This is a podcast about the leading role of the arts in this age of converging crises. It features remarkable stories of individuals navigating the climate crisis and leading transformative creative projects in music, performing arts, galleries, film, and independent organisations across the world. As demands and solutions evolve, what kind of leadership is needed? Who does that involve? And what is leadership in the creative sector context anyway?
Over six episodes, Emmanuella Blake Morsi hosts a diverse array of alumni from the Creative Climate Leadership programme (CCL) – artists, activists, academics, and professionals from various disciplines, exploring crucial topics like climate justice, effective communication, emerging technology, policy, and artistic practices. Produced by Hum Studio Interactive and Julie's Bicycle. Cover art by Emmanuella Blake Morsi
{Emmanuella}
0:03
Hi, I'm Emmanuela, also known as Emma Blake-Morsi, and welcome to the fourth episode of the Creative Climate Leadership Podcast.
This is a podcast about the radical leading role of the arts in this age of converging crises. Today we’ll be delving into into emerging technology and reimagined innovative spaces, and how they are influencing the creative landscape. We'll explore in the new toolbox of offerings available through emerging technology, such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other multimedia technologies in creative spaces, but also how they can be harnessed for sustainable progress, the opportunities they present, and also the risks we do need to be mindful of. In this episode, we'll be joined by Alistair Gentry, a writer and artist who also took part in CCL 2023 UK with me.
{Alistair}
0:53
Yeah, it's really exciting to be here. I'm Alistair, I'm a writer and artist. I've been working for decades now as a performance artist, a writer. I've written fiction, drama, journalism, which I still do a little bit of. I make work which is primarily for outside of conventional theatre or art gallery spaces. I work very closely with particular communities, sometimes over very long periods of time, such as on the Isle of Portland, where I've been working with that community for nearly 10 years now, genuinely by popular demand. They won't let me stop making that work.But that's great. I love it. And that work continues even when I'm not there. And that's developed into a huge mapping, ecological, critical access mapping, disability first kind of project, which I love and maybe I'll talk a bit about later.
But yeah, generally, I make things that are very involved with the face-to-face conversation with people. That's a huge part of my work. And it's become increasingly important to me to do that work sustainably in every sense, in terms of ecologically, but also in terms of our energy as people and our careers and lives and the ability to just live and be happy, which I think is a massively important thing to everyone. And I think, as we spoke about, I think at CCL, that's one of the things that I think we need to bring to the foreground, is that we're not fighting for a world where everybody gets dragged down and has a miserable life and can't do anything. We're fighting for a world where everybody gets opportunities and everybody has a nice life and everybody gets what they need to be happy. So it's not about misery. It's about joy. So that's what drives me in the work I do.
{Emmanuella}
2:50
I guess the first question being, what role do you think creative tech has as part of climate action?
{Alistair}
2:55
Well, I don't know. To roll back a little bit, one of the things, as somebody who is disabled and gay and otherwise marginalised and a lot of other ones, I'm self-taught too as well. So I don't come from a family that would have been in higher education or in the arts or anything like that. So I've done that myself. So I'm really interested in other people like that for a start. And what I've always said in my teaching and mentoring other people is that sometimes as a marginalised person or a minority, you get accused of playing the race card or playing the whatever card. So play the cards you've got. Slam those down on the table because you can bet that people with better cards, with better hands to start with than you, are playing their cards. So why shouldn't you play yours? Play those cards. So in a similar vein, I think our opposition, you can be sure they're using all the tools at their disposal. So why are we, with one hand tied behind our backs, we should use all the tools at our disposal as well? And use everything that's available to us. And use it for our purposes and turn those things to our purposes and turn the things they used against us back against them. So use those techniques. And again, this is the thing that we've seen with the right over the past 10, 15 years. They have very effectively weaponised the language and the techniques and the flaws of the left and the centre in terms of their disunity. And they've seen where our vulnerable points are and attack them mercilessly. So I think people on the left quite rightly, or progressive people have quite rightly, to some degree, had a reputation for being pushovers because kindness is great. But our opponents don't value kindness.
{Emmanuella}
5:05
But I mean, I guess for your work especially, you've touched on this a little bit. But yeah, what was the catalyst for the work that you do? And what does it ultimately mean to you?
{Alistair}
5:12
I started out way, way, way back. Being interested in playwriting and the stage and that kind of stuff. And I got a little bit into that. But got intensely frustrated with it because it was just - there were so many rules about how you had to do things. And the audiences for it were so narrow. And I worked a little bit for the BBC, and it was then - 30 odd years ago and still is - an intensely patriarchal kind of place. Both in its overarching philosophy, and it's like the day-to-day interactions. It's like working with dad. It's like working with centrist dad the whole time that you're there. It's always like moderation on both sides. Which again is one of the things which I think has again been weaponised against people who are interested in fairness and listening to both sides. It's like we were in an era of false equivalence. It's like my free speech is kind of balanced against somebody having the free speech to advocate for me to be killed, for example. That's not a balanced debate. That is not two sides of a debate, is it? My existence is not up to debate and should not be up to debate. Nobody's right to exist or just be, should not be up for debate. Initially, so I kind of went away from that kind of traditional kind of arts or media world. And I became interested in just teaching myself and kind of making. Back then, if you wanted to make something digital or electronic, you had to build it or programme it yourself. So again, I came from a background where I couldn't learn that from anybody else. So I taught myself. But for a long time, I just kind of had my head down. I was doing my homework without much regard for the wider world, frankly. And then kind of as time went on, I kind of just-- I don't know. Well, I guess I became woke. That's what happened. So I kind of realised to kind of adapt that slogan, there's no creativity on a dead planet. And that we need to work together. And that the best work that I enjoyed most by other people was work that really kind of engaged with the places and people that were around them and with the world as a whole and kind of wasn't necessarily crusading in an obvious way, but actually at least asked people to think and to kind of reassess where they were and what their assumptions were.
{Emmanuella}
7:55
And I wonder, as society continues to evolve, we're seeing all these new resources and tools that are available to us to reimagine the ways we kind of communicate with each other and kind of create impact. And I wonder, is there any tools specifically that are the most significant in the work of yours today? What kind of stuff are you utilising now? And kind of what has that change been like for you?
{Alistair}
8:14
It's been an explosion, as you will know, like over the last few years of the kind of the AI-based stuff, which is kind of a little bit weird to me. It's kind of--I don't know. There's never been really a shortage of tools, I don't think. Even pre-digital, there was never any shortage of tools. What there's a shortage of is good uses of them or what is a guideline of how you do good with them, whether that's good work or actual kind of social good. There's a lot of things, particularly with the explosion of the tech industry over the last 10, 20 years. People build things just because they can, and they don't necessarily-- again, especially this kind of tech-bro mentality, they don't think about really how or who is going to use it. And often, that means they're built in a very kind of normative– well, normative for the people that make them kind of way. They have horrible interfaces,
they're very ableist, they have a tiny little type on them, which is ageist and ableist and all of these things. But these considerations just never enter their minds. It's not a sinister conspiracy or anything. It's just their attitude is just, “oh, we make the tools, we don't care what you do with them.”
So I think what's kind of lacking-- we're not lacking in tools. All the tools are out there for you to use if you want to use them now, which wasn't the case when I started out. So we've got this almost infinite number of tools we can use. But I think what we really need is people who are using those tools or know how to use those tools to share what they're doing with them. To really answer your question directly-- again, this has changed a bit. But for a while, social media for me, because when it's kind of heyday, the pre-Elon Musk, social media in general was the place where I found community. That's the place where I connected, especially when I wasn't-- I mean, I live in London now. But I was living in different parts of the world and kind of outside of London in quite obscure parts of-- like way up in the north of Scotland or wherever. But I found community online with social media. And that was the most important thing, not any tool as such. But again, it goes back to the work I did. It was people that were important there. And social media enabled me to connect in ways, to do it publicly as well, to show community as well and to show solidarity and to be there for other people, virtually, if not physically. So for a while, that was the thing. And I got so many friends and colleagues and connections and work and ideas and things all coming through those communities. And going back even further again, like I'm old, I remember things like IRC channels and the early days of the internet, when those things were like real hotbeds of real communities and people distributed all over the world as well. So that was--yeah, again, people who are as old as me, I really lament the loss of that, those early days of that hope, which I think is one of the things-- yeah, we've lost that hope. The early days of the internet, and I've been lucky enough to work with Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web. And his optimism was amazing in those early days.
{Emmanuella}
11:50
To clarify, Tim-- I mean, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, he's basically the person who invented the World Wide Web in, I think it was 1989. And it was just-- what he invented was basically the frameworks of the coding and the sense that it was then possible to build more stuff off of. And what was so special about that is that it was also his awareness of what he had created, which was so incredibly-- I guess ultimately, the possibility of what he had made, he understood that it could be not just life-changing, but could completely change the face of the world we lived in. In a sense of that, he wasn't sure, but he was optimistic of it. And so he was like, I'm going to literally make it accessible and give it out freely. And just that notion of understanding how valuable open-sourcing is, the contextualisation of someone's responsibility, not just to humankind in that way, but to the world in the sense of, how can I really take value in what we're developing, but also who am I developing for, and actually how do I build a real longevity and the impact of that in mind?
Just thinking about just emerging spaces in general and emerging technologies, what kind of intentions or principles do you feel like we should be developing these platforms with, or these tools with?
{Alistair}
12:58
Well, I mean, one of the things, DoxBox trustbot, which I did with the Open Data Institute, which is Tim Berners-Lee's institution nonprofit that he founded, it was examining exactly these things. It's like, who's kind of normal is being represented there? And nobody's normal. Again, I've been writing about this recently. I've been increasingly thinking that everybody's divergent. It's like 90% of people on Earth are divergent. It's the people who run the planet who are divergent from the rest of us. They're the ones who have abnormal expectations of the rest of us. It's just they're the ones who are inhuman and not quite right. It's the rest of us that are perfectly fine. It's just we happen to diverge from the people who are in control of us.
Anyway, that's a bit of an aside. In that work, I really extensively researched where these things were being, where the sources of this knowledge was. And the sources of this knowledge and the philosophy behind them is this Californian, libertarian thing, which runs the letters of a stick of rock through so much of our technology. All of the assumptions of it are of a white 30-something Californian, even politically, it's this libertarian, centre-rightish, American attitude that goes through all of that technology. And that work, DoxBox, was trying to game out what it would be like. For a start, the aesthetic and the attitude of the whole thing was deliberately queer. So it was like an imagination of what would a queer device be. And again, this is an old thing. Brian Eno, I think, in the early 80s, was talking about imagining what an African drum machine might sound-- how an African drum machine that was built in Africa, technologically how that might work, what its assumptions might be outside of a Western view. So this is not a new idea. But I still think it's such an interesting idea. Again, we can do this in art. Imagine again, I just realised, of course, we have this Afrofuturism thing, which is going on since the 70s, which is exactly that. It's imagining a world that was re-centered around Africa. What if Africa was the centre of space exploration and all of the things that were, again, white endeavours in the 60s and 70s.
{Emmanuella}
15:48
I think often we can feel quite limited by society, because we almost feel like we can really struggle, because just how ingrained and entrenched capitalism is, patriarchal systems are within our day-to-day. It's really hard, often, to actually reimagine these new ways of being and to explore these experimental alternatives, which is why, actually, when you explore-- like you just shared about Afrofuturism, the excitement within that as just even the concept building of reimagination is so special, because it really allows that exploration around creatively. What does it mean to not just centre people who actually have been on the complete-- not just the fringes, but have been actually so exploited historically for such extended periods of our history? But equally, what does it mean to also give and lean into a lot of those pre-colonial legacies that are incredibly rich in knowledge and information and science and music and storytelling, and what does it mean to really celebrate that pre-colonial value that Africa does also possess? And I guess it's like trying to reimagine it with a lens that goes beyond a lot of the exploitation that we have experienced. And I actually got off the back of that wonder. In terms of how we--as knowledge progresses at various accelerated rates, we are seeing this increased adoption of these new digital tools that do pose both a risk and an opportunity. What other opportunities do you think tech can afford us? And what should we also be mindful of in this development of it?
{Alistair}
17:22
Protest is good, but I think resistance is actually a more long-term solution. I think what we-- because a protest is there and it's over, but I think resistance is a lifelong process, and it's something that you can do. And resistance is something that you can engage in if you are, for example, disabled and not able to be out on the streets as you might want to be or wish to be. And again, some of the other work I've done has been a lot of research with disabled people and disabled artists about how they feel about the climate crisis and all of these things and how much they want to do and how frustrated they are as they are in other sectors of society, by society's inability to make it possible for them to do the things that they have the right and the wish to do. But yeah, I think protest is great, but resistance is what brings change. Resistance is a thing that we can embody every day in everything we do. We can think about whether we're using the tech or the tech is using us. We can think about who benefits from our use of it. Are we benefiting more? Think about what we're giving up in order to benefit from those things. And again, the work I've done is often centred around that. It's about that idea of we shouldn't be vulnerable to the common tactic and saying, “oh well, you're against capitalism and you have an iPhone, therefore you are invalid”, which is the typical basic response when they can't argue with anything else you've said. But again, like I said at the top, I think we actually have the right and the need to use those tools for our good.And these tools are going to be around whether we like it or not. So we should use them for our benefit.
{Emmanuella}
19:16
These tools are going to continuously exist. And that's not to say we have to just let it go kind of brazenly. But what I do mean is that instead of feeling like we are powerless, it's happening at us and to us, there is something really much more empowering to understand actually how can we not only just subvert them, but also to utilise them at the forefront of reimagining how we use them. And I think what's really integral actually is that we will see people adopt these alternative uses for-- especially within the creative sector, we're probably one of the sectors that are also the most vulnerable in terms of how people have been developing these tools and processes faster. You can't address just climate action and climate justice without addressing social justice, without addressing disability justice, without addressing racial justice. These are all part of the intersectional lens in which we must look at the environmental sustainability crisis because otherwise, you're missing out on a very key important part of these processes in making stuff accessible and equitable.
{Alistair}
20:15
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, it's even scarier. Because as you say – as I often say as well, there can be no climate justice without social justice, without economic justice, without racial justice, because it's all part of the same system. It's all part of the same system that is broken and wrong and does not serve the vast majority of the people on this planet or the planet itself or anything else that lives on this planet. It is completely destructive to everything that is worth living for. And also, I was just thinking as well, I think these tech companies with their software and the hardware that they provide, I think they really don't mean to, but they're giving us power. I mean, it's a question you just take the power and use it in not the way that they intend for you to use it. Again, I think that's the thing I often put in my biographies, is just because it's true, I genuinely love taking technology and tools and using them for things that they were never intended to be used for. That gives me great joy and power. So take that power and use it, especially since they don't want you to have that power or realise that they're giving you that power. Just realise it and take it and use it.
{Emmanuella}
21:36
Also looking into other people who might be listening who are part of organisations or the businesses as well, I think what advice would you give to organisations maybe who are actually looking to build authentic, ethical approaches to incorporate new tools into their processes? What advice would you give them? And is there anything that they need to be as an organisation, would be mindful of?
{Alistair}
21:58
People first, tools second. The tools are not the most important thing. The most important thing on earth are the things that live on it, including us. Tools are secondary. So think about what you want to achieve and who you want to reach and who you want in your community first. Don't have a tool and then think, what can we do with this tool? Because that's the thing that plagues the tech industry. It's like a multiplicity of tools. Their answer is looking for a question. Their answer is to a question nobody was asking in a lot of cases. It's like AI drawings. It's like that's totally the answer to a question nobody was asking. No artist would be thinking, “yeah, I'd really love to not have to paint anymore as a painter.” It's just, it's bullshit. Nobody wanted that. Nobody was asking for that. So I think that's the key. It's like think, don't have a tool and then see what you can do with it. Do it the other way around. Think about what tools you need in order to do the things you want and need to do and reach the people you need in your community.
(gap in audio)
{Emmanuella}
23:06
In this term that I've used in some of my other research projects, which is access as a creative tool. And it's the idea that you literally start any kind of decision making when you're planning on designing something or even developing something is that access is like embedded into the creative development of it. So it's not something you kind of add on as like an additional thing, you know, access to these kind of resources and kind of technology is often limited. And we kind of have them significantly unrepresented as we've already talked about. But ultimately, what are the kind of immediate needs that you're seeing among your own peers or communities that you're working with and what kind of solutions or approaches do you feel would be more poignant?
{Alistair}
23:43
Well, again, I mean, then it's not my project, but I worked on two projects, kind of in my own kind of East End community called the Bank Job and Power. You know, the first was about kind of eliminating debt in our own community. And the second has been kind of having a whole street in Walthamstow, East London go solar as well, you know, and for it to be community owned and run as well, which is now kind of, they're kind of continuing to try and build that out to kind of other streets in London, other streets in other parts of the UK. I think it's really important, and I come from a background of artists-led groups as well, I think it's really important for groups and communities to sort of build their own kind of space, not necessarily literally and physically, but to build their own spaces, you know, to kind of build your spaces where everybody who needs to be there can be there, as you were saying, you know, think about what we need to, what tools we need to use or not use in order for everybody whose voice should be there, for their voice to be there, you know. So I mean, I think it's kind of happening, I think the problem is, again, as I think we discussed quite a lot at CCL, the lack of things being joined up, you know, there's lots of people doing things in small groups or little kind of peer groups, and because we often or usually or mostly don't have mainstream kind of media representation or visibility, we often don't even know that somebody's doing something amazing, you know, 10 miles away from us, you know, and we often work as activists or as community leaders or whatever in very small atomised little groups, and that is our weakness, it's just we need to be together more, and it's happening, but it's a slow process, and it's being kind of impeded by kind of the implosion of social media and it's kind of the decreasing usefulness of social media, but (big gap in audio)
Yeah, I mean, I invite you and everyone to check out the Open Data Institute that I mentioned previously, because that's what they're all about, you know, is about making citizen data, making sure that data is open, you know, and free and not just in the sense of no cost, but also in the sense of usable and you're kind of useful to everybody, you know, that it's not the way in silos and that it, and the data that you generate around everything you do inevitably nowadays is yours, you know, and I'm also really glad you reminded me as well of like the energy usage of tech and AI in particular, because I've been looking at this really closely recently, and it's a shocking amount. It's using about, I don't know, something like 4% of the entire Earth's power is going to like servers, media centres, and I think there's a report by Greenpeace that it could go up to like 15 or 20% in the next 10 years. So that's a huge, huge issue. It's something like, I'm not gonna do a figure because I've been making it up, but it's a huge like kilowatt hour figure. It's something like every day, the equivalent of like two nuclear power stations or something kind of just to serve like, serve like this platform we're on, for example, like video conferencing, all of these things, you know, and this is something that's not really being spoken about, certainly not by the industry. Their energy usage is huge. They use huge amounts of water to cool the server centres as well, which again is a thing which is like a massive issue, particularly in places like the United, well, in the UK as well now, Germany like some of their rivers are so low now that their ships can't navigate the rivers anymore at the moment, literally reading that today. So they've had low rainfall and there's so much water being drawn out of the rivers, you know, so this is not a problem for like, you know, not just a problem for, well, as we all know already, climate crisis is a problem for everybody, but some people think, oh, this is a developing world thing. No, it's not. It's Germany, it's the UK. We will literally be running out of water in these countries too, with all the political and social ramifications and economic ramifications about, for all of us, everybody on earth. So yeah, we do definitely need to be mindful of just the amount of energy that tech is using as well and try to find ethical and sustainable alternatives to that because we can't go on with the whole Earth being covered in like AI servers and unless we go to the matrix thing where we're like literally batteries for the AI servers, but other than that, I can't really see a solution. Again, you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet, so we need to kind of do better with less.
{Emmanuella}
28:44
And that actually feels like such a poignant, perfect way to kind of round off and you've already given us a kind of closing kind of call to action to check out as well. So I think that's really like vitals for people to really kind of take the time, do that additional research and do explore that, see how your data is being used. What was the website again, sorry?
{Alistair}
29:02
It's theodi.org, yeah.
{Emmanuella}
29:05
Thank you so much as well, Alistair. It's been so great to really unpack all of this with you. Thank you so much, Alistair Gentry.
{Emmanuella}/Outro
29:14
Thanks for joining us! What have you taken away from this episode? Feel free to share your thoughts with us using #CCLPodcast
And you can find links to resources mentioned in the description of this episode by visiting the CCL website at creativeclimateleadership.com for more information.
This podcast is constructed by the Creative Climate Leadership alumni network - an evolving network growing from the CCL programme led by Julie’s Bicycle - a pioneering UK-based non-profit mobilising the arts and culture to take action on the climate and ecological crisis. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe to the Creative Climate Leadership podcast and get in touch with us on ccl@juliesbicycle.com.
This podcast is produced by Hum Studio Interactive in co-creation with Julie’s Bicycle. We thank our sponsors Nordisk KulturFond, Swedish Postcode Lottery, and Porticus.