The Membrane Structure: AI, Governance, and the Accelerated School for Feelings
Details
- Interviewee: Poli
- Role: AI/ML engineer, Feytopian
- Community: Feÿtopia
- Location: chateau du fey
- Language: English
Summary
Poli is an AI/ML engineer working at the intersection of machine learning and artistic practice. He first came to Château de Fey for the Glitch art residency, drawn by the chance to meet others combining AI with creativity in one physical space. After the residency he returned for a full Feÿtopia season, extending his stay and eventually sleeping in a hallway room he made himself when no rooms were free.
As a digital nomad, Feÿtopia inverts his usual relationship with place: the rest of the year he moves toward people, but here people move through while he stays still. The seasonal container feels like the one moment of groundedness in his year.
On governance, Poli describes Feÿtopia as a membrane structure: permeable, not fully flat, not formally hierarchical. He captures the paradox through a visitor who said, after being told there was no person in charge, 'can you bring me to the person that makes sure there is no person in charge.' The community operates within Château de Fey as institution, with Jess holding the business limits while the community holds the playground.
His central challenge is the accelerated school for feelings: connections that form and dissolve in days carry the emotional weight of years. And the larger question he holds is whether Feÿtopia's practices can be transferred back to cities, rather than scaling more châteaux.
Key quotes
You know when you have a sound that you only notice when it stops, like a fridge, and then when it stops making the sound you feel this retrospective release. I felt the same thing, but something I did not know I was missing until I noticed that this is there.
In spaces like this, especially Feytopia, it is kind of like a school, an accelerated school for feelings, because sometimes you experience a very intense process of emotions and then the person is moving in one week.
Can you bring me to the person that makes sure that there is no person in charge.
Feytopia is a container within Château de Fey that allows Feytopia to be as free and expressive and open as the château infrastructure and dynamic allows.
My biggest dream would be to bring the best practices and the dynamics that happen here back to how we live in modern society.
Transcript
---
interviewee: Poli
community: Feytopia
location: France
featured_in_posts: none
transcript_format: clean
themes:
- Governance
- Connection
- Conflict
- Challenge
- Community
- Structure
---
# Interview Transcript: Poli
**Community:** Château de Fey / Feytopia
**Full name:** Poli (also called Polly)
**Interviewer:** Sharon Avraham
---
**Sharon:** So let's start with your name and where we are sitting right now.
**Poli:** I am Poli, people call me Polly normally. We are sitting right now at Château de Fey and the Feytopia community.
---
**Sharon:** And how did you find out about this place?
**Poli:** I came to Fey for an art residency called Glitch.
I came here as an AI engineer. I am a machine learning engineer for arts and creativity. This art residency integrates artists, engineers, technologists, people from different spaces, collectors, curators.
I discovered this place as a place where a lot of collaborations happened. And then I learned that besides this art residency that happens every year for two or three weeks, there is also this community Feytopia that runs from January to April, more or less every year. I was interested. So after the residency ended, I came here to see what it was about.
---
**Sharon:** And why did you get intrigued by this? Why come to this residency in a château in the countryside?
**Poli:** The art residency part, my interest was connecting with people working on this space. It was quite new. This was three years ago. People that were combining the latest advancements in machine learning and AI with artistic practices.
It is something that I have been working on that I felt is a bit isolated because I was not doing this practice with some other people in the space. So learning that not only there were other people that were doing similar things, which I knew from Twitter or the internet, but the fact that they were gathering in one place and hanging out, with a really nice structure and scaffolding, got me interested.
And then I came in to experience it, and it gave me such a good impression, both of the physical premises of Fey but also the potential of collaboration that this space entails, that I was intrigued by how this would work in not an art residency setting but in a more common communal living setting.
---
**Sharon:** Can you describe maybe a moment in your first steps here that felt like, oh, this feels right, this feels interesting, this makes me want to go even deeper here?
**Poli:** I do not know if there is one particular moment, but I remember a few different feelings that I had in my body.
One of them was the feeling of being in a container with a large number of people where basically you stay for two weeks seeing the same thirty faces. And this created some sort of, it activated a part that I did not know was there, of like, wow, there is something in being in a setting with different humans, even if you do not interact with all of them, you do not need to be in this crazy networking structure.
Just looking at ten, twenty or thirty different faces every day, interacting with some of them and feeling this feeling of like, we are in this journey doing something together, activated some part in me.
I normally describe it as, you know when you have a sound that you only notice when it stops, you know, like you have this fridge, and then when it stops making the sound, you can feel this retrospective release. I felt the same thing, but something that I did not know I was missing until I noticed that this is there and now I figured that there was something missing.
---
**Sharon:** And then you came for these two weeks and you decided to stay for the whole season.
**Poli:** So the Glitch residency happens at separate times from Feytopia. It happens in November. It is two weeks and then it is done, and Feytopia only started in January the other year. So I came for Glitch. And then because I learned about Feytopia after I applied, I came in the season forward. So I did not just stay directly because there was a time gap. But I came in the next season from Glitch.
---
**Sharon:** So why did you want to come back for the whole season after that?
**Poli:** The first time I came to Feytopia, I came to stay for two weeks, and then I extended for a month and a half. Because it felt really good to be here, and I started to create connections.
And then once this happened, I was like, well, next time. And it was a hassle of extending and finding a free room. At some point, I even created my own room in the hallway under the stairs because there were no rooms. So I made it really nice and cozy and cute.
I was able to stay. And then the other season, I decided to book for the whole season.
I think the why question passes through the fact that I already live as a digital nomad. So while for some people Feytopia is a place of expanding thoughts and meeting a lot of people and being in this place of kind of scatter to then regroup, I have some sort of a reverse process, which is that here is my grounding space.
Here is where I am, because it is the only time in the year that I stay three or four months in one place. I think I enjoy the nomadic lifestyle, that I am always going to where people are. And then when I am here, I am static and then people are passing through. So I feel like it is a similar dynamic but reversed in some dimension.
I also enjoy a lot that there is this ephemerality, that it is from January to April. And then I have my life, I have my job, I have my friends in different places in the world. And then I come here for a few months and then back in the world.
---
**Sharon:** Can you tell me about maybe an element of self-growth, a way that you felt that you changed and you grew from being part of this project?
**Poli:** I feel like I have found a part of myself that was not really present when I am in settings like regular city life and I live by myself and I hang out with friends in social settings and then go back home, or even if I live with a few friends in that kind of flatmate situation in an apartment in some city with two or three people.
I think I have never had the capacity to hold space for others in a way that, and also to be held in a way that in spaces like this is possible. So I feel like I show up more, I am more attuned to the communal needs and how I can be support.
And I also feel that the others here are attuned to some of my needs and they feel how they can be of support. And this is a dynamic that exists in normal life, but somehow I was not as attuned and as present in such processes.
I was not always the best flatmate when it comes to house chores. I would do my things, but I would not be known for being exceptional. Not that I am known for being exceptional here, but I am still way more connected and way more responsible and having a sense of shared ownership in the process.
This makes me feel more connected and more attuned and having this feedback that I am well integrated and part of the dynamic in a good way. And also I am able to then pass that along and connect with other people that also may not have the same dynamic when they are not in spaces like this.
---
**Sharon:** Can you tell me maybe about the big challenges that you experienced here?
**Poli:** I will talk about two different classes of challenges.
I think one is just that a lot of people describe it and I kind of agree that in spaces like this, especially Feytopia, it is kind of like a school, an accelerated school for feelings, because sometimes you experience a very intense process of emotions and then the person is moving in one week.
So you kind of feel excitement, joy, connection and then sadness and grief, which normally would take in a friendship a few years and here it happens in a week. So I think that there is an emotional challenge in coping and dealing with this super fast structures of human connection that are normally spread in time.
And I think that is challenging in a psychological manner.
And then I think a challenge in this space is understanding a bit the mechanics of how this can avoid becoming just a bubble. So I think that is one of my challenges with this space.
How can this avoid being just a vacation that people take and they partake in enjoying being together and then leave, and are we escaping the real world by coming here. And if so, it is not really what I aspire.
What I aspire is that this is kind of an incubator for how things could be back in normal living. But I think that is challenging because finding the place where the learnings of places like this can be transferred back to normal living is not trivial.
And I think that is the challenge of how to avoid indulging only in feeling good in these spaces and then deciding to fork and exit and live in this bubble.
---
**Sharon:** Then where do you think this place is actually challenging that, or not really getting it, if you can pinpoint it?
**Poli:** I think there is a lot of it that is in progress in that dimension, but it was not the focus.
---
**Sharon:** What is actually failing to do that, if we can even pinpoint it?
**Poli:** I think that part of it is just that when, one of my biggest challenges and this is maybe a bit personal, but maybe it is connected, is that I think we did not learn yet a process or a mechanism or a dynamic on how to keep the energy and the structure and the logics that happen here alive.
The digital formats or subgroups, people actually hang out a lot with each other. So there are subgroups, like Feytopia New York City, Feytopia Berlin, and then people will chat and hang out.
But it is definitely a different dynamic. It is more like normal friends hanging out, lets go to this bar. And there the community structure is a bit spread, like some people that met here and then they form a shared apartment in different cities, this has happened. And then other people that are nomadic stayed that way.
So there is a way to keep a little bit of the energy in the real world. But to me the transition from season to non-season is one of the challenges.
And then also it is how we structure the processes that happen here so that they have an impact in the real world versus being something that at the moment feels good for people, but then either they feel that they should be doing this full time and not go back to the real world and work on the problems that need attention, or they feel that they can but they do not have the tools or resources.
---
**Sharon:** If you do not mind going a little bit more personal, because I think the personal says a lot about the collective. Can you talk about a specific way that you found something challenging, either relating to other people here or working as part of the team, and how you dealt with it in a way that you think you learned something about yourself? It can be social or work related.
**Poli:** I think one of the challenges that I personally face here is how I express myself socially.
Sometimes I have this, you know, it is a space for co-creation and it is very conducive to it. And I feel very inclined to be part of a lot of co-creative projects and processes. I think I am a better collaborator to a project than the project needs in some dimensions, as my grounded way of being. This is how I function.
But then sometimes I feel this challenge of saying yes to a lot, feeling excited with so many different social dynamics that are happening, and I want to be part of many.
I create connections that feel really deep at the moment and that feel like I want to go deeper and collaborate and co-create. And when I am living them, they are deep. It is not just a surface feeling.
In the moment that this happens, I want to go deeper and collaborate and co-create. But sometimes, especially because of this transition challenge, the post-season or another week starts and then this project that I was working on, people get distracted with something new.
And then a lot of the things stay in the space of ideas only. And this dynamic, these connections stay as a potential. Psychologically, it is grounding in the sense of, I know that if I were to follow this through, it could go in an interesting direction.
But when you have a few of those, it can be challenging. You can feel like, am I only starting sparks and then never following through what it would mean to follow through, and would I lose the possibility of expansion.
So I think that is one of the challenges I experience in that social dimension.
---
**Sharon:** If you can dream as big as you can, what does it say to be or to become in this ecosystem of communities, either temporarily or even without time frames. What role can Feytopia play?
**Poli:** I think a big dream is basically creating an environment and infrastructure which allows people to exercise their radical self-expression, being themselves very unapologetically, and to enable co-creation in spaces.
I actually feel like my dream or ambition for Feytopia is not so much that it could inspire other communities like Feytopia. Because even though I really like this space, it does not feel like the future is everyone moving to the countryside and living in a big house or a château.
So I think this is an alternative available to not that many people.
So what I would love to see is how we can bring some of these elements and dynamics back into living in cities. Maybe it is not living in a house with thirty people, but maybe people could go live in smaller apartments, or even if people live in nuclear families, how do we bring a lot of the dynamics that happen here to social elements, third spaces, public squares and all that.
So I feel that dreaming big, my biggest dream would be to bring the best practices and the dynamics that happen here back to how we live in modern society.
Because I do not think it is scalable or sustainable that we create a thousand more Feytopias and then have a small slice of the population that can be nomad, work remote or have funds to self-sustain living in this way.
I do think that then this looks more like the exit dynamic. Rather I would like, how can we be in this dynamic here and through the processes that happen here, that maybe require a container like this, learn how to create this bridge to co-create this in the real world, in our cities.
---
**Sharon:** What do you think needs to happen for that to become a reality?
**Poli:** I do not know if I have a full map for what needs to happen.
But I do think that some of the practices that happen in communities like this, in intentional communities that allow for spaces of emergence, I have already seen some of this being replicated in spaces in cities.
Just a tiny example is the Night Cafe in London. And there are many other initiatives. I do not know if it is still cool to talk about third spaces because I think they have been talked about so much but built so little. But I still think that there are dynamics in which places and environments and structures could be brought back to cities that allow for this co-creative dynamic, self-expression.
And I think in parts this comes, and it is maybe a bit challenging or contradictory, because I think that a lot of these dynamics come when the business part is not the central element.
You can think of if you try to create a co-living space in a city or a co-working space, it is very tricky to make the financials be the most attractive ones for investors. Sometimes this feels like the challenge, how to create a community that is flourishing and nourishing and dynamic versus having the business model that is the best for investors.
I think it is sometimes somewhere in the middle, where maybe a co-living or co-working space is not trying to upsell and extract as much value as possible from the financial perspective, because if you do that, then there is less space for a community to grow.
Maybe it is just that I am not that good with business, but that is my impression from projects. Like I see a co-living that I like in Barcelona. I know that it has a really nice community, but the business is not as strong as some of the other institutional projects that are co-working with an amazing business model.
They charge you for everything, even every minute for when you are using the phone booth or whatever, but there is no community. People are alone. The idea is that you are going to work with other people, but then you go and you are isolated, you are not having social dynamics.
So I feel sometimes the challenging thing is how to build things back into a world where financial return is one angle among others.
How do we create these places that work well enough as a business but still put the people first and make them feel like part of it rather than just customers of it.
---
**Sharon:** Tell me a little bit about the governance model of this place.
**Poli:** I think that a lot of the governance here is executional in the sense of, instead of having clearly defined rules, it is a permeable structure that allows for the community to have elements that have their influence.
But it is also not a fully flat horizontal where everyone is exactly the same in the governance space.
So in a way, it is a model in which some of the people that came here first and started this kind of identify and create the social possibilities for inviting new and renewing energies that then join some parts of the projects.
Sometimes people just step up to it when you see they are part of the project and there was no formal introduction. It is kind of like a membrane structure.
But I do think that is only possible because there was an interesting interaction that happened here. Sometimes we like to say that we have no hierarchical structures. But then one person chatting with us was challenging this and said, okay, there was a little conflict happening and they were like, can I talk to the person that is in charge.
We said, we are a community, there is no one person in charge. And then this person answered, can you bring me to the person that makes sure that there is no person in charge.
In a way, this means that for a community to exist in this executional manner, it requires an institutional scaffolding.
I think that institutional scaffolding has a very well-defined structure, because Feytopia, the way I see it, is that Feytopia is a community that is within Château de Fey, which is an institution. And Château de Fey has Jess as the CEO, has a staff, has a functioning.
The relationship between Feytopia community and Château de Fey is a bit more permeable than just we rent the space to run the community. But at the same time, we are not fully autonomous. There are some things that simply the space will not accommodate, because the community does not own the space and is not the steward of the space itself in a full sense.
Feytopia does not have a say over whether the renovation will happen in one building or another. That is not the dynamic of Feytopia.
Feytopia is a container within Château de Fey that allows Feytopia to be as free and expressive and open as the château infrastructure and dynamic allows.
---
**Sharon:** We are in the middle of this season, kind of towards the end. What kind of evolution do you hope Feytopia is going to move toward this season?
**Poli:** I think my hope is that as the season progresses, one aspect of evolution is a more doing dynamic.
I think there has always been, the place is a place for laying out ideas and then discussing them and doing other practices, environments, on whatever. But I feel like a lot of times people are hanging out for hours.
It could be the case that they sit together in the evening hours, or in their time for those that do not have a day job, and just do things, make things happen here. Normally people discuss ideas here and then make them happen outside.
But I think a vision for the season is that we start to make some stuff happen here, especially because I am personally working on having community, decentralized, open source AI systems that live in the community, that are not sending data to the cloud and all that.
So I would like to make that happen. That is a personal vision, not only mine, as a community thing, but it is the one I am stewarding.
But not only that one. More in general, how can we have processes so that the self-improvement that the community does happens to itself while the season is still happening.
We have been talking about having a lab here for five years. We have been talking about having digital sovereign tech infrastructure even before I had, like, lets run a DNS server, and things like this.
Some of these things happen, some of them do not. But I would like to see more of them happening this season.
Thank you.