Reports from the Kyiv Emerge Gathering
Ideas becoming flesh
I’ve just returned from The Emerge Gathering and Metamodern Arts Festival in Kyiv Ukraine, where a group of luminaries got together to answer the big question: ‘What on earth will emerge next?’.
To begin with let us depart from the prosaic. Close your eyes, then breath. Listen to what emerges in this article, without any agenda in particular …
Already you have a taste. Meta-narratives and Mindfulness. Talking about how to talk about … crisis, collapse, and opportunity.
What kind of a world is emerging? And why will it emerge here in Kyiv? Are we heading over a cliff? Or can we create the next utopia? How do we manage machine intelligence and expand human intelligence? What kind of future emergence is possible? And why Kyiv?
Thomas Bjorkman explains: “For inspiration and collective sense-making Kyiv is in many ways a frontier land. Systems change always starts at the periphery, not at the centre of a system”.
I agree with Thomas: the future belongs not to Paris, London, and Berlin but to the wild east, frontier places like Kyiv. Kyiv is not yet gentrified and therefore has the potential for real poetry.
There is something dreamlike and cinematic about this city that was once called Kiev: a…
