The Future of Arts and Culture
The Future of the Arts and Culture fellowship was created by the Ford Foundation and is sponsored by The Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) and Arizona State University. I attended the Center for Cultural Innovation's Future Forward Convening and met with business people, researchers, artists and educators, including Cyndi Coon (Lab 5), Ruby Lerner (Creative Capital) and Robert Ransick. The fellows developed individual projects which spoke to the relationship between art, science and technology in 2050.
Abject Failure in the Arts
After research and interviews on arts funding, emerging artists, privilege among the arts and community impact, I became interested in the pedagogies of failure.
Password: Future
The Failure Foundation is a project I developed. I began with the hypothesis that project based failure exists in a spectrum. At one pole is abject failure, the experience of terrible loss and giving up. Iterative failure is constructive in nature. Currently, many foundations are unable to provide resources to risky applicants because they fear it will weaken their donor base. With proper support, more artists could avoid or move on from feelings of abjection, this would lead to iterative failure. To iterate is to reinvent, problem solve and prototype. By removing the stigma around failure and further exploring its pedagogy failure becomes creative. For example, publications on what isn't working for one person may inspire another, collaborating with others who have failed on similar or dissimilar projects may foster new ideas. This is not a linear process. Collaborative actions centered around defining areas of meaning within failed projects can have new and unexpected results.
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This research helped me develop the Failure Collective which encourages people to collaborate on new projects based on past failures. The participants meet in biweekly salons to discuss work and have a space based immersive gallery to display results and ongoing projects.
For more information click here. Feel free to get in contact if you have additional questions, can offer resources, support or if you’d like to see the Failure Collective in your area.