Popularizing a systems approach to culture is likely to take a while. I’ve started to sketch out a roadmap knowing it will take lifetimes to explore this landscape, create, modify, distribute and ground-truth these ideas at any scale.

a start.

articulture.systems is hoping to inspire this inquiry with a simple idea: What if our cultural landscape (from person to planet) was more like an ecosystem (interconnected) than a plant store (separate elements)?

I plan to break that idea down on this website and invite folks to consider its ramifications and then develop these ideas here and independently. If we stay in touch, we can build up a body of thought, experience and practices that can help us all cultivate a more resilient culture at a time when we urgently need something different.

I’ve listed these as steps and I can imagine some sort of progression but realistically, they are likely to happen out of order and simultaneously as well. Please take this as a guide to some of the tasks involved. As things move along, I expect we’ll find others. Thanks!

STEP 1:

Inspiration. First, research and communicate the concept and general approach to all this. The general concept is as old as dirt. What has been done before or is being done currently that we can learn from and celebrate?

STEP 2:

Experimentation. Let’s try making some art systems and try them out. Share them with people and see what it’s like to live with them.

STEP 3:

Evolution. We learn from our experiences and the experiences of others. How do we test and evaluate these ideas?

STEP 4:

Amplify. Share this information, 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 forgive me. Why does this approach excite me so much? [LINK to personal inspiration]

I can only imagine how our most ancient ancestors felt about the Earth, Pachamama, or the vast cosmos and their place in it. I expect those who study our prehistoric kin do what they can with the context, remains and artifacts available to develop models for what these ancient relatives’ inner lives were like.

Given how embedded these people were within the diversity of life, the seasons, the cycles of what we call nature and the universe, we can barely begin to grasp how their "art" as we look on it today, supported their long-term survival and happiness.

i’ve coined the term “articulture”…

… to describe this idea that we could nurture some semblance of that profound creative interconnection and celebrate, resonate and exalt the beauty, deliciousness and metaphors within and between the components of that enmeshed experience. It would be a type of interconnected feedback loop to help us and future generations care more deeply for the systems that sustain us. The more we love "all this" and find it rich and full of meaning, the more we may strive to live harmoniously within it. It has a Darwinian logic to it.

My question, in this post, is whether naming this is part of how it all might work. Assuming we could wrap our heads and hearts and hands around this concept, we could potentially reverse engineer healthier ways of relating responsibly and gracefully with each other and the world. We could use those healthy cultural principles to try something similar again, today. Like restoring healthy gut fauna.

Again, it's not about identifying cool projects, although that can be fun. It's the idea that various inspiring and even ordinary projects could be shaped to relate to each other, support each other and productively deepen shared interconnections. Rather than studying one artwork, tree or species of beetle, it's about understanding the interdependent eco-social spaces between them and the complex world they inhabit. I want to see this on a cultural level. I have a sense we've been so focused on art that we've missed the big picture about how we’re living. The whole being greater than the sum of its parts and all that. We could work with things that are already out there and try to piece them together (curator-style), or evolve/make our own groupings.

It's a shift in protagonist. From foregrounding ourselves, our art, our humanity, to seeing our lives as part of the background of something far more glorious and complex. How might that idea alone shift culture? If we act from a sense of profound interconnection, what would the resulting cultural manifestations look like? Perhaps even that question is the wrong one, since “culture” could be so astoundingly inertwingled that the notion of identifying "one" might even dissolve. The human body is supposed to be composed of over 90% non-human DNA. The universe is said to be mostly dark matter and dark energy which we don’t understand. A tree's digestive system is the soil and its minerals and macro/microorganisms, its skin the insects, bird nests and migratory patterns of related wildlife and its senses enmeshed with the geology and hydrology through interconnected roots, watershed and climate changes and even forest fires for health. Where does anything really end or begin?

A cultural shift of focus to the in-between would likely transform the materials we used, the topics which we chose to explore and focus on, even the notion of exploring and focusing. It would and could provide a lens to reexamine everything we do and an opportunity to build into this matrix, the aesthetic beneficial neurochemical producing and thinking patterns that could help support our participation within this complexity. It could also be fun, tasty and compelling and culturally and generationally transmissible, too, because of it.

It might not be immediately recognizable to us. If our notion of person or community is broader and considers our interspecies and contextual dependencies, any notion of authorship or collaborators or public gets wildly expanded. Who then, if not Pachamama as a whole is any of this for?

What we need is a kind of a “starter culture” for making life. Given the changes ahead it will have to be simple and compelling enough to communicate as well as joyously robust, diverse and adaptive. We'll have to be alert to where it grows best and where it won't. It may require waves of attention like succession plantings in a forest restoration effort to reknit a strong sense of interconnection. What temperature range, salinity, specific gravity and level of perturbation might encourage growth and interconnection of the most beneficial cultures (not just the most profitable in the short term)? I'd love to have a sense of these general conditions and identify the most effective ways to help them spread.

Once we begin to describe it, it may be easier to identify where it already is and dive in to support the people who already "get it" if we can. This is where groups like the Cultural Conservancy fit in. How can anyone practice articulture (or whatever anyone wants to call it) more fully ourselves and share what have we learned?

I'm thrilled to imagine that this approach might work even as I know it's all probably too late to change much in a collapsing world. For some reason, it gives me hope. How will these ideas, so often the result of grounded historically deep connectedness, apply to a mobile population increasingly impacted by change and the tidal flow of climate refugees? How can you hold onto a pattern when the environment it originally thrived in changes?

I'll do what I can to try it in my own life and let you know. This is the small work that's mine to do.

Perhaps it will help.

This is what I mean by these terms:

Creativity: Trying something new. Pushing the edges of innovation. Surprise us.

Components: How many elements are needed to make an effective system? Is it a diverse mix of elements engaging a range of senses? (See five questions)

Timeframe: How long will your interventions last? Is there a commitment to long range impacts or regenerative elements?

Interaction: How does your system begin to engage others? How much participation is possible, useful, realistic?

Customization: Is your system very specific or a more general proposal that can (or should) be tweaked or modified? What parts of it can be adapted to your own home, neighborhood or workplace? How flexible is your design?

Enthusiasm: Some things are popular, catchy, easy to repeat and so fun that they can spread on their own or become part of people's lives. Will people care? How many really need to?

Lifecycle: All things come and go. Is this a timely, short lifespan sort of thing or possibly even multi-generational in scope? Perhaps some elements last longer than others?

Documentation: Each system can be set up small-scale, privately and no one needs to know. If you want your ideas to spread and impact others, it will help to document them clearly. If you want feedback and an honest evaluation of how things worked out in the world and how to possibly make your system more effective you can plan for that. Some projects might be heavy on the description, light on implementation. It helps if the actual system isn’t just hype.

Community: As you decide the scale of your system, whether it's home-sized or global or anything in between, it will help to consider who and what might be affected. Who should care and who are your natural allies, potential organizational partners or dream community? How might this change over time and what support might they need from you?

Context: In addition to location, issues or themes being addressed and the timeliness of your system, you may seek to engage with ecological, cultural, historical or personal narratives. Economic variables, time availability, interest and other contextual factors can also play a role. These approaches to (re)creating culture may be difficult to implement. What is possible at this time? What is most strategically effective if you take a long term approach?

I'm interested in the ways that the elements of "culture" - everything from sculpture and painting to music and household crafts, cooking and theater and poetry - relate to each other, blend, support, riff, dance with people and place and sing with an awareness of deep time and future generations.

In cities and industrialized places where ties to preindustrial traditions are generally weaker, this interweaving role is often in the hands of the "curator" or perhaps a "curatorial team". They apply these skills to institutions, museums, concert halls, parks, festivals, and even cafés, often for a brief but intense period of time and then move on to a different theme or concern or location altogether. Sometimes an author or art critic might weave a bunch of ideas and components together in a written piece to make a point. Rarely, are these themes about helping people shift the way they actually live in a sustained way.

Theater of the Oppressed, a powerful blend of theater, community problem solving, personal transformation and education (even this doesn't do it justice- much to explore if you have the chance), offers the idea of the "spect-actor" a blend of actor and spectator roles common to what many people think of as theater.

spect-actor

"This is a term created by Augusto Boal to describe those engaged in Forum theatre. It refers to the dual role of those involved in the process as both spectator and actor, as they both observe and create dramatic meaning and action in any performance. …

Boal emphasizes the critical need to prevent the isolation of the audience. The term "spectator" brands the participants as less than human; hence, is necessary to humanize them, to restore to them their capacity for action in all its fullness. They must also be a subject, an actor on equal plane with those accepted as actors, who in turn must also be spectators. This will eliminate any notions of the ruling class and the theatre solely portraying their ideals while the audience being the passive victims of those images. This way the spectators no longer delegate power to the characters either to think or act in their place. They free themselves; they think and act for themselves. Boal supports the idea that theatre is not revolutionary in itself but is rehearsal of revolution." — from Wikipedia

I imagine articulture as an embodiment or practice of this type of decentralized creativity and piecing together. Just as we all gravitate to and develop our own music, books, food and fashion sense, we'd all be active participants in selecting cultural elements that matched our own sense of aesthetics as well as those of our family, friends and neighbors. Some people might be really good at it but we'd all be involved. Arti-cura-cultur-alists or some other awkward mouthful.

The "artist", "curator", "participant", "local expert", "educator", "student", scientist", "manager", "activist", “neighbor”, etc. all merging together dynamically in a conversation about fitting our world back together more effectively. Plenty of community engaged social practice artists work with this but generally, it's the work of a specific artist or team and not part of a larger evolving, ongoing community/individual scale effort with multiple shared components layered over time.

Rarely is it connected to how we live our day to day lives. Rarely does it offer practical support for anyone wanting to decolonize their life and reclaim more direct access to the food, water, shelter and resources they need to survive or that others and particularly other beings might need.

Widen the circle of generosity, and the dance gets bigger. A bigger dance makes each individual’s roles blurrier until finally everyone is consciously part of this dance/sculpture/banquet of life.

For this to work, it must emerge, I believe, from lived experience rather than theory or pretty words. Top down, side to side and bottom up, inside/outside and relationships I don't have words for will all be welcome and necessary for the diversity of interrelationship to sprout, bloom and reseed. How do we compost for this? What would it take to nourish this process?

I don't want pesticides and plastic in my compost. I know that much. It takes a balance of brown and green and dry and wet and aeration and time. It also depends on what I have around me. What can I use? After that, what do I want to grow with it?

I think it will work like that. Culture will feed and nourish itself and the land. Neither the shovel nor the shoveler cause compost. They can each help it but it's infinitely more complex. Until we can hold that humility (yeah, humus, soil) our egotism and misconceptions of agency will limit what we can support. We contribute to and give of our efforts and love; we can't cure, make, fix or solve it all. Nonetheless, there's plenty of space to begin at any point along the way. To follow the composting metaphor we could look at the full span of culture and articulture it all along the way.

Food- what are we eating and where and how is it grown?  What are the things that inspire us and where do they come from? What cultural elements do we feel we can actually use and incorporate? Are these elements self-generated, coming from a friend, museum, gallery or gift? What are the stories of our things? Can we grow more? So many traditions anchor their connection through food: it’s delicious, convivial and nourishing. How do these practices highlight interconnection?

Scraps- what is left from what we consume? Is it toxic? What other compostable/reusable organic material can we use? What do those scraps say about our our habits, our inspiration or our environment? In essence, what are the downstream effects and byproducts of our culture? (Hint: fix this.)

Composting- how is this cultural digestion process and it’s downstream impacts tended and supported? Who does this? Breaking down/remixing/adapting and repurposing? Can we mix them enough to create or highlight useful patterns or bring healing? Are some things too sacred to mix? Whose job is this?

Sifting/soil-making- What do we do with the organic richness that emerges? Where do we put it; what do we want to grow? What cultural structures, festivals, mobile salons or potlucks can we come up with to share this creativity with our neighbors? Who needs to be gifted some tasty decolonial jam complete with song and poem to follow up cob oven bread baking day? Good ideas and systems need to be shared.

Crops and garden- this is where we live and where our food can come from, so we have more opportunities to tend and nurture and plan. How integrated is this with the rest of this process?  What big infrastructure or planning or policy can we support to enhance our collective wellbeing and address systemic issues? Is this the traditional role of the artist? Can we avoid fetishizing charismatic cultural megafauna while neglecting the systems and humble microbes yet again?

Plus consider the buildings required to support this, the tools, the myths, the ancestral traumas, the atonement and reparations, the science, the watersheds and safety of the neighborhood...  All opportunities to weave back in and nourish with great love.

I'm not fully sure how to empower this creative synergy yet, other than to point and try to embody it myself until the words get clear. People curate their homes and lives to some degree already. How do we invite a deeper, more shareable approach that supports how we want/need to live in the decades ahead?

I welcome suggestions and as always, would love to know about related resources or other people who might be researching this general topic. It seems like a gap, so I'm diving in. I did the same in 2000 when we started greenmuseum.org. Our hunch that environmental art was an emerging movement ready to dive into the mainstream worldwide proved accurate. Because of that, I was able to contribute to the field as a whole to some degree, which was fun/overwhelming.

I'm particularly interested now, in the lived experience making regenerative culture, ultra-low footprint, net-zero-carbon lifestyles attractive and resonant. I think the gift-ecology, off the grid, art and farming satyagranjero movements might have some insights here, as well as Homefulness urban freegan activists, integral nonviolence folks decolonizing white supremacy, patriarchy and other forms of oppression, people exploring traditional cultural roots and deep culture, engaged monastics and giftivists everywhere. For the bulk of human history people have been living holistically within their bioregional means. There’s really no end to the possibilities if we focus on interconnections instead of things.

Yet another list -

i think we need:

Examples of articultural systems

• Compelling examples from a range of cultures and time periods (in as much detail as possible describing how they work and how various components complement each other), preferably by people from those cultures, but other perspectives and analyses could be really helpful as well.

• Examples from the world around us today. Things you're learning and practicing in your homes and communities. Can it be shared or reproduced?

• Understanding useful patterns or mutually beneficial cultural practices across cultures. What interconnecting systems seem to work exceptionally well?

• How do these systems emerge? What are the best conditions for emergence?

• How might we evaluate an “effective” systems approach?

Models for understanding

• To wrap our heads around these ideas and share them with others, it may help to understand or conceptualize them using existing models from ecology, systems thinking, natural farming, spiritual traditions that believe in letting things emerge, decolonization, Boal/Theater of the Oppressed,  etc. What perspectives can we try and what interconnections might they help us see?

• How might we compare and evaluate these tools and under which circumstances might we want to use them?

Thoughts and examples of how to support or encourage more articultural systems

• What can organizations, communities and individuals do to help these systems spread or interconnect?

• What do we see as impediments or challenges? Suggestions of what to do about structural, legal, financial, emotional/psychological forms of resistance.

• What would it look like to build a movement around this idea?

• Forming discussion groups to help move this forward in some way.

• Network communities living simply -what challenges are they facing? How does "art" or articulture begin to fit in?

• Aggregate resource lists: books, articles, videos, visitable examples, open source reproducible examples (and downloadable kits!), tools for interconnecting projects, etc.

Identify thought leaders and allies

• Who else has already been studying this or related topics?

• What resources or networks are out there to help enlist the support of more clever and experienced people internationally?

• What values might we want to identify to help keep this movement anchored in lived truth and transformation?

What are we missing?

Someone asked me once what I'd do with a couple dozen researchers who wanted to explore this topic with me. Perhaps I'd invite them to find some like-minded friends from different backgrounds and try to live really, really simply together for a couple of years. (Here’s something I wrote to that effect a while ago.) We'd stay in touch and talk about these ideas and see what emerged. Some would want to study, others to practice, others to share and interconnect, still others to systematize and build infrastructure for others. Maybe friends and family could help them out with the experiment. Maybe they'd find people who are already living in these ways and offer to help out. After the year was up, see what emerged as sticking points and challenges, unexpected and anticipated outcomes, cultural implications and patterns. Then, we'd sit down together and go over what we learned and what we'd like to continue exploring. I'm hoping we could harvest seeds of cultural wisdom and beauty to scatter and see what sprouts.

I’m currently in a co-housing community in Oakland eager to try some of these ideas out in my latest context. What’s clear is that changing our lives is hard work. Plenty of brave people doing very interesting life experiments and working to preserve traditional knowledge but it’s not clear to me how our culture is supporting them. What support systems can we explore, glean, and try for ourselves, for the future?