An Enactive AI? Computing and Sense-Making Beyond the Data-Driven Approach

Bruce Clarke and Martin Rosenberg met back in 1989 in a meeting of the Society of Literature and Science. More than 35 years later, they came together again as panelists at the 2026 Barcelona Power & Care Conference, co-hosted by Mind & Life Europe and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Both came from literature departments in an era in which high theory was a defining feature of literary studies, and eventually, both found themselves stretching out well beyond the confines of their original dissertation topics: Bruno, as one of the world’s preeminent historians of systems thinking, second-order cybernetics, and the Gaia hypothesis; and Martin, as a scholar of emergence, jazz improvisation, neuroplasticity, metaphor, hypermedia, and even the game of chess. Both are colourful examples of the many risks and rewards of interdisciplinary praxis, and of the necessity to lay down a path in walking.

Speaking with Andrea Hiott was very much akin to moving through a dynamic constellation of ideas and watching that constellation shapeshift in real time. Hers is an intellect that dwells in paradox, that embraces movement, and that does not shy away from friction. Almost immediately, one is struck by her unbounded curiosity and refreshing humility, as well as the astonishing breadth of her thinking. She is one of those thinkers who pushes us to hear familiar words anew, and reengage with descriptions of our world in a generative, non-reductive way. As you’ll hear in the beginning of the conversation, her work stretches across phenomenology, neuroscience, 4E cognitive science, urban planning, care ethics, and more, and she has elaborated a constellatory approach to thinking and being, which we explore, and at times enact, throughout our conversation.

Welcome back, dear listeners. In Season 4 of The Enactive Fold, we are "Empowering through Caring." You can learn more about our 2026-2027 programming theme on our website.

Stephen Nachmanovitch is widely known as a musical improviser, and wise teacher of improvisation. But his is an improvisation not separate from life; it is more that of a Zen master’s, tuning into the microscopic contingencies of everyday life, probing life itself as the ground for creativity and wonder. His earliest beginnings as a scientist, and later a student of psychology and scholar of William Blake, have afforded him a uniquely integrative view on the power of play and permeability, on the Pythagorean mysteries of the human mind. Most of all, he was a student of the great systems thinker Gregory Bateson, a presence one can feel when speaking with Stephen, whether through his recounting of anecdotes, his love of silence and patterns, or his generous, playful ways of relating.

Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser are forces to behold. As they describe themselves, they are “an artist duo whose work combines poetry and music to conjure speculative futures and multiverses.” Their collective, which you’ll hear more about in our conversation, is “Hylozoic/Desires,” or H/D. H/D “aspires toward a flat ontological ether in which all forms of life—stone, spirit, machine or human—are equal. They skew the linear imagination of time and space to produce divergences that elicit critical wonder. H/D’s research orbits around (non)place and histories of migration, transnationalism and environmental cosmism to learn from the multiple materialities of contemporary existence. They are concerned with the (poly)rhythms of love and the bea(s)t of belonging. Hylozoic/Desires use metaphor as an event, as a force of attraction that holds otherwise distant entities together.”