Planet Ivy recently caught up with futurist, techno optimist and filmmaker Jason Silva
“LA is beautiful but it lacks the jarring, juxtaposition that makes New York more dynamic… It’s easy to get to Europe from here as it is to get to the west coast. It’s a wonderful, amazing, exuberant, creative place. Even though the subway is cramped and the infrastructure is old, people want to live in this nexus.” Even when answering the simple question of where he lives, Jason Silva certainly has a way with words.
Silva, who was born in Venezuela, moved to the US to study philosophy at the University of Miami. He went on to work for Al Gore’s TV network in LA for five years before settling in New York. Talking about technology and its application in the modern world, it is quickly apparent that Silva, who is currently collaborating with Russian Standard Vodka, feels very optimistic about man and machine co-existing, though at times it feels like he struggles to express the multitude of thoughts, images and ideas in his mind with the spoken word, despite his aptitude for it.
“I think that it’s a case of bandwidth anxiety where we have technology which is like HD video and we’re trying to pump it through humans who operate on a 56k modem,” he says. We’re struggling with competing signals and capacities and it’s a challenge of our age. But technology sprouts from the human mind. Jet engines and skyscrapers are just condensation of human imagination, where the human desire manifests itself. Kevin Kelly from Wired magazine said that technology and nature are very much two sides of the same coin.”
If you watch videos of his speeches, like the one from the 2012 TED conference, or his short weekly videos on YouTube called Shots of Awe, you’ll be working hard to assimilate the ideas and concepts that Silva throws at you. This is especially the case with the YouTube videos which feel like a double espresso shot directly into your brain. For Silva, the videos are a perfect way of letting people into his mind to show them the imagery that corresponded with his stream of consciousness.
When we talk about where his intensity and energy comes from, he muses: “[It’s from] an insatiable curiosity and desire for transcendent experiences. For example, this smart phone we’re using now, this thing made of plastic and metal can send my thoughts thousands of miles across oceans instantly. It’s a tangible thing but it’s also metaphysical because I can’t possibly understand the technology behind it.”
I sense an opportunity to discover a little more about his private life, to gain a better perspective of the man today, but when I ask if he had a religious upbringing, he replies: “The answer is… no. I grew up in a secular and liberal household in Venezuela. My mother was an artist, a teacher and a poet. My environment was one of art and ideas in which we talked about film and theatre and human condition. My mother’s family were Jewish but we were about as Jewish as Woody Allen!”
However, Silva isn’t dismissive of religion, something he considers to be a social technology in its own right. He believes that it evolved as a means to mediate people’s encounters with the transcendent, that it offered a map for people to connect with something larger than themselves and created social cohesion and a moral compass. However, it is a technology that he feels needs an upgrade, just like one would upgrade the iOS on their iPhone.
I feel compelled to ask if he has had any psychedelic experiences, which might account for the way he views the world. “In terms of LSD or magic mushrooms, no I haven’t tried those. But I think we have psychedelic experiences every day. The definition of psychedelic means to manifest the mind and there is a train of thought that our man-made world is the ‘literalisation’ of the psychedelic dream. It doesn’t matter if it’s chemical agents interfacing with neurones in the brain or a shot of vodka, or fasting for 10 days, or even falling in love. Experience is psychedelic and it’s what separates us from the animals.” Not exactly an answer that would have shocked Hunter S. Thompson,
So how does he explain his energy on stage and on video? “I’m big on my sleep and recovery times. People see me when I’m at my most energetic but I definitely have my recharge time. But that energy comes from this existential agitation like Neo in the Matrix: with a splinter in his mind. That energy is my angst and it’s my itch being scratched. I’ve found my outlet in a very public way and people like it because they can resonate with it. I’m basically working through my obsessions on stage and in my videos.”
When considering his own influences, he is a huge fan of fellow futurists and philosophers Ray Kurzweil and Erik Davis, the author of the book Technosis, who Silva considers to be ‘”just brilliant”. And when he isn’t digging at the splinter in his mind, Silva prefers to unwind at the cinema which is “the closest thing to religious ecstasy that I can find.” He continues: “I like immersive experiences that envelop me, that are so engrossing and bewitching that they push aside all other thoughts. I like experiences that put me in the now and arrest time, like making love to a beautiful woman, or having an amazing cocktail with friends, or attending a TED conference or seeing Gravity on IMAX 3D.”
These days Jason Silva is a very busy man. In addition to his public speaking and Shots of Awe videos on YouTube, AOL has recently commissioned a new series which aired on 1st November called The Future of Us, which explores biotechnology and nanotechnology, amongst other technological discoveries. He has also helped launch Russian Standard Vodka’s new advertising campaign at an event in the Science Museum in London. No wonder he’s optimistic about the future.
Jason Silva is the new Russian Standard Vodka collaborator, see the full story here and here
