FutureEverything is excited to be a part of the Spring 2025 Conference: Spirituality and the Arts, hosted by Harvard’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality. Taking place April 23-26, the conference explores how spirituality manifests through artistic expression, drawing insights from of scholars, spiritual practitioners, artists, and performers.

In our session with Professor Keith Williams, we will explore how dominant extractive uses of technology result in “bypassing” meaningful interspecies communication while highlighting art-technology practices that reconnect us with the sacred web of life from which much of humanity is estranged. What possibilities does technology bring for co-creation with the more-than-human? How can tech be used to honor and remember the spiritual beings that also animate and influence the world around us? And how can we draw on the power of place in all of this?

The sixth extinction entails the loss of more-than-human (MTH) relationships that compose our collective identities. Interspecies communication is one way to reconnect. Yet, the dominant scientific approach uses technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence) which are intrinsically encoded with extractive and abstractive capitalist colonialist logics. This reinforces the severing of relations with our MTH kin.

In response, we highlight art-technology practices that resist extraction, foregrounding the sacred and healing MTH relations. As a site of metaphoric and intuitive open exploration, art can help to reorient and reconnect humanity with the sacred web of life from which much of humanity is estranged.

‘Approaches to interspecies communication: Between the synthetic sacred and the technological bypass’ will take place on Friday, April 25th at 19:30pm GMT.

Register for this online session by clicking the link below.