a start
articulture.systems hopes to inspire with a simple idea:
What might emerge if our cultural landscape was understood more as a system than as a collection of individual elements? This could apply at a personal scale, all the way up to a global scale. It’s about reinforcing interconnection over the illusion of separation. I’d like to shift the focus away from inspiring examples of ecoart, green fashion, and LEED Platinum architecture, when we think of culture, towards how these elements might interact with and relate to each other and the world we want to see.
I plan to explore this idea here, invite folks to consider the ramifications, and see what emerges. If there’s greater interest, perhaps we can build up a body of thought, experience, and practices to help us all cultivate a more resilient culture at a time when we urgently need something different. A systems approach could create space for collective action and accountability, particularly as they relate to social and ecological justice. Unless our culture and creative efforts reflect an understanding of interconnection and interdependence that supports practices of profound reciprocity, we will always be fighting an uphill battle. Everything around us, including our most compelling music, architecture, and art, will still reflect the destructive, atomized worldview that is harming the Earth’s climate and threatening its bio-cultural diversity. We have only to look at human history to see what has worked (and hasn’t) for our ancestors.
A quick example, drawing from a quote on the Home Page:
“our dances are not art, they are devices to teach and educate the next generation about the principles and the skills that will support their life future forward… our jewelry, our baskets, our clothing, all of that to the untrained eye just looks like a piece of art, but if you look deeper, they are devices, they are tools that guide us and teach us.” - lyla june johnston
Making a traditional Dine’ basket, involves long term land stewardship practices to ensure the sumac fibers and natural dyes are available, the prayers, songs, food production, clothing, and countless other elements woven together to make what we may call a “basket” and place on a museum stand with a laser printed descriptive label. The basket, however, embodies interconnection and relationships and would traditionally help sustain a way of life (along with many other elements working together) for humans and their non-human relatives within a particular bioregion.
That’s what I mean by interconnection vs the illusion of separation. Modern colonial industrialism relies on chopping these relationships up and pretending, where possible, that they don’t exist.
I’ve listed some potential steps for exploring what interconnected cultural systems might look like moving forward. In practice, these steps are likely to happen out of order and simultaneously as well.
STEP 1:
Inspiration. First, research and communicate the concept and general approach to all this. The idea is as old as dirt. Before things were commodified and obsessively chopped up into categories, culture was a lot more embedded and interwoven with daily life and the ecosystems we depend on. What has been done before or is being done currently that we can learn from, support and celebrate? Who else is working on this? (For more on this, see this post.)
STEP 2:
Experimentation. How might this apply to existing cultural restoration efforts? Perhaps try making some art systems and test them out. Share them with people and see what it’s like to live with them. How might this work in a city or in a rural area? With people already experienced with living close to the Earth or new to it? What might this testing look like?
STEP 3:
Evolution. We learn from our experiences and the experiences of others. How do we effectively iterate, modify and evaluate these ideas? What resources might support this?
STEP 4:
Amplify. Share this information, interconnect practitioners and people interested in these ideas, build online organizational and institutional structures to support emergent systems, and make them better, more accessible, and relevant.
I tend to think in terms of infrastructure, so please forgive the many lists on this site. Can any of this turn eventually into action or even a movement of some kind? I have no idea. I tried to boost things along with greenmuseum•org, and I eventually lost faith in the power of “environmental art” or even “eco-art” to do much to change things. The core of “art” as I see it, by definition, is still rooted in this illusion of separation. Even the boldest community-engaged, science-based, time-blessed projects, are caught in this fatal bubble, divided from the unbounded fluidity and interdependence of life. This is an attempt to piece some of this back together so human cultures can once again, become more than just the sum of so many parts. My hope is to support (if I can) those who already live this way and those who are working to shift their own lives at the grassroots level of transformation. This effort and website are dedicated to all of you.
