Origins

Finding new ways to co-create images and narratives

Two Peppers Press was founded by Ted Wade and Bill Gore as an imprint to publish their collaborative book projects.  The college friends reunited in 2018, bringing two lifetimes occupied with questions in science, ecology, culture, art, photography, primate behavior, artificial intelligence, and the mind.   They became fans of each other’s work, and Ted began using Bill’s images in his essays.  Soon after Bill included one of Ted’s stories in the photobook, Dimensions, and the wheels started to turn.

The “Saugatuck Cosmology” project began with Bill’s photographs of the Saugatuck River.  The visual patterns from the camera passed into computer software, something like a digital bardo, where they were deconstructed and remixed in ways that respond to sensory and conceptual experience.   Bill shared the images with Ted, and they became intrigued with the idea of an artist who created a different kind of world: so real that it could be visited in person. Ted thought that the story and images could be combined into a metaphor of a conjured world embodying the artist’s intuitions.  The making of The Saugatuck Cosmology became a way of combining narrative and visual storytelling, and on the conceptual level, a way of rethinking our relationship with nature. 

The Saugatuck Cosmology had adopted the paradigm of animism to tell its story. The Flown Bird Society project followed and elevated animism to the focus of a new tale: one that doubled down on multiple realities and the extension of social life beyond the human tribe.  

The basic setup was inspired by a famous sci-fi series where aliens and humans meet in an isolated tavern, which in turn was a riff on the old joke paradigm about characters who “go into a bar”.  The story has adventurers who get together in an exotic location and explore provocative ideas about alternate realities and animism.  The themes explored include what it means to be alive, our place in nature, the limits of science, and knowing what is real. The outcome endorses the animistic view that the world is a tapestry of living, co-creating personhood.

Two Peppers Press will launch The Flown Bird Society as a genre-bending narrative illuminated with new images fresh from the bardo.  The story spins together art and ecology, science and philosophy, religion and nature, and maybe/maybe-not reality.  So, it’s like most news stories today, but more interesting and hopeful.