Alternative Editorial: Expect Surprises

Green Space Dark Skies

The view from the UK this week is tired. As we move into Autumn we are facing the prospect of a Winter of activism taking place within an unknowable future. We are now in Week 79 of The Shift which began with the first lock down. It’s becoming clear that the government’s call to Build Back Better is not going to materialise on their terms.

The economy is struggling; Brexit is still manifesting negatively. On the Covid front, the vaccine gave us a small window of forward motion but there are already reports of its waning effectscarbon: numbers are rising again. No-one wants another lock-down but our collective intelligence about the best strategy seems to be back to square one. 

One of the most difficult propositions for change is COP26 – a gathering of world leaders in Glasgow that presents itself in the media as our ‘last chance’. If we cannot come to agreements to radically reduce our carbon output by 2030, the scientific consensus is that we will have run out of time to change direction, as we head towards the cliff. Meanwhile, this government is doing its best to position itself as a climate champion - while openly breaking all the basic rules on carbon output

We know we do have the solutions to climate change and we even have the capacity to do what is needed – to survive as a species – in time. However, our complacency about knowing the solutions makes the obstacles appear ever more insurmountable. It’s like watching a bunch of drunks cavorting on a railway track, enjoying themselves enormously, never understanding the train coming down the line wouldn’t be able to stop in time, even if the driver saw them.

Antelope has returned from extinction

Nevertheless, Nature relentlessly shows us that it’s possible to change, suddenly and surprisingly. Autumn can take your breath away with its beauty. In Africa, a species  of antelope that went extinct reappeared. None of this should make us complacent, but these periods of sustained darkness need relief.

One of these surprising changes took form this week: a national project that was doomed to be highly divisive has matured into something inspiring and potentially significant. Co-initiator of A/UK Pat Kane was part of the team for this project. Here is how he described it in his regular column for the National newspaper in Scotland:

“Festival of Brexit? No way. Festival of Creativity and Innovation? Tell me more…” Everything about the beginning of my engagement as an R&D consultant to Unboxed2022, previously Festival UK*2022, and vernacularly “Festival of Brexit”, was creative-class to the max.

The first meeting, in February 2020, was in a Soho bakers called Princi, all marble walls, communal slabs of table and Milanese flakiness. My companion was the cultural producer Sam Hunt, who a year before had asked me to host some sessions on possible futures at the Bluedot festival in Cheshire.

Bluedot mixes anthemic bands and hardcore science tents, under the immense, rusted shadow of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. What a geektastic day it was: I thought I’d died and was about to empirically prove the afterlife. Sam, his bearded coolness equally verifiable, wanted to explore something with me.

Yes, this was the festival proposed by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Teresa May, intended to be a post-Brexit booster for British-national spirits, with £120m ring-fenced for the celebrations. But what Sam presented to me was the opportunity for something quite different: a “festival of creativity and innovation”.

As Sam had written to me: “Politics is continually reduced to the binary. We want to try and celebrate the complexity of places and the people who choose to call them home”.

Does that remind you of the spirit of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony? No surprise - much of that team (including the producer Martin Green) is also in charge of this project. This week’s flurry of outraged Tory MPs, complaining that Unboxed2022 is “trendy” and “politically correct”, displaying no Spitfire flypasts or Proms-like flaggery (or even one mention of the word “Brexit”), were always fated to be disappointed.

…I was just as enthralled by the idea that this could be a massive collective celebration of human creativity, in and of itself. This has been the theme of my adult life, by means of music, media, technology and activism.

I wrote a tome about these matters in 2004, titled The Play Ethic. The book has left me with a multi-disciplinary interest in how human nature keeps our options open, by means of joyful experimentation and exploration (in other words, “play”).

From that interest, the clincher for me was that the Festival was taking a STEAM approach - standing for science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics. And that all of these creative commissions had to touch on most or all of these fields. (We also took the A of STEAM, and slotted SHAPE into it vertically - standing for social science, humanities, arts, philosophy and environment).

My curation of FutureFest since 2012 (a London-sited festival of the future, powered by the innovation foundation Nesta) had been all about the collision and fusion of artists, transformers and radicals—from Edward Snowden to Deep Mind, from Brian Eno to (indeed) Nicola Sturgeon. All on the basis of the old Alan Kay slogan, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”.

So I was raring to go, thinking furiously as to what conditions, structures, practices and concepts would be required to make this R&D process hum. What sociable set-ups could allow coders to talk to dancers, land activists to work with mobile engineers, dance musicians to co-create with neuroscientists? When would they move together, where would they hang out, how would they play around?

And then, along with everyone else from March 2020, everything shut down. Posing the question: how do you prepare an islands-wide festival of creativity from behind screens, in domestic back-rooms, fiddling with untested shareware and virtual whiteboards? Well, how?

…When I look at the ten final commissions, narrowed down from a shortlist of 30, taken from over 300 submissions, I can’t help but connect the nature of their visions to the context in which they were birthed.

“From one little roome, an everywhere”, as the Elizabethan poet John Donne (of “no man is an island” fame) once wrote. And from the online forums and platforms that we devised, the projects have literally gone everywhere.

Green Place, Dark Skies uses GPS and light tech to reclaim community authority over the land. Our Place In Space deploys the same island landscape to look at our current divisions from a literally cosmic perspective.

Olympics 2012 Opening Ceremony

Dreamachine will ask communities to commit themselves to a brand-new, drug-free psychedelic experience, traversing new inner worlds. While See Monster planks an entire North Sea oil rig in the middle of a fairground in Weston Super-Mare, urging us to consider what to do with the relics of a fossil-fuel age we must leave behind.

And a special mention for Scotland’s lead entry Dandelion, which reimagines the harvest festival as a platform for food growth anywhere in the country. It’s led by one of our great Scottish imagineers, Angus Farquhar, bouncing back from his failed attempt to turn St. Peter’s Seminary into a requiem for modernist ambitions.

So, yes, I would say that Covid (and other planetary disruptions) hung over the coruscating creativity of all the participants, in the process that resulted in Unboxed.

But it’s creativity, initiative, and adaptiveness—drawing on all resources, deploying all knowledges and practices, artistic, scientific and participatory—which is the most valuable human response to these systemic challenges. Unboxed2022, probably to a fault, aims to prove the truth of this response.

As Pat mentioned, there is a precedent from the 2012 Olympics when the local community became directly involved in the design and performance of the Opening Ceremony. The arts were able to bring together a much more diverse range of local inhabitants than politicians could in the lead up. Director Danny Boyle and writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce later lamented that nothing was done with the ‘social capital’ built through that intense period of ambitious creativity. 

From an A/UK strategy perspective, could these injections of cash for community creativity be kick-starters for building Citizens Action Networks? It’s a model that is already being actively pursued with Cities of Culture, that, when participatory, leave an important legacy of self-organization for the citizens (See here for Hull and Aarhus and here for Coventry). The pattern is, invariably, that this kind of collaboration turns easily to how to make better futures for those who live in these places.

The biggest asset we have in the fight for climate change – the people – are currently being scrambled by competing political interests. Could this surprising morphing of a national call to action - from divisive, patriotic triumphalism (a “Festival of Brexit”) to the common love of creativity - be a new framing for collective action? One we should seize and make use of?