Ep31 Positive Future Projection - Rob Hopkins

Listen to the episode here

Luke 00:00:07  Welcome to another episode of the Improv Pod podcast. My guest today is Rob Hopkins. Could you tell me a bit about yourself? What is it you do?

Rob 00:00:15  I'm Rob Hopkins, I'm a father. I'm one of the people who started the Transition Town movement, which is now active in about 50 different countries. For a long time, my work has been around supporting this international movement of communities who are trying to respond to climate change from the bottom up, from a community scale. More recently, my work has been about the need for the radical imagination. So I write books, I do trainings, I do a podcast as well called From What If to What Next? And then I'm also involved in some projects in the town. I live in Totnes.

Luke 00:00:54  So I'm going to play a piece of music, and I want you to tell me what it makes you think of. That means anything that comes into your mind. Don't overanalyze it too much, okay? It's all, completely improvised So what did you think of that?

Rob 00:02:15  It made me think about.

Rob 00:02:18  And it's probably partly influenced by where we are and the setting in. In a way, it reminded me of going for a walk on Dartmoor. You go through places where you're very much in the dark and the shade and the overgrown sort of wild spaces, and then you come up out of those spaces into those big, vast, kind of open areas where you can see for miles and miles. So it felt like passing through a series of landscapes to me, from spaces that were very open and where you could see the skylarks, and then you went right down into places with lots of rocks and trees passing through different times of day, different kinds of weather, different kinds of environments.

Speaker 3 00:03:06  So I'd like you.

Luke 00:03:07  To tell me a story of some kind. And then I'm going to improvise a soundtrack.

Rob 00:03:12  So at the moment, I'm just starting work on writing a new book, which is all about time and time travel as a tool for activists, and how it can really help people who are trying to change things if they can be more fluid in how they approach time and how they think about time.

Rob 00:03:31  So I'm going to tell you a story from the past, and I'm going to tell you a story from the future, which I imagine is the first time somebody has done that on this podcast. But it'll make sense. So I'm very involved with a project in Totnes, which is called the Atmos Project. If you've ever been to Totnes on the train, you arrive at the train station and next to it is a big old milk factory. Big green buildings covered in graffiti which is all falling apart and that used to be the biggest employer in the town until 2007. And then all the jobs were lost and it closed down. And there's been a community campaign ever since then to buy the site. The volunteers did an amazing consultation in a town of 9000 people, consulted 4000 people for what should happen. Their master planned what should happen there did a referendum in 2016 for whether it should go ahead. 86% of people voted yes, that it should. And then in 2020, we were a day away from signing the contract to buy the site after months of negotiation.

Rob 00:04:31  And they told us we've sold it to somebody else, we've sold it to a glue company from Essex. And so from that stage on, we've been in a big campaign to get the site back again. I had had the great Brian Eno as a guest on my podcast a few months before, and I woke up one morning with this idea in my head, which was that he created a thing called 77 million paintings, which was a software generated thing that would create these projected light pieces of art, you would do them in a gallery. The idea was that they were always changing. So the picture that you were looking at in that moment, nobody would ever see again, no one has ever seen before. It was a unique piece of art. So I thought, what would it be like if we projected that onto the buildings on the factory as a sort of raising awareness celebration of Atmos things? So I sent him an email and I said, Brian, I've woken up with this idea and it's completely crazy.

Rob 00:05:27  He wrote it back in five minutes and said, fantastic, let's do that. And he composed a piece of music, especially for this event. The guy who was helping us to organize the actual projection of them. He knew people up in London who run the biggest projections company in London who said, oh, Brian, you know, Totnes, of course, whatever you need. And they lent us for nothing these two massive projectors, which I then found out, cost £125,000 each. And then we were projecting out the back of this van. It was during Covid. So in the end about two 300 people came. It was dark. We were projecting these beautiful light works onto the chimney, onto the roof of the building. This music that was playing for about 45 minutes, and it was like being in a sort of outdoor cathedral. It was just this very beautiful, very magical moment of community coming together around a dream that they have for what they want to happen in the future, mixed with a sort of an outrage at what has happened and the situation that they're in.

Rob 00:06:28  And this great artist has made them this offering of something for them to come together around to celebrate. My favourite was on that big chimney, which everybody who lives in Totnes will know, because you can see it from pretty much everywhere that we projected onto it, so that the chimney went completely white and then running down it in red letters, it said another world is possible.

Luke 00:06:48  Do you remember the soundtrack that Brian provided?

Rob 00:06:51  I remember some bits of it. A little bit unfair because I'm saying sound like Brian Eno. All I could say is that it was very sparse and very atmospheric.

Luke 00:07:01  I don't know if Brian. If he hears this, well, he'll be outraged.

Rob 00:07:05  I'm sure Brian will be deeply honoured if he were to listen to it. He's quite a humble, very positive kind of man.

Luke 00:07:12  So what I do is I break it down into sections. I think I'll start with the initial disappointment and then this sort of idea of what can we do about this? We're collectively building this experience. And then I'm going to go for my interpretation of what it might have been like.

Luke 00:07:27  There's several layers of imagination here. So you've experienced it. Now you're telling me the story then. Now I'm interpreting the story and playing my interpretation of it. It would be quite different to what you remember. Probably So what are your thoughts on that?

Rob 00:09:57  The first bit. The disappointment bit. I thought you captured that really beautifully. I'm writing this thing about time at the moment, and how, in theory, we all experience the same time. We all have 60s in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour and all that. And we all, in theory, it's all the same. But actually, of course, we have very different experiences of time. If our football team is winning, time passes much quicker than if they're losing. And for me, that experience of being there felt completely timeless. We could have been there for half an hour. We could have been there for about four hours. Because these visuals move so slowly but perceptibly. You can look away and you can see the changes.

Rob 00:10:35  I think you captured that really beautifully, and it gave me that feeling of being there when you really slow everything down, like how different that feels to how we normally experience life. Yeah.

Luke 00:10:47  I've listened to a bit of Brian Eno stuff. What I was thinking is getting into his mindset of taking a simple idea and then repeating it, but then just trying to evolve it in some way The.

Rob 00:10:58  Beginning really reminded me of the piece that he made. There were some beautiful flourishes you did in your bit, and his was much more pared back, almost like sparse.

Luke 00:11:13  Story number two, then.

Rob 00:11:14  Story number two involves stepping into the future. This project, we had the site taken away from us by some very dubious people, and they put in two terrible planning applications. Both of them got turned down and now they're appealing those. So there's a public inquiry that's going on at the moment. We as a community organisation are also represented in this inquiry. And then the inspector then has two weeks to make her decision.

Rob 00:11:41  So I imagine it's a day in February to somebody's house to open the email together. All those people who have worked so hard on this for 13, 14, 15 years of voluntary work and thousands of hours of community time. We have a cup of tea. Maybe someone brings a cake, and then we open the email together, and the email says that the inspector has decided to refuse the appeal. And so therefore, it then opens the ground for us to be able to move forward. The next stage for this project that the community designed, voted for, fought for. So it's that moment of receiving a piece of news. Are we about to have the most depressing morning of our lives, finding out that actually we've just wasted the last 15 years? Or are we about to have a moment where actually the world makes sense?

Luke 00:12:33  Something I haven't done before on the podcast is to make a soundtrack based on projection. So I'm going to go for a sort of massive uncertainty, and then this is going to morph into a sense of relief.

Luke 00:12:47  This is a good thing that's happened.

Rob 00:12:49  Things coming into alignment and feeling like, okay, this is good.

Luke 00:14:41  So what did you think of that?

Rob 00:14:43  Gorgeous. I just was reading recently. There's the novelist Don DeLillo. He wrote a book called underworld. And in the book he said longing on a large scale is what makes history, which I think is just beautiful. For me, there's something Thing very powerful about being able to have a piece of music that you can attach to something that you want to experience in the future. Part of the work I'm doing for this book, I interviewed these two researchers at the University of Plymouth who created this thing called Functional Imagery training, which is about the idea that if you want to make some sort of change in your life, like if you want to lose weight or whatever, they stopped smoking or something, that they work with you to create this very clear, imagined image of that already having taken place in a kind of multi-sensory way. What does that future taste like and smell like? And then what they find is that when you create an image like that, that it gives you something really powerful and dynamic to run towards.

Rob 00:15:41  It means that people make a lot of changes in their lives. So for me, I feel like actually having a piece of music that I can associate with what that point in the future is going to feel like will be a very powerful thing in terms of helping to manifest it.

Luke 00:15:57  Scientific research is going into.

Rob 00:15:58  Yeah, they use it with people in the military. They use it with SEOs. They use it with all kinds of people who want to improve their performance in what they do. But I think the way they talk about it is they ask people to close their eyes and imagine holding a lemon would feel the weight of the lemon and the coolness of the lemon and the texture of it, and then maybe you cut it and a bit goes in your eye and people kind of wince, because actually, when we imagine it's not just images, we imagine smells and tastes and experiences as well. So the more that we can attach to those images and make them really multi-sensory, then the more powerful that becomes.

Rob 00:16:34  So for me, there's a big role that music can play in helping us to really imagine the future and our ability to realize it and to step into it is that beautiful research where you take a group of people, half of them spend two weeks practicing a sequence of notes on a piano, and the other half aren't allowed to touch the piano. They just have to sit by it and imagine themselves playing that sequence of notes. And after two weeks, they're pretty much as good as each other, and people who imagine exercising a muscle can actually find quite a lot of improvement to that muscle just by imagining it. The human imagination is a very powerful thing.

Luke 00:17:07  Talk about the potential of music within this field of study. What are your thoughts on that?

Rob 00:17:13  So the first chapter that I'm writing in this book is all about Sun Ra, who was this incredible jazz musician in the 60s, 70s, 80s who told this crazy story about himself. He said, I'm not a human being. I'm actually an angel from Saturn.

Rob 00:17:27  The legend has it that when he traveled around Europe in the 1970s from America, he had a passport that said his name was Sun Ra and gave his place of birth as being Saturn. He had a big band when nobody else really had big bands anymore, and all of his music was about space and traveling through space because it was a different way of talking about black liberation. He was very hot on improvisation, but he always talked about it not as something that was just an abstract, airy fairy sort of thing. The improvisation was about precision and discipline, and a lot of what he talked about was about the impossible. And he said, we tried the possible and it failed. And now it's time to try the impossible. And so that's something that really underpins a lot of the work that I do. How do we bring the impossible alive? And music and improvisation is very powerful way of accessing the impossible, I think. There's a lovely quote about any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.

Rob 00:18:22  And so whenever I do workshops and talks, I always encourage people to be a lot more ridiculous in what they do. And music can bring that sort of free improvised like you've done now you've gone from nothing to having created something. It just pours out of you somehow. And being able to have music that we can attach to the future that we want. When I do talks, I was invited to close their eyes and imagine they're travelling to 2030, in our time machine, and that 2030 is the result. It's not utopia and it's not a dystopia. It's the result of us doing everything we could have possibly done. I do this project called Field Recordings from the future, where I go and record things that already sound like the future needs to sound like. And then I work with a guy called Kit who lived in Totnes, who does create sort of ambient electronic music, and then we put these recordings into these ambient music pieces. And his brief is that they should cultivate a nostalgia for the future into a different kind of a future.

Rob 00:19:16  Could we use smells? Can we somehow capture what the future might smell like and give people wafts of that? Can we find different ways to help people feel what it would be like? The more multi-sensory we make it, then the more we're able to create longing for it, I think.

Speaker 3 00:19:37  So what did.

Luke 00:19:38  You get out of this podcast?

Rob 00:19:40  I got to experience the joy of watching somebody create something spontaneously, which is just something that I love, whether it's painting or drawing or whatever. I just feel like that creative, imaginative spark is something so precious that the piece of music you played at the beginning. I'm sure pretty much everybody else who listened to it will have had a different mental picture while you were playing it. It might have been travelling through space or being at the bottom of the ocean, finding an undiscovered city. Or it might be a song about love and heartbreak or something. That ability of everybody to hear something and to come at it with new eyes, particularly in a world where we're spoon fed so much stuff.

Rob 00:20:23  So to actually have something where your imagination has to make up the story and there's no right answers because we get so used to here's a problem, Lucan. There's only one solution to it. And like when we're in school, we gather all the time. But actually life's not like that. And so I think there's something very freeing about here's a piece of music. What is it? What does it make you feel? What does it bring alive? I wonder when you do that and you're playing it, do you have a picture in your mind? You get to the end of it and think, yes, that was a submarine piece of music. And we were being attacked with torpedoes. And then the person who played it, who says it was about elephants making jam on a Thursday or something. Do you have a mental picture of it when you're doing it?

Luke 00:21:02  Sometimes a lot of it's blank. Weirdly, there's quite a lot of space and then something will pop into my head. But I'm also thinking in terms of the immediate future of where I'm going with a bit of technical stuff and a bit of thinking, oh, maybe I should make this more.

Luke 00:21:16  Maybe I can make it darker. I don't know, sometimes quite vague ideas of how to progress it. So what? I'll play a piece of music and I'll analyse my own thought process. It's just anything improvised. So just that when I started, it was pretty much nothing. It's like you're connecting to some other kind of thing, the otherness, I call it. And then whilst I was playing the dude I heard in my head, the better. Okay. I often hear things in my head before I play it kind of thing. Okay, and then I played that and then after that, an idea of being in some sort of dungeon. And the Baba was this light that was coming through and shining onto the wall sort of thing as a kind of hope.

Rob 00:22:21  Nice. It's like painting, but a dark over here and a bit of light over here. And if I put those two colors next to each other I know they'll, one will push the other one forward in the same way that an artist learns all those techniques and abilities in like the Expressionists would know, if I put a lime green next to whatever, it creates a sense of unease and monks kind of paint those very sort of harrowing paintings of grief and all that sort of stuff.

Rob 00:22:49  But using the colors, you're able to evoke mood. You're able to think, oh, I want to feel like this. I'll go there because you have the palate, the musical experience, to have that palate at your fingertips, as it were.

Luke 00:23:06  So your podcast, how can people find it again?

Rob 00:23:08  So you can either find it on Spotify or all those places it's called from what if to what next? Sometimes people subscribe for just £3 a month. That Patreon.com slash from what if to what next? And then you get our bonus Ministry of Imagination episodes and other things too. So every episode is based on a different what if question, and it's a lot of fun.

Luke 00:23:30  Hey, thank you very much for being on the podcast.

Rob 00:23:32  My pleasure. Thank you. It's been an honor to be here.

Speaker 3 00:23:34  Thank you.

Luke 00:23:35  Join us next week for another episode of Improv Pod. Thanks for listening. Would you like to be a guest on this podcast? If you're into telling stories that inspire improvised music and exploring our relationship to music, then please get in touch.

Luke 00:23:51  Email guest at Limpopo. Com or send a message via the Improv Pod Instagram page.