“Sing Wild Seeds”, guided by Brian Eno, invites songwriters and musicians to become social futurists with their skills. First gig? Glastonbury
We’re beginning to more closely link arts like dance, improvisation, food and music into our political design, as we develop our putative political project called Spring.
So our eyes widened when we heard about futurist Stuart Candy’s enterprise in conjunction with the great genius Brian Eno - a meeting of social futuring and music making called Sing Wild Seeds.
Here’s an edited cross post of Stuart’s report on his process, which culminates in a performance at Glastonbury Music Festival (see the Instagram post above).
Sing Wild Seeds is a project about having musicians and audiences pre-enact preferred futures together.
Conceptually, it springs from a question along these lines: how might music-making be combined with experiential futures towards developing our collective ability to imagine and shape desired change?
Institutionally, it’s a collaboration between the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF)and Earth/Percent, both independent UK-based social change organisations, dedicated respectively to accelerating the “transition to a more equitable and just future”, and “unleash[ing] the power of music in service of the planet”.
Also centrally involved is Earth/Percent founder Brian Eno, a celebrated musician, producer, and expert collaborator in multiple artforms. Brian’s extensive experience in facilitating individual and group creativity has helped form the foundation for this effort.
The focus is on harnessing the promise and pleasures of worldbuilding on one hand, and musical co-creation on the other. And this to help people not just think or imagine but play and perform their way into future possibilities.
If this strikes you as different from the commonplace framing of futures in support of “strategy” or “decision-making”, you’re right. We’re aiming at some of the background or cultural context within which conscious decision-making occurs. And we’re also aiming at the detail of lived experience, a part of what I call the futures of everyday life.
As I wrote in The Economist many years ago:
Driven by the irrepressible human urge to bring our inner worlds to life, the culture of public imagination is set to make a leap: in coming years we can expect to see more and more companies, governments, advocacy organisations and communities creating and sharing experiential futures.
The sooner we learn to use and democratise collective imagination to dramatise our alternatives, the more powerful will be our capacity to shape change towards just and worthwhile ends.
Sing Wild Seeds could be seen at once as exemplifying this forecast coming to pass, and as a conscious contribution to taking it further.
It’s a matter of what my collaborator Cassie Robinson of JRF, who initiated the project, has inspiringly framed as imagination infrastructures—a kind of “soil work”, gardening towards conditions favourable for certain kinds of things to grow.
We launched Sing Wild Seeds in March this year, with a hybrid online / in-person event in two parts: I gave an introductory presentation on foresight and experiential futures practices for a cohort of interested musicians, assembled from Brian’s network
Cultivating public imagination through music is an appealing creative prospect, and also a good practical challenge.
Our chosen approach has been not simply to have musicians integrate richer or more deliberate futures imagining into their existing creative practices. While helping professional music folks make “songs from the future” is super interesting, Sing Wild Seeds has a more ambitious, more participatory notion at its heart.
The idea is to expose musicians to futures ideas and methods, and then to support them in devising site- and event-specific experiments. They in turn will engage live audiences in real time, co-creating and performing songs from the futures that they’d like to see (and hear) come to pass.
Not only were the particulars of the musicians’ own sensibilities and orientations impossible to plan for in advance – the ways artists write songs varies enormously. But the ultimate design parameters, practical elements of context in which they would eventually run something themselves (location, duration, format, audience size, cultural composition, etc), would not be found out until later either.
Last month, then, while I was in the UK, we held two in-person workshops at Brian’s studio in London, to try out some ways of helping folks navigate and identify the most promising sectors, for each of them, within the vast design space of potential project-experiments.
I chose two contrasting points of departure for engaging our musician friends in futures imagination and songwriting ideation. One was quick, and deliberately time-pressured; a combinatorial prompting activity using The Thing From The Future card game (second edition).
The other was more leisurely, taking the form of a guided meditation or daydreaming exercise; the sort of approach that my colleague Oliver Markley calls mental time travel.
The pair of contrasting tempos aimed to elicit different kinds of creative response: imagining fast and slow, you might say.
From the outset, in relation to the mental time travel exercise, I was specifically interested in going beyond guided visioning. The sense of sight often implicitly overrides all others when it comes to imagining alternative and preferred futures.
So we invited engagement in guided listening, too – having folks attend especially to their auditory experience, along with other senses, during their inner journeys.
We used a time horizon of 30 years (02054) the first time, and 50 years (02074) the second.
With participants clustered in small groups of 2–3, one member was asked to select a card on behalf of their group, to indicate the type of preferred future or world that they would be creating a song from (e.g., a “fair” future, a “decolonised” future, and so on).
The theme or aspect of that world which each person would focus on for their song was individually drawn from the deck at random (e.g. farming, the ocean, love, cities).
And finally, I assigned to the musicians not just the generic output “song” as the future thing for them to create, but instead gave each one a particular kind of song to make from within their chosen future (e.g. anthem, show tune, folk song, etc).
(The Thing From The Future has been compared to, and at its inception over a decade ago was directly influenced by, Brian Eno’s own classic creativity-enabling card deck, Oblique Strategies, so there was a highly satisfying coming-full-circle quality in getting to deploy it with musicians in his studio!)
Stuart Candy and Brian Eno, doing Sing Wild Seeds in Eno’s studio
In addition, following one of Brian’s specific creative mandates that arose in workshop one, we ventured to insist on strict parameters: people had to finish a song corresponding to their personalised prompt within five minutes, then actually sing it.
While obviously the product of a highly compressed creative process, the resulting first-draft compositions from both gatherings truly exceeded expectations.
They included a chanted exchange between different species seeking to peacefully inhabit the same planet, a future ballad about farming, a children’s song celebrating science, and a call-and-response performance recounting how humanity saved the oceans.
I think there’s something very intriguing here, and potentially significant as a kind of prefigurative politics (see TFOEL p. 220). We’re using music not just as a social medium – part of human society since time immemorial, and which has nothing necessarily to do with futures content per se. But on top of that, we’re using it as a way into shared imagining of new possibilities.
We can make out a kind of double prefiguring. There’s a desirable-in-itself investment in solidarity or community-making, by creating and performing in a group. And this is coupled with the roleplay-like composition and singing of lyrics, deliberately formulated to bespeak and summon futures we hope to bring into being.
Politics is perhaps too small a word. If this doesn’t sound like a recipe for magic, I don't know what is.
The very first public deployment for Sing Wild Seeds has just taken place – at Britain’s world-renowned Glastonbury Festival, in an experiment led by the marvellous Genevieve Dawson.
Related:
> Dreaming Together (short piece on experiential futures / XF)
> Introduction to Experiential Futures in The Economist
> What Is the Value of Futures and Foresight? (a Q&A with the RSA)
> Imagining Transitions (interview by Rob Hopkins)
> The Futures of Everyday Life
> Inside a bold new experiment in public imagination (on UNTITLED Festival)
> Participatory Futures for Democracy (see “acculturation”)
> Gaming Futures Literacy [PDF] and Transforming the Future
> The Thing From The Future (see also Situation Lab website)
> Anything but Text (post anticipating XF from 02006)
> Historical pre-enactment