When I began to sketch out the various components of Nature Directed, they serendipitously formed an alien-like creature which had a bit of magic about it. From here, artist Yi Zhen Leong made an illustration giving shape to the figure – part creature, part ecosystem, part FutureEverything diagram – something we now lovingly refer to, internally, as the Elder Sprout. Taken together, the various dimensions of the model, or Elder Sprout, form a guide with which to begin the work of re-orienting ourselves and our organisation.
Only by doing this work, can we really start to address our mission – to imagine and catalyse just relations with the technologies that increasingly pervade our lives and shape our relations, socially, ecologically, economically and politically. We envisage future technologies – their material infrastructures, lifecycles and use – being guided by more-than-human intelligences, built through reciprocal flows and bound in relations across bodies, time and place.
After over a year of research and development, we’re now at a point where we can formally roll out our model and begin the deeper work of aligning our approach to tech justice with emerging ideas in multispecies justice. I’ll very briefly touch on some of the key aspects of this emerging model. We’ll unpack them, and the ideas and decisions that underpin them here on the FutureEverything website on the FutureEverything website over the coming months.
As the Nature Directed illustration points to, updating our mission and vision have been essential to this process, doing a Theory of Change has been a key part of this. The model itself is framed by three core values which guide everything we do – the importance of identifying the values that orient us is something we’ve learned from Odawa Ashinabee attorney, Ariel Clark, Our values, kinship, leadership, and accountability are all phrased as doing words so that they are not abstract, I encourage you to take a look at these, by clicking the link HERE.
Our Nature Directed protocols set out the rules of engagement, the commitments we are making and how these are enacted throughout the organisation and Board. The protocols are a kind of sub-layer to the changes we’ve made to our Articles of Association as part of bringing the Nature Director on to FutureEverything’s board. Fundamentally, the appointment of a Nature Director, is to bring independence and accountability to this work. The Nature Director will be supported in their role by a network of technology advisors. This is where animate Nature meets western legal rights systems with all the tensions (and opportunities) this brings. In our model, responsibilities are arguably as important as “rights”. The legally appointed Nature Director is not solely responsible for holding the model, it’s devised so that responsibility is distributed across the organisation and Board. Our Declaration of Responsibilities, is both an organisational practice and device which connects all of this to our creative programme – and therefore to our vision and mission for just relations with technology.
However, these actions would be nothing without attunement. So much of this work is not really possible without practicing attunement with more-than-human lifeworlds, and doing it over and over again. It’s only really here that we can start to get to grips with and begin to build our understanding and reverence for how nature “speaks itself”, and explore how the more-than-human participates in our model, rather than just being represented. We are experimenting with integrating a repertoire of practices within our curatorial work flows, team processes and governance. Likewise, our projects will engage with how technologies both enable and obfuscate attunement. Finally, our principles help orientate how we devise and enact our practices of attunement, as well as the wider model itself.
The model we’ve devised is flexible so that we can keep iterating; we know this is still only the beginning. Our commitment is not to rush to solutions but instead to use our model as a framework for how we learn to ethically navigate the problems. This is part of the politics of addressing the polycrisis and of bringing technology into “right relation” with ecology.
This has been a whistlestop introduction to our model and why we are using it, it’s the tip of the iceberg – there’s so much more to say, including unpacking what we mean by “Nature”. Please stick with us for the journey or follow us on Instagram for more updates!
