Communities of practice for an ecology of the imagination: Thoreau’s Walden and the GAIA journey

This article analyzes the “GAIA journey”, an initiative hosted by the Presencing Institute (PI) between March and June 2020, by discussing its precedents in terms of social art, and its potential for facilitating social change as a container in which a multitude of communities of practice can re-imagine the future. GAIA (Global Activation of Intention and Action) emerged during and in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic and associated lockdown. It aimed to virtually bring together communities to bear witness to the current moment as a way of mobilizing social change. It included online and offline interaction, both local and global, but this article focuses only on the online-global aspect of the journey. Our hypothesis is that GAIA is a contemporary instance of “social art” as initially conceptualized, among others, by Henry David Thoreau in the 19th century and Joseph Beuys in the 20th. Their seminal ideas have been put into use, developed in several cycles of iteration, and upscaled by Otto Scharmer and his colleagues at the MIT and the PI. Methods include a review of the literature, textual analysis, participant observation (Antonio Casado da Rocha took part in the whole journey), and qualitative analysis of recordings from seven live sessions over the fourteen-week duration of GAIA, in which 13,000 people from 77 countries participated.