After… investigates past and present events that form the basis of alternative realities and futures. Publications feature creative outcomes, documentaries, experiments and narratives along wide-ranging curiosities and subjects.
So if you’re interested in how people, technology and futures will change 'who we are' and 'where we are heading', then After… is for you.
After… is created by art duo, Burton Nitta and features their work alongside guest contributors.
Personal sessions available: book now June & July 2021 ------------------------------------------------
“ It opened so much potential for my future
We launched the Reality Coach cards in November 2020. We are now offering a limited number of personal sessions using the cards. We don't want the price to bar entry to the experience, so we are offering some sessions for £1 alongside a menu of fee-based options. We are trialling this approach and will offer the slots on a 'first-come, first served' basis. If you would like a one-on-one session with us to work on transforming either inner or outer realities, please click below:
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Articles
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THE TRANSFORMOSPHERE Maps to find and create seeds for transformation July 2020 ------------------------------------------------
Synching minds As a collaborative practice, we often invent systems and titles to capture abstract concepts. Once these are within a discourse, we can ‘sync’ our minds and test the ideas. We think this process of invention is natural when working across disciplines. These placeholders help to make ideas that are ‘fluffy’, vague or indistinct, into something tangible and relatable. In some ways, the process is essentially an act of discovery. It’s a manifestation method to shift the new or unknown towards detail and the explorable. |
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One such term we invented for this reason is the Transformosphere. This conceptual framework was born out of a project called Instruments of the Afterlife in 2016. The word borrows the context of the biosphere where features such as food chains, life cycles and elemental cycles all contribute to life-sustaining dynamic systems. However, the name also plots transformative elements such as human technology, man-made impact, beliefs, extreme events and heightened realities, that create consequences and possibilities.
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The concept also considers how the use of elements and their trajectory within the system can combine to give multiple outcomes. The Transformosphere term soon became more than just a placeholder; it became a conceptual framework to discover future systems/artefacts that would ‘push and pull’ reality in particular directions. In a nutshell, the Transformosphere is a dynamic system of many actors and factors trans-versing scales (time, size, process, assembly and entropy) and possibilities for transformations. We look for convergences within our Transformosphere model to find alternative possibilities. We consider these convergences to be niches or points of change and opportunity. Patterns linking the convergences share similar characteristics; past events transform by emerging technologies, disruptive events or shifts in beliefs on refracted trajectories.
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Map to discover other realities The veil between our reality and other dimensions was peeled back, dissected and cultured into vocal folds. We created a voice that could straddle the divide of realities, transporting us between dimensions. This voice was a new organ of creation, able to speak to the dead and the living on additional levels. |
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The voice-box within New Organs of Creation occupies a curious niche in the Transformosphere. Landscape Within revealed spirals of reincarnation through guts made for a species trapped in accelerated entropic cycles, where waste circles across time and scale to pollute minds and sully bodies. Adaptations in the human microbiome give respite, protect cognition and power adaptations. Within the Transformosphere the project revealed a complex tangle of influences that form us. These tangles reveal we embody and embed ourselves in not only local but global landscapes. And influences on our sense of self extends by not only current situations, but by people who we have been and past global communities (through epigenetics and contamination exposure). Altered Ways of Being challenge the construction of reality. Minds alien to us, inspire alternative possibilities for the human body and as a result extend our design of being and reality. In this artwork, elements including cephalopods (the family of animals that include octopus), stories, coaching, neuroplasticity and mind exoskeletons, converge to enable us to direct reality-making. We distil these projects from the Transformosphere, as a map and concept to discover transformative tools that act as catalysts to go beyond our current human being. The Transformosphere map is dynamic. It takes the role of a protagonist as encountered in an Indiana Jones film, or as an astrological divination chart that promises a future path. Its materiality comprises a paper 2D chart, an instrument such as an astrolabe, a satellite real-time eye-view or AI simulation. The map may act as a navigation tool, a measuring or plotting device, or a priming influence to create self-fulfilling prophecies and holder of a conceptual framework. As a map to discover a catalyst of transformational alchemic power, the plotting may not relate to landscape or space, but instead be a map to artefact creation. And in terms of a map of an artefact ‘to be’, what form might this relic, device or object take? All outcomes of the Transformosphere disrupt reality, and here we explore the processes involved. |
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The Transformosphere exists on the premise that everything connects. It reveals the connections more clearly when looking back in the past and with the gift of hindsight. The links between events, matter and ideas spiral to the present. The associations are a mix of intentional plans alongside chance serendipitous accidents. When we look from the present into the future, there are a myriad of directions these connections could take. The result of these undulating tendrils that expand to mesh and create our world create the realities we live within and those of the future. At the heart of these futures are the tools, ideas, mindsets, technologies, religions, cultures and political paths that steer the realities we live within and embody. In short, the things we think and make remake us. |
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| The subject of tools that can construct reality is an area covered by Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows. He outlines four ways our technologies extend human abilities. A fascinating group of technologies construct other realities through their potential to alter the mind.
Within this group Carr includes the map, clock, globe, newspaper, school and the library, the computer and Internet. The map in this context is interesting when enabling changes in the mind. Beyond the representation of regions of earth, the map can also capture, plan or speculate an abstract notion (like the spread of disease or strategic plan). When we think about the conceptual framework of the Transformosphere, we think of this as a map. Carr quotes Arthur Robinson a cartographic historian: “more impressive is how the map advanced the evolution of abstract thinking.” Particular aspects of the map that advanced the mind include, he continues, “the reduction of reality and the construct of an analogical space”. Carr writes: “the technology of the map gave to man a new and more comprehending mind, better able to understand the unseen forces that shape his surroundings and his existence.” In this vein, the Transformosphere acts as a map to test and probe the possibilities of how we might construct realities through the things we make and concepts we live within, and how they change us. |
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Origins The Transformosphere originated from a project called Instruments of the Afterlife we made in 2016/17. We made the work in collaboration with a consortium of scientists from varying disciplines. These ranged from synthetic biologists in Edinburgh University to nanotechnologists at Birmingham University and plant biologists at Warwick University. The mix of individual technologies to create alternative possibilities inspired us to consider how else an alchemy of disciplines and approaches could give us alternative ways of living and making. The Transformosphere mapped the different scales and elements involved in the project. Size spanned from the nano-scale (the tiny) to planetary-scale impact. Timescales ranged from the past to the future. The Transformosphere also created a space to engage critically in the consequences of how these technologies come together and also the potential for how they can create alternatives to how we use the landscape and other ways of being. Once we began using the Transformosphere concept, we saw its presence in every project we worked on. |
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Evolutions As human beings, there is an innate limit on the knowledge we can retain and draw upon. However, artificial intelligence (AI) offers tools to draw on an entirety of human knowledge and fluid assemblages and connections. An AI assisted Transformosphere will speed up the process and produce maps to a vast array of objects of transformation. In this reality, we enter a taxonomy of alien potential interventions, products, systems, artefacts, things and stuff. These will be other-worldly, exotic and create a myriad of possibilities that do not exist. They will redefine who we are and create endless possibilities to shape us into different human animals. We are developing some overarching frameworks in our interests and research. We are exploring the Transformosphere further. We see convergences within the Transformosphere in key areas, such as the gut, city, sewers, and the mind. Each niche reveals interesting insights into how we might steer or design reality and our evolution. The Transformosphere navigates the endless possibilities available to direct evolutionary trajectories and how this affects on our humanness. |
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10 years of Burton Nitta
3rd January 2020 ------------------------------------------------ In recent work, we proposed Altered Ways of Being and made New Organs of Creation from living cells to imagine other versions of humanness. We invited audiences to hear and feel other worlds. Audience reactions from the full house included: “It was an entrancing experience”, “I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience” and “I want this again ”. |
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Our early projects as Burton Nitta featured extreme visions of Algaculture to confront environmental change and consumption demands on global resources. The work created symbiotic relationships with algae and developed heightened food rituals in The Algae Opera. The pieces continue on a global tour with Algaculture currently exhibited at MAK Vienna and The Algae Opera recently tantalising the ‘sound-buds’ of VIP audiences at the Royal Academy. |
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A theory to discover possibilities. Paths divined from the Transformosphere have led to the Landscape Within where we have found global pasts, presents and futures inside the body. In response, we engineered bacteria with synthetic biologists at the University of Edinburgh to integrate into our gut flora and mine the body for useful nano-materials. |
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Evolutions in the Shadow Biosphere. |
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Where now? In the next 10 years, we will continue to develop projects that discover and uncloak overlooked relationships with the wider world and our inner self. Works will challenge and create experiences on the edges of the known. Most importantly outcomes will connect with audiences and collaborators on a journey of curiosity. |
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Reflections. |
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Futures are not enough. At the ten year marker of working together, we are still fascinated by concepts of the future. However, these ideas have been sharpened to focus attention on adaptation and transformation. Elements that are intrinsically futures focused, but, for us, more embedded in action. As a result, works and research are reflective on the past, consider the present and embrace an ‘Afterist’ approach to consider ‘what’s next?’ Far from happy to accept what’s on the horizon, we aim for artworks to inspire and envision, to reveal and reframe; and ultimately to invite along all who wish to join us on a journey of discovery to imagine other realities. |
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