Funding, Learning Materials Portfolio
Andrius is applying for the Learning Materials residency. Thank you, Marcus, for alerting me to this possibility.
Learning Materials Residency
Biography
My parents, born in Lithuania, grew up in refugee camps from 1944 to 1950, when they came to the USA. I was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1964, and moved to Lithuania in 1997, and to the neighborly village of Eiciunai in 2009. My small (80 m2) home is a Finnish model built in the Soviet days (1979). I don’t mow my yard (1,100 m2) but rather allow various miniature ecosystems (forest, swamp, mound, field) to flourish, including forest ants. I know and eat my weeds, herbs and berries. I make good use of gray water, ash and sawdust, and compost my own humanure. I don’t have a car but get around by bicycle, journeying all about with tent, sleeping bag and laptop. In this way, I embrace the country my parents taught me to love. Since childhood, my deepest value is living by truth, my quest is to know everything and apply that knowledge usefully, and so I document a language of wisdom, Wondrous Wisdom. My BA is in physics. My PhD is in math. I organized hundreds of independent thinkers with my online laboratory Minciu Sodas (Orchard of Thoughts). We organized the Pyramid of Peace to avert genocide in Kenya. Chris Messina credited my paper „An Economy for Giving Everything Away“ as an inspiration for the hashtag. My creative impulses and desire to share my abstract world led to seven personal art shows at the Uzupis Art Incubator (Vilnius) and the Southside Community Art Center (Chicago).
Motivation (Waste and circular economies)
I seek an investigatory culture for a science of subjective experience where a language of wisdom would let us work together to discover and apply absolute truth for a divine harmony in diversity. In 2023, I started Math4Wisdom to link the language of wisdom with the language of mathematics. My video, „Introduction to Math4Wisdom“, conveys my creative impulse to express the deepest ideas with the energy of the children’s television program, „Sesame Street“. Ecotechnology pioneer Jere Northrop and I both cultivate this language of wisdom and so we founded Econet https://www.e-c-o.net to encourage thinking and acting ecologically. Jere invented TimberFish Technologies for cultivating ecosystems to solve problems such as waste management. Specifically, wood chips, microorganisms, worms and fish, thrive together in an aquarium or pond. My hypothesis is that if we try this out in the right place, our artistic creativity will yield a hub for communal activity. A theatrical display can bring together locals and visitors and inspire artistic, activist, scientific, technological, entrepreneurial, social and ecological creativity. We’ll investigate the ways this ecosystem figures things out in good times and bad times and the tipping point in between, when it may demonstrate full fledged consciousness. Likewise, we’ll engage people locally onsite and globally online to share their deepest values in life, relationships with truth, and how they figure things out. Together we’ll express that with costumes, props, memes and symbols. I’ll regularly report at the Econet wiki on the resulting serendipities and we’ll end onsite with a theatrical conclusion.
Work Plan
In the first month, I’ll bike around the island, interview residents, learn about local wastes, ecosystems, found materials, social activities, organizations, concerns, initiatives and visions. I’ll organize a team of enthusiasts to bring different people together. We’ll decide on an ideal place for cultivating the TimberFish ecosystem. With Jere’s advice, I’ll get it going. I’ll inventory our artistic talents we’d like to contribute. We’ll reach out to online participants and potential visitors.
In the second month, we’ll meet at our TimberFish ecosystem, which we’ll care for, experiment with, and try to engage. I’ll interview people about their deepest values, relationships with truth, investigatory questions and ways of figuring things out. I’ll encourage my local team to do this and invite help from Econet investigators such as Marcus Petz of Tampere, Finland, who I visited for three weeks in March. Artistically, we’ll express these values with costumes, props, sculptures, backdrops, poems, jokes, songs and music. Philosophically, I’ll use this data to map out a landscape of truth.
In the final month, I’ll organize a theatrical event at our TimberFish ecosystem. We’ll present our landscape of truth as a map of our different relationships with truth, by which our deepest values are all aspects of love, as revealed in caring for our TimberFish ecosystem. We’ll share and gift all that we’ve created. We’ll record a video. All along, I’ll be blogging at the Econet wiki. I’ll write a Learning Materials Lab overview on how to adapt, remake and evolve this project further.