Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Nora Bateson.
Nora Bateson, is an award-winning filmmaker, research designer, writer, educator, and international lecturer, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute based in Sweden. She is the creator of the Warm Data theory and practices. Nora’s work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems.
She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father Gregory Bateson.
Her first book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, released by Triarchy Press, UK, 2016 is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity.
In her latest second book Combining, Nora invites us into an ecology of communication where nothing stands alone, and every action sets off a chain of incalculable consequences. She challenges conventional fixes for our problems, highlighting the need to tackle issues at multiple levels, understand interdependence, and embrace ambiguity.
She was the recipient of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity in 2019.
If you’re already familiar with Nora’s work, you already know this conversation will go in surprising and refreshing places. And if this is your first time hearing her, you’re in for something special. Nora brings such a unique blend of the brainy and the embodied—weaving together concepts from systems thinking, ecology, and biology to art, poetry, and philosophy. I hear so many people talk about the importance of systems thinking and systems change, but Nora really brings these ideas to life.
Her perspective is radical in the best way. Whenever I hear her speak, or read her words, I’m gently jostled out of some pattern of perception, thought, or communication I didn’t even realize I was holding onto.
This is nowhere more evident than in her latest book, Combining. It’s a book that defies a single genre, featuring essays, poems, artworks, and hybrid-genre texts, exploring communication as an ecology. This notion is applied at micro and macro scales, and everything in-between, from interpersonal communication in our daily lives to the overwhelm of the Polycrisis.
As a lover of words, I also delight in the terms Nora has coined, and think you’ll find powerful resonances in them as well. We touch on some of these in the conversation, but of course you’ll find deeper explanations in the book—so be sure to pick up your copy at the link in the description or wherever you buy books. I see these words not only as sensemaking aids, but also representative of Nora’s playful relationship with default systems.
This conversation covers way more than I can do any justice to with a quick recap, so instead of saying any more I’ll leave you with this bit from the book description to give you a sense of what awaits you in the episode:
Combining is an invitation to nurture genuine connections and navigate a world brimming with “Warm Data” – the interrelationships that integrate elements of every complex system. The book calls on us to shed our linear thinking and embrace “Aphanipoiesis” – the unseen ways in which life comes together to foster vitality and propel evolution. In Combining, love, humor, curiosity, and vulnerability entwine amidst the trials of a world in flux. As we face the Polycrisis, Nora Bateson urges us to swerve from the traditional paths and to dismantle the illusions of fitting in. She beckons us to step into a world where learning, uncutness, and readiness converge, promising both revelation and revolution.
Pick up your copy of Combining here, or wherever you buy books.
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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lia Halloran & Kip Thorne, Cherie Hu, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, and more. Here is another recent episode with avant-garde instigator Al Hassan Elwan:
"Who Can You Be When You Are With Me?"—Warm Data and 'Combining' with Nora Bateson | Urgent Futures #27