 Thank you, Jenny. I'm an artist. What do artists do? We've heard from an artist there and very eloquently about some of the aims and goals of artists. It's odd as an artist, I think, because you feel a little bit isolated. You feel like, what are your goals in life? I've come to the conclusion that my goal in life is to show us to ourselves. In that way, I'm about challenging culture, really, and pervasive culture, culture that we don't necessarily know is around us, making it visible. It's been really interesting sitting here and listening to all of you talking, all the speakers talking, and that's exactly what you're saying. It's about challenging culture, and more than that, creating culture, which I think lots of artists don't like to admit they're doing, but I think they're trying to do that. I want to start by talking about a familiar subject that Yos talked about, being a school, being a kid. This is where it all started for me, and I'm going to take on a bit of a story of what I've been doing and what I hope to be doing in the future and hope that it has some meaning for you. When I was at school, I used to stare out of the window a lot, and I used to also pretend I was an animal a lot, and these two things were quite important to me. One day, the teacher called my mum in to school, and she said, look, he's just staring out of the window all the time, he doesn't do any work, and there's a genuine worry about this. To my mum's credit, she said, that's him being creative. She told me that recently, and I didn't know this, and I thought that was amazing that she recognised that, and that's something that's taken me almost this long to realise, that's been my battle in life, to understand the fact that my imagination and the world that I can enter, which isn't this conscious reality, is equally as significant as this world. So this is me, up a tree, and I am not pretending to be, but I am a bird, quite a rare bird called a goss hawk. As you can see, I am that bird. Now I am believing that I am that bird. Now this is me challenging the idea that we live in one reality. This is me thinking my imagination in that I can believe in enough to believe that I can be something else. Now I got someone to take this picture, they're quite a long way away, just to show me that it didn't work, because actually when I was up there I was really believing that I was, and it's this kind of commitment to my imagination, this sort of immersion that's been really important. Also this idea of becoming an animal, it seems to be quite a good vehicle for me. I started to do this myself, and I was the test for this, to see what this would do, how much I could believe in this. Then I started to take it out into the real world, and this was a residency I did in the Galapagos Islands. I have a big problem with conservation there. The animals are basically more important than the people that live there. I did a report for the local TV news as a blue-footed booby, this quite rare bird, iconic bird of the island, so I dressed up and made this homemade costume, and I walked around the town, sometimes driving on the back of this truck, like the potmobile. I could say things, and I noticed things because I had this other perspective, because I was able to enter into this other world, which was entirely of my own creation, I could then have perspective and see things very clearly actually. Also, I could say things that probably weren't being able to be said by politicians and other local people, that were quite contentious, but ultimately I think quite healing, because in a way I wasn't a threat, I was just an animal, I was just in my imagination. As a society, I think generally devalue that place, we don't give it the significance it needs. Then I went further on, and I thought, well, this imaginative world I have, I need to really test this, I need to put this on the line. If I'm going into my sort of dream space, so I'm going somewhere now, and it's very real for me, and I'm coming out and telling you about it, and then I'm in again, I became quite good at this, going somewhere real and seeing things, and I thought, how can I test this? Maybe people can ask me questions, if I could answer those questions, and I could find a logic within this, I could bring this back into rationality, I could make this sort of functional and pragmatic. So I've sort of went on the journey around the world, asking people to ask me questions. I went to Stavanger in Norway, and I asked them there to ask me a question. He asked me a question about prostitution there. I went to Japan, and the Tokyo City Council asked me a question about cycle parking, and then I went to Israel, and I saw the mayor of Halon, and I was in his office with him, and he asked me a question that was sort of related to the Palestinian crisis. Now all these things, I don't really know much about, but the idea for me was, if I trusted my imagination enough, if I trusted the idea of unconscious thinking, the idea that I do have knowledge, and that I do have experiences that are valuable, then I could hopefully relate to anything that comes my way. So within all these things, I felt like I was offering an insight through an unconscious process. I was finding a rationality that wasn't being used before in very intractable circumstances like this. And then, more recently, I spent about four years in the Elephant and Castle. In London, if you know the area in South London, it's quite a historically deprived area, and there are big plans to knock it all down, all these 60s housing developments, and there's a big vision, really, by the council, by the mayor of London, by the government, all these big agencies bought forward their visions for the Elephant and Castle. And I just thought, that's what I'm dealing in. I'm dealing with visions. I'm having visions. I'm talking to people about these visions, and these visions are powerful, and they have information in them that we need. So I thought, okay, well, I'm going to have my own vision for this place. Now the official vision is basically knocking down all these council flats, and about 3,000 people live there in the Haygate estate, and building luxury flats for rich people. So basically all the people in these flats have been now moved out and dispersed across London, and that's dispersed all the communities that exist there, and all the amazing interactive, sort of, or interconnected roles that people played for each other, the informal network, really, of people. And the council did their own consultancy process to decide what they should do with the people there and their input in this, but it turns out that the people there actually have their own vision. They won't ask for their own vision. So I felt like I should, in a way, find a vision, really. So I went to see the council and got them to have their own visions. This is the planning department in Southwick Council who are responsible. So rather than the corporate vision, I said, well, come on, what is your personal vision? So they went into their imagination and dreamt up some quite amazing things that would have been amazing for any way. And then I teamed up, and I did this with residents and office workers and developers, all the people involved. And I teamed up with this band called Chromehoof. I noticed the Chrome. And you'll start noticing that there's quite a lot of costume involved in my work. And they're kind of a death metal, sort of psychedelic punk amazing band. And I thought, OK, how can I... How can I communicate this vision? How can I actually have a vision? I've heard all these other people's visions. I think I need to supplement those and maybe have my own. So we decided to put on a concert in the Coronet Theatre in Elephant Castle, which seats about 1,300 people. And this was really a culmination of everything that I'd experienced. A very sort of physical consultation, a very visceral consultation. Not really language-based. It was just about, in a way, expressing what... I suppose expressing a vision in a way that has some kind of link and connection to the people it was affecting. Beautiful seals. Beautiful seals. Beautiful seals. Beautiful seals. Beautiful seals. Beautiful seals. Get on your shit. So after this odd consultation, I went back to the council and I had to remember what I'd seen, really, in my imagination, what I'd come out with this improvised performance with Crome Hoof. None of that was planned. We just had a beginning and ending and we were on stage for about an hour. And I went back to the council and I saw these seals and I saw these geese do this stuff. It's always animals with me and I saw these swallows. Anyway, the upshot was that they really had a responsibility to these people. And there's something called sight tenacity, really, which I recognised in swallows. They're very loyal to sight and that's a very physical embodiment of psyche and it's very important to people. And once you start breaking that up, you start breaking up very, very complex communities and in a way it's impossible to just invent community which they're trying to do. The idea of acting politically in this imaginative way was quite important, but then I started to think about what is the imaginative world itself? What does it do for us? How does it really relate to life itself? And I started working in a hospice in North London. I worked there for about two years, off and on. Well, every week I went in and I had lunch with patients there. And we just started talking. And the patients started to say, well, what are you doing here? I said, well, I'm artists and residents. I've set this thing up and I'm just chatting to you. And they said, yeah, but what are you actually doing? And I said, well, what can I do for you? And they said, what can you do? And I realised, what actually can I do? And I said there's a breakdown what my skills are. And as an artist I never really asked that. I'm sure you're asked that a lot in business. So I said, well, I trust my imagination. I believe through it. I think it's significant. It's important. I think there's truth there. I think there's knowledge there. And there's huge untapped resources there. And it turns out that all of them, because they were generally confined in their hospital hospice rooms, they were really living through their imagination. They were relying on their imaginations to create a world for themselves. So the conversations became quite interesting in that sense. And there's one guy, Alex. He told me, well, I've always wanted to go to the Amazon. I've always wanted to go and see this very, very remote tribe. I always wanted to go and ask them these questions. I said, well, are you doing that in your imagination? He says, yeah, I am, but I've only got so far. You know, I need to know what's around the next bend of the river. I need to know what they're going to say. I can't invent that stuff. So I said, okay, I'll do that. I'll go and be your imagination. I'll travel to the Amazon. So I got the funds together. It took about three days to get to this tribe. And I spent about three days with them. And then I came back. And as soon as I got off the plane, I went back to Alex at the hospice. And he just grilled me about my trip. And he didn't even call it my trip. He called it our trip. It's like he went on this trip. And he just asked for all this information that he needed. And in the end, he died about three months later. We talked again before he died. And he said, this was amazing. It gave me, when I was really suffering, it gave me the extra bit of jungle to explore, the extra other conversation to have, the extra other place to live through, either because the pain was bad or because he was so confined. It was a very real place for him. And that for me was a real testament to what I've been trying to do in a way, which is to acknowledge our society's dependence, or over dependence on the rational conscious world. We are over-dependent to our own suffering, really. And we only realise that we live throughout imagination so much when we are forced to. So I wrote this book called A Practical Guide to Unconscious Reasoning. It's quite a light title, I think. Trips off the tongue. It should be the Almanac, shouldn't it? Anyway. So this is really a book I wrote last year. And it's really trying to sublimate all that experience that I had and think, okay, this is open to everyone. This is practical skills. These are skills that everyone should have, really. And it's really a handbook for the imagination. It's just full of exercises you can do. But ultimately, it's asking you to put your imagination to the test. It's asking you to risk utterly letting go and not think, let your images you have guide you and notice what you see, notice what you experience and bring those back. But do that with a task. Preferably a question. And the reason, really, for writing the book was because I started doing a few workshops. And this woman, I was saying, okay, everyone close their eyes. We're going to go on a journey now in imagination. We're going to walk down this road. We're going to walk about a minute. We stopped. And then I said, oh, did you manage to go anywhere? Did you manage to see anything? He said, well, I've had my eyes closed. I said, yeah, I know. But did you see anything in that darkness? Did anything come through? He said, no, because I had my eyes closed. I couldn't see anything. So in a way, it really showed me how the degrees to which we live our lives through this. And I think some people do it more than others. And I think that's obvious. I don't really utilise this much. And to that end, I thought, okay, right, let's create a school. So I created a school of the imagination. And it only ran for a week. But I did it in the East End. And I asked people, I put it at an advert. I said, who wants to be in the school of the imagination? And lots of people came in and I interviewed people. But most of the people came from this organisation called Carball Citizens, which is people who have been homeless at some point. And they had this amazing ability to be able to let go and invest in their imagination, a wonderful skill. So we basically trained up. We trained up by understanding different perspectives, understanding our own personal internal perspectives that we have, looking foolish in how important this is, humility, and also the idea of really convincing yourself that the person you're talking to is intelligent, in this case. These conversations went on for hours. It's amazing. But mostly it was the ability to invest and believe in your imagination, believe in an imagined world, and this was very important. And then we took these, as a group we went out on the street and we set up this flip chart and we found strangers and we said, have you got something you can't solve for yourself rationally? And then we'd write up their question, this guy here we were working for, how can I approach this job interview differently? And he's really been struggling with it. He's said he's made so many job interviews, he's not getting the jobs. So it's a big thing for him. And I love this, it's like putting something at stake, putting something on the line. So we all got together as a group and we put these white glasses on, and we went into our world, our imagined world with this question. And we came back with some stories, basically. Some stories which we didn't really try and make the links to, but he did. He made the meanings for himself. And what was so wonderful is that he's making the arts, he's making the purpose, he's making the meaning. This is a woman, Irene, she lives on the local estate where we're doing it at the community centre. And her question was, what helps me from starting my own business? She's been wanting to do this for years. And it's so simple. She doesn't want her own business. But she's been battling with this for years. And she couldn't not see that. She couldn't see it until we came up with these stories of cows and fields and mountains and pumas and chickens and all these strange scenarios where we had interactions in these other worlds and we had interactions that were significant as experienced and we took knowledge from that. And she related to that in that way. So then the ultimate challenge for us as a group during that week. And this is sort of day four, really. So this is quite advanced now. We went to the City Hall in London. So we went to the mayor's office, really. And we said, can we work for you? Well, I arranged it beforehand, obviously. And this is the health team. Basically, the health team organised health policy. And we offered our services to them. OK, so we're the unconscious reasoning consultancy group. OK, I'm Helen. I'm Liz. And we work in the health team here for the mayor in London. And our job is to help him to make London a healthier place. It's not to think about hospitals and health services. It's about helping people be as healthy as they can. And to make London a place that it's easy to be healthy. So, do you have a question that you haven't been able to sort out rationally? Yeah. Our question is, if people know something is bad for their health, why do they carry on doing it? OK, I'll write that up. If people do something that's bad for them... If people know that something's bad for their health. Yeah. Why do they keep on doing it? And it's almost as though the question at knowledge is that just information is not enough. It's better than nothing. It's a beginning. But just the information doesn't seem to be quite enough. Yeah, I think that's always the case. Just because we know something's bad for our health doesn't mean... That would never be enough, you know what I mean? I think we all know lots of stuff. You can find out anything that you want on the internet, on YouTube. You can know anything that you want to know. We know that knowledge doesn't change behaviour. If you'd like to move your chair slightly back. Let's move our chairs back to the wall. Give us some space. OK, if you just find... This became about behaviour change, really. And that was an interesting question for us because it's an irrational question. It's about irrationality. Ultimately, we're not rational beings. We kid ourselves that we are, but we live in our unconscious. I think George Lakoff said actually, he was a psychologist. He said, our thinking, our reasoning is 98% unconscious. Our conscious minds are fairly small and limited. I mean, we can only apparently remember seven things. But unconsciously, we can remember an infinite amount of things. So we were pulling on these resources, really. And we came up with some really interesting answers for them. That they really valued, and what they valued most was witnessing us coming up with these answers. I mean, some of the stuff they knew before, but it gave it an element of truth for them. It was coming from people. It was coming from a place that they could actually see. So that's it, really. This is the last slide I'm going to show you. It's something from the book. It's on an elementary level. I took this into a school recently, and I put it up on the board, and it was an art class. And we were using the imagination productively. And then the maths teacher came in, and he stood at the back for the whole lesson trying to work this out. And then I said to him, did you work it out? And the brilliant thing was 90% of the kids knew the answer. And he said, no, no, I know it. I know it. You move all these ones down one. No, no, hang on, hang on. You add one to all of them, and no, no, hang on. And then the kids were just laughing at him. And that really showed me also that the idea of acquired knowledge, the idea of being an expert, we are all an expert in ourselves. We are all an expert in our imaginative worlds, and we can use these for lateral thinking, for creativity, for everything. I'll tell you the answer if you don't know it later. Thank you.