no place like home
(the context)
when creating an art system (or practicing articulture), it will help to consider scale and location. I hope to make a case for testing everything at home, in your own life - an underexplored wilderness of creative expression.
deeply refreshing
to take the first step
if we could change ourselves
So much privilege in writing this and imagining how things could be different when I’m not in imminent danger, have enough food, water and shelter. There’s much to say about the benefits of lived experience. What can any of us do to break free of this madness? Gandhi was a big advocate of experimenting with one’s own life and “being the change” you want to see in the world. I believe that we need to build our collective resilience and experiment with low footprint lifestyles while we still have some abundance “wiggle room”. Any climate crisis/plague/collapse future will challenge our infrastructure, economic systems and political capacity. Agriculture (feeding ourselves), general “ecosystem services” (water, air, soil, everything nature does to keep a biosphere intact) and who knows what else will be strained to their limits. While we still can, it will help us to learn from the past and share contemporary experiments in how to live.
That’s why I am most interested in “home scale” articulture. What can we bring to our homes to support living in more resilient and low-footprint ways? If we can experiment at the scale of households, neighborhoods or even homesteads and farms, we might gain some valuable insights.
The ecophilosopher Joanna Macy once asked me, “Why not just use what people have already in their homes? Why buy or bring in anything new? We already curate the myriad cultural objects in our homes. So many people have too much stuff as it is.” Objects can remind of past events, places, people and ideas. Depending on what you have in your home and what you value, you could certainly begin to reconnect them intentionally as a “system” to support a theme or behavior you want to reinforce in your life.
For many people, home decorations and tools are less about metaphor, and more about style, history or practicality. The hope here is to encourage a purposeful systemic way of thinking about the stuff in our lives and consider that we can use that space intentionally to help shape the life and world we want.
I’ve had the honor to spend time with people who made most of their own things. Their homes, their furniture, tools, clothing. For them, everything has a story. A carved wooden spoon is a tool for eating food they’ve grown (with its own deep lineage and adventures), but also a connection to a specific tree, the weather, a favorite knife, a friendship, a period in their own or someone else’s life, etc. This depth of interconnection can help us stay grounded and remind us constantly of what we value. I believe articultural systems have the chance to do something similar. To help us rewrite patterns in our brains and lives that support rather than distract us further. Bringing an artful grouping of things (or rituals, songs, etc.) to our homes might help do that, no?
Because these experiments are ultimately of a personal nature, it’s even more intimate than the spacial or architectural notion of home. It’s about personal transformation and creating environments that support meaningful shifts in artful, inspiring and delicious ways around us. The tastier and more resonant we can make it, the easier it will be to embrace, share and spread.
It also reinforces a more fractal approach to life. The notion of an integrated world in which the personal, home and larger contexts share some aesthetic and philosophical consistency offers additional cognitive redundancy. The elements are self similar at any scale. Important things are harder to forget if you think that way.
Industrial culture shares an approach of consistent separation and disconnection to the detriment of all life. articulture.systems hopes to begin to shift that. It may take too long or be too late to make a difference but I reckon it’s worth trying.
Starting here, now. It’s an experiment.
why I care
Some of you may be curious about the inspiration or motivations behind this website.
I have a background as an artist, community activist, puppeteer, nonprofit director, consultant and public speaker, house painter and bread factory worker, among other things. I've split my time between the US and South America (Venezuela as a kid, Ecuador after college) and now live in what the local Ohlone people call Huichin (Oakland), California.
For over a decade I advocated for and shared information about art and ecology internationally. I thought it was the future of art and I was passionate about what it could do to help heal communities and ecosystems. Over time, I became disillusioned about the nonprofit sector, the embedded injustices and constraints of our political and economic systems, and how terribly limited the numerous projects we encountered and celebrated on greenmuseum•org actually were once I began to consider them more deeply.
The way modern industrial culture treats people, perpetuates colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and other embedded forms of oppression is almost inseparable from the ways we treat the Earth, deepen the climate crisis, mass extinctions and other disasters. It seemed to me that an illusion of separation was underneath it all, so when I looked at art, with its the focus on separate artworks, the enduring “myth” of the genius artist and the demands of making a living, selling sellable stuff, it all seemed part of this piecemeal approach to being alive.
I've lived in places where people were intimate with the life, land and water they depended on for survival. I've witnessed first-hand the beauty and depth of non-commodified gift-based participative cultures. I know that what's good for us and the Earth can be compatible yet we (I) seldom see it fully in action. Even a great community-engaged ecological artwork is still relatively isolated and sadly truncated by financial, conceptual and ownership conventions and by the public’s often distanced sense of engagement.
The standard options I grew up with and see around me are not as inspiring as I’d like. Adopting foreign cultural practices, even those of my mixed Northern European ancestors, feels like a stretch to me as well. Modern industrial culture has stripped me of my pagan roots and largely sterilized the soil it might depend on. So perhaps the knowledge that my ancestors, everyone’s ancestors, had more holistic grounded and participative traditions which anchored them to place and to each other, can serve as inspiration for new ways to do the same for future and present generations. More directly, what if we could incorporate meaningful and helpful elements and themes, as they likely did, into our own homes and lives? How could we build a world that supported and riffed off these ideas?
Now, I know I’m projecting a lot onto these people I’ve never met, except through the eyes of my parents and their parents. I won’t pretend they had it all figured out, but I do believe their cultures of origin, long ago, were more holistic and connected to the natural systems they depended on. I have been haunted for years by this quote from the ecological theorist Paul Sheperd:
“All around us, aspects of the modern world – diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology – have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence. Whether they can arrive before the natural world is damaged beyond repair and madness destroys humanity, we cannot tell.”
Perhaps, having traveled as a kid and wrestled with new schools, new cultures and customs each time we moved, I long for something that might reflect a deep sense of incompleteness, that just on the horizon lay something more profoundly integrated and beautiful. A better world that celebrates diversity, honors our interdependence and supports resilience in the face of climate catastrophe.
I have a child now and she’s growing up fast (almost 4 as I write this!) and I can’t help but imagine what she’ll inherit from me and how her world might differ from the one I grew up in. My father was raised in a home in upstate New York with an outhouse as their sewage system. Automobiles were a novelty and when he went to college and to study engineering in the 1940s, there were no computers to handle complex calculations, instead, large rooms full of people known as “calculators” did the math all by hand. What might the parallel paths of technological wonders and mass extinction bring? The situation is clearly urgent and exploring a systems approach to culture seems to be one way I can contribute. It’s a pattern that seems woefully under examined culturally. I want to test it out and see what emerges and explore what we can learn from there. It’s a huge privilege to experiment with one’s life. Spending time writing all this is a gift from my sleeping family and life circumstances for which I’m profoundly grateful. Seems to me that a more integrated articultural and regenerative culture is closer to what humans and the Earth can afford, so I’m going to try.
