On the irreducible intelligence of the living world, and what hope means

The intelligence we are talking about is not abstract. It is the river reading the weather before the forecast does. It is the mycorrhizal network beneath a forest floor redistributing nutrients to the trees that need them most. It is the wild bee in Piaroa cosmology who governs the balance between species: you feed her, she sends the boars. This is not metaphor. It is a functioning knowledge system, refined over millennia, that Western modernity largely chose to ignore.

We call it irreducible because it cannot be separated from the living systems that carry it. It is not stored in a server or a textbook. It lives in the body of the river, in the seasonal rhythm of the soil, in the breath of the person who has spent a lifetime paying attention to the wind. It is situated everywhere, but it requires presence to access. You have to slow down. You have to be there.

We call it irreducible because it cannot be separated from the living systems that carry it.

For our work Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream, we placed handcrafted sensing objects by the River Thames to listen to wind, birdsong, tidal movement, and shifting light. AI translates those signals into poetic weatherlore, but the important thing is the reversal: instead of humans prompting the machine, the river prompts us. It says, look up. It says, the tide is turning. It says, you already know this if you stop and listen.

That is where hope lives for us. Not in a grand solution or a technological breakthrough, but in the recognition that the intelligence we need to navigate what is coming has always been here. It predates us. It will outlast us. Our task is not to invent it but to remember how to participate in it. A hopeful future, for us, is one where that participation becomes central to how we live, make, and relate to each other and to the more-than-human world.

That is where hope lives for us. Not in a grand solution or a technological breakthrough, but in the recognition that the intelligence we need to navigate what is coming has always been here.

On misremembering the smartphone, and what hope lives in devotional objects

In the Weltmuseum's permanent collection there is an obsidian mirror. It is a divination tool: you gaze into a dark, reflective surface to commune with forces beyond yourself. When we saw it, we immediately thought of the smartphone.

Consider the parallels. A smooth, dark slab of glass. Prolonged gazing. Communion with an entity that resides in something called "the cloud." The language we use for our own technology is already saturated with the spiritual: we speak of clouds, of streams, of feeds, of followers. We just don't notice it because we are inside the myth.

The language we use for our own technology is already saturated with the spiritual: we speak of clouds, of streams, of feeds, of followers.

In Relics of Abundance, our descendants have excavated smartphones and, lacking context, have interpreted them as instruments of divination. They are not entirely wrong. What they have misremembered is not the function but the intention. They assume the gazing was contemplative. In reality, it was the opposite: a stream of micro-distractions designed to hold attention in service of the Market.

But here is where something hopeful emerges from the misremembering. The obsidian mirror is a surface that gives you back yourself. You project onto it. You sit with the blankness. The smartphone, by contrast, is a surface that takes you away from yourself, constantly, deliberately, by design. The gap between those two objects is the gap between contemplation and consumption.

What if the misremembering contains a kind of instruction? What if a future relationship with such a device could be closer to the obsidian mirror than the smartphone? A technology that invites reflection rather than reaction. A dark surface that holds space instead of filling it. We are not proposing this as a product. We are proposing it as a question, an invitation.

What if a future relationship with such a device could be closer to the obsidian mirror than the smartphone?

On the collective myth, and the urgency of forging it now

In the exhibition's opening blurb, we write: "The present is never complete. The Craftocene is our chance to imagine different ways of being, the writing of a collective myth that we shape together."

We use the word myth deliberately. Not as a synonym for falsehood, but in its original sense: a shared story that organises how a culture understands its place in the world. Every civilisation runs on myth. The myth of our era is the Market: the belief that growth is infinite, that progress moves in one direction, that the value of a thing is determined by its price. This myth has been extraordinarily powerful. It has also brought us to the edge of ecological collapse.

When a myth stops working, you do not get to live in a comfortable pause while a new one is written.

The urgency is simple. When a myth stops working, you do not get to live in a comfortable pause while a new one is written. The old story frays around you while you are still inside it. That is where we are now. The supply chains are stuttering. The seasons are shifting. The systems that underwrote the myth of infinite growth are showing their limits. But we have not yet replaced the story. We are between myths, and that is a dangerous and fertile place to be.

The Craftocene exhibition at the Weltmuseum gathers three works that each attempt a fragment of this new myth. Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream listens to the intelligence of a living river and asks us to attune. Refuge for Resurgence seats humans alongside foxes, ravens, and mushrooms at a shared table, proposing a new contract of kinship. Relics of Abundance looks back at our present through the eyes of descendants and asks what our worship of the Market will look like from the outside, once the spell has broken.

None of these works claim to be the myth. They are contributions to it. Fragments, gestures, openings. We believe the new story will not be authored by any single voice. It will be woven from many hands, many traditions, many ways of knowing. Some of those ways are ancient. Some are emerging. The Weltmuseum's collection holds objects that carry weatherlore, multispecies reciprocity, and ecological reverence stretching back centuries. Our speculative objects sit alongside them because the myth we need will draw from both the very old and the not yet.

We believe the new story will not be authored by any single voice. It will be woven from many hands, many traditions, many ways of knowing. Some of those ways are ancient. Some are emerging.

The urgency is not about panic. It is about timing. Myths are not written after the fact. They are written in the middle of things, when the ground is uncertain and people are reaching for new stories to hold onto. That is now. The question is not whether a new myth will emerge. It is whether we will participate in shaping it, or simply inherit whatever story fills the vacuum.