A creation myth for 350 futures

In association with High Tide Mersey, this live street storytelling performance will consider how the rising tide of arts practices are wishing, needing and being co-opted to address the most important issues humans have ever faced.

As the themes of Global Warming, Climate Change move to ‘centre stage’, what is the role for culture and the arts? How may arts practice contribute to the discourse and how is arts practice being changed by this discourse?

James Lovelock leads the scientific community in his assertion that we have less than 10 years to respond before Global Warming passes the ‘tipping point’. However, acknowledging potential collapse, or ecological perturbation may be factors for liberation and action, rather than inertia. As Ilya Prigogine wrote:
‘The inclusion of irreversibility changes our view of nature. The future is no longer given. Our world is a world of continuous “construction” ruled by probabilistic laws and no longer a kind of automaton.’
He continues:
‘We are led from a world of “being” to a world of “becoming.”
So, taking responsibility and ‘making time a matter of urgency’, are of the utmost relevance to our society. While reflection promotes the ‘precautionary rule’, we must ask as Christopher Alexander suggests:

‘What is the most important thing that I can do now, at this moment, to bring the whole to life.’
But as governments and corporations appropriate ‘Global Warming’ and ‘Climate Change’ as a catch-all phrases concerned with economics, security and energy, it is ever more necessary for the arts to ‘keep the discourse plastic’.

Perhaps, one of the defining and most enduring characteristics of being human is our ability to tell stories. Storytelling may be considered a primary function of all art and a means of maintaining culture.

A reoccurring plea is that environmental and social crises are too complicated for the general public to comprehend, so the arts must be employed to ‘tell the good story’ of what science understands. As my practice drives my research to engage with issues of complexity, whole systems ecology, integral critical futures studies , non-equilibrium thermodynamics and indeterminacy, I find myself resorting to less sophisticated means of expression.