From Transformational Festival to Whitehead Conference and Back Again

On Wednesday I’ll board a jet-powered steel tube and sky-sail to Europe for a few weeks. I land in Madrid, Spain where I’ll immediately catch a shuttle to drive along the southern side of the Sierra de Gredos mountains across the boarder to the small town of Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal, just north of which is the permanent site of the Boom Festival.

At Boom I’ll give a talk titled “Earth and the Human Mission: Love and Death in the Gaianthropocene.” Here’s a prologue for the talk I recorded a few days ago (transcript here):

My prior experience of such festivals (e.g., Burning Man, Symbiosis) has been as a kind of social sculpture, an opportunity to engage in serious play under the assumption that life is cosmic art and we are its makers. We’ll see how all the psytrance at Boom suits me…

Next I’m off on another sky-tube to Munich, where the Munich School of Philosophy is hosting the 13th International Whitehead Conference. I’ll be presenting a few ideas from a draft paper I’m working on, shared a few weeks ago, titled “Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Turning Idealism Inside Out.”