discuss their inspiration and writing process. Without further ado, these are the collective responses from members of Level Ground.

Charlene Modeste 2:16
This is Charlene Modeste. The air is warm and hearts are light on this centennial day of celebration. The year is 2120 and the long rays of the sun take a leisurely lap across the face of the earth to form the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. On this day of reveling, all nations in the world unite in celebratory solidarity to honor and commemorate what is now called The Great Awakening. According to the sacred stories of the elders, passed down through generations, the Great Awakening began with a trickle and grew into a force that eventually broke the dam of ignorance and terror that once pervaded the world. One hundred years ago, during the summer of 2020, The Great Awakening began. The stars aligned, a paradigm shifted and everything changed. The legends of the elders say, it was like waking from a vanishing dream. In the blink of an eye, reality dissolved into an ethereal mist. Confounded, they awoke, like amnesiacs recovering their memories all at once. They awoke to their humanity. We now know, the revolution was internalized. One by one, acceptance and agency for all. They simply changed their ways and ushered in The Great Awakening.

Chance 4:40
This is Chance. With the concept of survival specifically, that’s something that’s intriguing to me in relation to “future.” So often people in marginalized and minoritized communities or people entrenched in struggle are focused on short-term survival, which is technically a future of sorts, but the “future” inspires me to think further. I dream impossibility into possibility, namely I see a future where assimilation is rejected and affirmation is demanded. I see a future where youth have access to mentors, something too many in the queer community were robbed of and too many non-white people were violently denied. And, personally, I don’t think we’re going to get there peacefully, at least not at first. What’s alive for me is risk and courage. The younger generations don’t take shit, and it’s seeping into the rest of us, which is crucial for the systematic destruction that comes from true revolution. I think we’re headed towards two extremes. A world of people willing to look after the “least” of us, and a physical environment that’s too late for us to save.

Jireh 5:45
Hi, this is Jireh, a queer poet and multimedia storyteller. These days I’ve been dreaming about love. (I mean whenever have I ever not?) But these days I’m indulging that part of me that crushes. Letting myself daydream about someone that I’m falling in love with. And I hate that we see crushes as infantile forms of love and how we dismiss them. There is something so radical about hope, about putting faith in your ability to lean into the possibility of affection in a time of late-stage capitalism, in a time where the world seems to be bent on war and hate. And it’s not just romantic love, but community love that I’ve been steeped in. Over the past two months, I’ve found unexpectedly refreshing and renewed connections with people in my life — at the community garden, at the community film screening, running with my neighbors, and more. I’ve found such a deep hope among the people I’m surrounded by. I find pleasure in breaking out of the bubbles I can often box myself into, and find that there is at times exciting conflict and new friendships to be had with people I might not at first be aligned with. These days I’m leaning into confrontation, meeting it head-on. Learning how to sit in intimacy and not be afraid of it. I think that this is marking a new era in my life, of healthy attachment, and not being afraid of losing people. Allowing people to enter and leave when seasons inevitably change. And I think that this is the only way in which we can survive today and tomorrow. So much planning for the future can look at catastrophe and the fear of it. But we can lose sight of what is precious and beautiful in the now and what we are fighting for. Dreaming of love isn’t a useless pastime — it is a generative force in all areas of our lives. Because I truly believe that the vehicle by which we drive toward freedom is the integral means to the end. So if we move with love, we will end with love. And all I have wanted my life to be was to be fuller with it and for it.

Bri Stokes 8:22
This is Bri Stokes, I’m a writer, editor, curator, producer and poet based in LA. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the relationship between the artist and the ever-expanding world of AI. As it stands today (and in centuries prior), artists exist as a vessel through which the echoes and will of Divinity can filter through and manifest in tangible reality. Our duty as creative individuals is to reach deep into the Collective, scavenge through its pulse, and reflect back to the world what we have discovered there. Those discoveries may be profound or simple, political or personal, humorous or frightening; the overall shape of what comes into being through our Searching depends on the greater energies within the Collective, and what is seeking to aid or disrupt them. I wonder, then—what does it mean if that very essential, deeply-human role is being taken away by technology? What do we lose if we cannot see ourselves? Furthermore, who helms these AI corporations? Who designs and programs the technology implemented, and how might their perspective influence it? If man-made art becomes inaccessible to the masses, who will get access to it? What does it mean that this crucial, almost spiritual role to exist as a “reflection” within society is being replaced in tandem with the rise of global fascism? Or, does AI ultimately “reflect” something that humans cannot presently access or see? And if that’s the case, then what are we not seeing?

Cedric Tai 9:52
Imagined by Cedric Tai. 100 years projecting… Pre-figuring a century from now… What will our relationships to models be? Will Epicureanism have spiraled its way to still being useful or as popular as the four noble truths? Who will remember you? The end of the US as an empire, and first ever steps towards land back, 100 parties that occasionally come together but they kind of fade out… Unsubsidized Peak oil means that gas is $30 – $40 a gallon and you get bootleg moonshiners who make ethanol fuels… International travel becomes cost prohibitive. Capitalism shifts… You are ranked by your level of responsibility. The blockchain tracks your families contribution to global warming including how warm is the trash water? From the medications, the micro plastics, the trash, the algae bloom? This has all been tracked at one point by smart dust surveillance. Urban cities have kept changing the most over these hundred years. Large encampments at border crossings… Land back isn’t dystopian where it’s not wholly agricultural but more a semi-localized roaming horticulture, a farmers Almanac of predictable, remediation of soil, floodplain agriculture, cities lose their feeling of “the place to be”, all of LA is a floodplain again, marshes take up Sacramento. There are many more “sanctuary cities” of many kinds and there are also a quarter of existing cities are locked down cities, where a lot of people who work here don’t live here… think of Disney World and Atlanta’s cop city… A vacant city inhabited by barbarians that come and go, and the only real residents are the rats, the cats and the birds and bugs. Hoarding in a planned community… now entering “family city”, where the nuclear family unit is still upheld as a pillar of society, feels very old and backwards even. Trailer park homes that are based on sea containers that are stacked 5 high and more next to train tracks, van life and tiny homes being less secluded and more like veins along railroad tracks. Even MORE guns if you can believe it but art deco and plastic, tons of different kinds of wounds… Smoke weed, eat bugs… people take psychedelics to change how things come through our senses… A century later we are finally corporation skeptics, but trying to deal with patterns of data, so much data… No more cheap buildings are made anymore, the kind that have to be torn down every 50 years… we’re leaving an era of fast fashion, fast furniture, fast infrastructure, fast art. Amazon.com couldn’t just keep transforming what it “provides”, actually it is considered a nuisance to just keep shifting money around. There is a diversity of unions and more worker owned guilds, you can trace this back to how we form neighborhood schools. What IS a school? It’s the end of art schools because of the emphasis on an everyday practical philosophy. There are many versions of ‘Steal this book’ by Abi Hoffman, The Anarchist’s Cookbook, The Green Book, mental health remedies like Ayurvedic and Chi Gong etc., people get better at reclaiming stuff getting thrown out. The workers… the workers are still distributing nutrition. What is the largest fish you can eat or is there a cure for mercury poisoning? Heavy on regulation, the ownership of land means tending to the soil, we cleared all the warehouses, used all the stuff? Re-using and re-purpose the waste of the 20th century. Those who are the most resourceful become the most in demand. Beauty is finally understood as being the least preoccupied with pixels, perfect mirrors or other people’s short term denial. What form does colonialism take? Somehow Costco hotdogs are still a dollar?! What’s the public space of the neighborhood where education can take place? Currency is decentralized but now organized by people who grew up on peer-to-peer networks and Minecraft. Social media has meant that 70 years ago we’re all ranked like Yelp but it shifts to how we would likely do and be vouched for to join certain communities, a wider social sphere, all communal needs and the way you care is communal. Your references become your keys to the kingdom. This is a kind of social mobility. Jobs of the next 100 years? For one, multiple people do share jobs. We’ve got “Un-work consultants”, “soil accountants”, urban planning turns to climate planning (to move people), intimacy coordinators for publically polyamorous relationships. Like the people who are skeptical of ADHD & Autism, Disability Deniers became a New Age religion. There is so much to say…

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 15:27
So thank you so much for reading that story, for taking us into this other space. And I’m wanting to ask you right off the top, what are you dreaming, having us sort of dream into with you in this story? What world have you imagined, here for us?

Chase Joynt 15:47
Well, I think that the beginnings of our answer include our deep desire to always be working in collaboration. And a real refusal of the ways in which we are isolated from each other in our artistic pursuits. So when we received your beautiful offering, we knew immediately that the next move was to democratize and make available the opportunity to anyone in our circuits who wanted to dream with us. And so what you have just heard, is a very organic flow of those who have self-selected to come toward the project, with no requirements for editing or other kinds of approvals or supervision. And instead, we are really, I think, and I hope I can use we in this context, are really energized by getting out of the way and seeing what happens in that space.

Samantha Curley 16:50
Yeah, I would just add, I think that when we received the prompt and invitation, I think our first impulse was like, the future is the collective. And so let’s not only in the words that we’re sharing, but in the process, let’s reflect that future that we are dreaming about, and hoping for, in even how we approach the project.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 17:16
So much of what we’ve seen, certainly since 2020, in some of the uprisings and, you know, the lockdown of the pandemic, was this rise of disabled wisdom. And we’ve seen some incredible turns towards interdependence. And so this idea that we can and should, in fact, rely on each other to make sure that we make it to the kind of free future that we’re dreaming into. And so, I love this idea that you turned to the collective. And I’m also so captured by this passage from your writing: “They awoke to their humanity. We now know the revolution was internalized, one by one, acceptance and agency for all”. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the kinds of freedoms I suppose that you’re imagining in this future?

Chase Joynt 18:03
Oh, I love that. And Sam, I wonder if maybe this is an opportunity for you to offer up some of the logics of Level Ground as a collective. And I feel like some of that writing very beautifully speaks to some of the core tenets of your ongoing collaboration and organizing in that space.

Samantha Curley 18:23
Yeah, of course. That line, Syrus, was written by Charlene who’s an artist, that’s part of the Level Ground Collective community and you know, certainly even before 2020, Level Ground was facilitating this network of artists who are creating together and really interested in a space for experimentation and collaboration. And when the pandemic happened, and then the uprisings and just the way that we understood our lives and communities were sort of so dramatically called into question, it was this group of artists that kind of turned towards each other and said, let’s start creating together, let’s start taking care of each other. Let’s share our needs and our resources with one another. And in the midst of that, see what we built and what happens. And I think that is that process of, you know, the external, being internal and then also vice versa, that it’s reflecting in both ways and I think that process for Level Ground as an artistic community and a collective and cooperative has grown in really incredible ways over the last three years. And I think, you know, Charlene sharing those words, is certainly you know, how she is understanding what that moment meant for the future, personally and globally. And I think even within this community that we’ve cultivated over the last few years.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 20:10
I’m so interested to dive a little deeper behind the scenes and go, ‘how into the how’, of the creation of this. So you knew that you were going to turn to your collective, you put this sort of open call, this really sort of vast, you know, ‘we want to hear from everybody’. And then how did this conversation sort of manifest? Could you take us through a bit of the process of creating the work?

Chase Joynt 20:37
So I love speaking about the technical bureaucracy of collaboration, because sometimes I think we have this fantasy that collaboration just emerges through good intentions. And actually, it’s such ongoing organizing and logistics that makes some of these more fantastical imaginings possible. And Sam, I won’t take any credit for your organizational labor that really kick started the first offering, but I’m happy to talk about editing after that, if that makes sense.

Samantha Curley 21:10
Yeah, happily. So we sent the call-out to about 40 artists in our collective and weren’t sure what we were gonna get back, or what we were gonna do with what we got back. I think, you know, Level Ground approaches things as an experiment. And so we just kind of dove in. We offered everybody who submitted a response a stipend, you know, to compensate their time and creative labor. And we had six artists who responded with their work and their words, and then I handed that over to Chase, hahaha.

Chase Joynt 21:56
Hahaha. You know, one of the things that’s so energizing about a lack of control, is being able to witness the very organic connections between people’s offerings. And as a filmmaker, I’m always thrilled by the editing process, which I see less as a manipulation of one’s offerings and more of a strategic placement of ideas around one another. And so, took a very experimental documentary film approach to the assembly of the work, which was trying to find switch points and connections between thematics so that if you were to encounter the work on a page, or through some kind of auditory listening or other experience, you would be able to link and make associations between the folks who were thinking together around a set of shared questions. And again, just to say that we really had no desire to edit or control those offerings, but rather to present them in a fashion that can be encountered as multiple parts of a whole.

Samantha Curley 23:01
And a cool thing that happened, is that when we put all of the offerings together, and Chase sort of ordered them in a way that flowed, we were like, exactly at the word count, haha. We were like, wow! This, this is it, then! Let’s let it lie.

Chase Joynt 23:17
Our work is done!

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 23:18
That’s amazing. And I’m so interested to find out how the collective, you know, particularly the 40 people who were initially invited into this conversation, you know, when they hear this recording, and when they hear this reading of the story, of this collective work. I mean, the last thing I suppose I would want to touch on before we wrap for today, is just to sort of think a little bit about your audience, you know. Who are you hoping this story reaches? Who were you imagining when you were beginning to collectively coauthor this offering? Who were you imagining and sort of dreaming into would be accompanying you on this journey? So I’m hoping if you could just talk a little bit about what you’re hoping people are going to leave with, and who you’re sort of hoping, I mean, this call towards the collective, I think is really loud in this. And I’m just wondering if you could talk a little bit about what it is that you’re hoping people leave with?

Chase Joynt 24:27
I love that question. And it sparks a number of different responses in me. The first of which is we said yes, because it was you. As a beginning point, you know, I felt very honored and excited to be able to be in conversation with you. And by that I mean, you as a person, as a human in the world who I know, but also as an entity who transforms the circumstances of your world, and the concentric circles of community and collaboration that surrounds you. And by virtue of who you are and what you do, all of the different ways that our work can be in conversation with others by virtue of the assembly of your project. And so, that to me is an incredible audience in and of itself that’s baked into the structure of the project as a whole. We are an audience to each other, we get to keep showing up in the micro moments, as well as the macro moments. And I think that in trying to render the offering poly vocal, we also get to hear each other differently and collaborate and co-create differently. And then of course, there’s the fantasy of the broader public, there’s the fantasy of the broader audience. But to me, that’s always an unknown and unanswerable question about who is going to find the work, when, where and why? It’s kind of the glory of the time capsule, right, as the idea that you would put something in place and hope for a future where someone might encounter it and understand something about the past, present or the future. I see these kinds of collaborative and experimental moves as time capsules in and of themselves. I think it really is inspiring to reflect on your question about the difference between when we recorded, when we spoke,\ and when the project will emerge in the world. And how our imaginations of the future will have inherently changed even in that small block of time. And so, I’m thrilled by the inability to answer the question about audience. But I hope that in some ways, it is something that can be found again, perhaps much later than we anticipate.

Samantha Curley 26:32
Yeah, I also think about… I think for Chase and I (not to speak for you), but to speak for us, are really interested in process. And that the process is as important, if not more important, than the product or the ending point. And I think, in terms of who I hope hears this, or how I hope they might be impacted by it, you know, I just feel really inspired Syrus, that you reached out to Chase, in the midst of however many other people you invited into this project, and who knows how all of those people, you know, took and transformed and alchemized this invitation. And then Chase invited me and we invited this collective and even just in that one small arm of this project, we have gone from you, Syrus, one person, one entity, to 50 or 60 people who are aware of what’s happening here. And I hope that that kind of process sparks people’s imaginations about what’s possible for the future and how movement work happens, how organizing happens, how art making happens. And that, you know, that would be sparking new ways of imagining how we live and create together.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 27:58
I’m very thankful that you agreed to come on this journey, and that you said yes to this. And of course, you know, when inviting folks to participate in this project, I knew I wanted to ask people who are dreaming or thinking about the future, you know, that idea that artists and activists are very much world builders and future builders. And, I wanted to ask folks, what they were thinking and imagining, but of course, you have no idea what you’re gonna get back. So to get your offering here, and have it be this collective conversation, it was so thrilling to me. And I think that one of the things that stands out is that as I was reading each person’s offering, I was pulled in and I wanted to get to know them better. I wanted to get to connect with these humans more and to find out what else they were chatting about and what else they were working on. And you know, to me, that is such a beautiful part of a creative project, when you can have the listener in the audience really care so much about the activist and the organizers and the dreamers, that they want to make sure that of course, they continue to thrive into a future that looks a bit different than the one that we’re in now. So, I’m really thankful for your offering. I’m really thankful for the chance to talk with you today a bit about your process. And I think that for anyone who’s listening, who might be thinking, you know, this is a really great prototype, you know, you too, can get people together and have some big questions planted, and have a bit of a conversation in this format. And really think through where do you think you’re going to be in 100 years. And I love that the way that the story, or the offering that you’ve presented, imagines immediately forward to 2120. And then, of course, ends on this idea, it’s so much even more vast than that, and that there is so much more to say. So thank you, Sam, thank you Chase so much for taking us on this journey, for bringing these collective of voices together. And for taking us into a future that might look a bit different than the one that we’re in now.

Chase Joynt 30:10
Thanks Syrus

Samantha Curley 30:11
Yeah, thank you so much.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware 30:13
All right, everyone, thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to like, follow, subscribe, and of course share. No Future No Cry is a collaborative production of Visitor Media and 221A, a nonprofit organization that works with artists and designers to research and develop cultural, ecological and social infrastructure based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Original Music and Sound Design by Dominic Bonelli, Podcast Production by Krish Dineshkumar, Production Management by Afua Mfodwo, Editorial and Creative Production by aeryka jourdaine hollis o’neil and a special thank you to New Sound Production Music Studio for their recording services, to Sean O’Neill and Anni Spadafora from Visitor Media and to Tao Fei from 221A.