The Swede Anders Kreuger is a curator, writer & educator. He has been the director of the renowned Kohta Gallery in Helsinki since 2019. Prior to that, he was the senior curator at HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, the director of the Malmö Art Academy, & was a member of the Programme Team for the European Kunsthalle in Cologne. He was a founding member of the Nordic Council of Minsters Information Office in Vilnius, served as the director of the Nordic Arts Center in Helsinki & has served on the editorial board of the London-based art journal Afterall as well as the Ghent journal A Prior.

He has also worked as an independent curator, organizing numerous exhibitions throughout Europe. He has taught at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, Royal College of Art in London, & other European art academies. Served as an advisor to the Raqs Media Collective at Manifesta 7 in Bolzano. Anders Kreuger regularly writes essays for catalogues & journals, & has edited numerous publications.

He has been deeply & personally immersed in words, reading, & language since his childhood experiences immersed in reading children’s books. As a curator he thrives on how words affect his work as a curator & loves working with, for & through people as his way of constructing a situation that allows the viewer to become immersed in an exhibition.

I met Anders in Helsinki through Martti Aiha, the acclaimed Finnish artist known as Mara, a long time friend of my wife, librettist Maija-Leena Rems. Mara, sadly recently deceased, was on the founding board of Kohta Gallery. Anders & I had many conversations about shamanism & the influence of the oldest ideas on the contemporary world. Growing from this shared interest, Anders created the gallery show, Charlie Morrow, A Gathering which included Winter Solstice Celebration with musicians around the world. Currently, he is curating the Yes & No Tation gallery show which is paired with Sound Circus, a public event.

Subjects discussed: Telepathy, AI, immersion, written language, thought before language, reading minds, inducing immersive states, seeing images in objects, shamans, origin & development of language, Chomsky, galleries, curation, museums, cave paintings, dream singing, desire to connect, Stalin, Finland, comparative linguistics, arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, Cratylus, Andaman Islands, Navajo, Elias Canetti, Fascism, Trumpianism, color theory, Kandinski, & so much more…

Harri Koskinen is a man of many talents. Born in 1970 in Karstula, Finland, with a populations of a population of 3,625 is located in Central Finland.

Harri studied design came to Helsinki city to st at the Institute of Art & Design. He's best known as a leading innovator of Nordic design for, among other things, his award-winning Block Lamp, the familiar light build inside a rectangular brick of glass, which is exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He has designed furniture, packaging, pots & pans, turntables, hotel rooms internationally & many other immersive spaces, but most importantly for us here at iMMERSE!, the Genelec 8000-series of speakers for cutting-edge sound systems. Soon being released, Genelec headphones.

I met Harri in New York City in the first years of this century. He had designed a traveling show of Finnish design and engineered the installations. Typical of Nordic society, Finnish designers have worked together for decades to build on their shared values of several generations. Similarly, Finnish architects and orchestra conductors generate a wave of multigenerational forces. Sweetly, the meaning of architect Alvar Aalto’s family name. Mr. Wave.

Later, Harri gave a home to a MorrowSound 3D showroom system in his Helsinki design company offices. We have collaborated on the show Sound Glass Space 2012 in the Akusmata Gallery in Helsinki and on a floating chair for listening to 3D sound.

Harri’s design includes sound, light and physical materials. How fitting that he named his company, Friends of Industry ltd.

Topics discussed: first immersive experience, biking through woods, Finnish countryside, milk cans, playing bass, LPs, ACDC, Genulec speakers, design of sound systems, art, glass

Robert Thurman's words were the first I ever read about Tibetan Buddhism, describing the inner explorers of its practices as "psychonauts" and its mental tools for liberation "spiritual technology." Few have done as much to advance the understanding and practice of Tibetan Buddhism in the West and I consider him one of my greatest heroes and teachers.

Robert Thurman, an American author, professor, translator & popularizer of Buddhism, takes a deep dive into immersion through a Buddhist portal, sharing with us, stories & ideas of returning to the essential origin of oneself. Being the father of famed actor Uma Thurman is totally inadequate to describe who he is and where he’s been.

Born in New York City to the stage actor Elizabeth Dean Farrar (1907–1973), a stage actress, & AP editor & UN translator Beverly Reid Thurman, Jr. got his BA from & also did his graduate studies in Sanskrit at Harvard. He eventually built a house in Woodstock, NY where he lived with his first wife & two children for some time.

He has seen much of the world, traveling around Turkey, Iran & India, & moving back to NJ in the US, he became a Buddhist monk, study with Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama to become the first American-born Tibetan Buddhist in 1965. He was the cofounder & president of the Tibet House in New York, established to preserve Tibetan culture.

He is also the author of many books on Tibetan Buddhism including his popular translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Thurman & I exchanged numerous stories of immersive experiences & ideas. This was our first conversation in roughly 60 years.

We had met in summer 1960 in New York City through a mutual friend, Bruce Bennett, Thurman’s Harvard classmate. Bennett and I were studying organic chemistry in Columbia University summer school. I was studying Organic chemistry as a pre-med. Although, I never went to medical school, organic chemistry and fluid mechanics are seminal to my work as a composer and sound designer

Bruce, a fine saxophone player, took me with him to meet Thurman in Thurman’s parents’ apartment south of the Columbia campus on the Manhattan upper west side. Thurman was then part of the scene around Timothy Leary at Harvard and working with psychedelics.

I was 19 years old, Thurman and Bennett were 20. A few years later Thurman lost one eye in a horrid accident while changing a car tire. This caused him to change his life. He spent five years traveling in Turkey and Tibet, a journey which would prepare him for a life of scholarship and spiritual growth.

What follows is a 33 minute excerpt of our 75 minute talk, the discussion of immersivity. It begins with Thurman speaking about his friend the Dalai lama.

Topics discussed: Buddhism, immersivity, essential origin of the self, Tibetan Book of the Dead, NYC, Bruce Bennett, Timoty Leary-psychedelics, travel, scholarship, meditation, Dalai Lama, the Sami, reindeer, Helsinki, Himalayas, chanting, sound artist, death, clear light, transparent light, nothingness, void, emptiness, aliens, god, hell, freedom, Joseph Cornell, consciousness, life force, 4 points, of confidence, Alexa AI, musicians losing themselves, remembering one’s birth, dream chanting, dogs.

• Photo: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis