Human Generated: VESA

This is Human Generated

This is an interpretation of VESA’s appearance on the Human Generated podcast by Omid Honari. The two met during a day of keynote speeches at the Mohammed Bin Rashid library, where as it turns out, both of their topics touched on not only art and its implications, but also spirituality.
It was no wonder that when VESA and Omid sat down to record this podcast, the deeper topics were soon elaborated on.

Watch the conversation on Youtube
Watch it on Spotify

Why read further ( or return)?
Breakdown, links and illustrations:

The conversation took place in late May when Dubai was plunging into the hot temperatures. Vesa told that as a 44-year-old, the elapsing winter was the first where he had enjoyed consistent warm weather, being natively from Finland and having lived in the UK for several years.
‘There’s a lot of cold trauma still to be purged’, he said.
Omid relayed a piece of advice he heard as a boy that coping with cold is much easier than coping with heat, since you always have the option of adding a layer of clothing, but there is only so much you can remove. This advice also speaks to how personal our relationship with the weather and our immediate surroundings is. We rationalize our emotions towards it via stories and these pieces of advice that we tell each other.

VESA and Omid met at the Mohammed bin Rashid Library in early 2023, where they both were speaking.

New Horizons

To delve right into the mouth of the beast, Omid poses an interesting proposition of the constellation of new technologies, NFTs, metaverse and the whole Web3 being at odds with the creative arts as we know it.
‘Most respectfully, I disagree with that, VESA starts.
VESA explains that one of the concepts that governs how he views art, and life itself, is Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory. This theory helps to see yourself, your contribution, philosophies, and beliefs as functional parts of the elaborate whole. This way of approaching art is not taught in colleges and universities, where most art history begins or at least emphasises the post-modern period without studying the roots of why humans began creating art in the first place, namely cave painting and body painting.
With a fractionalized outlook on art, new technologies can feel like a jarring, disjointed note in the melody of human creativity, whereas from the Integral point of view, these are tools that if utilized to their utmost potential, will remove the old…