Interview: Jared Zhang of Fresh Air

Jared Zhang is a conceptual artist and community designer. He and his collaborator, writer and spiritual entrepreneur Ireland Adgate, ran a 30-day pop-up educational institution called Camp Air this summer in Woodstock NY, combining elements of a retreat, artist residency, and incubator. We recorded a conversation about what he learned from the retreat about the design of new social forms, and looked at some documentation from their project.

Toby: This is the first time I've done a formal interview question process with an organizer of one of these new hybrid church type of spaces. It was fun to think about what questions I want to ask you. It's been a while since I had this kind of conversation, but I did a lot of research about DAOs when I was working in crypto, where we asked similar kinds of questions.

Jared: Pleasure.

Toby: My first question is somewhat inspired by the research that I did in the DAO space. There are so many different kinds of metaphors for organizations that people use in that world. They use “co-ops,” “corporations,” and “nations” to talk about what blockchain communities are. And those assumptions really change how they design the communities. So I wanted to ask you about the organizational metaphors that you used when planning, designing, and thinking about this endeavor.

Jared: I just did whatever made the most sense at the moment. We called it a "retreat" because it truly was a moment of respite to take people typically in a very urban environment, especially artists and designers, to into complete quietude. Besides nature sounds, you could hardly hear any human activity. And then we called it a "social sculpture." I think Joseph Beuys coined the term, but to me, it means the material is also the artist. Like we are sitting here, seeing ourselves as the material, and then we are about our lives and how we are making decisions and how we are making choices. So at the same time of us being the material and the thing that we are sculpting, we're also the sculptors.

And then at the core of it, we're meditating, we're chilling in nature, and we're using design and art principles and exercises to understand the nature of reality. I think that to explore reality is basically to me to think about reality research, reality exercises. 

Toby: What’s an example of "reality research?"

Jared: Before we went through the exercise of fasting from time, I lived with shoulds, woulds, coulds, will, shall. During the exercise, for three days, you were basically able to think about, okay, if no other moment existed, except right now, what would my language be like? And what would my psychosocial understanding of time be like? And I think that by going through three days of reality research at this camp, we figured out what it’s like to live without Gregorian time. I want to orient time on my own. When I'm hungry, I eat; when I'm tired, I sleep; if I'm antsy, I exercise or I paint or I make something. And I think if I can live in that way, according to what is really aligned for my energy, then I'm actually able to use time differently.

Toby: And did you notice people's language changing, as they did that three-day exercise of fasting from time?

Jared: The number one lesson I had was understanding how I don’t have to think about everything in terms of "being on time." Like if I came to this meeting 10 minutes late, if it was in person, then typically I would have the “I'm late right now” energy. I'm going to sit here on my way to being late, and I'm gonna feel bad. And in a way, that's not monitoring time. Time is present. Time is enjoying the time that I have. And this was a construct that I didn't fully understand myself.

Toby: So how did you actually do Fasting from Time as a group?

Jared: We fasted from time from Thursday night to Sunday night. On Thursday night, we covered all the clocks. We basically removed Gregorian time. Then said that for the next three days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we will try to have the physical environment tell us what time it is. So our bodies tell us when we need nutrition and when we're tired. And the sun is the only time we can tell for what time of the day it is. It became really hard to get people to come to exercises or come to meditation on time. People would just come whenever, or we would run down and have someone ring a bell.

So this subject lasted for three days. It was actually kind of disorienting for me. What elements of time do I want to redact from my previous understanding? Within the 3 days, we created smaller exercises and tried to document and share the transformation in our personal understanding. So, one exercise was called, Switch Up Piece. Switch Up Piece is to list out your whole day, organized by duration from longest to shortest, and switch up the timing for certain things. This is Ireland's example. Out of her list, one of the pieces was to go to the park for 45 seconds. She wrote:

the car was still running, still rolling, when I got out. Some older couples with big cups sat. In their car, on a bench. I ran at the field with my wings up and back, I ran and ran, and ran in a circle. What a pleasure to be drunk on such dizziness. In a state of ecstasy I collapsed, sinking 1000 miles down into the cool grass, on my back. The sky, still warm. With my whole being I looked at the sky, we were one. My breath slowed, settled. The sweetness of that moment was infinite.

Toby: Wow. That is beautiful.

Jared: Another exercise is To Done List. First you do whatever feels good at the moment, then write it down and cross it out.

Toby: That's really funny. I love that. So you had three other subjects: Childsplay, Magic Market Fit, and Institutional Anatomy. Do you want to talk about what those ones were about and then explore some of them?

Jared: Childsplay was on returning to the essence of being a kid. This piece was to draw an installation for your kid self, but with all the resources of an adult. [Showing me pictures] This one was Ireland's tent. This was MiqDaad's dish from being a kid. Fried okra chips—bhindi. This is from MiqDaad. This is just a cool flower I wanted to ID. This was a poem from someone.

A lot of these were basically remembering being a kid again. So we used kids games to basically understand “what do I want outside of LinkedIn and Instagram and Twitter?” What’s the very inner version of me? What does my soul feel like? And let this guide my main intentions for this camp. Childsplay was essentially whenever we didn't have a three-day exercise.

Childsplay was 001. 002 was Fasting from Time. 003 was called Magic Market Fit. Magic Market Fit is basically trying to understand what we even want from money. I think more people are talking about ikigai right now, but also I've heard a lot of people haven't heard about it. It’s the quadrants, you know—

Jared: How can I contribute to the world and what can make me money? And many times that's the issue with artists. And if you're working a traditional nine-to-five job, maybe you have the opposite problem. You have money and you know how to make money, but what feeds your soul? So we can use design principles from our feelings first. We go backwards from “what do I want to feel”? For me, I want to start from mobility. I want mobility, I want stability, I want nature, I want greenery.

So if I break those down, I want to be able to be in nature and I want to be able to make enough money so I can travel to be in nature and be in the city sometimes. It can't be that every waking hour I'm productive. If I go backwards from that, then I basically have this amount of time to make this amount of money and then I have these skills. In that week we had that design aspect—guiding people through gaining self-understanding.

Toby: Can you say more about magic, market, money, three M words—how do they fit together? How did you come up with this title for this theme?

Jared: Our magic is our zone of creative genius. What makes me feel alive? And then where does that fit within the market? What is needed in the world now and what problems can we solve now that would be aligned to my genius? The intention was to understand the magic first, understand the market second, and then understand the ikigai. On day three you would leave with some type of diet plan. Diet plan is our verbiage for what’s essentially a to-do list that is like a waypoint or a north star.

Toby: One thing I really like about how you’ve been doing this is you have a lot of special language. You don't take the topic of “what’s my relationship with money for granted.” Instead you put it into a metaphorical language that heightens the feeling of specialness of the activities you're doing, and gives them more metaphorical or magical or conceptual themes. You're doing a really good job with that.

All right. Do you want to talk about the last one briefly?

Jared: Anatomy of the Institution. This was a lot to try to go over in three days. This was the subject of educational, technological, spiritual institutions. So that could be like a school, an incubator, any type of church. We were trying to first understand just what an institution is. We came down to the idea that an institution is any system or container that creates a philosophical thought sculpture. If you think about Christianity, it's Commandments, rules to govern, how a good Christian would be, and then teachings and teachers, and then peers. So we spent the first day trying to understand the core components and containers that create and maintain the institution.

Then we tried to understand the emotional needs that are met by the institution. Throughout those days, we had other small exercises, like dissect the components of your life, and make an institution of your choice. Call up a friend to see what they think. The first time I started organizing this, I called MiqDaad to understand institutional design. He's an urban planner so we broke it down from a societal architectural perspective. He defined an institution as a system of ideas, rituals, and containers that create structure for a group of people, then we understood there were leaders, teachers, peers, and rules.

Toby: So is this an exercise in helping people understand how they relate to existing institutions that they are part of? Or for designing new institutions like Fresh Air.

Jared: Well after day one, all we thought of was making our own meditation club or our own book club. You can actually book club anything. You could have a book club but only for objects, you know. A book club that is not a book club at all, but it's fulfilling our needs of ingesting something and talking about it. 

Toby: Yeah. It makes sense. I really like these exercises. So you did these three-day pieces over the course of a month.

Jared: Yeah. So it'd be like Childsplay which is more like classic camp, and classic retreat with the residency. But it was more flowing. We're meditating and going to nature. And then we'd have three days of incubating on a concept like fasting from time. 

Toby: This reminds me a lot of my friends Norm and Yatú in New York who  have a really interesting relationship to time and they have their own non-Gregorian time system called Paragonday which also tries to get more towards sun-based time.  They would really like your idea of fasting from time.

I really like the format of a container with Child's Play as a continuous substrate, and then these moments of specific exploration. What other camps or retreats or social forms have you experienced that you were drawing from when you designed this?

Jared: What?

Toby: Social form is a term I use a lot to refer to any kind of social architecture. I think of camp as a kid as one social form, but also the therapist's office or an art residency. Those are social forms, but so is a classroom set up with a teacher at the front and 20 desks facing the teacher. That is a specific arrangement of bodies and behavior in space. And when I think about social forms, I think about the whole repertoire of these kinds of architectures in our culture.

I really liked what you said on our first call, about how in effect what you're trying to do is question “what is a dinner party?" That's the kind of question I'm super interested in. Or when you talked about the book club for objects just now. It’s not exactly a book club. It's taking the social form of a book club and applying it to something else in a new way. That's the kind of thing I'm interested in exploring, and why I'm trying to go on the ground and look at all of these different kinds of new churches and retreat centers and clinics. Because I think that new social forms are kind of essential to finding better answers to a lot of the questions that people are asking right now.

Jared: It's funny, the architecture of conversations… social forms are basically like rooms within a house. If institutions are social sculptures, then social forms like a classroom are just the things that make up the larger thing.

Toby: Hmm, that's interesting! I like that framing too, because institutions are kind of made of all of these different arrangements of miniature social architectures. Another way of thinking about this that I sometimes use is to think of social forms as a more basic form of a thing, whereas an institution is the institutionalized form of that model. So the social form of the classroom that I mentioned is the basic arrangement. But in a public school system, or in a university, it has become kind of captured by this rent-seeking institution, which formalizes it, stabilizes it, and extracts value from it.

Or the way art residencies have become a stable model in the art world, part of how it functions. They become institutionalized, whereas something like Camp Air that is not even remotely close to an institution yet. It's actually just an experiment with this kind of social architecture. That's another way of just thinking about the relationship between those two ideas. But I like your version as well.

Jared: It's funny that you say this, because last week I was thinking about how we made a temporary pop-up institution to think about institutions and to see if new will emerge from the old. And the old evicted us while we were designing the new!

Toby: Well that’s the way to do it. You talk about Fasting from Time and these experiments that you did as entering into a specific kind of space or container where you explored or prototyped or brainstormed, right? These social forms are kind of like that. There is space between them, when we're not inside what they call the “magic circle” in game theory. And when you enter into one of these social forms, like a book club, you have entered into a magic circle with its own specific rules. There's no real way to prototype these things without being inside one. There’s no real way to be outside of the context of life, which is the medium we’re working with when we're composing these social forms. So I think it makes perfect sense to me that, you know, you had to create a pseudo-institution in order to prototype what an institution could look like.

Jared: So, yeah, I didn't even answer your original question.

Toby: Oh yeah. So what forms were you inspired by when you were creating this? Not just forms, but specific other institutions you've been a part of.

Jared: There were three of us that thought of this Camp Air idea, Michael, Ireland and I. And we all came with our own references. My personal reference was Black Mountain College. I don’t know that much about it, but there were a few pillars that I really liked, such as seeing art as a way of life. John Andrew Rice said "our central and consistent effort is to teach method, not content, to emphasize process, not results." And that is essentially what Fresh Air is. It's an attempt to catch to the wind. And when you try to catch the wind, you can't. But between trying and doing it and failing and trying and doing and failing again, you learn something. And I think that our methodology is how we share our methodology of cultivating collective tools and understanding the architecture of thought.

Toby: This actually brings me back to the organizational metaphor questions. As the organizers of this, how did you think about your role? Were you organizers? Do you call yourself camp counselors? What, what was your role as the facilitators of this thing?

Jared: We were "counselors" when we got the space, designed the curriculum with the intention and the exercises, when we went got equipment, amalgamated 100 year-old space with these old cottages. And then when we started the thing, when we were guiding Anatomy of Institutions, I’m a "facilitator." And then at other times of the day, if you need a counselor, I’m a counselor from 2-4pm. It was hard to create these boundaries when you’re several people, but we tried. 

Toby: If you were going to run it again, do you think you'd like to change some of the metaphorical framing or sculptural symbols that you're working with?

Jared: I would definitely keep many of them, even just in my life. But there are just as many containers that we could have done without. I also learned that there needs to be one technical producer. There were several of us leading the retreat-slash-residency, and we were also facilitators. There needs to be one person who is the counselor who doesn’t lead classes. They need to not have any responsibilities other than being the caretaker. We had that at times but not all the time. Another thing I learned is you can’t do a residency for some people at the same time you’re doing a retreat for others.  

Toby: What’s next for Fresh Air?

Jared: I don’t know. Speaking of social forms, a lot of people you’re interviewing are creating their own institutions. I’m trying to understand what’s needed in a home for me. How do commerce and spirituality  meet in a way that is artful? We see many examples of spirituality-laundering. That’s not my interest. I’m interested in—how do I remake church, or the dinner table, so that we feel some kind of safety? We’ve done an installation, and a really large pop-up institution, but now I want to do something that can repeat itself. I’m playing around with a meditation club called Club Oxygen.

Toby: Cool, keep us in the loop on your findings!