[MUSIC PLAYING]
PROFESSOR: Fantastic.
All right, so here we are on this gorgeous day James.
I hope you appreciate the weather.
JAMES LEONARD: I do.
PROFESSOR: And so let's just start by you just
introducing yourself, a little bit about your background,
and how you came to be here today.
JAMES LEONARD: My name is James Leonard.
And I am an artist.
And I live and work in Brooklyn, New York,
but I'm back up here in the greater Boston area with my current art work,
the Tent of Casually Observed Phenologies.
Which is a, for lack of a perfect term, it's
what I think people would call a performance installation.
And this is a piece that was begun back in February of this year, 2015.
When I was an artist in residence at the Boston
Center for the Arts for four months, as part
of their program of trying to encourage and foster
the emergence of new artworks that are socially engaged artworks.
PROFESSOR: My original inspiration for this whole prediction,
prediction x course, now was so that the public would really
understand what's behind climate change simulations,
and that they would take seriously the work that's being done.
And that they would think about their future much more reflectively.
And that they wouldn't kind of dismiss these predictions as uncertain
when they hear the word uncertainty.
And then what resonated so much with me about your work and your project
is that you are also, I think, trying to get the public
to think more about the future and divination traditions and climate
change.
And I'm just curious if you can tell us again a little bit more
about how the creation of the tent and the research that you
did for this project relates to the climate change issue.
JAMES LEONARD: The research for me has really been a process of discovery.
Like, and I'm coming at this very much as an artist and a humanist.
As opposed to a scientist or an engineer, and saying aha,
I have a clear path.
And I may be actually giving scientists, like putting them
too much on the, I don't know, on the peg,
saying that you guys must know what you're after when you start.
Because maybe you guys begin with questions too.
Maybe that's it's called research overall.
And for me, the first question that, as well as
working on another piece of media that was,
or another performance piece where I was shaving
a boat away into a sea of shavings.
And this was in part a response to the Arctic melt of 2012, which was one of,
it's the largest on record that we've ever experienced.
And trying to relate to my own sort of visceral emotions about that sense of--
the impermanence that that showed.
The massive scale of change.
And it came to me sort of as a dreamlike image, this guy shaving
a boat out from underneath himself.
And so while I was working on that, I was
realizing that I was working a lot in my relationship
to the past and the present.
And somewhere along the way I was thinking about the future.
And I think it started as a very cynical and naive moment, where I said,
well if we're not going to listen to climate scientists
we might as well be listening to fortune tellers.
And at that point I had a very, very different relationship
to divination than I do now.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I've spent
a lot of time actually working with diviners
of a number of different traditions.
Doing artworks about impermanence.
Doing artworks about my relationship to try to understand divination.
And this side journey has taken me into territory
where I'm now rethinking a lot of my own original assumptions
about divination as something that--
I know I held what feels to me sometimes in vernacular conversation with friends
and colleagues, seems to be sort of a stereotype of,
well divination is protoscience.
It's science that isn't quite right yet.
And when you actually get computers to tell you the answer
and run simulations for you, you don't need it anymore.
Or when you have an accurate scientific theory, you don't need it anymore.
And instead I've started seeing it as a cultural practice.
Having now experienced it both as a diviner.
I'm giving readings inside of the tent about climate change.
And experiencing numerous readings myself, receiving readings.
PROFESSOR: And that was part of your research process--
JAMES LEONARD: That was part of my research process.
Very much to try out.
Starting with the store front fortune tellers,
and then going into more traditional religious and cultural spaces
that took a long time to get into.
They're fairly closed communities.
A reading is made up of several things, several components.
There's a diviner in the querent, which is
the person who does the reading and the person who asked the question.
And the reading itself begins usually with a question or a concern,
something that has been brought.
And then there is often a tool in between
that will be your method of divination.
Sometimes that's an internal method in some cases like the people
who are members of the spiritualist church will conduct seances.
And so their method of divination is happening from visions and things
happening within their head.
PROFESSOR: Yeah we talk about that a lot in the course.
About all the different kinds of processes that people use.
And that some people use random processes in nature.
Some people take the more human spiritual approach.
And some people use some kind of official randomizing influence,
like a tarot deck--
JAMES LEONARD: Like a tarot deck
PROFESSOR: or stones.
JAMES LEONARD: Or the I Ching Like flipping quarters to do the I Ching
or casting the yarrow sticks.
PROFESSOR: So did you try all of those?
JAMES LEONARD: I haven't tried all of them.
And there's several hundred existing different methods of divination.
Some of which have been sort of lost to history, but there are echoes of them.
There's Lore of them.
And I've found that that's sort of a side interest that I've developed.
Is just sort of the flavor.
There's something about it that--
Very quickly as I was just even exploring,
let's say, the Wikipedia entry on all the methods of divination.
It's so long and half the time it reads like something
from the 1960s conceptual performance art.
That for me really moved me.
Like divination by dripping wax.
Divination by the tracks of beetles.
Divination by laughter.
But the thing that all of these divinatory experiences that I've had,
when they function well have had in common,
is that they create a space that does a couple of things.
It creates a space that opens up the mind for decision making.
It's not a substitute for freewill.
That's one of the first mistakes that I think a lot of modern people
who are unexperienced in divination come to it with.
PROFESSOR: You mean that it's not a way to see a preordained future.
JAMES LEONARD: It's also not a way to get a yes or no answer.
PROFESSOR: Right, and you know what I have experienced by being in your tent
and talking with you, is that there really
is this aspect of getting people to think about their alternatives,
and about possible futures, and about what they know about their own future.
And you were telling me earlier that part of the role of the diviner
is to get the querent to really talk and think openly, and to be in a space
where they can really kind of have this experience where
they're focused on their own future.
And where they sort of can see their world around them, but not really.
And I think that the space that you made definitely accomplishes that.
JAMES LEONARD: And this leads us to what the other main function that I've
seen in any of the successful divinatory experiences that I've had is.
Which is, we're all taking in so much information.
By the time you're 35, 40, 50 years old, you have decades of life experience.
If you're an active participant in the information
age, and you've read hundreds of thousands of words.
You've experienced maybe hundreds of academic theses
and takes on something, if you're an expert in your field.
And how do you put all those thoughts in order.
But what ends up happening, and I believe we've used this term before,
that divination can function almost like as a comb for all of those thoughts.
All that information that you've taken in.
It's a way to sort of, if you think about the way a comb can
move through hair, and lay it into line and give it shape.
It's a way to take these hundreds of thousands of different ideas
and start finding the natural shape within it.
PROFESSOR: You know, there's a story that David Carrasco who
is an expert on Mesoamerican cultures told us.
I don't know whether we had heard this story already
when I met you the first time.
But he talks about the gods being annoyed with the humans.
That the humans on Earth were learning too much
about the future and about the world, and that they took a sort of,
a philosophical mirror.
And that they breathed on the mirror to kind of fog up the view
that the humans have.
But that nature, around the humans, still
has all these hints about the future and what's going on.
And that a lot of the divinatory practices in Mesoamerica
have a lot to do with nature and natural phenomena.
And the idea is that they're trying to see past this fog.
And it's the same kind of thing you're talking about.
About the periphery about.
That there's information there that people just don't normally
access in their everyday lives.
And they're sort of trying to find a way to access that information.
And you know you might think that I, as a scientist, you know,
wouldn't want to think about the world that way.
But I think that there are a lot of different ways
to think about the world.
And what you've taught me, really in talking to you,
is that just like you said, you know that you--
We were talking about climate change a minute ago,
and you said, you know that you thought, well we might as well just
listen to fortune tellers.
And when I started working on this course.
I think that I was probably pretty biased against this kind of, well
just sort of human reflection.
And what can you learn about the future from human reflection.
And I've really come to see that I don't think you can predict the climate 100
years from now by human reflection.
But I think you can get people to think about their future.
And think about choices.
And so I'm curious just to come back for a minute to climate change,
how has the reaction been to this tent and how do you
feel you're doing in getting people to think
about the future and their own futures with respect to the climate also?
JAMES LEONARD: Well just two days ago we were exhibiting
the piece in the south end of Boston.
And I was just finishing up a reading and I overheard somebody
outside who was--
We have a little sign that sits out in front
of the piece that lets people know sort of the general house rules, you know.
Sort of, please be respectful if we're engaged.
And this is what we're doing.
And this is what the piece is called.
So it sort of helps put people in the right state,
and have some instruction for how to approach it.
And there was somebody who just sort of out loud
said, why would I talk to a diviner about climate change?
And then somebody else said, well why don't you go ask him and find out.
PROFESSOR: All right that's a perfect way to put the question.
JAMES LEONARD: The short of it is, this gentleman walked away not fully
convinced that tarot works, doesn't work.
But instead that it made him look at everything that he has already
taken in himself about climate change.
Some of the grim prophecies, some of the hopeful stuff, some of the stuff that
says don't look at it ignore it.
And juggle it just differently in his head for the afternoon.
And it got him thinking about it.
And he even remarked that, sort of, as he left that while
that this is a great tool.
Whether he's going to use tarot or not.
But like just even this way of looking at this problem, to start digesting it.
Because I think that's one of the things that I find why
I want to make art about the problem.
Is it's so huge.
It's so overwhelming.
I don't know--
I don't even know about my fellow man.
Just for myself, how do I bite this off?
PROFESSOR: I know people who will be part of the course later,
who do the climate change simulations and who do climate policy
research and all of this.
And they also feel overwhelmed.
And I actually think that what you're doing
is a very important complement to making people sort of take the perspective.
And look at the context of all of the different kinds of predictions
about climate.
Most of which are not good if we don't do anything.
But that giving them a sense that there are choices,
and that they can think about the choices.
And maybe they can even learn something about the choices
from these somewhat time tested or ancient techniques.
You know, from talking to a lot of people about climate change,
have you gotten a sense of whether people respond better
to maybe a positive message or a negative message?
And how are you thinking more personally about it makes a difference?
JAMES LEONARD: I think it's actually the fact that divination is a personalized
story.
Since you are the querent and you are starting the story off with a question.
There's an instant level of investment there.
And it's tailored to you.
And I think that engages people differently.
That personalize it.
And sometimes people are actually just even looking for affirmation.
But they don't want just a pat on the shoulder.
They want some sort of external medium.
And this comes around to one more third major benefit
that I've experienced, myself.
PROFESSOR: Benefit of divination.
JAMES LEONARD: Divination as a cultural practice,
whether it's connected to a spiritual practice or not.
Is how it helps us in a non-pharmaceutical way
deal with chronic anxiety.
Like chronic reality based anxiety.
And there are times where I find myself saying loss is going to happen,
but it doesn't need to be absolute loss.
That even in and of itself helps people make some sense.
PROFESSOR: Cause people think about what that means.
JAMES LEONARD: And it helps sort of either step down expectations
or get people more on a realistic plane.
That, OK, it can't be business as usual anymore.
But where do we go?
PROFESSOR: It's been absolutely fantastic.
And you've opened the eyes of a scientist.
[MUSIC PLAYING]