This is a concept and musical composition that I developed for Utopia 2040 – Reclaiming the Future exhibition in Helsinki, Finland, May 2016.

Deep Freedom is a new global narrative and “spiritual” revolution that would replace religions and neoliberalism as our defining belief systems. It draws on the book The Religion of the Future by philosopher and Harvard law professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger, in which he argues for a religious revolution that dispenses with the concept of God and elements of the supernatural, and expands individual and collective human empowerment through revised social and political structures; designs that enable life of creativity, risk, experiment, cooperation and meaningful personal connection. He calls this condition ‘deep freedom’.

Rooted in the actual world, collaboration, harmonious disagreement, intelligence, ecological balance and science, Deep Freedom offers a heightened, intensified, and more meaningful life in the present. It includes the notion of long-term thinking in which our sense of ‘now’ extends for thousands of years and which, in 2040, has been finally adopted by mainstream politics, media and culture; we better understand our place in the long continuum of humanity and evolution, from our migrant origins in East Africa to the migrant generations to come. As our understanding of the natural world and cosmos grows, so does our awareness of the wonder that is this life.

‘Deep Freedom’ is a generative sound composition, consisting of recordings of various religious sounds from different cultures, but reimagined and projected into the year 2040. It is generative in nature, meaning that it is constantly and ‘infinitely’ self-organizing, yet sustaining a unified characteristic throughout: this living nature as well as its slow pace derive their inspiration from the idea of ecology (where things come into being through interactions at the bottom rather than hierarchically from the top) and the concept of deep time.

Illustration by Iulia Radion