Notes from Digital, Culture, and the Transformation of Europe

I’ve just posted the report (slides here, and embedded above) from our climate-action strategy workshop Digital, Culture, and the Transformation of Europe, held on November 18-19, 2021 in Leiden, the Netherlands.

The goal of the workshop was to determine if, how, and to what degree the cultural sector (very broadly defined) can contribute meaningfully to the social, economic, and environmental transformations required by the climate emergency.

The word “culture” gets thrown around a lot in climate policy circles, and many of us, as cultural professionals, are outraged by the climate emergency and want to take action. But what can the cultural sector actually do for the climate fight?

Some clear themes emerged through our two-day workshop and the weeks of thinking and dialogue that followed. I’ll list a few below as a preview, as one does, but the depth and complexity of the ideas (and more) really come to life through the words of the participants themselves, as shown in the report.

  1. The Big Frikin’ Wall — With a nod to the remarkable Kathy Sierra, much of the cultural sector seems afflicted by, metaphorically speaking, a Big Frikin’ Wall that stands between the world of safe, established practice and the world of urgent work that needs to be done. Working through, around, or over this wall will require a combination of strategic thinking, bold and enlightened management, well placed incentives. If we do not work through the Big Frikin’ Wall we are not likely to make significant progress on the climate emergency, as a sector or as a society. (See slide 38)

  2. Local, bottom-up approaches — The importance of local, bottom-up action was a persistent theme throughout the workshop. Participants emphasized that they felt many organizations wanted to be more involved in campaigning, movement-making, and local action but don’t know how to start. Training in these techniques might be a smart investment for the sector. (See slide 56)

  3. The role of culture — Participants offered a variety of opinions about the role of culture in society. Is “culture” a social good? A tool that serves power? An expression of identity? An entertainment medium? A tourist industry? A human right? The term culture is used in a variety of sometimes contradictory ways, even within the same sentence. A shared understanding of what we mean by “culture” would help us have more productive discussions about how to use it as a tool for positive change. (See slide 70)

  4. Digitality — It is hard to imagine how we will win the climate fight without an enlightened and strategic use of digital platforms; and it is easy to imagine losing the climate fight if digital is ignored (or worse, subverted). But a concept of digitality — what it means to live in a society that is infused with digital — is notably absent from the cultural strategies emerging from initiatives such as the European Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus. The cultural sector must develop a concept of digitality to match its ambitions for participating in climate action or effecting social change. (See slide 69)
    - - Note that I’ll be speaking about a new concept of digitality at Computers in Libraries and the MuseumNext Green Summit this month.

  5. The need for solidarity — Workshop participant Tom Pravda, Co-founder of Avaaz, asserted that the social problems caused by the climate crisis may prove to be more of a problem than the climate crisis itself. “We need to be working in ways to build human solidarity — a sense that we are in this together,” stated Tom. “Only by cooperating are we going to be able to tackle this problem.” (See slide 17)

I am happy to say that a number of clear, actionable initiatives arose directly from this workshop, including a sector-wide training initiative, a proposal for Horizon Europe funding, and a radical “incentive prize” competition. These, in addition to the remarkable work already being done by workshop participants.

Concept development is underway for these new initiatives, and I’m also working to organize a follow-up meeting in Europe and similar workshops in the Americas, where the cultural-sector issues are different but the will to make a difference is likely to be the same.

Finally, as I’m writing this I’m aware that the COP26 conference in Glasgow was taking place as we were planning this workshop, and the IPCC’s grim sixth climate report was issued 2 days ago as I was finalizing the report. Meanwhile, the world is still afflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia has invaded Ukraine. If we believe that the cultural sector, however defined, has the potential to inspire and educate people, build solidarity, and transform lives for the better then there’s a lot of work to do.

Many thanks to everyone who participated (listed on slide 6), including our supporters and GoFundMe contributors who pitched in to defray travel and lodging expenses for participants. And of course many thanks to my co-conveners Meta Knol, Director of the Leiden 2022 European City of Science, and Harry Verwayen, Director of the Europeana Foundation, who stepped boldly into the void to help make this workshop a success.

Free strategy workshops March 23 – April 3 (crosspost)

This is a crosspost from my main site.

Over the last few days I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, and talking with organizers, leaders and practitioners in the cultural community, about how GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) and community/civil-society organizations are coping with the Covid-19 crisis.

Most of us are in shock or reactive mode — closing down public spaces and caring for loved ones and neighbors.

But once the initial shock wears off (which hopefully, it will) and we’ve done what we can do easily in the realm of public service (for example, move programs to the web and promote online resources), we’re going to need to take a serious look at the role our organizations really play in society, and what we need to do differently in the short (next few weeks), medium (3-4 months), and long-term future (years) to make sure we’re doing justice to our missions and our communities.

With that in mind I’m offering some free strategy workshops for GLAMs and other public-facing community/civil-society organizations in the coming weeks.

Not that I have answers to teach you — far from it! I’m doing this because, as a trained facilitator with 25+ years experience in the digital cultural sector and a lot of international experience at a variety of scales, I think I can help teams and organizations find their own best strategies and solutions for this unsettling and difficult moment in time.

That’s what I’m trained to do. And I’m doing this because I can, and because I want to help, and because I believe in the value of what we do in the cultural sector and in civil society.

So here’s the plan

  1. What I imagine is that you are a team within an organization like a museum, a library, a civil-society org. that faces the public. You could be the online or communications team, a leadership group, the board of directors, whatever. Or you’re an ad-hoc team from a movement like Fridays for Future. The important thing for me is that you have a civic mission, you face the public, and you want to create value in society, as they say.

  2. You are hungry to dive deep, over the course of a day or two, into your mission, purpose, and identity — and to model through what those things mean now, in the world of Covid-19.

  3. You’re curious to experiment with the LEGO Serious Play process — a facilitated thinking, communication, and problem-solving technique for groups — in a remote (online, distributed) teleconference setting. (The LEGO Serious Play process is optimized for face-to-face interaction, so moving it to a videoconference format is unorthodox and experimental.)

  4. You want to start soon (as early as the week of March 23, 2020).

If that sounds interesting to you, or if you have any questions or suggestions, please get in touch with me through this form at the bottom of my “consulting” page. Tell me a little about who you are and what you’d like to do and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Thanks!

P.S. If you want to leave a comment or question on this post, or make a suggestion, please ping me on twitter (@mpedson) or use this comment form here. I’ll review your comments/questions and respond, or post them here, as appropriate. :)

P.P.S English is my best language (though god knows I still struggle with it), but if you need to work in another language we’ll figure something out.

Free strategy workshops March 23 – April 3

UPDATE (March 28, 2010, 11:45am EDT): there’s a new, follow-up post about free workshops, peer-to-peer roundtables, and “Ignite” talks here: https://www.usingdata.com/covid19/2020/3/26/register-here-to-participate-or-help

Over the last few days I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, and talking with organizers, leaders and practitioners in the cultural community, about how GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) and community/civil-society organizations are coping with the Covid-19 crisis.

Most of us are in shock or reactive mode — closing down public spaces and caring for loved ones and neighbors.

But once the initial shock wears off (which hopefully, it will) and we’ve done what we can do easily in the realm of public service (for example, move programs to the web and promote online resources), we’re going to need to take a serious look at the role our organizations really play in society, and what we need to do differently in the short (next few weeks), medium (3-4 months), and long-term future (years) to make sure we’re doing justice to our missions and our communities.

With that in mind I’m offering some free strategy workshops for GLAMs and other public-facing community/civil-society organizations in the coming weeks.

Not that I have answers to teach you — far from it! I’m doing this because, as a trained facilitator with 25+ years experience in the digital cultural sector and a lot of international experience at a variety of scales, I think I can help teams and organizations find their own best strategies and solutions for this unsettling and difficult moment in time.

That’s what I’m trained to do. And I’m doing this because I can, and because I want to help, and because I believe in the value of what we do in the cultural sector and in civil society.

So here’s the plan

  1. What I imagine is that you are a team within an organization like a museum, a library, a civil-society org. that faces the public. You could be the online or communications team, a leadership group, the board of directors, whatever. Or you’re an ad-hoc team from a movement like Fridays for Future. The important thing for me is that you have a civic mission, you face the public, and you want to create value in society, as they say.

  2. You are hungry to dive deep, over the course of a day or two, into your mission, purpose, and identity — and to model through what those things mean now, in the world of Covid-19.

  3. You’re curious to experiment with the LEGO Serious Play process — a facilitated thinking, communication, and problem-solving technique for groups — in a remote (online, distributed) teleconference setting. (The LEGO Serious Play process is optimized for face-to-face interaction, so moving it to a videoconference format is unorthodox and experimental.)

  4. You want to start soon (as early as the week of March 23, 2020).

If that sounds interesting to you, or if you have any questions or suggestions, please get in touch with me through this form at the bottom of my “consulting” page. Tell me a little about who you are and what you’d like to do and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Thanks!

P.S. If you want to leave a comment or question on this post, or make a suggestion, please ping me on twitter (@mpedson) or use this comment form here. I’ll review your comments/questions and respond, or post them here, as appropriate. :)

P.P.S English is my best language (though god knows I still struggle with it), but if you need to work in another language we’ll figure something out.

Rumors of War

Photos CC-BY Michael Peter Edson, 2020

Edit: Back when I wrote this in February, 2020, three years into the Trump presidency and also a thousand years ago, I couldn’t imagine the spark that would finally cause our communities to erupt in violence. The anger and justification were there in our hearts, but what would it take to light the flame? And now, as Ezra Klein wrote, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder: We weren’t there, and then, all of a sudden, we were. –Mike, June 3, 2020

* * *

Something that fascinates me about Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War is the idea that Wiley’s sculpture makes an end-run around established battle lines regarding the preservation or removal of monuments to Confederate Civil War leaders.

On one hand, many argue that such statues should be removed because they celebrate and ennoble racism and slavery (many of the statues were commissioned as part of a deliberate campaign to intimidate African Americans during our Jim Crow era in the late 19th to mid 20th centuries); while others argue that removing the statues is tantamount to erasing history.

In 2017 alone, Baltimore removed its monument to Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the dead of night; New Orleans did so in public, for reasons eloquently described by mayor Mitch Landrieu (“Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart…”); Charlottesville, Virginia, which saw violent protests around the issue in 2017, has still not removed its statues of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson though the city council voted to do so over two years ago.

But Rumors of War takes the debate in another direction by changing the way we see the statues in the first place.

Wiley’s monument sits in a place of honor outside the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: immense, powerful, relevant, and shocking.

“As a lifelong Richmonder, born and raised, I am overwhelmed with what this means. To see somebody with the shoes that look like people of Richmond, the hoodies that look like people of Richmond, to be such a contrast. I’m excited. I’m terrified,” a local radio host told journalist Kriston Capps.

As Capps reported, “Wiley seemed to endorse the approach of building new statues rather than removing old ones. ‘I say don’t tear down the house,’ he said, ‘even though it’s ridiculous, even though all this chest-beating is symptomatic of a broader illness. We can compose poetry of broken bones.’”

A few blocks away from Wiley’s sculpture, on a barren traffic island at the intersection of Arthur Ashe Boulevard (named for the trailblazing African American tennis star) and Monument Avenue (named for its many monuments to Virginia veterans of the Civil War) sits a monument to Stonewall Jackson. Jackson’s memorial was erected in 1915 at the height of Jim Crow.

After I saw Rumors of War, cast in 2019, with its young, powerful rider wearing jeans and a hoodie and straining at the stirrups in Nike high tops, Jackson and his horse looked isolated to me — skinny, tired, and defeated. Left behind as a footnote while the real work of society carries on somewhere else.

I believe in civic discourse. I believe that we need to practice the long and patient process of talking to each other and making shared decisions even when, especially when, we disagree. But I also believe in the deft and unexpected move, the ninja move, the lightning bolt, the stroke of insight that can emerge from anywhere, at any time, to break through the static and force us to see where and who and what we are — and what might be possible if we think and work in new ways.

Culture for All

Slides from my keynote for the Prague Platform on the Future of Cultural Heritage, convened by the European Commission, October 7-8, 2019.

The Prague Platform talks about “Enhanced digitally enabled cultural heritage participation for all citizens.”

But what do these words mean? And how might we approach them — as practitioners, communities, governments and institutions, and citizens?

Such moments represent

I stumbled across the kind of scene that can momentarily catch you off guard — four teenage girls playing trumpets and trombones in a dirt yard adjacent to a half-built church on a hill, on the edge of a town called Beni. There was something haunting about that sound in that place. Storm clouds rolled in, as they did most afternoons, and the air became heavy. It seemed to keep the sharp metallic notes from floating too far away. I knew the scene had no direct link to the Ebola story I was reporting, but I shot it anyway, trying not to disturb the girls. I wasn’t sure the image would be published, but I felt the moment was still important. These girls wanted to be better musicians and were rehearsing to improve. It's easy to get caught up in the hype and drama surrounding conflict or a catastrophic epidemic, but such moments represent what's happening on the ground as much as any scene more obviously related to the Ebola narrative. It’s a quiet reflection of daily life amid an unfolding tragedy.
Photographer Finbarr O'Reilly, @finbarroreilly, commenting on his photo Democratic Republic of Congo in The Year In Pictures, New York Times, 15 December 2019

On the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans…

“Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart.

Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world? We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz, the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures. Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think.

All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity.”

Remarks delivered May, 2017 by the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, upon the removal of the last of the city’s several Confederate monuments. Transcript (NY Times)

"Faced with that nothingness…I decided to be a maker of things"

  

 

 

Just 16 and recently released from a naval academy, Kenji Ekuan witnessed Hiroshima’s devastation from the train taking him home. ‘Faced with that nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for human culture,’ he recalled from the offices of G. K. Design, the firm he co-founded in Tokyo in 1952. ‘I needed something to touch, to look at,’ he added.

‘Right then I decided to be a maker of things.’ One of the most enduring objects in his 60-year design career — which includes the Akita bullet train and Yamaha motorbikes — is the Kikkoman soy-sauce dispenser.

— via calebkramer

A frieze of horses and rhinos near the Chauvet cave’s Megaloceros Gallery, where artists may have gathered to make charcoal for drawing. Chauvet contains the earliest known paintings, from at least thirty-two thousand years ago.

A frieze of horses and rhinos near the Chauvet cave’s Megaloceros Gallery, where artists may have gathered to make charcoal for drawing. Chauvet contains the earliest known paintings, from at least thirty-two thousand years ago.

What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.

From First Impressions: What does the world’s oldest art say about us?
By Judith Thurman, June 23, 2008, New Yorker 

Contrast the mind-blowing concept of 1,000 generations of cultural continuity with Sir Ken Robinson’s statement at TED in 2007,

If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that’s been on parade over the last 4 days, what the world will look like in 5 years time…

Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity? [At around 2:20]
http://youtu.be/iG9CE55wbtY