The Artist as a Creative Steward
My understanding is constantly evolving. Below are some general thoughts on what I have come to learn about my role as an artist.
I think in recent years, Western society has managed ecosystems and media in a similar way. The general trend has been to manage nature/media so it will deliver results that are beneficial for the managers. In TV, success is measured by viewership. In nature management decisions are taken based on what they will yield for humans in terms of natural resources for industry or recreation. It is a management model.
As can be seen in the media world the management model is crumbling and the pendulum is swinging in the other direction. The web has allowed everyone to become a maker and a publisher. Social media has allowed ordinary people to become celebrities.
Recent technological developments have put to question the ‘special’ role of a creator, but have also opened new and exciting possibilities to creating art through community collaboration.
How do I create collaborative art that is not just adding to the digital media noise that is overwhelming all of us? I do feel that an artist has a similar place within a democratized, easily accessible landscape of media as a human has within an ecosystem. She is a steward, but not in a controlling way or a way that makes her more important. Her responsibilities and functions are simply different. The question that a steward asks is not: how can I manage something so it will yield results for me, bring me more viewers, make me more popular, give me commercial success. Not because those questions are not important but because they are not the motivation and the core responsibility of what a steward does. To me they are the byproduct of a good stewardship.
To me the core of good stewardship is listening to the inherent intelligence that already exists within each entity. My actions are not aimed at telling something what to be, but to listening to what it already is, and entering a collaboration, in which my function is to help its essence to blossom.
As a community collaborator, the artist plays a vital role in the society of makers. This collaboration to me has to be a symbiotic relationship that is a conversation between the artist and the community, inspires both of them to grow, and in a way is fluid and ever changing like a dance.
I have been searching for the best ways to apply this approach to my art practice.
The structure I am experimenting with right now is to create an art piece (film or new media) where I have creative freedom to experiment with new perspective and to look at an issue in depth from my point of view. (ie. the documentary Green Dream) I use this art piece to set the tone, spark a discussion and inspire community collaboration. The next stage is where I use my creativity to make a framework that allows for the community to engage in the dialog and carry it further (ie. The Community Mapping Project) In this stage I work in the capacity of a media facilitator of the community dialog.