Create the Art Music Magic and Reality That Makes You Come Alive and Helps You Heal

I got back from the Dark Mountain Project's Uncivilisation festival a few days ago, and while I could write well-nigh many of the aspects of that stimulating week, one thread it really tugged on for me was the role – the disquisitional importance – of the arts in shifting the cultural stories that shape our future.

So today I would similar to highlight a few musical artists who have inspired my personal journey, and to invite you lot to suggest a few artists of any kind who accept brought something to your engagement with the global problematique, in whatever way, and perhaps deserve a footling more than exposure.

The 'headline act' at Uncivilisation was George Monbiot debating the usefulness of the Dark Mountain project with one of its founders. Sitting in the audition I was engaged by this – if rather frustrated by some of the arguments unvoiced or misrepresented – but then establish myself profoundly refreshed to have my intellectual cogitations blown away by what followed. Immediately afterwards, Alastair McIntosh took the stage, and used the language of music to speak to the spiritual in us – to our connexion with our homes, our country.

Maria Elvorith, 'Carmine vino, Lipstick and the World in my hand', 2009

The shift in energy in the room (and in me) was palpable, as we moved from our split intellectual camps to what felt a unified sense of wonder and shared values.

Thinking dorsum on this, I am put in listen of some insightful communication from the tardily Howard Zinn which I recently discovered and am endeavouring to embed into my outlook:

"Don't look for a moment of total triumph. See it every bit an ongoing struggle, with victories and defeats, but in the long run the consciousness of people growing.

So y'all demand patience, persistence, and need to understand that even when you don't "win", there is fun and fulfilment in the fact that you have been involved, with other adept people, in something worthwhile."

The arts are so key to that fun and fulfilment, too as to the growth in consciousness, that I feel the need to acknowledge some of my own inspirations…

Saul Williams – Act III Scene 2 (Shakespeare)

Ani DiFranco – Cocky Evident

My new friend Alex Fradera has already suggested adding this link to three folk songs on the subject of the credit crisis (though clearly none too-sung as this one).

For me personally though, Nine Inch Nails' 2007 album, Yr Cipher, was the point where my musical interests collided caput-on with my life.

The mysterious initial trailer video (to a higher place) contained the critical clue to send online fans worldwide spiralling off into an 'Alternate Reality Game (ARG)' ready in a dystopian almost-future ravaged by climate destabilisation and social breakdown. Without ruining besides much of the fun for newcomers who want to explore, the Viability Alphabetize site gives 1 flavour of the world that music fans were drawn into, some parts of which are genuinely moving and disturbing. And drawing us ever deeper was the fact that a few of the tracks off the forthcoming anthology lurked in its depths.

I talked with people for whom the experience – and the music it uncovered – opened their optics to the realities of our present, as well equally to new ways of engaging with those realities. And for me it led to my work on the Superstruct ARG, which tried to aggrandize on that success.

Only that's another story. For now, I'll leave you with some of the art that has affected me, and await forward to discovering more through you lot.

9 Inch Nails – Zero-Sum

Painting by Edwin Landseer, 'Homo proposes, God disposes' ,1864
Photograph by Iain D. Williams, Canada, 2009

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Edit – March 2011: This is just too good not to add to this mail:

roloffyouredut.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.darkoptimism.org/2010/06/03/the-art-and-music-of-our-worlds-predicament/