Creative Agency (Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture) 3030774333, 9783030774332

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Intermezzo 1: Space
Chapter 1: Creative Ecologies
January 2021
Creativity in East Asian history
Creativity in Western History
A Fascination with ‘the New’ (Avant-Garde)
Philosophy and Creativity
A Creative Ecology of Practice
A Summer Sunday Afternoon
Creative Agency
Why Autotheory?
Intermezzo 2: Fire
January 2020: Black Summer—Melbourne, Australia
March 2020: COVID-19 Arrives in Australia
Chapter 2: Melbourne
May 2020
I Blame Ken Robinson
Performance Devising Online
Intermezzo 3: Air
Urban Heat Island Effect
Chapter 3: Singapore
The Arts faculty members, 10 a.m.
The artist, 2:35 p.m.
Coronavirus Arrives in Singapore
Intermezzo 4: Land
Monday, 5 March 2018:
Educational Ecologies (Hong Kong’s School of Everyday Life)
Uncertain Times
Education
Chapter 4: Hong Kong
February 2018—Cast of Characters
Tuesday, 6 March 2018
Actors Perform Hong Kong Soundscape
Actors Reprise Sounds from Hong Kong Creativity Soundscape
Intermezzo 5: Water (badu)
Chapter 5: Sydney
August 2020
15 October 2018
The Script: Bubble of Love (Sydney)
Chapter 6: Creative Agency: A Manifesto for Posthuman Creativity Studies
September 2020
Posthuman Creativity Manifesto
5:14 p.m.
January 2021
Some non-human attachments in the time of post-COVID:
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CREATIVITY AND CULTURE

Creative Agency Dan Harris

Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture

Series Editors Vlad Petre Gla˘ veanu Department of Psychology and Counselling Webster University Geneva Geneva, Switzerland Brady Wagoner Communication and Psychology Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark

Both creativity and culture are areas that have experienced a rapid growth in interest in recent years. Moreover, there is a growing interest today in understanding creativity as a socio-cultural phenomenon and culture as a transformative, dynamic process. Creativity has traditionally been considered an exceptional quality that only a few people (truly) possess, a cognitive or personality trait ‘residing’ inside the mind of the creative individual. Conversely, culture has often been seen as ‘outside’ the person and described as a set of ‘things’ such as norms, beliefs, values, objects, and so on. The current literature shows a trend towards a different understanding, which recognises the psycho-socio-cultural nature of creative expression and the creative quality of appropriating and participating in culture. Our new, interdisciplinary series Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture intends to advance our knowledge of both creativity and cultural studies from the forefront of theory and research within the emerging cultural psychology of creativity, and the intersection between psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, business, and cultural studies. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture is accepting proposals for monographs, Palgrave Pivots and edited collections that bring together creativity and culture. The series has a broader focus than simply the cultural approach to creativity, and is unified by a basic set of premises about creativity and cultural phenomena. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14640

Dan Harris

Creative Agency

Dan Harris School of Education RMIT University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-77433-2    ISBN 978-3-030-77434-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77434-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to the oceans, the lands, the air and fire: endlessly creative and not an innovation or industry in sight

Acknowledgements

My thanks firstly to Kelly McConville whose work as Associate Researcher on this project has enriched not only the project but my own thinking and being as well; to Ka Lai (Kelly) Chan, for her friendship and stewardship in introducing me her rich and complex Hong Kong and helping me to better understand the relationship between ‘Hong Konger’ and Australian ways of being; to Sean Tobin, Moses Tan, Edmund Chow, Susan Sentler, and many other artist-educator-activists in Singapore; to Aaron Koh, Tanya Hart, Eno Yim, Bridget Steis and Ken Chan, Margaret Lo, Kitty Chow and Annabelle Tan in Hong Kong; to Andrea Chester, Julia Vagg, David Rousell, Carla van Laar, Joshua Iosefo, Kim Munro, Tamara Borovnica, Matthew Cunnane, Jack Tan, and the Creative Agency research lab community as well as the Posthuman Creativities reading group for contributions to my thinking and companionship along this road (for more on Creative Agency see www.creativeresearchlab. com). To the dynamic wider creative, collaborative, and practice-based community at RMIT University, especially Francesca Rendle-Short, Peta Murray, Stayci Taylor, Anna Hickey-Moody, Linda Knight, Tania Lewis, Larissa Hjorth, Kit Wise, Jeff Brooks, and Ellie Rennie. To Robyn Ewing, Jonathan Wyatt, Mark DeGarmo Dance Company in New  York City, Peter Cook, John N.  Saunders, Madonna Stinson, Craig Batty, Vlad Glaveanu, Danah Henrickson, Bem LeHunte, Susan Kerrigan, Phillip McIntyre, Pam Burnard, and Kristof Fenyvesi for being most excellent vii

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fellow-travellers. I thank my sister Lisa Gordon for keeping me going throughout my hardest times in 2018–2020, and as always thanks most of all to Stacy Holman Jones, Hazel, Murphy, Tasha, and Li’l B.  This research project, thought project, and book have been produced with funding under the Future Fellowship Research Fellow scheme of the Australian Research Council (2017–2021).

Contents

Intermezzo 1: Space  1  Chapter 1: Creative Ecologies  3 Intermezzo 2: Fire 25  Chapter 2: Melbourne 31 Intermezzo 3: Air 57  Chapter 3: Singapore 61 Intermezzo 4: Land 89  Chapter 4: Hong Kong103 Intermezzo 5: Water (badu)135  Chapter 5: Sydney145

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 Chapter 6: Creative Agency: A Manifesto for Posthuman Creativity Studies165 Index183

List of Figures

Chapter 2: Melbourne Fig. 1 Brainstorming the creative sights and sounds of Melbourne using padlet software Fig. 2 A night at the theatre

42 53

Chapter 3: Singapore Fig. 1 Soft Wall Studs space, Singapore Fig. 2 Singapore devised performance

69 82

Intermezzo 4: Land Fig. 1 A section of the gardens at the School of Everyday Life, 2019 (courtesy of the author) Fig. 2 One of the wooden murals showing a more sustainable ecology in Hong Kong

92 93

Chapter 4: Hong Kong Fig. 1 Hong Kong workshop with the verbatim script Fig. 2 Actors perform Hong Kong Creativity Soundscape

117 126

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Intermezzo 5: Water (badu) Fig. 1 Six ways First Peoples’ stories define Sydney’s Harbour Walk, City of Sydney website (https://news.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/ articles/6-ways-first-peoples-stories-define-sydneys-harbour-walk)136

Chapter 5: Sydney Fig. 1 Sydney creative ecology performance Fig. 2 Bubble of Love

146 158

Chapter 6: Creative Agency: A Manifesto for Posthuman Creativity Studies Fig. 1 Creative Agency

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Intermezzo 1: Space

Of the five natural elements, space is the most subtle. In yogic and Ayurvedic teaching, the other four elements are said to telescope out from space. Space gives rise to wind, which gives rise to fire, and so on. The element of space, sometimes called aether, is the place where everything happens. In its most subtle form, it is the place before everything happens. The qualities of space reflect that. It is still because it lacks the movement of wind. It is cold because it lacks the heat of fire. It is dry because it lacks the moistness of water, and it is light because it lacks the weight of earth. It is the place that is nowhere and so it is expansive and pervasive and has no centre. All of the ‘spaces’ in the body are predominantly the space element in nature, from the intestines to the most delicate nadis (channels). An un-cramped space element has no preferences and can host everything just as it is. When you express an  unfettered space element, you accept your own and others’ situations. You feel

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flexible and open-minded. You accommodate changes and challenges with a natural ease because you do not hold too tightly to the way you would like things to be.1 * * * Ancient Greeks saw space (which they called ‘aether’) as the god of light and the fifth element of the universe. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle brought this concept of heavenly air into the world of physics. He believed the four terrestrial elements were changeable and transient, but the planets and stars were eternal, and therefore must be made of a more transcendent substance. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, medieval scholars translated ancient Greek and Arab texts which gave rise to, amongst other things, the pseudo-science of alchemy. For alchemists, aether was the invisible material thought to permeate all the empty space in the universe, used by famous thinkers from Aristotle to Isaac Newton to explain the mysteries of the natural world. Alchemists called it ‘quintessence’ and believed it was found in all things, whether animal, plant, or mineral, but it needed freeing. A bit like the creativity conversation today. Alchemists believed that metals were alive and growing and could change into other substances, ultimately transitioning into a perfect state of quintessence. Aether was widely discredited by the late eighteenth century, but even as late as in 1920, Albert Einstein affirmed, ‘We may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an aether.’ In one form or another, aether has had an enduring influence on science and spirituality, from Descartes and Newton to the Ayurvedic tradition of India, and has returned in more recent investigations into dark matter and dark energy. Whether aether lives on as empty space, or a conductive fluid for the movement of light and for planets to swim in, or the internal element that binds us all together and to our ecologies, it is as elusive, as durable, and as adaptable as the idea of creativity and has shown its agency throughout the centuries. Aether, meet creativity. 1  https://www.yogajournal.com/lifestyle/purifying-the-five-elements-of-our-being/#:~:text= Everything%20in%20nature%20is%20made,of%20how%20the%20universe%20operates.

Chapter 1: Creative Ecologies

Some of my friends won’t let me talk about creativity at dinner parties anymore. They say creativity has gone the way ‘nice’ has gone in the lexicon: it’s a dead word. Meaningless, empty, worn out, over-used, discarded. And most of the artists I know have never had an easy relationship with the word, given its generic umbrella status. They prefer to talk about their practice, their own artform, how they work. Their impulses, provocations, flow. But never creativity. And teachers? Teachers have never really wanted to talk about creativity in my experience. It started out as an aversion to what seemed to high school teachers as an elite, or gifted, exceptionalism. Once creativity began to appear in national curricula, it became just another thing to incorporate into their already over-full programmes and workdays. In higher education, creativity is inevitably and ubiquitously coupled with ‘innovation’, ‘industries’, or ‘economies’. But creativity had other lives before this one, as I outlined in my book The Creative Turn.1 It has an art history origin through which aesthetics and creativity and the inchoate, immeasurable visitation of the muse dominated thinking about creativity and the creative impulse, and it has a  Anne Harris. (2014). The creative turn: Toward a new aesthetic imaginary. Sense.

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philosophical history through which the notion of creativity derived from considerations of god, immanence and the spiritual. It also, more recently, has a history in education and developmental psychology which concentrates on what is called ‘giftedness and talentedness’ and how adults may further foster these traits in exceptional students. But none of these histories takes an ecological approach which considers the collective, the milieu, the atmosphere of creativity, and all the components within. Creativity has become my closet obsession now. It avoids awkward encounters like Someone: “What do you research?” Me: “Creativity” Someone: “Oh, interesting! So what is creativity?” Me: “How long is a piece of string?” Sometimes I go down the research rabbit hole in libraries and old bookstores, emerging hours later with blinking watery eyes, a dusty cough, and turning-pages cuts on my index finger and thumb. But more often these days my digging involves online searches. Whatever the faceless Social Dilemma trackers want to know about me in my search behaviours they are welcome to. Most likely they have fallen asleep by now. While most of the time I prefer to be doing the actual creative writing itself, or thinking through narrative knots, sometimes I get caught up in the labyrinth of tracing back the many strands of creativity history. If most think of the long history genealogy of art history, aesthetics, and religion, there are so many more and, like all histories, the line is not a straight one. The roads are zigzagged and intersecting, and have always carried aspects of markets, spirituality and emotions. What they haven’t always—or almost ever—addressed helpfully is education. But I get ahead of myself.

January 2021 I make a long black and settle in for the afternoon in front of my computer. We have just finished repainting our little beachside house in bayside Melbourne, and my wife Stacy has hung my ‘Gertrude Stein’

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salon wall with paintings and photographs of beloveds. One of the dogs sleeps nearby. This is home, or what I call my ecology. I’ve been thinking and writing about creative ecologies now for several years and the longer I engage with it, the more I see how many human, non-human, animal, plant, mineral, atmospheric, and cultural components there are to my current ecology. Or rather, to the ecology in which I locate myself at this moment, because our ecologies are always changing, and it may be wrong to even claim them as ‘ours’. For now, I still use the word ‘mine’, and mine consist of gardening, writing, walking, biking, cooking, Stacy, our dogs Murphy and Hazel, this house, this office, my chair, my computer, my body that breathes, that sits, my hands that type and hold books, the ocean, the waves, the canal along which I walk, the sulphurcrested cockatoos that squawk up and down this neighbourhood, the computer platforms which allow me to connect through video with friends, family, colleagues, students, the season, the changing moods of the beach here, wine, my kayak. There is no end to the list of the elements that make up my ecology, and my meditation practice around this awareness shows me that any creative act or atmosphere or assemblage is also never ending, always changing, becoming with its ­ecological elements. Every ecology is creative. And every creative ecology is an event, forever changing all of its elements as it co-creates the next moment. This is how I define creative agency. This too is why I find it no longer reasonable or useful to measure creativity in any human-centred, or individual, exceptionalist way. It ignores the truth of this always-creative interconnectedness. That, in many ways, is the focus of this book. This assertion is grounded in a project I have been engaged with for the past four years, exploring the creative ecologies of one of the regions to which Australia belongs, East Asia. This is not a traditional academic text, although it does relate aspects of these experiences with Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, and Melbourne as unique creative ecologies. It makes no truthclaims about these ecologies nor does it seek to compare, contrast, or hierarchise them. This text is a modelling of the ways in which theory, critique, analysis, autotheory, and performance writing can be used to paint an affective portrait of an engagement, event, or encounter that goes beyond the human.

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Kathleen Stewart tells us, ‘the point of theory now is not to judge the value of analytic objects or somehow get their representation “right” but to wonder where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating and attending to things are already somehow present in them as a potential or resonance’.2 Welcome to this exploration of creativity as I found it in my particular time and place. There are many disciplinary-­specific terms for this kind of writing, but it is not the goal of this book to categorise or explore academic conceptual or onto-epistemological terrain. This book (and its author) invites the reader into an event, an encounter with the stories in these pages, and by doing so model the power of theory to help us move beyond the familiar with care—which is, of course, the role of creativity as well. Creativities. So many creativities! A history of creativity alone is the history of subjectivity, time, place, culture, and science. It is the history of omissions as well as new discoveries. It is the history of humans claiming ownership over what, in many cases, has always been there but had previously eluded our recognition. It can be called a history of becoming-intelligible.

Creativity in East Asian history Some trace the Confucian notion of junzi (exemplary person) as a cultural foundation of East Asian conceptions of creativity. A junzi embodies creativity in three ways: by interpreting and constructing meaning within one’s sociocultural ecology, being motivated by social harmony, and by seeking to bring about incremental (rather than radical) social change.3 While much has been written about the culturally embedded nature of creativity, more recent creative industries literature has put forward a kind of globalised/ising creative economy discourse that focuses on the global circulability of creative and cultural outputs rather than  Kathleen Stewart. (2008). ‘Weak theory in an unfinished world.’ Journal of Folklore Research, Volume 45, Number 1, January–April 2008, pp. 73. 3  Charlene Tan. (2016). Understanding creativity in East Asia: Insights from Confucius’ concept of junzi. International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation, 4(1), 51–61. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/21650349.2015.1026943. 2

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celebrating local differences. Some scholars maintain differences not only between cultural specificities but also regional ones; as in my study, some argue  that Westerners hold Westernised  perceptions of creativity and therefore using measures standardised in the West may not be appropriate  in all parts of the world.4 The most significant difference/s can be described as a Western adherence to ‘Big C creativity’, or creativity as innovation, radical visioning, individual vision, whereas an ‘Asian’ creativity (‘middle C creativity’) is typified by a more incremental advancement of culture or products that extends but does not seek to break with the status quo. There is an ‘appropriateness’ question at the heart of Asian creativity, which might be as central as the ‘usefulness’ argument in Western definitions. Howard Gardner claimed in 1989, after research in China, that the main difference could be described as ‘revolutionary versus evolutionary’. But he’s a Westerner, so you decide. An Asian approach has also been argued to be much more collectivist, socially focused and ecological, including maintaining a connection to nature, spirituality, and duty. Most Western definitions or valuings of creativity focus on newness and difference, and the notion of creativity as having a product, both significantly differing from the foundations of a Confucian history still predominant in East Asia.5 While acknowledging the unhelpfulness of generalisations, especially culturally re-essentialising ones, it is still important to understand how applying Western definitions of creativity to East Asian contexts and practices is unhelpful, unproductive, and at worst alienating. Some Western educators working in East Asia, or teachers wishing to address cultural or intercultural differences in their classrooms more generally, have noted the Western nature of definitions and enactments of creativity in education specifically but in creativity discourse more generally.6 Most of these concentrate on China and Japan. As noted, generally  Niu & Sternberg, 2002, p. 281, in Tan 2016 (Niu, W. & Sternberg, R.J. (2002). Contemporary studies on the concept of creativity: The East and the West. Journal of Creative Behavior, 36, 269–288). 5  Leong, S., & Leung, B. W. (2013). Creative arts in education and culture. Hong Kong, China: Springer. 6  Smith, C.  A. (2016). Creativity east and west: Preconceptions and misunderstandings. In P. Clements, A. Krause, & H. Brown (Eds.), Focus on the learner. Tokyo: JALT. 4

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speaking the Western prejudice that Asians are less capable of original thought has a long pedigree, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.7 This betrays a Western highly individualistic, human-centred, and competitive imaginary of creativity that constitutes the ‘revolutionary’ and not the ‘evolutionary’ concept of creative innovation. These differences are important for trade across cultural boundaries, and also in areas as diverse as education, political alliances, military agreements, and peace agreements. But it also impacts the ways in which many non-Western cultures and economies continue to play ‘catch-up’ with Western enactments and definitions of what constitutes truly creative work that ‘has value’, as creativity has been defined in the West.8 There are an increasing number of works focused on the ‘rise’ of creativity in the East—particularly in China, but extending to the ‘Tiger economies’ (used for the booming but still-­ emerging economies) of East Asia, including Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It is to this region that I turn in my current project, and in this book.9

Creativity in Western History A potted history of creativity in the West can be simplified as emerging from the twin prongs of Greco-Roman cultural, and Judeo-Christian spiritual, traditions.10 For the ancient Greeks, art (except for poetry) was a form of imitation, a technical craft which adhered to strict rules, and therefore was not considered to be a creative endeavour. This view of ‘art’ was linked to nature, considered to be perfect, and governed by rules. Human endeavour was aligned with natural perfection and therefore any deviation was not viewed favourably. This binary between technical rendering versus  Mahbubani, K. (2002). Can Asians think? (2nd ed.). Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. But see also Kim, K.  H. (2009). Cultural influence on creativity: The relationship between creativity and Confucianism. Journal of Creative Behavior, 43(2), 73–94, as well as the 2011 radio interview by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s criticism of Singapore as too straightlaced to be creative. 8  Teri Silvio (2018) After creativity: labour, policy, and ideology in East Asian creative industries, Culture, Theory and Critique, 59:2, 75–80, https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2018.1446839, p. 3. 9  For a good overview of the ways in which the 1990s British ‘creative industries’ discourse impacted China, see O’Connor, J. & Gu, X. (2020). Red Creative: Culture and modernity in China. Intellect. 10  Niu & Sternberg, 2006, p. 20 in Smith 2016, p. 46. 7

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self-expression remained a topic of debate throughout the Roman period, including debates around the value of freedom of expression in art versus masterful execution of the rules of aesthetics. The Middle Ages11 were not without creative advances, but fell more in the ‘popular’ or practical category than the monumental, flashy creations characteristic of the Renaissance that followed. Some of these creative advances included musical notation, horseshoes, ploughs, eye glasses, aquaculture, the three-year crop rotation system, chimneys, clocks, wheelbarrows, Gothic architecture, oil-based paints, sonnets, universities, and the foundations of science, to name just a few. However, there was less intellectual and aesthetic activity, and so the conceptual advancement of creativity stalled.

A Fascination with ‘the New’ (Avant-Garde) In medieval Christianity, the Latin ‘creatio’ referred to the act of ‘creatio ex nihilo’ (creation from nothing), and was only attributable to God, never to mere mortals. In the Renaissance, however, all this changed and popular views shifted to the idea of arts being something thought up and executed by the artist. A newly acquired neo-classical love of ‘the past’ led a Renaissance pursuit of the ‘new’, and these tastes (and the rise of ‘creativity’ as an individual pursuit) was tied from the beginning to the market: city states requiring engineers and artists created the first markets for identifiable ‘artists’ and the first ‘creative economies’.12 The first to apply the word ‘creation’ to human endeavour, however, was the seventeenth-century Polish poet M. K. Sarbiewiski (1595-1640), who described only the work of the poet as inventing, building, and ‘creating anew’. But for A. N. Whitehead, who is commonly attributed with coining the form of the term ‘creativity’ (as such), there are only instances of creativity, and these instances are always conditioned: ‘creativity is always found under conditions, and described as conditioned.’13 By the eighteenth century, the concept of creativity gained in popularity and was paired with imagination during the Enlightenment,  Also known as the Dark Ages, approximately 500–1500 AD.  Smith 2016, p. 47. 13  Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929, p. 31. 11 12

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especially in art history writings, but resistance to human creativity as a mysterious and godlike activity was still rife. It took until the nineteenth century for human art-making and creativity to be considered synonymous. Finally, around the turn of the twentieth century, creativity discourses extended to nature and the sciences as well. Considerations of creativity in nature (Henri Bergson), science (Jan Lukasiewicz), and philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, and later Maxine Greene) began to develop a creativity discourse within theoretical and philosophical literature. The beginning of the psychological study of creativity is widely attributed to J. Paul Guilford (1950s) and his contribution to psychometric testing of divergent thinking and giftedness in education. Howard Gardner (attributed with introducing the notion of use-value in defining creativity14) and Paul Torrance are pivotal others. In the history of psychology since the nineteenth century, there has been a movement from grand theories and the beginnings of experimental aesthetics through behaviourism to a resurgence of interest evident in early cognitive psychology. There is a fairly consistent history within psychological studies of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts, primarily examined through behaviourist, early cognitive, and psychodynamic theoretical lenses, followed by a long dominance of cognitive approaches. More recently, and coinciding with the emergence of popular theories of creativity, the psychological approach to creativity studies has focused on evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. The relationship between arts and science is not new, however, and for the past 25 years has undergone considerable academic investigation for the ways in which aesthetics and science are linked culturally, cognitively, and socially. Of course, this history has much older origins in those like Henri Bergson, and before him evident in the work of Leonardo da Vinci (fifteenth century) and others during the Italian Renaissance. Brunelleschi’s discovery of perspective (circa 1415) heavily influenced  Recent critiques of this definition can be found at Weisberg, R. W. (2015). On the usefulness of “value” in the definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 27, 111–124 and David M Harrington (2018) On the Usefulness of “Value” in the Definition of Creativity: A Commentary, Creativity Research Journal, 30:1, 118–121. 14

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Galileo’s (sixteenth-seventeenth century) understandings of the relationship between mathematics and arts. By now, it should be obvious that the study of creativity or the history of creativity studies has never been conducted or advanced in one field alone: it has, since the beginning, been inherently transdisciplinary, cross-­ sectoral, affective, marketised, and socially embedded. And since the fourth century, mathematics, science, and art have been mutually advancing in ways that the current STEM ‘versus’ STEAM debates in education make not only ridiculous but also anachronistic. Mathematics is at the heart of Renaissance discovery of perspective and also of Galileo’s New Science of Nature. For those who are interested in exploring more, these are just a few examples of the ways in which creativity (articulated as aesthetics and art) is interconnected with nature and a range of mathematical, architectural, spiritual, and anatomical investigations of what I’m calling the creative ecology of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Of course, this explosion of new knowledge and cosmologies was still firmly humanist, and would remain so for centuries.

Philosophy and Creativity Maxine Greene and John Dewey were both philosophers of education who contributed to understandings of aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Both were proponents of creativity as central to both individual human actualisation, and also importantly to social advancement and cohesion. In this way, the work of both blended to some extent features of ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ creativity. In 1934, Dewey in Art as Experience wrote about creative arts in a way that is both individual and ecological: Colours which in nature have almost always a certain vagueness and elusiveness, become so definite and clear to him [the artist], owing to their now so necessary relation to other colours, that, if he chooses to paint his vision, he can state it positively and definitely. In such a creative vision, the

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objects as such tend to disappear, to lose their separate unities and to take their place as so many bits in the whole mosaic of vision.15

In discussing the relationship between technique and art, he identifies three main stages that ‘usually attend the appearance of a new technique’, starting with the opposite of that Greco-Roman claim that human art-­ making is never creative, only craft and imitation of nature with his assertion that craftsmanship alone is not art, but is it creativity? He answers this by claiming that the phase of synthesis in any creative process serves as a unifying phase, even more than the analytic, and is a function of the creative response of the individual who judges. It is insight. Dewey concludes that there are no rules that can be laid down for its performance. Which would no doubt alarm today’s educators who seek so stridently for standardised means of schematising, measuring, or assessing creative activity in schools in the 2020s. Dewey’s most influential text describes art as an experience (not just any everyday experience, but an event which has resonance), a notion which might be compared with the contemporary concept from Karen Barad  of intra-action as an event, an emergence. Dewey’s  experience, however, has a beginning and end, is complete; for Barad, an intra-action is not interested in measuring its duration or even quality, but for Dewey the continuum of aesthetics runs from everyday experiences to high art. Importantly for my conception of contemporary creative ecologies, Dewey felt that all begins with attention to everyday art and aesthetics as lived experience. By seeking to connect the arts with everyday experiences (a true kind of democratisation of creativity, rather than the current commodified one), Dewey drew attention to the very obvious relationship between human and non-human aesthetics and creative experience. For Dewey and other pragmatists, human creativity can be understood in practical terms as an extension of nature and the ethereal. For William James, another pragmatist and contemporary of Dewey’s ‘radical empiricism’ (everything that is experienced, is real in some way, and that everything that’s real is experienced), said that both disjunctive and conjunctive are equally part of experience, influencing Alfred North Whitehead and  John Dewey. (1934/2005). Art as experience. Penguin, p. 87.

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his contributions to a philosophy of experience (and creativity). Later, Brian Massumi takes up this notion of ‘an’ event and starting in the middle of things, of the experience of the event, draws on Whitehead:16 ‘“Creativity is the principle of novelty” (Whitehead 1978, 2). To be at all is to become, actively creative.’17 Yet in the midst of the event and change, Massumi reminds us: The straight run encounters turbulence: process as becoming is not just creative activity, it turns out. It is self-creation. More than that, the self-­ creation is enjoyed. The principle of unrest eddies into something we would be forgiven for suspecting is not unlike an aesthetic appreciation: an enjoyment of creativity.18

Pleasure. Event. Life happening in an ecology. Action and unrest eddying. The event as the protagonist. Experience as enjoyment, as creation, investigation from in the midst. These are all ideas that run throughout this book. ‘Ingressions of bare-active relation pulse the event, modulating its onward phasing. Every event is a qualitative-relational economy of process, “full of both oneness and manyness”.’19 I make another coffee. I walk the dog. I take a shower. The sun comes out. The magpies are loud this morning. Walking makes me. Barking makes the dog. Waves make the ocean. The coffee moves through me. Oneness and manyness.

A Creative Ecology of Practice Isabelle Stengers offers an ecology of practice which she describes as a continuous ‘process of learning’ and an ‘act of creative resistance’.20  Brain Massumi, 2011, Semblance and event: Activist philosophy and the occurrent arts. MIT Press, p. 4. 17  Massumi, 2011, p. 2. 18  Massumi 2011, p. 2. 19  James 1996a, 93–94 in Massumi 2011, p. 5. 20  Isabelle Stengers (2011), Cosmopolitics II, trans. R.  Bononno, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, p. 407. 16

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Ecology, for Stengers, is quite simply a question of habitat, the context in which you undertake your labour, and the habits that circumscribe your methodologies. In operating within your “habitat” your practice must feel out its borders, recognises its limits, and also push against them, in order to re-establish them again and again.21

Stengers’ recent work continues to explore the indivisibility of the human, and more than human, entanglements that form the core of my attention to a creative ecology. Again, creativity as an activity, but not just any activity, not any experience. As in: Creativity, for its part, is bereft of qualifications. In particular, we must avoid associating it with an underlying impulse. Its “activity” has nothing to do with the power of a river, that always ends up destroying the banks that imprison it. Creativity is “activity,” but activity affirms, simultaneously and inseparably, the river and the banks without which there would be no river, whether it overflows or not… The river’s course can be deduced from the relief of its banks. If, however, in addition, what conditions creativity always entails “the stable element of divine ordering,” how can we avoid reducing creativity to some kind of more or less tractable material, whereas intelligibility, legitimacy, rationality, and right refer to what conditions it?22

And if, for Stengers, ‘creativity is always conditioned’, she points out that Whitehead’s conceptual innovation of creativity draws, like those before him, on the God connection. That is, when he decided to make creativity the “ultimate” affirmed by his system, he had already been forced to abandon a possibility he had envisaged in 1926, in Religion in the Making: that of God as a “principle,” “ideal entity,” or “formative element,” that is, an authority bereft of individuality, a name for an aspect of the creative advance of the world. Since creativity is the ultimate, none of its aspects can any longer be named, that is, privileged.

 Hélène Frichot, “A Creative Ecology of Practice for Thinking Architecture”, Ardeth [Online], 1 | 2017, accessed 17 December 2020. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ardeth/1007. 22  Isabelle Stengers (2011b), Thinking with Whitehead: A free and wild creation of concepts. Harvard University Press, p. 256. 21

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God can no longer be a principle, and if Whitehead needs him, he will have to be conceived, like everything else, as an “accident of creativity.”23

The speculative realist question of ‘can subject and object be considered independently of one another?’ is central to Stengers’ work here, and in many ways it is for the emerging field of creativity studies as well. The commodified creativity that has become so familiar suggests that they cannot be understood independently of one another, given the product focus of sociocultural creativity in the twenty-first century. Hence the focus on creative industries, economies, and workforce. In schooling too, from early years to postgraduate study, by and large creativity is understood as its outputs, even with a curricular focus on creative and critical thinking (in name only), with education’s obsession with assessment prevailing – assessment which somehow requires something to measure. In this climate, creativity becomes the object or the means to the use-value of the object. It was not always so, and it is time for creativity to migrate beyond transactional definitional constraints once again. Another limb of the tree is Maxine Greene, who articulated an aesthetics informed by imagination, where aesthetics as a philosophy that studies artistic making, perception, and affect as a means of understanding experiences, and the meaning of those experiences as connecting (and awakening) individuals to and with the world. While Greene went beyond pragmatism, both she and Dewey  were interested in creativity and aesthetics as events, actions, and interactions. Both in their different ways (and 60 years apart) helped advance a twentieth-century aesthetics and creativity studies that attend to both the individual and the collective, and to a social imagination and engagement. Others into the twentieth century, in addition to Bergson, Whitehead, and Stengers, have written extensively through a process philosophy lens on the nature of creativity and science, and nature and emotion, influencing the work of Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Deleuze and Guattari, and others who attend to creativity in process philosophy. More recently, design creativity has its own discursive lineage which is related and yet draws on other sources (ethnographic, neuroscientific, pedagogical) for discussions of 23

 Stengers (2011b), pp. 264–65.

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the need for creativity in society and sustainability. All of this work and these threads of enquiry contribute to an emerging field of creativity studies that is taking shape across sectors, regions, and onto-­epistemologies, including more nature-based eco-discourses reflecting contemporary concerns with climate change and climate justice, biodiversity, artificial intelligence, and increasingly algorithmic life. All of these fields of inquiry also contribute to the ‘creative ecologies’ of our various lives, events, encounters, and enactments, including the project which this book draws upon. * * *

A Summer Sunday Afternoon We have just returned from the Mornington Peninsula, a wild strip of land extending southeast from Melbourne, famous for its wineries, natural beauty, hot springs, and water: one side faces the open ocean with its thunderous tides, surfer joy, and hidden histories, while to the West is Port Phillip Bay (where our house is, an hour closer to the city), and on the eastern side is Western Port. This morning our friend Jacqui took us for a walk through the dunes up to a spot called the Great Divide up behind Number 16 Beach, overlooking the popular surfing spot known as Dragon’s Head rock. The peninsula gets compared to the Hamptons in New York, and who knows? Maybe someday it will be as expensive. It’s certainly as beautiful, and only an hour from the city. Since the COVID pandemic took hold last year, real estate prices have gone through the proverbial roof, as city dwellers have sought a ‘sea change’ now that everyone can work from home. It’s easy to see why. We stand around 16 Beach General Store (where Jacqui knows everyone), catch up with everyone’s kids, how hard it’s been on them during lockdown, how impossible it is to now afford independent housing so they are all still living at home, and why wouldn’t they? It’s pretty close to paradise, Stacy and I think as we wait for the chai lattes and snack from a box of free plums left by a

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neighbour picked right off the tree. I’m supposed to be finishing my book, but the book is about this: lived experience, natural aesthetics and creative connection, belonging, rest, and wildness. Not that our house is too awful either: A few years ago, Stacy and I bought a house in Elwood, a sleepy neighbourhood on this side of town, about 7 kilometres from the city centre. A ten-minute walk to the beach, a quiet and friendly local ‘village’, no need to drive, and fresh sourdough sold out of a house on the canal that leads to the beach. We bought the house before COVID, and I could never have imagined how important this proximity to the beach would be for me. More on that later. Suffice it to say that this book asks you to walk with me around this neighbourhood, around my memories and artefacts of travel to East Asia during the period 2018 to early 2020, to get to know my dogs and my beach and my house,24 as they have made up my creative ecology over this time, as directly as any thoughts, feelings, affects, or imagination has done so internally. My material encounters with this natural and artificial physical environment around me, and with my dogs and select humans, during this lifetime-defining period of the pandemic and its lockdown trajectory here in Melbourne, have brought home to me in deeper ways than I could have imagined how local and embodied our experiences of creativity really and always are. The project that I share here is a regional one set in Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and my hunch (there are no arguments here) after researching creativity for the past 15 years is that creativity is always unique to its time, place, and event. So with the financial support of the Australian Research Council and my university, I set out to explore the ways in which it might be uniquely expressing itself, coagulating if you will, asserting its agency independent of humans, economies, or the other usual suspects in the contemporary life of creativity. I have come to see creativity as a force, like love, or gravity, or electricity, that moves through but is never contained by or within. Like affects, it can instantiate or emerge, but it will never be harnessed (the seemingly favourite pastime of contemporary creativity researchers). So  But can we use the term ‘my’ anymore at all, in a committed posthuman orientation? Ownership ceases to be. 24

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in this text I invite readers to trace creativity’s path through my home ecology, my work, my relationships, my dialogues, but always remembering that this book is a map, not a representation. It is a trail of breadcrumbs through human and posthuman creative thinking and acting, but like all trails it may be washed away with the first rain.

Creative Agency Readers may be wondering why a book on creative agency and ecologies is divided into chapter-silos rather than an amorphous swamp, separated both geo-spatially as well as by an accompanying natural element (earth, wind, fire, water, space). If an ecology can be called the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment, then my creative ecology attends to my interdependent relationships with human and non-human organisms and my physical environment. I have written a lot on my articulation of ‘creative ecologies’, and why I think that is the only way forward as a planet that must attend to more-than-economic concerns, urgently. In fact, that’s why the first chapter of this book is entitled Creative Ecologies. But why is the title of the book then Creative Agency? Because considering all of our natural and artificial environments as having their own creative agency takes this idea a step further, both in imagination and in respect. By beginning to see the creative agency in all things, events, organisms, and impulses, humans must reconsider our parasitic relationship to creativity and our compulsion to control and profit from it. This book is my call to a rewilding of creativity. While each chapter visits a different site, and draws on different material, relational and creative events in that site, together they paint an always-subjective but more ‘ecological’ portrait of the place. They are not meant as representations, for that would be futile and arrogant. They are not comparative. They are simply all distinct but interconnected elements in the larger posthuman creative ecology of the greater East Asian region, of which Australasia is a part. The fieldwork from which these sketches derive included (at each site) 25 interviews, photographic self-portraits, and a co-devised verbatim

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performance (scripts are included in each chapter). The process for the development of the performances was that I would return to each city with associate researcher and theatre-maker (and dear friend) Kelly McConville, and with a provisional verbatim script that I created from a sample of the interviews. We  would work with local actors to create soundscapes, physical theatre elements, and hone the scripts, culminating in a public performance, including especially those who had been interviewed. By using this creative, collaborative, and iterative process, we hoped to create a kind of affective event, or capture a momentary resonance of this place at that time. In research terms, these kinds of inconclusive affective echoes are not the most sought-after of ‘hard data’, and certainly not ‘big data’. But in relational terms, it helped to acknowledge and also extend the ecologies already there, and to explore our interconnectedness, sameness, differences, and proximity. And to continue in that affective and relational vein, I needed to write a book that reflected the emergent, speculative, and personal nature of those events, which are still unfolding within me, and—I hope—within the others who were/are involved. But the idea of creative agency extends some common ideas prevalent in posthuman and new materialist theory, namely a ‘conception of agency not tied to human action, shifting the focus for social inquiry from an approach predicated upon humans and their bodies, examining instead how relational networks or assemblages of animate and inanimate affect and are affected’.25 In this way of thinking, ‘matter is not inert, nor simply the background for human activity, but “is conceptualised as agentic”, with multiple non-human as well as human sources of agency with capacities to affect’26 nor is a force like creativity. If material objects or natural phenomena can be agentic, certainly creativity, which has always been characterised by its flow, energy, or force, is a great candidate for having its own agency. As Karen Barad has argued about the agency of  Nick J.  Fox & Pam Alldred (2015) New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the research-assemblage, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18:4, 399–414, https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2014.921458, page 399. 26  Taylor, C. A., & Ivinson, G. (2013). Material feminisms: New directions for education. Gender and Education, 25, p. 666. 25

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lightning, in this book I advocate for a reconsideration of the self-­ directedness of creativity and its consideration of its life beyond the human.27 * * * I return to my own creative ecology/ies in the writing of this book. I return to my love of writing, and its role as my primary means of connection to the creative impulse, imagination, and flow. I have used the affective experience of writing this book at home, throughout the COVID pandemic’s worst days in 2020, to be present with my co-­ existent ecology members: my wife, my friends, my dogs, my natural environment, my university work. Too often, even in creative research projects, the affective and aesthetic aspects take a supporting role to the ‘research’ and COVID has in many ways shown us this is no longer sustainable. Our ecologies always co-create our experiences, our work, our feelings, our atmospheres and accomplishments. In this book, I foreground the two concepts that have preoccupied my thinking over the past five years: agency and ecologies. Agency because I’m suggesting that agency outside of capitalism and productivity is now urgently demanding attention. COVID made clear how quickly the productivity goals and imperatives can fall away. Mental health, emotional connectedness, and physical resilience took no time in reasserting its primacy. Creative agency is not only the name of my research lab at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia (more on this in Chap. 6), but also a recognition that beyond creative industries, economies, and innovation, there is a widespread desire to reconnect with creativity as a form of personal, natural, and collective agency. A sense of being ‘in it’. A sense of directing one’s own enquiry. A sense of connection to human and non-human worlds.

 See Mel Y. Chen (2012) Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke; Karen Barad (2015). Transmaterialities: Trans*/matter/realities and queer political imaginings. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21:2–3. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2843239, pp. 387–422; Karen Barad (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; and Anne M Harris & Stacy Holman Jones (2019) The queer life of things: Performance, affect, and the more-than-human. Lexington. 27

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The Oxford English dictionary defines agency as an ‘action or intervention producing a particular effect’. Creative agency, an intervention producing a particular effect—or affect. Or both. In the case of this book, it’s an intervention into the neoliberalisation of research, industry, and formal education in order to produce a particular effect (collective approaches rather than individual human exceptionalist ones), and an affect (co-becoming, an inherently creative act which defines all lifeforms). We do not know what course our lives will take nor quite often what course our work or personal efforts will either. Yet we spend considerable time charting. And then reflecting. This book is an intervention into research and living in order to model a different way of proceeding: proceeding by experience, observation, curiosity, and being present. The pursuit of agency is also a conceptual goal that keeps me connected to my multiple ecologies. It reminds me that I am not just working in a purely ‘academic’ ecology for and with other academics. In my kind of academic scholarship, I work with educators, students, community groups, non-profits, mental health services, arts programmes, theatres, galleries, and diverse individuals and communities like migrants, refugee-background youth, queer youth and adults, trans* community members, and many many non-human others. Attending to the notion of agency, including creative agency (or the ways in which creativity can build agency), makes transparent and present my connections with these groups, individuals, and flows. It reminds me to go out of my way to be inclusive in my language as well as my ambitions. It reminds me that I am co-constituted by my membership in these ecologies, my affective relationships, and collaborative processes with them, and that my self as I understand it at this place, and time, and awareness, is a co-production with them. So the notion of ‘creative agency’ and ‘creative ecologies’ are inextricably interconnected.

Why Autotheory? Making new arguments and engaging newly with old material at the intersections of imagination, sociality, theory, and cultural politics requires new modes. While I come from a background in

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autoethnography, I felt like this book—these essays—was different. It has shades of both fictocriticism28 (although this genre has a strong digital media bent which is not strong here—despite the inclusion of links to audio-visual artefacts from the sites) and autotheory,29 where autobiography combine with theory and cultural criticism in a way that attends more to the literary, I would say, than autoethnography, and also has a decidedly feminist history and orientation. Its ability to bridge inside/ outside academic literature, too, is appealing, and aligned with the orientation of this book. This is a book about everyday creativity that should have an everyday audience. While autotheory makes a case for the productive enmeshment of the personal and theoretical, it does so in a work of written art that is modelling the affective nature of creativity, and that is why I lean towards it here. It also challenges the still-pervasive myth of objectivity in academic writing, which alone wins my heart. The problem however is that most autotheory (and fictocriticism too for that matter) demand a juicy narrative—in the case of Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts, it is queer sex and desire. My challenge has been in writing about creativity like that—whether for a live performance, or this book, or the odd dinner party where I still get away with talking about the topic. While creativity implies passion, it is not explicitly so in a corporeal way. But isn’t it? This is my challenge and why I chose to write in a mode like autotheory: because my relationship to creativity is a personal, embodied, political, and literary one, or put another way, Exploring autotheory has helped me foreground the value of situatedness— placing myself and my perspective into the historical, political, economic, and social contexts of the topics I’m exploring—as I write…My engagement with autotheory…has taught me a lot about moving away from the  Brewster, A. (1996) ‘Fictocriticism: Undisciplined Writing’ in (Eds. Hutchison and Williams), Writing-Teaching, Teaching Writing, Conference Proceedings, UTS, pp. 29–32; Taussig, M. ‘The Language of Flowers’ in Walter Benjamin’s Grave, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp.  189–218; Smith, H, 2009, “The Erotics of Gossip: Fictocriticism, Performativity, Technology”, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 403–412. 29  See, for example, Lauren Fournier (2021). Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, MIT Press; Maggie Nelson (2015) The Argonauts. The Text Publishing House; Paul (Beatriz) Preciado (2013) Testo Junkie: Sex, drugs and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. The Feminist Press. 28

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conceptual binary of research versus imagination, of real versus true. It has offered an important reminder to approach thinking and research as both playful and rebellious elements. And it has prompted me to think about the ways in which “research” can also be a physically-embodied practice, a mode of information-gathering rooted in and through the body.30

* * * I’m attempting to make smoked salmon tonight in our new ceramic barbeque. Slow smoking is an art, they say. We are just glad we can now move around freely after the months of hard lockdown in 2020. As an event, the pandemic, it is becoming clear, is leaving indelible marks on the ecology of earth, on its human, animal, plant, biological, geological, chemical, and mineral elements: we are all in this together. In the events that come after. In all events that are now forever co-created by this becoming-not-new-never-finished event called COVID. I get distracted by the inauguration of Joe Biden and the good-­ riddancing of Trump leaving office. The salmon is dry. That is, the product of my smoking experiment is not an A+ output, but the event of the smoking experience is full of pleasure. Stacy and I eat it anyway. Why do we eat it? An event-in-the-making from an incalculable string of events that preceded it: the way we were raised, out of respect for the fish’s sacrifice, as a comparative for (hopefully) a better version to come, sheer bare hunger. ‘Think of event-time as the time, in the event, of cueing and aligning to the futurity of experience in the making.’ This is what

 Arianne Zwartjes, July 23, 2019, Michigan Quarterly Review. Available at: https://sites.lsa.umich. edu/mqr/2019/07/autotheory-as-rebellion-on-research-embodiment-and-imagination-in-creativenonfiction/. Zwartjes also reminds us that recent works of autotheory include Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieu, and Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick, as well as work by Claudia Rankine, Wayne Koestenbaum, Hilton Als, Sara Ahmed, Fred Moten, Kathy Acker, Dionne Brand, Ann Cvetkovich, Paul Preciado, and numerous others. But in any discussion of autotheory, it is critical to acknowledge that, like the lyric essay and like hybridity, this is not a new literary practice, and it is one whose roots are in the intersectional writing and performance art of many black feminists and women of colour, including Audre Lorde, Adrian Piper, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Mendieta, and others. 30

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Manning calls the shift ‘from agency to agencement’,31 and what saturates my days, from the salmon soaking in the cherry wood smoke, to these experiences of creativity-in-the-making in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne that make an appearance here, that assert their agencement as creative agents, not just inert places. Autotheory and creative agency work together to embed the event in its unique time, place, ecology. Foregrounding my entry into an already-unravelling/accumulating creative ecology. We finish the dry smoky salmon and clear the plates. Stacy feeds the dogs, and I water the back garden, inspecting the swelling tomatoes on their vine, doing their thing. The tomatoes remind me of Kathleen Stewart’s attention to the ordinary, in which all things ‘have their forms of alertness to the poesis of a something snapping into place, if only for a minute. All of these stories of tracing things that come together have their attachments to potentiality and their constant production of the sense of being in something’32 and so do the stories and sites in this book. They are accretions, events, if only for a minute. That is enough, and perhaps that is all we have.

 Erin Manning (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke, p. 4.  Stewart 2008, p. 82.

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J anuary 2020: Black Summer— Melbourne, Australia One of the odd things about time (like creative flow) is that it accumulates in ways that don’t feel like accretion until hindsight puts them altogether. The year 2020 will go down in global history as a pivotal year, but like all watershed moments or periods, it does not have shape while it’s happening. While it’s happening we just focus on surviving, planning, trying to make sense from one jarring event to the next, pacing, adapting, and the million other cognitive, affective, emotional, and interpersonal demands of a sudden rupture. I remember when 9/11 happened and I knew it was bad, but couldn’t imagine the kind of magnitude of ‘things will never be the same’. In fact, I remember people saying that at the time, and me scoffing: of course, things will be the same again! Don’t be so apocalyptic! And of course, they never were the same again. Whoever knows in the moment that things will never be the same? I remember the autumn day standing on the front lawn in my parents’ embrace hearing that my brother Michael had committed suicide; the same. I knew it was bad, obviously. I did not know how long and far and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Harris, Creative Agency, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77434-9_3

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loud and deep the reverberations of that announcement would go in shaping my life. When I’m writing, when I’m playing piano or composing, when I’m performing, in a state that some have called flow,1 time slips away. Grief and shock can be like flow too, beyond temporality. In hindsight, some of those moments in time and the events that occurred there have more reverberations than others. All moments are not the same, all time is not the same, and all creativity is not the same (as the emerging field of creativity studies continues to show). All weather is not the same, and all years are not the same. And in the scale of least to most reverberation/s, 2020 has been a whopper. Here in Australia, from September 2019 to March 2020, forest (bush) fires ravaged various regions of the country, particularly New South Wales and parts of regional Victoria where I live. Beginning in late November 2019, large swathes of forest burnt out of control in eastern and north-­ eastern Victoria for four weeks before the fires emerged from the forests in late December. Firefighters, supplies, and equipment from Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United States, among others, helped fight the fires. On 21 November 2019, lightning strikes ignited a series of fires in a region of eastern Victoria called East Gippsland, endangering a range of small towns from the morning of 31 December. Despite being advised by authorities to evacuate, approximately 30,000 holiday-makers chose to remain in the region. Approximately 4000 people, including 3000 tourists, remained in the town of Mallacoota as raging fires bore down on the town, cutting off roads in the process, trapping the inhabitants. In one of the most dramatic, visually terrifying and defining moments in Australian bushfire history, those who can make it, run to the beaches to seek relief from the extreme heat, smoke, and fire, as the skies turn blood red in the middle of the day. The power goes out as 4000 men, women, children, animals and what they can carry shelter on the beach, faces covered with wet towels to minimise the dangerous smoke inhalation. The temperature is measured at 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 Celsius), with wind gusts up to 80 kilometres and hour, and heroic volunteer firefighters make a ring of trucks around the  Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1991). Flow. HarperCollins. ISBN 9780060920432, 0060920432

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crowd on the beach. They instruct them to get into the water if their sirens begin to wail. The morning sky slowly turns from red to black. Larry Gray is at the end of the Mallacoota jetty, wrapped in a blanket. ‘We can see the fire coming towards us, there’s hot embers flying through the air—small ones,’ Gray tells The Age newspaper. ‘It sounds like a freight train. It’s completely black like midnight. There’s a weird red glow.’2 On 3 January, approximately 1160 people from Mallacoota were evacuated on naval vessels.3 It wasn’t until 27 February 2020—three months after they began—that the Victoria fires were declared contained, and by 4 March 2020, all fires in the neighbouring state of New South Wales had been extinguished completely for the first time since July 2019. Almost three billion koalas, kangaroos, and other animals are estimated to have been killed or displaced in Australia’s Black Summer bushfires, with experts calling it one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history. The researchers believe the only comparable wildlife disasters in recent history are major oil spills in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, although there is insufficient baseline data to even measure the loss of animal and ocean life in these instances. Why isn’t there baseline data? Why don’t we measure the loss of animal life, ocean life, plant life? In the wake of this ecological disaster, a team of ten scientists from several universities around Australia examines the impact of the fires on mammals, reptiles, birds, and frogs and finds that in each group, millions of animals were killed or displaced, including: • • • •

143 million mammals 2.46 billion reptiles 180 million birds 51 million frogs

 McGuire, A. & Butt, Craig. January 19, 2020. ‘Cut off: How the crisis at Mallacoota unfolded’. The Age. Available at: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/cut-off-how-the-crisis-atmallacoota-­unfolded-20200117-p53sdn.html 3  ‘Mallacoota evacuations begin as thousands trapped by bushfires are transported to navy ship’. ABC News. Australia. 3 January 2020. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-03/ navy-starts-bushfires-evacuations%2D%2Din-mallacoota/11838424 2

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That place and those ecologies will never be the same again. Dermot O’Gorman, CEO of the World Wildlife Fund Australia, said with climate change making extreme fires more common, the findings would ‘give other countries a window into the future of mega fires and their devastating impact on wildlife’.4 By the time the wildfires were finally declared contained on 27 February 2020, as the enormous financial, cultural, ecological, and emotional toll was only beginning to be measured, COVID-19 was beginning.

March 2020: COVID-19 Arrives in Australia The first confirmed Australian case of coronavirus was identified on 25 January 2020, in Victoria, when a man who had returned from Wuhan China tested positive for the virus. Australia’s national borders were closed to all non-residents on 20 March 2020, social distancing was imposed on 21 March, and state governments began to close ‘non-essential’ services. The number of new cases initially grew sharply and then levelled out at about 350 per day around 22 March. In April we were hopeful and restrictions started to ease. But then in late May, a second wave began which was more severe. At its peak, the state of Victoria alone had over 7000 active cases. The wave ended with zero new cases being recorded on 26 October. As of 1 December 2020, Australia has reported 27,912 cases, 25,409 recoveries, and 908 deaths, with Victoria accounting for nearly 75% of cases and 90% of fatalities. Compared to other Western countries, notably the United States and European countries, Australia’s handling has been praised for its effectiveness and speed. The reverberations echo. And somehow, we continue to cook, to knit, to write, to walk the dog. What is trauma except for a series of embodied and affective impacts, weathered. Loss. Elemental fear. An unforeseen  Slezak, Michael. (2020). ‘3 billion animals killed or displaced in Black Summer bushfires, study estimates.’ ABC News Australia, July 28, 2020. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2020-07-28/3-billion-animals-killed-displaced-in-fires-wwf-study/12497976 4

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need to change daily life quickly, completely, and to invent new ways of doing things, creatively ‘pivot’ to online teaching, isolation, and constant monitoring of mental and physical health. We turn inward. Art-making and gardening rise. A return to the self, and to the soil. Trauma yes, but can it be more than that?

Chapter 2: Melbourne

COVID is not the first epidemic to hit Melbourne nor Elwood, the inner-city neighbourhood where I live. In 1937, a polio epidemic struck the population here, and Elwood canal was shunned by all, fearing it was a ‘Plague Canal’. Polio is caused by an enterovirus. It is contracted orally through infected faecal matter, such as on someone’s hands or an object, and is contagious during the incubation and acute phases. If polio affects the central nervous system it can lead to paralysis and the subsequent atrophy of muscles, ending in contractures (the permanent shortening of a muscle or joint) and permanent deformity.1 Like now, parents were frightened, not understanding yet how polio was transmitted. During the height of the polio epidemic in parts of Australia, state borders, schools, pools, and theatres were closed, and travel restrictions and quarantine measures were introduced. Like today, newspapers published daily case numbers and deaths, and those infected were isolated, feared, and shunned.2  https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/remembering-australia-s-polio-scourge  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-04/levels-of-fear-with-coronavirus-not-seen-sincepolio-epidemic/12115228 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Harris, Creative Agency, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77434-9_4

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In the United States, before a vaccine was available, polio caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis a year and it was the most feared disease of the twentieth century. With the success of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk became one of the most celebrated scientists in the world. However, he refused a patent for his work, saying the vaccine belonged to the people and that to patent it would be like ‘patenting the Sun’.3 Economics tells us that the exclusive rights provided by a patent makes the patent holder a monopolist over the invention. Monopolists reap monopoly profits. They sell at artificially high prices by restricting production. And where production is restricted, the invention will be available only to those people most able to afford it. In the case of a patented vaccine, this means that only people in wealthy countries will get access and therefore immunity from this virus that has killed over one million people thus far (echoes of AIDS and its continuing inequalities here). According to this logic, to ensure availability to all, we must not grant patents on COVID-19 vaccines, but that is not the way the economics of illness works.

May 2020 Every morning, I walk a 40-minute loop, which takes me down to the beach, back along the canal, and through Elwood village. I do this loop twice a day. The morning loop is when I put on my headphones and do my daily mindfulness practice. It’s autumn now, and the orange and yellow plane tree leaves fall down around me like snow. Living near the beach after living in more urban parts of the city brings the movements of nature back to me. They are no longer benign, but active, changing, alive. The ocean, in particular, is infinitely creative, with not an innovation, industry, or economy in sight. The ocean, my mindfulness teacher tells me, is what we are; we are more than the waves of 3  https://theconversation.com/the-deadly-polio-epidemic-and-why-it-matters-forcoronavirus-133976

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daily life. But the waves are as much a part of the ocean as anything else. They are not separate. Waves can be volatile, but they have just as much ocean-ness as the ocean they belong. It’s getting on to winter, and we’re still under lockdown due to COVID-19. A week ago the government said we could have a few friends over. I wasn’t in a particular rush. Since the pandemic began, I’ve been living apart from my wife (it’s a long story), but at first I had housemates. The last one moved out a couple of weeks ago, and it’s so different living alone—well not alone, but just my dog Tasha and me. It’s very quiet. Once the fear went, it’s become gradually more peaceful. I’m lucky. I’ve been a full-time research fellow for the past seven years. At first that was hard too, as I was a new academic and I wanted to be in the midst of it. That was before I realised what the midst was like. I forgot how much freedom, creativity, and agency there is in the margins. Now I’m happy enough working at home, basking in my marginalia. Dogs are essential. Back then, I was companioned by my first dog, Luna, a black cocker spaniel with the kind of eyes you look for in a lover. Luna’s gone now, but I have Tasha, also a black cocker spaniel, but Tasha is declining too now. She’s a rescue dog who’s had a good run, but at 17 or 18 she is fragile. She allows me to care for her, and I practise my loving kindness. I’ve got a long way to go. Tasha has dementia. She was already blind in one eye and deaf. Now she is ‘demented’ and two weeks ago burst into incontinence. For some reason, it’s easier to care for Tasha in her demented state than it was to care for my mother in hers. I guess Tasha and I have less unfinished business. Tasha is teaching me a lot about affect and the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. Tasha was always a skittish dog, being a rescue dog who we adopted from the Lost Dogs Home when she was about six years old. As an adoptee, I hate the idea of the Lost Dogs Home (which I always anthropomorphise into the Lost Children’s Home, which is not the same thing as posthumanism) and it was almost physically unbearable to walk down the rows of caged animals hoping to be rescued. I have always had a low tolerance for vulnerability in myself or others. It terrifies me. Having spent the first six months of my life in a Lost Dogs Home for

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humans, I over-identify and the distress I feel is unbearable. Nevertheless, I’m so grateful for these services given the alternative, and getting Tasha was a wonderful day. When we first adopted Tasha, she was highly neurotic. We didn’t think she’d been out of a cage much, or outside at all. She was terrified by birds. Her gait was awkward and stilted. We got her as a companion dog for Luna, who was by then elderly. Tasha was still young and wanted to play but Luna made it clear she had no interest. Now Tasha is the oldie and when young Murphy wants to play with her, she glares. Murphy arrived five years ago from Los Angeles with his mother, my wife. Tasha has always been a sweet dog. She was not as people-focused as Luna, and would eat her dinner and race back to her bed at the other end of the house. She hoarded shoes and sometimes socks, never harming them, but coddling them in the most heartbreaking of ways, compounded by a visiting dog trainer who said she was obviously trying to gather her lost pups and nurture them. She had been a breeder. Tasha’s nerves meant she has never been able to stand raised voices or any loud noises, including joyful ones like laughter. So the quiet now suits her too. She sighs a lot. I choose to believe those are restful releases, not regret or sadness. Dogs do feel sadness—that’s not me anthropomorphising. She puts her paw on my leg or my arm a lot, and just looks at me. She sleeps close. I’m grateful. We keep each other warm. Elder incontinent Tasha reminds me of how delicious water is. She can’t get enough. I have to ration it for her, or she just pees all the time. As it is, the nappy-changes are hard to keep up with. It’s beautiful to see the changes in Tasha as she becomes more confused. There are so many similarities between her and what I feel more slowly licking in around my own consciousness and changed habits, it’s easy to see why and how we humans anthropomorphise animals. She’s not interested in breakfast anymore (I still am), but she willingly goes out on the back deck even when it’s cold, especially if it’s rained the night before, so she can go around licking up the water in the puddles. Walks are now just another chance to source more water. She craves it like a junkie. She wags her tail when she gets it. I wonder what it feels like in her mouth, her throat, and how much exists in her mind. I watch her drink and think of the word satiated in a visceral way.

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Tasha used to walk the loop with me, but she’s too feeble now. We walk around the block, then I put her diaper back on, give her a treat, and leave her inside as I start my first loop of the day. Usually in the morning I walk through the village and along the promenade towards the city, so I can see the morning sun on the metal buildings. Today it’s grey and cloudy. Cold and a bit windy. I think about Tara Brach’s advice that the waves belong. I wonder what my internal waves are today. Today is my adoption day. Some people say Elwood beach is not a ‘real’ beach because it doesn’t have big waves (it’s on a bay) and it’s near the city. Some say it’s dirty and less than, because it has city-like rubbish at times. Not Coney Island level rubbish, mind you, but still. It didn’t help that in April 1970, Prince Charles swam at Elwood beach and described the water as ‘diluted sewage’. But all of us feel like diluted sewage at one point or another. I walk along the water and think about creativity and the tyranny of its relentlessly positive connotation. We hardly ever consider, for example, dark creativity, or creative accounting, or even the notion of creative historical accounts. Creative lawmaking? Or Donald Trump’s reign of creative fact-making. When one can start to think of things—beaches, canals, creativity, dementia—as just things, as just ‘what is’, curiosity can return. Creativity as a form of agency. Even Tasha’s absence of self-­ consciousness about her incontinence inspired me to think more creatively about the challenging things in my life and in my research. It can just be pee running down your legs if you let it. Agency as a kind of reclamation. Creative reclamation is so needed right now. I feel lucky to live near a beach and still be able to ride my bike to work in the city. Back when we went into work. Living on the water has changed me. The horizon is different, the smells, the air, the reminders. Everything is moving, all the time. Nothing is permanent. Not the weather, not the tide, not the colours. The last (or first) part of the beach walk is along the Elwood canal. It’s a tidal canal that flows through our suburb. People since the beginning have called the canal a stinkhole (it was a swamp originally, after all) and call my suburb ‘Smellwood’ instead of Elwood, because when this tidal canal is down at low tide, you can smell the mud, seaweed and other detritus. This has been going on since Europeans invaded this area in the 1840s and sought to colonise the natural swamp. It’s also because back

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then, for a while, this area was an abattoir disposal site and the place where human ‘night soils’ (aka shit) were dumped. No wonder it stinks— generations of stink and murder and rot—human and non-human others pushed away, under, out, in the interest of white settlers. It stinks. And it’s still beautiful, resilient in its insistence on how nature renews, despite and because of the influence of humans, in this era we now call the Anthropocene. Here, today, I like seeing its ups and downs, even in the rain. It often floods, like me. It’s home to a lot of beings. There are bird wars, for one thing: the seagulls fight with the miner birds, the crows, the magpies, and the grand sulphur-crested cockatoos up high and swooping all along the bendy canal. They fight for territory in the palm trees. They chase each other with squawks like rusty horns. And they announce themselves and their territories at dawn and twilight. They comfort me, both in their nastiness and in their beauty. Sometimes I stop and watch them and think about how much like academia they are. I’m glad to know it’s not just humans. The ducks and two black swans are generally quieter, calmer, and stay down in the water. Water that rises and falls, flows in and out with the tide. Doesn’t question itself, wonder how it could be better, feel left out. Just flows, like Tasha’s pee, unselfconsciously. It’s also home to large schools of small fish especially near the mouth where the canal opens out into Port Phillip Bay. I and many others delight in these lovely small fish and the life they bring to the mercurial canal, but they are called smooth toadfish (Tetractenos glaber), which is part of the pufferfish family Tetraodontidae, and they are poisonous. As one neighbour said, if they were edible they’d have been extinct long ago. I love thinking about these vulnerable little fish happily paddling up and down the canal and deadly and full of toxins that can render a human paralysed and dead within moments. Never judge a fish by its size. Sometimes, when there’s been a big rain and a very high tide, these big white jellyfish come up into the canal, sometimes far up, and I stop and watch them billow and glide and hover in the waxing or waning water. The water in this canal has a history—a history that extends from the original Indigenous occupants—the Yalukut Willam clan of the

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Boonwurrung people—through colonial histories, through hippie poet years, eastern European refugee years, to now. The water sits at the centre of that narrative, as water so often does, binding time and movement and cataclysms together.4 But this neighbourhood, like much of Australia, is made up of a tense interrelationship between fire and water, much as creativity is made of the inextricable threads of mastery and experimentation. They go hand in hand. * * * I’ve been reading at home with Tasha now for several days in a row. When it’s raining, the screaming toddlers next door at the childcare centre stay inside so I don’t have to wear my noise-cancelling headphones. Tasha and I fall into a rhythm. I like the predictability, even though I’m researching creativity and spontaneity and improvisation are at the heart of the creativity that I’m interested in. I reread William Faulkner and I remember how so many of the books I’ve loved depend on a weaving of the human, non-human, and natural world. Why are there so few scholarly books on creativity which do this? What is the use of considering creativity and creative practice that is outside of the inherent intersectionality of our lives? It’s like talking about love without talking about the messy side of sex and feelings and dependency. Always trying to sidestep the mess. But the mess is what makes us human, and so deeply linked to what leads to the next thing, wanted or not. Not ‘productive risk-taking’, just plain old garden variety risk-taking. Venturing. Or as Tara Brach says, ‘no mud, no lotus’. It’s getting colder now. The days shorten. One hundred and forty cities across the United States (home) are marching against the racist killing of George Floyd at the hands of (yet another) white police officer. I walk to the beach and listen to Tara Brach talk about seeking ‘beginner’s heart’ in which everything is new, curious, open…one might even say the same state of heart and mind we offer as ‘creative’. Open. Receptive. Curious. Noticing. The waves are choppy tonight. The surf smashes into the blue stone barrier and splashes over me, and the joggers and the old eastern  http://melbournewalks.com.au/the-history-of-elwood/

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European refugees, and the yuppies with cavoodles, and the cyclists in lycra. I let the water break over me without recoiling. I laugh spontaneously. I can still love the messy, the wild, the drenching. I think about how I have come to see this body of water as a friend, as a touchstone with its own body. I wonder what ‘mood’ the water will be in each time I’m approaching, as I do a friend on the way to a meet-up. I admire all its moods, I see good things in its violent moods, and in its placid glass-like reflectivity. I even like the smell of the seaweed when after a storm or a particularly high tide, it piles up on the beach and stinks and collects rubbish and flies and attracts dogs and seagulls and people scoff and move away and dogs roll in it in a canine euphoric brackish ‘fuck you’. The sea has many moods. And sometimes, it just spits up a stinky mess. Nothing is poised and photogenic all the time. I lived in a place like that—Alice Springs, in the ‘red centre’ of Australia—and I tired of its endlessly blue cloudless days, its consistent heat, its long wide horizons with radiant red dirt hills. I longed for clouds, for squalls, for variance. Melbourne is all variance, often in the same day. That’s more to my personality, up and down as quick as you can say ‘jack sprat’. But why would you. I walk home along the canal and think about how Tasha can’t walk that far now, wonder if she minds it, remembers it, misses anything. I’m listening to a meditation about being present. I struggle with this more than Tasha, that much I know. While she carries the trauma of her early years in her body and her reactions, surely she doesn’t regret, or miss, or spend much time in the past or future—her brain is the size of a lemon. What a blessing to have a brain too small to ruminate. Hell, she doesn’t even care that she’s in diapers. That is peace. I am learning so much. I walk back along the cold wind-blown canal and while there are beautiful sun-columns blazing down in various spots, the canal itself is churned up, brown, replete with debris both natural (leaves, branches) and artificial (rubbish). I don’t love it less than when it’s crystalline, transparent, reflecting a golden sunset. It’s just having a rough day. It still shows up. It canals. It’s not upset about its different character on any given day, and I take something from that too. Just some days, it’s full of trash. Aren’t we all.

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I Blame Ken Robinson Ken Robinson died yesterday. I felt a little wistful. I am grateful for his contribution to creativity and education—a contribution that has value as he would say—but he also always bugged me. He was a great speaker, and great speakers are needed these days. It’s not enough to be a great writer, these days of the internet and live streaming and visuality but also audio and people need the rhetorical force of someone reaching out to us with their voices, their eyes, their bodies, as well as their image. The poetry and power of their voices. We need to be touched. The ‘fourth wall’ of the computer screen needs to be transcended. So Ken was good at that, brilliant at it. But he’s the guy who also popularised the need for creativity to have value as well as originality, a longstanding measure of contemporary creativity. Who determines what is valuable and what is not? Name the artists who were thought to have no value at first, then it changed. Van Gogh. Vivian Maier.  Possibly every single one. Of course every single one—there is no artist or change-maker who was born famous, making change or making art. They were just ordinary people, kids, students, grandmothers, who one day did something that made people take notice and suddenly (or gradually) they had value. Value begins and ends, and is seldom predictable. The very notion of value is reproductive—it relies upon intelligibility. And intelligibility is constantly changing, like the ocean. He’s not the first one, by any means, but he did popularise it in a neoliberal era in which education once again contracted around workplace readiness (whatever that is) in a time in which value is largely understood to mean commercial value. My 2014 book The Creative Turn on the commodification of creativity addresses this, and I still argue that the so-called democratisation of creativity through creative industries rhetoric was really the commodification of it, and we are all the poorer for this shift. If only we all had lemon-sized brains like Tasha, we would have just remained in our embodied creative agency rather than getting lost in these capitalist post-industrial fantasies called value. The value road is a slippery slope. Today, in this book, I am going back to the work that feeds me, and that is not the measurement work. It is the wonder.

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Creativity and nature feel good because they open our eyes and return us to possibilities, not constraints, to not-yets rather than the known. COVID returned me to the water. I can start to see more now, the flecks of sun on the sea or the brooding grey or the dive-bombing white birds or the stingrays and jellyfish when I’m out in my kayak. Nature is endlessly creative. It does not need to learn how to be innovative, and it doesn’t need to be assessed on it for it to matter. It adapts, naturally. Humans too are infinitely adaptive. Wonder and adaptation. These are not definitions of creativity; they are mindsets, states of being. So I return to wonder, curiosity, and work. I want to know how creativity can be put to work for good. The great tragedy of contemporary creative education research is that it has somehow become reduced to seeking ways of harnessing creativity, schematising it, instead of fostering it. In 2016 I wrote5 that ‘We KNOW you can’t measure creativity, but we try to work with what we’ve got: Even a sucky creativity is better than no creativity at all’ but I don’t believe that any more, and I think a lot of other educators don’t either. Creativity, in a posthuman worldview, laughs at us. Creativity is the wild thing. No matter how much we research creativity, most schools do not want to change timetables and habits to invite in the wild thing. Wild thinking. Even design thinking is just another model, a system, to harness it. On 27 June, in the dead of winter, I drive five hours to near Dubbo, New South Wales to pick up baby Hazel, a Havanese like Murphy (Stacy’s dog). She is ten weeks old. Tasha is, by this time, on a steep decline. For three months I get up every night every three hours and take Hazel out the back to pee. The rest of the time she sleeps in a crate. In the morning, I take Hazel out, then put her in her playpen, then take Tasha’s diaper off, take her out the back, let her try to pee. I make them both breakfast, feed them, put a clean diaper on Tasha, and play with Hazel for an hour. Then I walk them both. I’m exhausted, and it’s full time. Like a baby, Stacy says. But a dog isn’t going to look after me when I’m old, I say. Ah, there  Harris, A. (2016). ‘Why does creativity suck so bad’. In NJ: The Journal of Drama Australia, 39:2, 147–152, https://doi.org/10.1080/14452294.2015.1128314 5

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it is again, transactionalism. I use the dog care as my meditation practice. Three months in, I find out that I didn’t have to keep taking Hazel out during the night. Of course.

Performance Devising Online After conducting all 25 Melbourne interviews by zoom, and with the pandemic’s end nowhere in sight, by November we decided to experiment with online platforms for the Phase 2 devising workshop part of my study. Over the nine or ten months of lockdown here in Melbourne, so many arts organisations (and others) have gone online, and there is much speculation and discussion about how this new approach to performance will change the arts world permanently. Museums, galleries, theatres, music producers, and others are making works available online, both for free and paid. Not only that, but COVID has brought us to new realisations that our ways of interacting are changed too; we are not just passive viewers watching altered creative events or products. It is a disembodied embodiment, an absent presence, a virtual engagement that is not disembodied, as social media scholars have long argued. So releasing lockdown has now taken on a different meaning here. We no longer talk about things going back to how they were. How were they, anyway? Of course, in the spring and summer I think of creativity because of renewal. But creativity is not flowers blooming every year, that is, reproducibility. Creativity is the endless variation of nature. Creativity is nature making better colour in flowers than we can with all our fancy machines. And yet, it would be lazy to think about nature as being a pre-requisite for creativity itself—so many creatives and artists have no contact at all with nature—city dwellers and insiders. But then there’s that whole argument (is it really an argument?) that people in cold weather countries are more ‘productive’ and perhaps more creative than those who live in hot climates because if you lived in a beautiful warm climate why would you rather be inside working than outside enjoying it? Is winter less creative than summer, autumn or spring? Obviously not. They are atmospheres. Equally creative—I suppose Ken Robinson would say they have equal value. I would say they have equal agency. They activate us in different ways.

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So we decided to do the Melbourne performance workshop online. Rehearsing was different but not as challenging as Kel and I had feared because by then we were all used to online meetings and gatherings. Moving into performance, however, was significantly altered due to the online format. Luckily, we enlisted the help of a local genius tech dude, Chris, who helped us understand that the online format was offering creative opportunities rather than constraints. The three actors inhabited their three broadcast ‘boxes’ from their own locations, so were all interacting ‘blind’, choreographed by Kel directing, and Chris running the tech feeds. For example (see Fig. 1), Chris was able to move each box around, to create different directional flows according to the script, and to bring certain speakers to the foreground when desired, much like happens in live theatre moreso than in film or video. As with all the verbatim and devised performance workshops for Phase 2 of this project, Kel led the actors in two improvisation and brainstorm sessions to draw out their local experiences of Melbourne-specific creativity (see Fig. 1). Prior to the online experience, we would have all been in a studio or physical workspace together and the session would start with physical warm-ups, team-building exercises, and improv games physically together. Despite the embodied distances of this online platform, there was surprising intimacy and the work was able to be informed by

Fig. 1  Brainstorming the creative sights and sounds of Melbourne using padlet software

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actors’ environments, and the props and artefacts they brought into the work from their own environments. Chris was given the script that I created using verbatim transcripts from some of the 25 Melbourne interviews, creating composite characters. He watched a run-through, and created the following tech script which shows readers how Chris worked creatively with the online platform and the script (here in full), to create vignettes suggesting other locations, physical intimacies that had been missing for us here in Melbourne for nearly a year, and supporting the directorial work that Kel and the actors did to bring these real-life experiences of creative Melbourne to life: Tech Script for Melbourne Performance #1: artist-scholar in higher education (East Asian male) #2: menswear designer (white female) #3: Australian artist (Indigenous Australian female) (SIX layouts in total: Note the different positions of the actors for layouts 3, 4 and 5)

Anne

1.

Devon

Justin

Carissa 2.

Justin

3.

Devon

Carissa

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Devon

Carissa

Justin

4.

Devon

Justin Carissa

5.

Justin

6.

Carissa

Devon

INTRO (Layout 1: Anne introduces the study and the work)

Anne

Cue line: We hope you enjoy the performance

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SECTION 1 (Layout 2: Entrance—mute0/camera on/camera off)

Devon

Justin

Carissa

#3 (Carissa): You can put me down as a cynic when it comes to the language of creativity. Nationality? We’re known as Australians. And I identify as a Keerraywoorroong language group, and a Gunditjmara citizen. #2 (Devon): We try and create that culture of creativity whether it’s— we have things, we have a weekly afternoon where we just sit around our bar. We’ve got a bar in the thing. We just throw around ideas and if that idea gets implemented then someone in the team gets to head that up and then they get paid additionally for that sort of stuff. #1 (Justin): They protect practice above everything. They never have to go, “Oh you know, actually, this production should count as an output”. I never have to do that. And so, you put up with the struggle of overwork and the hot house of the university because actually it’s exciting and creative. I feel like I’m in a creative space. Look, I know it’s mad, but it’s my mad. SECTION 2 (Layout 3: Play Audio ‘Melbourne Soundscape’)

Justin

6

Devon

Carissa

 Copyright permissions not held, so not included here.

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Cue: audio finishes (back to Layout 2)

Devon

Justin

Carissa

#3: I started off on boards of directors since I was 21 and to me, that is a creative role in visioning an organisation and where you want to take it and you got to do boring things like policies and strategy—strategic plans, but that’s how you implement the vision. So there’s that kind of creativity where you create and you plant seeds and you watch them grow and other people grow them up and carry on with them. #2: I don’t have enough information about what’s happening in the Pacific per se, to even be able to guess whether there is such as a thing as ‘Asia-Pacific creative practice’. #3: Look at the museum, it’s full of everybody else’s stuff. #2: Making connections. Be connected with the world. #1: And how do we learn from other cultures, other environments, where creativity thrives? SECTION 3 (Layout 4: MCG Improv)

Carissa

Devon

Justin

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All actors exit. All actors re-enter as if entering the Melbourne Cricket Ground (a multi-sports stadium) with football gear—Devon wearing a hat, Justin bringing snacks, Carissa with sports anxiety. Side by side and facing audience, they ‘watch’ a match: #2: No, no no! #1: What is it, what’s happening? Oh are we supporting the um black and …red? #3: It’s white. #2: it’s black and red! #1: white, ok. #3: Oooh no, uh uh uh! #1: What? What what what what’s going on? #2: No, no no no! #3: Yes! #1: What? #3: He marked it! He kicks from 50…he won’t miss. He never misses. He’s so good. #1: What’s ‘marked’? #3: He caught it. #1: Oh he caught it!

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#1: Like half the time? #3: No, like fifty metres, like distance. #1: oh the distance, ok great. #3: He never misses. #1: Oh that is a huge kick. #2: You beauty! (cheering) #1: Is it going to go out? Cue line: I thought you said he never missed? (back to Layout 2)

Justin

Devon Carissa

#1: For my current field of co-design, it’s so important because at the moment it runs on the fact that yeah, we bring diverse people together in one space and be creative. It fails. And there are so many different reasons why. Culturally, some people are not comfortable to talk, and all that kind of thing, but if you look at most so-called creative environments, it’s very flashy. There’s direct sunlight from everywhere with colourful materials, with lots of people and noises. A lot of people can’t deal with that… So what values are embedded in everything, from the little pen and paper to post-its to the wall material to the acoustic environment. It really matters. #3: Basket weaving had survived. My nan and my aunty and then my cousin and myself, we still weave, so it’s like this unbroken line back to time immemorial, and pretty amazing. The possum cloaks, well, that was just—skill wise, we had to learn ourselves because there was nobody really who’d made any. In terms of a cultural practice living back in the community, cloaks had been—not been there. You’re making a cloak and you’re talking about putting the ochre on it and the young boy says, “Well, where’s our ochre?” And so you create this opportunity for that transference of knowledge. That boy may never have asked his uncle because they may never have been doing anything.

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#2: We’ve got really talented tailors in this country. We see this country as a modern diverse country. We want to tell those stories. I’m often looking for inspiration by way of design. In my world I kind of, I keep an ear to the ground or follow really closely a technology standpoint and I think you have to be incredibly open to creativity and innovative in how you utilise that tech. #1: We do need digital creativity tools and methods, but at the same time, basic human skills; how to listen, how to be respectful, and how to be humble. Humility, I think, is—that’s not a skill; is it a consequence, is it a quality? #3: It comes back to that sense again of—(beat)—what are we really talking about in terms of creativity? SECTION 4 (Layout 5: Melbourne creativity vignettes)

Devon

Justin

Carissa

Theatre call bell rings. #1: Good evening ladies and gentlemen, tonight’s performance will shortly begin. Please switch off your mobile phones. If not, Geoffrey Rush will leap off the stage and break it in front of your face. Thank you. #3 (enters shop): Ok so we’ve got here a soy…nuh, almond latte. And here a long hot black (winks). And here we have a half almond half soy extra hot flat white. #2 (on the street): Ok, hey, sorry, is this the line for Reservoir dogs? (beat) Did you just say Reser-VOOR dogs? (laughs derisively). It’s Reservwha! No, sorry sorry. It really sounds natural the way that you say it (laughs again, exits). #1: (fedora on, tunes string instrument. Plays, nods his thanks to invisible listeners. Exits).

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#2 (on the street, handing out fliers): Hey! I’ve got a show in the comedy festival (tried to give one away)—no worries. (another bystander walks by) Hey! Hey I’ve got a show in the comedy festival tonight, I turn myself into a vegan croissant, it’s free! (no luck). (another awkward try) Hey! (nope). Hey, I! (heavy sigh, she tosses the fliers away) Fuck you. #3: Hey there’s a skinny—nope, an almond flat white. (beat) Um, yep, I’m Australia. Nope, not Italian. Yes, definitely from Australia. (beat) I’m Aboriginal actually. (beat). Okay, that’s not a compliment. (beat) You work in government? (beat) No, I can’t do a welcome to country, it’s not my country. No, no Australia’s my country, but THIS isn’t my mob. (beat). Yep! That matters. (beat). Ah, you’ve been to the Northern Territory, cool. (awkward beat) Um, no, I don’t know William. (beat) Ah, you got a skin name too. True? I’m gonna go— Cue: Indigenous barista (played by Carissa) exits screen for the second time (Back to Layout 2)

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#3: And if we’re talking about those ideas like asking questions and being open-minded, and opening oneself up to new ideas and being empathetic, then sure— #2: I see myself belonging to two bigger ecosystems. There is certainly the Melbourne startup scene. And then I’ll interpret creativity in the user interface design scene, which is the global one. I don’t think Melbourne or Australia does it any better or differently. All of the design leaders are in the States. We just copy the trends. And that’s largely attributed to the fact that entrepreneurship, innovation, people starting up companies that need user interfaces is really, really new to Australia. #1: I don’t believe there’s an Asian aesthetic. There are multiple forms of creativity within those. We’ve got to accept that there is East within the West, just as there is Western influence in the East.

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#3: Aboriginal art generally, the south east is still somewhat in that paradigm, the Australian paradigm, which thinks it’s not part of the Asia Pacific and Pacifica culture. The western art world thinking, defines Aboriginal art to some extent in the world market . #2: Melbourne positions itself more closely to Europe than Sydney does. The Sydney art and design scene is a different feel for me. Sydney’s contemporary and commercial galleries, the Sydney Biennale, all have a bigger relationship with Asia than Melbourne does. #1: If we work closer together with the Asia Pacific there’s so much more we could do. ALL: so much more #1: But it doesn’t mean that we need to lead. Maybe we could just be part of it, part of the ecology, and help others. There’s a desire to engage with the Asia Pacific, absolutely, because of our huge immigrant population. But also, that’s where we make a lot of money in terms of creative industries; and education, well, they go hand in hand. I think we do realise how important it is for Australia to be in the Asia Pacific. (PAUSE) Whether our neighbours think that or not, is a different question #2: a lot of our stuff is produced in China so we—I’m over there a lot and far from an expert but, yeah, it’s a place you need to understand— there’s definitely a vast cultural difference particularly with how you do business and deliver service that we’d have to learn. #3; it’s never an ‘I’, it’s a ‘we’. It’s always the ‘we’ thing and I don’t even particularly like the word ‘empowerment’ anymore because it still seems to be coming from a position of ‘I am giving you something’ rather than collaborating. And the new catchphrase ‘codesign’—(laughs). SECTION 5 (Layout 6: Awkward theatre vignette)

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(All three enter their row awkwardly, #3 with wine). #3: Sorry, sorry (as she makes her way past already-sitting theatre-goers). (all three look around, settle in). #3: Devon, hi! How are you? #2: Yeah good, good. #3: It’s so good to see you. #2: I’m looking forward to seeing Mike’s work. #3: And Geoffrey’s in it too, did you know? #2: Yeah, I knew Geoffrey was in it, but I don’t know him, do you know him? #3: Oh yeah, we go way back. He’s so nice! #3: I’ve been so busy—I had this Neighbours audition? I think it went really well. #2: Oh cool, you’d be really great at that. #3: Yeah, it’s so good. Ooh, hey is that Justin? (Fig. 2) #1: (trying not to notice them) #2 & #3: Hey! Hello! #1: Oh, oh my god, hey! #1: Hey look at the two of you. Did you come together? #3: No, we just bumped into each other. #1: Wow, what are the odds? I mean how are you doing? I heard you had the audition. I mean for Neighbours. How’d it go? #3: Good. I think I got it, yeah. #1: Course. I mean, with a talent like yours, who needs luck anyway. #3: Thanks. #1: I went to the same audition but I totally blew it. #3: I’m sure you were fine. Have you got any projects coming up? #1: Yeah, in about a month we’re going into a show at STC and with Cate. Cate Blanchett. #3: Aw, Cate. She is so lovely. #1: She’s the loveliest. #2: (can’t take it anymore) Shhhhh! Cue: Devon indicates that it’s time for the show to start.

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Fig. 2  A night at the theatre (Back to layout 2)

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#2: Do I feel that graduates are coming in with the right skillset? I think their skillsets are a bit precise. They need to be broader. I’m always interested in “Does the university have an accelerator?” Of all the people that I’ve employed, all those people came to us from accelerators. Because they had the mindset that we were looking for which is “Can do and will learn to do and want to do anything and everything.” I went to uni in 2014. And there was no talk of entrepreneurship. #1: Students fear a lot about their grades. I think that really has a detrimental impact, and educators do see it and try very hard to fix it, but we need a broader approach. A good case that’s representative of what people are trying to do is Anab Jain. She’s a co-director of Superflux,

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which is a global foresight and design agency. She’s now the head of Industrial Design at the Vienna University of Applied Arts. She takes a speculative approach, and it’s very hands-on, but critical thinking is at the core of it. And it’s very affordable. I think you pay 20 Euros or something ridiculous to study there. To be able to offer that, obviously we need infrastructure. So in a way it’s a very special and unique case, but they’re doing such an amazing job of what a lot of us want to do in education, if we are really to help develop the next generation of creative practitioners. I’m from South Korea, and when we think about what’s advanced education, it’s always the western model. Euro-centric model, actually . #3: Our culture is based on the understanding of interconnectivity of everything and that’s why we’ve got so many cousins because it’s not so much we’ve got that many blood cousins, we probably have, but it’s— we’re connected and interrelated, so you can’t separate yourself from that bird or that tree as your family and all those other people. You have a relationship to everything and everyone, and our culture explains that, so you and everyone’s got a place and so many people are—not just homeless people, but obviously, they’re the obvious example of displacement and disconnection. But there’s so much displacement/disconnection and people not feeling part of or belonging. There’s initiatives from the community, from the people, not the bloody government, to bring back that connectedness, that neighbourhood, that local community, ‘buy local’ and all this stuff. So that gives me hope. Yeah, that’s my creative ecology, and I feel very blessed and fortunate to be working in the spectrum of everything that I love. #2: I think we’ve got a great story to tell. I don’t think there is an embracing of the fact that we do have our own identity. #1 & #3: Yeah but who’s WE? #2: If we did, we’d be—yeah, I think we’d be a much more—particularly from an entrepreneurial standpoint, I think we’d thrive. We wouldn’t be relying on things like mining and resources and agriculture. Australia can stand on its own two feet creatively. Italy, England, they’ve got their thing but we’ve got our thing too. Yeah, I mean, we’re looking to move internationally and we’ll be pushing our Australian aesthetic and bringing that to the world.

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(Layout 3: Reprise Audio ‘Melbourne Soundscape’)

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Cue: end audio #1: If this pandemic has offered us anything, it’s a chance to understand globalisation better, and global mobility, and human connections…what Asia and South East Asia has to offer to Australia, but maybe more importantly, what we have to offer THEM. FADE TO BLACK: 5 seconds The full video of the performance can be found here: https://vimeo. com/500703450 * * * It’s getting hot now, December in the southern hemisphere, December 2020. I am remembering the red skies of Black Summer, as the heat rises. Bushfires, like heartbreak, leave permanent scars but are a part of life here and in many other places around the globe, including the west coast of the United States. But knowing that some loss is inevitable in life (and nature) is not the same as being able to prepare for (or recover from the) devastation. The rupture of life as it ‘was’, or as we thought it was. Yet it pushes us into the new, into dissonance. Into creativity. How else to get up every morning? Hope, curiosity, the always-already something new.

Intermezzo 3: Air

One-third of Singapore, including the central business district, is less than five metres above sea level—not as low as the Netherlands, one-third of which lies below sea level, but low enough to worry the city-state’s famously foresighted urban planners. Singapore’s plans to defend against rising seas include building sea walls, polders, and new islands made from reclaimed land. New buildings are to be built four metres above mean sea level, and critical infrastructure at least another metre higher. The ways in which Singapore expresses its creativity uniquely is also informed by its atmospheres, including air, as a part of a Singaporean ecology. Atmospheres is another way of approaching a consideration of the elements (natural and manufactured), actants (human and non-human including animal, plant, mineral, microbial, and more), and agency (the ability of something to be self-determining in any sense). Atmospheres,1 like creativity, resist research apprehension, but bathe experience in the sensory and experiential of everyday lives, places, and encounters. Like creativity, and climate change, atmospheres exist in a space of speculative concern, be it celebration or dread.  Shanti Sumartojo & Sarah Pink. 2018. Atmospheres and the experiential world: Theory and methods. Routledge. 1

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Singapore’s ubiquitous haze is mainly caused by the burning of large tracts of forested land in Sumatra, Indonesia. The haze usually occurs during the southwest monsoon season between June and September and becomes more severe during periods of dry weather. Since Singapore introduced their ‘circuit breaker’ (CB) measures to address the spread of COVID-19, key pollutant levels fell. The National Environment Agency (NEA) said key pollutant levels have been falling even before the circuit breaker measures started. The four main toxins are: nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, and PM10 and PM2.5 (particulate matter of 10 and 2.5 microns in size). The levels fell further after the measures kicked in on April 7. NEA said all the daily pollutant levels are now “within World Health Organisation air quality guidelines”. Singapore has long been unable to meet some of these guidelines, especially for particulate matter. All five pollutants are hazardous to health, with elevated levels linked to several respiratory and cardiovascular diseases as well as strokes and cancers. Ironically, the coronavirus is reducing the 8.8 million premature deaths a year around the world linked to air pollution. Traffic volume fell noticeably due to work from home practices, while global demand for petroleum products decreased due to economic slowdown, but this improvement will be short-lived, as the world rebounds from coronavirus interruptions.2

Singapore has a well-deserved international reputation as a clean and green city due to many important environmental accomplishments, particularly in water resources and urban landscape management. Comparative reports of air quality levels and trends indicate that Singapore’s ambient air pollution is considerably lower than other cities of Southeast Asia.3 However, it is reported to be heating up twice as quickly as the rest of the world. While not having the highest temperatures on record, the problem is the high humidity, which means perspiration doesn’t evaporate as quickly. The body has to work harder to stay cool, which can lead to heat exhaustion and heatstroke. As a gauge, the current relative humidity in Singapore varies from more than 90% in the morning to around 60% in the mid-afternoon  https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/spore-air-quality-improves-amidreduced-activities. 3  Erik Velasco & Matthias Roth. (2012). Review of Singapore’s air quality and greenhouse gas emissions: Current situation and opportunities. Journal of Air & Waste Management Association, 62(6): 625–641. 2

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when there is no rain, according to the MSS website. Relative humidity frequently reaches 100% during prolonged periods of rain. To mitigate further temperature increase, Dr Roth cautions on the importance of leaving untouched Singapore’s current forested areas that are unprotected and which could be subject in the future to development. Professor Matthias Roth of the department of geography at the National University of Singapore (NUS) attributed the rising temperatures to global warming and the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect—caused by the heat generated from human activities and trapped by urban surfaces such as buildings and roads. So Singapore’s urban density not only makes real estate expensive, and significant governmental control of housing density management required, but it is a health risk. The impacts of climate change are visible already. Sea levels are higher, rainfall has increased, and temperatures have increased. As a low-lying island, the rise in sea level poses the most immediate threat to Singapore. Much of the nation lies only 15 metre above the mean sea level, with about 30% of the island being less than 5 metre above the mean sea level. Singapore is situated in a region where vector-borne diseases are endemic. Most cases of vector-borne diseases like dengue are observed during warmer periods of the year. In addition, frequent and severe instances of warm weather may lead to more occurrences of heat stress and discomfort among the elderly and sick.

Urban Heat Island Effect Urban areas tend to be warmer due to the replacement of natural land cover with buildings and other infrastructure that retain or produce heat. Singapore imports more than 90% of its food. Many existing buildings that lack underground drainage will be harder to protect from the sudden bursts of rain—a climate phenomenon known as ‘rain bombs’—that will be a more frequent occurrence in a warming world. More parks will be needed like Bishan Park, previously a concrete canal that was converted

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into a green-flanked river that is naturally able to absorb excess water through the suction power of plants. Singapore, a country almost entirely covered with tropical jungle before rapid urbanisation began, has lost much of its natural ability to absorb water and is left with only about 3% forest cover; only 0.5% of the 70 square kilometre city-state is covered by primary forests, around the country’s water-critical reservoirs. Some suggest innovations like floating schools, villages, and buildings could be built on pontoons that float off the coast of the island. Comparisons are made to Jakarta, which seems destined to lose its status as Indonesia’s capital due to rising sea levels, showing Singapore as highly adaptable to the changes ahead.

Chapter 3: Singapore

Singapore is the kind of place about which everyone seems to have an opinion: it’s too orderly, it’s uptight, it’s creative, it’s not, it’s too humid, it’s got a great cultural scene, there’s too much censorship, it has the best food. There’s no queer culture, there’s abundant underground queer culture. It goes on. Every time I go there, someone (white) says oh I LOVE Singapore—it’s just so….easy! and it makes me think about New York and how people always read their own needs onto that place and feel that they get it after a momentary visit. What is it about some places that allow people to believe they can know something, or someone, or someplace—deeply, after only a passing encounter? Is that desire to know a kind of colonialism? Are white Westerners more inclined to orient that way in our encounters, to ‘know’ as a way of owning? This project embodies that tension in trying to say something about places and their relationship to creativity and creative work, without longstanding knowledge. Even my commentary about Australia can be questioned, as my status as a migrant means I am still, to some extent, an outsider, even after twenty-four years. Is it possible to make cultural statements at all anymore? Or maybe it never was.

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I’ve been sceptical about it for a long time,1 and yet it’s important to try and figure out who and where we are in relation to one another— individual self-knowledge, group self-knowledge is important too, even for a ‘group’ as unwieldy as Australasia or the Asia Pacific or East Asia (even names are problematic; always language is problematic). I think about one of the friends-of-friends I’ve met in Singapore over the past three years, and her way of talking about Singapore really made sense to me. Let’s start there: I entered the art scene in the late ’90s. At that time, at least in Singapore, we only had one art centre. That’s called the Substation. It’s still around and it was started by a creative practitioner, who felt it was important that there was a home for the arts. That’s the tagline, yeah. He thought it was important that artists had a place to go to that was going to save space, we could meet one another and we could work out things together and do stuff. And so, he actually worked with the government and then he got this space. The government still is—all these years, are still supporting this space, with the small budget, but the whole art ecology has changed in Singapore. In the ’90s, it was very much about self-help. There was a lot about communities; it was important because there was no infrastructure, nothing. So it was important that you would get together and do things together, and that was how I entered into the art scene. The art students nowadays, they don’t learn about this. They don’t have the same feeling. The way you relate to each other and the things you want to do together, is completely different when you work with the community than when you work as a ‘creative genius’. So that was the feeling in the ’90s, and then in around the year 2000, the government implemented a new cultural policy called the Renaissance City Plan. In the late ’90s already, they started building the museum. They started creating first with the Arts Council and then they started creating the museum and the Esplanade and all these spaces, which was meant to promote the arts. And then they put a lot of money into those; most of the money was for hardware. Even then, we were talking about how it was important to cultivate the people instead of just putting money into buildings. And actually, right now, we are still talking about this because we still feel that the people are not taken care of. And if you see—if you’re talking about a creative ecology, actually, a lot of the  Harris, A. 2014. ‘Ethnocinema and the impossibility of culture.’ International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Vol 27:4, pp 546–560 (published online first April 2013). 1

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people who graduated from the art schools, they’ve given up: they stopped making art after two or three years because there is no way to survive as an artist. Even if you study arts management, there are no jobs and basically, there’s no point. In the early 2000s, the government started using this term the Knowledge Economy. The Knowledge Economy is linked to creative industries. The government was trying to shift the economy away from manufacturing and all these business things into something less tangible. But it never actually really happened because that’s not just how the education is in Singapore. We are not really taught to think for ourselves. I think the government is trying to separate this economy thing from normal people’s lives. So, okay, you can be completely creative in your job, in what you do to earn money. But you don’t think so much when it comes to governments. Just follow what we say. So, in the arts as well, they try to limit what you can do and what you can’t. The censorship and all these things are still very strong. So, this Knowledge Economy thing, I think, couldn’t have worked anyway. But they’re still there, in cultural industries, Knowledge Economy and the Renaissance City Plan as well is still there. but it’s not really working. They started the National Gallery recently [five years ago] and so that’s more money pumped into the arts but it’s all for this official top-down culture stuff, which really has just evolved from people’s view, people’s lives. It’s not relevant, but maybe that’s how they want it to work. I’m not sure, but to us, it’s not really working because it never trickles down. I mean, the National Arts Council has the Arts Housing Scheme, so actually you can get studio places or office spaces with cheaper than market rent, but that has been changed over the years as well, so it has become harder. You have to pay more now. And then they also have—you can technically still apply for grants if you want to do an exhibition and all that, but it’s little and it’s really hard to get. And then, at the same time, they also try—there’s scholarships and all these different things which theoretically count as investing, but it’s not on the same scale. Recently, the National Arts Council have been focusing more on community art. So, theoretically that’s good for me, because I’m doing lots of stuff with community and actually for one of our projects, we did get a grant from them, which is quite a lot of money. But in general, we can’t really earn money from this. I mean, we can of course commodify what we make and then try to sell it. And then, of course, we can also work with companies and charge them a certain amount for their staff to come and do something. And the problem with Singapore is also because we are considered a developed nation, we cannot get a

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lot of the grants that other countries get, we are not eligible to apply. So, in many ways, we are just left on our own now. There’s always pros and cons. But I don’t want to really say how bad it is. I think we just have to learn how to work with the situation, and look at it as challenges and find ways to do it together. That’s why we work as a network collective. So, we find like-minded people and then we try to do things together. So, the official policy and all that don’t really matter. There are so many cultures here and people travel a lot actually, so there’s always already a lot of different influences. How Singaporeans are really obedient is really quite significant to me because a lot of people are just happy to— they just work for money and then they have a place to stay. They’re very comfortable. They just go on with their lives. They don’t bother with politics. They vote for the same party all the time because everything is good. Yeah, this unquestioning or maybe unwillingness to take risks is quite a big thing, which actually you don’t see even in Malaysia, just across the causeway. People are not like that and actually, in the whole—okay, I won’t say ‘whole’ but a lot of countries in Southeast Asia, I think people still want to talk back to the power, but in Singapore you don’t really see that. I mean, of course, when we are among friends we just complain and all that, but nothing goes beyond into the public sphere, and that is a big problem here. So, actually, to just exist and not stand out is quite a big thing here. Now the whole theme about colonialism is getting quite strong, but we haven’t dealt with it. In Singapore we don’t talk about colonialism. It’s very different from Hong Kong, I think, because we became independent in ’65. So, in the ’50s, there were actually a lot of people talking about self-rule. They didn’t want the British to be in charge anymore and that was quite strong and that’s also how the government Lee Kuan Yew and his party got into power but once they took over, a lot of the British policies and the way the British did stuff has remained. The government itself is quite pro-colonialism in a way, and to me, it’s almost just like a change of masters because a lot of things are still the same and some of the laws like 377A, which make it illegal for gay men to have sex, that is still in Singapore, even though it stopped in the UK. In so many ways, we are still colonial.

I reach my hotel room and unpack and I think about her and her life here in the ‘cultural industries’ and the interdependence and cross-­ influences of any city, any site, any country or region, and how creative practice and industries and relationships really can’t and don’t exist

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outside of the mainstream culture (even if it’s in opposition, it’s still part of the creative ecology here). Creativity—whether commodified or community-­based or whatever—is always in relation to power. I think about the wide range of ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, socio-­economic orientations, sector differences. Singapore is surely the melting pot of Southeast Asia. Just in our small group of folks whom Kel and I met and talked with, there were those who identified as Chinese-Singaporean, as Singaporean, as Chinese-Indonesian, as Chinese, as American, as Chinese-Malay, as Malaysian, as British expat, as Australian, as German, as Filipino. It is a language all its own, with complex ethnic signifiers that may require historical, economic, and cultural translation for outsiders like us.

The Arts faculty members, 10 a.m. Next morning, I get ready for the interviews. We are back at my favourite place, this arts institute that pulses with creative activity and models a creative ecology from materiality to energy to transdisciplinarity to people. I exhale. The first interview takes place in a small room in a library area of the campus. The campus is highly contemporary, a mesh of industrial design and green spaces. Tall buildings made of asymmetrically cut glass, black steel. There is a comfortable contrast between the industrial and outdoor, airy character of the spaces. Buildings standing opposite one another with green spaces in between, a bridge joining the two. Students lounge and relax in these open spaces. The interview room is quiet—well set up for a quiet conversation. It sits away from other spaces which are more open and oriented towards public collaboration. ‘Frank’2 is our host for this visit, a young guy in his 30s who identifies himself as Chinese-Singaporean. He speaks of the transdisciplinary approach to arts here. He also comments on the inward-­ facing nature of Singapore and Singaporeans, in his view more focused on wealth and the nation itself than on other cultures.  Almost all names are pseudonyms in this book, except where explicitly mentioned.

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As an arts school, Frank speaks of the value here of ‘productive failure’ and the tension between making space for that, yet not having it affect students’ final mark. He talks about the importance of the social learning that happens within the context of the course. His job is to curate the learning within the space, but he can’t curate the people who are within that space that allow the social learning to happen. Measuring creativity within the classroom is another story. According to Frank, ‘as much as we want to, we haven’t found the language for it’, and I comment on how this seems to be a universal challenge, across many diverse subjects, courses, and disciplines. The arts industry world wants the measurement, but it’s an uneasy fit with post-compulsory training in the arts. This refrain is stuck on repeat throughout this study, my education work, and the frustrated stories of teachers, students, artists, and creative industries managers alike. For this place, Frank says, ‘Our creativity is regulated… It doesn’t allow creativity to be organic… Once you need to get permission for something, you already cannot be creative.’ Ah, that old chestnut. Do it first and apologise later, rather than ask permission. I leave the interview thinking how culturally imbued everything is, how creativity itself is now not seen as political but neoliberal, and yet nothing could be further from the truth. * * *

The artist, 2:35 p.m. I meet the artist, Shan, at a Bangladeshi restaurant in a busy Central neighbourhood. By way of introduction, he tells me he was born in Malaysia, his family moved to Singapore when he was very young, and he’s ethnic Chinese. Although he was trained about twenty years ago in classical painting (and then print making, photography, sculpture, ceramics), he describes his current work as digital visual art. He explains that video art comes in many variations: installations, video performance,

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screening, photography, and even computational-based work, digital imaging works, and stop motion video and press-making videos. The restaurant belongs to a friend of his. It’s small, humid, quiet, and white-washed with metal tables and chairs, and a buffet with images of food at the front. It’s a local hangout in which there is a combination of people of diverse ethnicities. The artist is friends with the owner, a middle-­ aged Bangladeshi man who wears a colourful patterned shirt, who offers us a taste of a sweet, traditional Bangladeshi dessert that we share. Shan enthusiastically explains the cultural significance of the restaurant, having had some involvement with the community of it. He wears a colourful and patterned 1980s-style short-sleeved button­up shirt and black trousers. He wears black-framed contemporary-style glasses. He has neatly trimmed dark hair that is short on one side and longer on the other. He carries a feminine leather handbag and has a thin metal cuff bracelet on his left wrist. He has tattoos on his wrist and underneath upper right arm. Shan speaks very quietly and so it is often hard to hear him. We talk about space: Well I don’t know what’s a creative workspace. This space can be a creative workspace, but for some people, it’s not creative. Some need a clean, quiet, pristine space—for me, I like messiness. I like the mess, I like the city and some buildings, the school so nice and the setting, all the stuff around. People all rushing around—for me, this is a way of life, and why would I want to go to a forest and pretend I’m not in a city? Maybe that’s too cliché, but I think everywhere can be creative, it’s just that—okay, right now I need to do my project? I just need some time to write and I wouldn’t just stay in to write. I’d probably go to a cafe, which is not easy, I can still write. I think that living in the city is actually quite creative for me, because constantly there’s something going on. But of course I need maybe a conducive space if I want to view my installation, or test some video projection, or do some stuff that I couldn’t do in my place or in a school. So, certain spaces it’s more for testing, doing experimentation or a bigger space, workshop space. I will even go to different workshops and factories to get some parts done, printing or making. I also like the old buildings and places that are constantly rebuilding or demolition happening, construction happening. Because the city is always changing. Especially this area, because in between the old and the new, Little India and maybe a few stations down is Orchard. But we’ve got City Hall—in

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the centre of the old and new part of the city, and the things that they’re selling here, all the gadgets, appliances and machines, and then we have shops of all kinds. So, I think this kind of environment gives me a lot of ideas. My work talks about city, talks about the ecology of city life and my own personal life, in these spaces. This area is quite cool, quite a good place to just see.

What are the greatest obstacles to his practice, I ask, and what about censorship? He responds like the artist he is: Time, space, money, there’s always these problems. But I think the biggest obstacle is how we deal with red tape. Some work shouldn’t be shown, or censorship, or things like too sensitive. I think in Singapore, it’s still struggling with what can we show to the audience, and what can we talk about as subject matter. But then again, this sort of friction happens in many cases, not just in Singapore. Ok, you can’t talk about certain topics. Then how do I show something that talks about the topic? Maybe in a way, the medium or the art form becomes more interesting. Maybe it can be good, maybe it can be bad. So let’s say I often use this text from the National Arts Council’s mission statement. I just appropriate the work. I will use it to talk about a certain value of our art, about how we view arts and culture in Singapore. So, I use text from NAC’s mission statement. Mission statements are quite corporate. It sounds so perfect and nice, but how is it actually helping us? So, I use it as text, as voice, voice-based, moving image, text-based image, and I use it in my video work. I can show you the links if you want. I’m more interested in the way we look at art in Singapore. I find that Singapore is still quite conservative. Even though we are an advanced, fast-­ paced country, somehow there’s a lot of—there’s a sense of—they try to hang on to a certain way of life, or hang on to some kind of heritage or mindset.

While he’s talking, I think about the different forms of conservatism in both Australia, where I have lived for the past twenty-four years, and the United States, where I’m from. I think about the idea that repression so often leads to creative foment, or at least different kinds of creativity and arts. If the arts in Singapore experience widespread censorship, what affordances might that open up? He goes on…

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Fig. 1  Soft Wall Studs space, Singapore

Another network that I’m working with is actually this independent art space called soft/WALL/studs (see Fig. 1)  and they are very theoretically driven: https://softwallstuds.space/, which is something that I benefit from because I didn’t really have the background in philosophy or English lit, for example, but this group of people are so theoretically driven to the point that, a lot of times I’m actually just downloading readings from them. It’s a space that not only supports creative practices and art exhibitions, but the last thing we did was an effort to talk about sexual harassment within the arts industry. So even from that, there were a lot of readings that were about spaces or how do you make safe spaces. Those were things that I was not aware of until working with them. …last year the National Arts Council came up with this project or research looking at the arts community at large and how can it support with that. I think they were trying to create a centre that people may come in and find out about, say, IP rights, copyright laws and all that. So for me, I guess, I wonder how do you rethink the whole ecosystem? How do you rethink the whole industry? How do we rethink and sustain and better support younger practitioners? That’s one challenge that I see coming up. The other is there are a few new platforms that are coming up. So say, for example, I know that one just opened up. I haven’t gone for it yet, but there were a few artists whose works were

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within an industrial fridge at Gillman Barracks. That says how they are all doing their work and also based off curating their own works, so they could get exposure from that. Another one last year or the year before was at abandoned shopping centres. There might also be rented house spaces and they put out really interesting shows there. It was not only younger practitioners, but also young practitioners with older practitioners together, which I think is nice because there’s that exchange between practitioners at different levels of the industry.

Part-way through the interview the noise in the café becomes louder, and we decide to move upstairs to the owner’s office. We make our way up and, despite there being plenty of chairs to sit on, Shan immediately takes to the floor. He explains that the owner uses the space to produce a Bangladeshi newspaper, the evidence of which is on a shelf with hundreds of copies neatly stacked. After making a plan to meet up again in a few days at his studio, we part ways out front of the café, where Shan remains to eat dinner.

Coronavirus Arrives in Singapore A few short months after our first visit to Singapore, a robot dog named Spot has replaced humans in Bishan-Ang Moh Kio Park and elsewhere across the city, as the rapid spread of COVID requires social distancing and changed social conditions. As ever, the efficiency of Singapore’s government comes in handy as it turns to these robotic animals and avoids putting vulnerable humans at risk. Spot is a headless, four-legged robot dog developed by Boston Dynamics that patrols and occasionally makes announcements to remind people to keep their distance from each other. Spot is being used on a trial basis by the National Parks Board and the Smart Nation and Digital Government Group in Singapore to see if it makes a measurable difference in helping to control the spread of the disease.3 Spot was not developed in Singapore. Does it matter? Like the supposed global nature of the ‘creative industries’, the military industrial complex has been global for some time. The company Boston Dynamics  https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-52619568

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first introduced Spot in 2015, when it was still in development. The first video in which Spot starred racked up a whopping 22.7 million views, and additional videos of Spot have continued to draw millions of views over the years. Spot can do cool and cute things like moonwalk and twerk, which seems to help viewers forget the more sinister or invasive potential of such a bot. Some of Boston Dynamics’ other products are creepier: using military funding, they have developed quadruped robots that can assist soldiers by carrying over 400 pound of equipment, can jump 30 feet high and do other less human-friendly reconnaissance activities. Boston Dynamics started in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was purchased by Google in 2013. Four years later, Google sold Boston Dynamics to Japan’s SoftBank—one of the companies behind Pepper, which has been billed as the world’s first robot capable of reading human emotions.4 Given Spot’s invasive surveillance potential, SoftBank may find it hard to expand its global market, especially in Asia, considering the new voluntary guidelines from the US State Department for exporters of surveillance capabilities. Boston Dynamics initially focused on robots for the US military, with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. However, by 2015, the US Marines had passed over BigDog, Spot’s older, bigger, meaner version which was meant to have worked as load bearer for the force. Explaining the decision, US Marine Warfighting Lab spokesperson Kyle Olson told Military.com in December 2015: ‘As Marines were using it, there was the challenge of seeing the potential possibility because of the limitations of the robot itself.’ He added, ‘They took it as it was: a loud robot that’s going to give away their position.’5 While writing this chapter, I reflect on Spot and the move toward the socialisation of machines. Shan’s artistic orientation, while incorporating smart technology, seems to me to represent a more affective and sustainably integrated way forward.  I recall my initial impressions of Shan’s group studio, located in an industrial part of town. I’m keen to meet as many of the artists, curators, managers, and university educators in their  https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/25/app-tech-section/robot-dog-sale-intl-hnk-scli/index.html  https://thediplomat.com/2020/11/are-robot-dogs-coming-to-your-street-anytime-soonprobably-not/

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workspaces, so we can explore the relationship between their creativity or creative practice and the ecology, the environment, in which they work. Shan’s studio takes up the first floor of an industrial building in an old  neighbourhood. From the ground floor, visitors take a colourful (albeit slow) elevator up to the space which exits out onto a balcony. To the left of the balcony is an open, white tiled, concrete space. A library of shared materials holds a variety of textbooks covering a range of artistic and social theory, as well as different arts methods. There are zines produced by artists involved in the collective who use the space as a base, as well as stickers and badges related to different social movements including queer and women’s rights. The space behind the library that runs along one of the side walls of the buildings appears to be for art supplies. A more open space between the two is shared and collaborative. There are artworks belonging to different artists on the walls, some of which are painted or drawn directly onto it. There is a kitchen area and fridges, as well as an old sound system in one corner. There is a shrine to Solange Knowles which he explains is a memento from an art installation that a fellow artist had been involved with. Today he’s dressed casually, wearing a white t-shirt with grey ribbing around the sleeves and neck. He wears shorts and shoes, and thick-­ rimmed, round black glasses. He rolls and smokes cigarettes almost incessantly, holding onto a lighter and cigarette throughout most of the interview. He rarely looks at me as he speaks, looking into the distance as he grapples with multiple thoughts at once. The interview takes quite a bit of time to get started, as he explains various things about the collective. Just giving an overview of the study takes some time, as everything appears to spark many thoughts and tangents. This ends up being consistent throughout the interview, as he provides multiple answers from different perspectives to most questions, some of which respond to the provocation, but many of which go off in other interesting directions. He shows me lots of his amazing video work and mostly installations, although manipulated photos as well. He uses analog, manual and digital tools. His work is both aesthetically beautiful and political. He is clearly an artist who thrives on the city and urban spaces, as he told me when we first met.

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I don’t know whether it’s specific to Singaporean culture but, I guess, because I’m always looking at queer politics here in the industry, but the last work I did that was specific to Singapore’s history was, I was looking at dating sites. For that work, I was looking through a lot of newspapers that were talking about the signals that gay men give when they are cruising. Say, for example, I was looking at a specific site which actually used to be beach areas. I’ve not visited it in the past, but it is very different now. So in the past, it was a beach, then when you walk further down, there’s a heavy vehicle carpark. When I was researching, it was only the heavy vehicle carpark is left. The beach is cleared out. Everything is removed. I was interested in the site because in the 1990s, police entrapment happened with police went down as plain-­ clothes policeman and actually trapped men there who hit on them. Twelve men were arrested for that and all their names are published. I was interested in this history because for younger gay men, it is sometimes hard to find a lot of resources and understanding their stories can help inform, like how do I relate to them? I wanted to understand this history of oppression and how that can create space for resistance in a way. One of the things I was looking at was during that period was designing toilet cubicles fashioned at different sites, like different public toilets in Singapore. That was a demonstration of creating spaces that allowed a gay space for men to cruise. It’s important for me to at least talk about Singapore in my work. Essentially says this is where I’m coming from, this is also the history that I want to talk about. I’m interested in researching about artists and politics and about how different artists create resistance. Looking at trajectories for Singaporean artists who tried to avoid censorship by being very coded or very secretive in their works. So say, for example, one of the ones I always look up to—there’s an artist called Jason Wee and he first did a portrait Lee Kuan Yew, but each—so he used different bottle caps which were actually from the shampoo—No More Tears? Are you aware of that? Just used the bottle cap as the symbol to talk about this idea of the tears. The No More Tears, to make a political portrait. So I think, for me, it was shaped by the fact that—how I see it shaped is that I’m not very direct in my making. I say, how do I do, or rather, talk about these subjects in a very coded way? In a very—in a sense, also, I am using poetry, I guess, with works— that openness to reading and how can we then understand different meanings of a work that might be very simple from the first contact?

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I go to (yet another)  loud and bustling Starbucks to start putting together some notes, now that the majority of interviews are done. I have an ambivalent relationship with this ‘data’—I don’t want to colonise and interpret and analyse it as data, reducing these human and more than human experiences, expertise, passions, sufferings, and materials to sets of data to be used or abused by me or any other academics or white Western interlopers. But I also want to understand. I want to know more about this region, and want others to, also. I want to resist the colonising genericism of white Western definitions and practices of creativity in and outside of industry and education. I know that creativity is culturally defined and to some extent historically and culturally constituted, and I want to honour those cultural differences here, and even in Australia, from other regions, nations, and communities. We are not all the same nor is all creative practice the same. How can I consider and try to make sense of these intersecting samenesses and differences, while not assaulting and dominating them? I consider these ambiguities while the oppressive humidity and heat, even in the air conditioning of the very global colonising Starbucks environment, make me sweat, uncomfortable in my own sweltering skin. I feel like just another in a long history of fat white Westerners sweating my way through yet another ‘Asian’ country. But here I go: When comparing and contrasting themselves with other countries, most of the people interviewed in Singapore tend to compare themselves with other countries within their region. There’s a sense that Singapore and Hong Kong are the most similar in relation to governmental infrastructure supporting creativity (and to China), unlike in other countries in the region (like the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia) where it is more ‘grass-roots’ and community oriented. The types of artistic output in Singapore are frequently described as being derivative of European/Western artforms, a sense of conforming to what was widely accepted as being artistic, rather than trying to innovate. A majority of them feel this is linked to education being geared toward Western models, and a contributing factor as to why there is no recognisably ‘Singaporean’ brand of creativity. The predominantly conservative approach to education is considered to be a hindrance to people’s ability to think independently, create and innovate. A pervasive self-assessment is that while Singaporeans are obviously

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hard-working, some say things like they are not so good at thinking on their feet, improvising or asserting an  individual point of view, characteristics seen as limiting their creativity. There was a recurrent discussion about the ways this enculturated approach might be seen as reinforcing a very cerebral way of working, which potentially leads to Singaporean art also being cerebral, as opposed to creativity in other parts of the region (Indonesia and the Philippines) where it is more embodied, material, and experimental. The orderly nature of Singaporean society is widely considered to be a hindrance to people’s need to create, articulated by several as equating a lack of chaos to a lack of creativity, or an absence of the messy conditions and environments in which creative experimentation can flourish. Adding to this, the perceived tight controls of the government (both the Singaporean government as well as Beijing’s influence here) mean that there is a lack of political critique allowed in creative work in Singapore. Where other nations in the region criticise aspects of their government, politicians, and society through art, there is a distinct lack of any of that in Singapore (although increasingly that is also true in Hong Kong). So, while the government has created infrastructure to support creativity and artists, the culture it creates deters artists from pushing boundaries. Some linked this to a lack of national identity. * * * I take a break from the interviews to visit a cousin of my friend and colleague Cat. I meet Dara on the 23rd floor of one of the ubiquitous high-­ rises around Singapore. This place is in the far north of Singapore island, but only comes to about 35 minutes by car from downtown. It’s an apartment she shares with her sister and sister’s boyfriend. I am surprised when Cat’s cousin Dara answers the door and looks nothing like Cat’s Malaysian Singaporean features. A tattoo’ed, hippy vibe, Dara is a performance poet and other things, and has that performer’s air and sense of presence. She gets me some tea and water, and while doing so tells me she’s been through a rough time lately processing another wave of grief about her mother dying 5 years ago—she is 30, so lost her quite young. I do not really pursue that opening of vulnerability and connection, but I wish I could. Tired after a full day of interviews and running around in the humid Singapore heat, I express my condolences and stear the conversation elsewhere.

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Dara and this place (with open windows looking dizzyingly straight down, and out onto the distant horizon where the afternoon rainstorm moves closer) are kind of moody, hot, slow, and thoughtful. The apartment itself is small and simple, but with touches of beauty—a batik wall hanging, rich wooden kitchen cabinets, a soft colourful patterned throw on the couch, where we sit in very close proximity—and also with touches of playfulness—games around the TV and amidst the photos of family. The building itself sits amongst a forest of other high-rises. This is Singapore too. She talks about not looking like Singaporeans (although she is—she has dark brown skin and kinky hair) and not speaking like Singaporeans. She definitely does not present as what I would imagine as Singaporean—but she offers nothing about the specifics of her ethnicity. I don’t ask. It is a slooooow conversation, and yet she pulls me into her time. By the end, I’m surprised we have spent 45 minutes—and I wish we could keep going, which she seems to be open to. And yet when I stand up and say goodbye (through fatigue, not disinterest), she quickly touches her heart and says goodbye and closes the door. This is completely in keeping with the past hour—she seems a being completely in the moment. Present and then gone. How perfectly creative, and how specific to Singapore, whether she says so or not. An absolute pleasure. * * * The next day is my last of interviewing. I’m tired and always get a bit down after more than ten days away from home. Now at just over two weeks, I’m thinking about the dogs and the local takeaway and Stacy and sleeping in my own bed. Each morning I’m a bit slower getting out of bed and want to stay online with Stacy longer than either of us can manage. Finally I’m ready to leave the hotel, reluctantly. And then I meet Joanne, at the amazing Post-Museum,6 and my fatigue evaporates: Post-Museum is a network collective. So, there’s two main people and then for every project, we will get different people involved, depending on what we want to do with the project. Post-Museum came about because we were wondering  https://www.post-museum.org/rowell.shtml

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what to call ourselves and also because we are really small but we wanted to sound bigger than we were so we thought, ‘Okay, “museum” is great’, being the highest and most official form of what culture is, or something that we wanted to speak back to. And then ‘post’ came about because we are more interested in creating culture from the ground. We’re not so keen on top-down. So, it’s ‘post’ as in beyond and after. The idea of a traditional museum was also something that we thought of as passé and we really wanted to offer that platform to create and to speak back to official culture, so Post-Museum. We started because in Singapore, official culture is always so strong and I mean, not to—I would say the official government culture is a lot stronger than the commercial one. We don’t really deal with the commercial part, so for us, we are more interested in culture on the ground. We’re now in our 12th year.7 In the first four years, we ran an art space. Actually, we rented a huge space and then we ran it as a cultural centre. So, we had a café. We had a showing space. We had artist studios and offices and then we had a smaller room for other stuff. So, I would say the first four years it was more of just organising events because we had to keep things going on, right, and people coming to eat and all that. So, it was very much programming and getting people involved, and also curating because we did some exhibitions. And then, after that four years, until now, we haven’t had a space, so we are dealing more with making artworks and also working without a space. So, that means we have to work with other people’s spaces. We have to find public space to work in. We have to look at just possibilities in general, yeah, because when you have your own space, you’re just limited to—we just need something to happen in this space. So, it’s a different way of looking at it. Mostly it is socially-engaged art yeah, but of course there’s also a range, right. I mean, socially-engaged art itself has a very wide range, so it could be just— okay, the easiest thing is maybe okay we start with this idea that we’re going to get 100 drawings and then we go out and find 100 people to make drawings. That’s really simple. But at the other extreme, there’s also art where we say, “Okay, we want to deal with what is happening in Singapore right now,” and then we go and we do this—we talk to lots of people and then we figure out what people want to do together. And then we come up with a product together at the end. So, that is a really complicated way of doing socially-engaged art. Right now the focus in the Singapore art institutions is very much on being commercial and artists— 7  https://www.on-curating.org/issue-41-reader/interview-with-the-founders-of-post-museum-­ jennifer-­teo-and-woon-tien-wei.html#.X_vzOOBxXBI

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students are trained to be career artists, so they are not even so interested in the part about making art as collective or as a way of coming together of people. So, I would say most people who go to art school, they only—the focus is really on how they can make their art saleable or attractive to international curators. We actually call ourselves nomadic right now. So, that could mean that we don’t have our own space, but that could also mean that every place is our space—every space is possibly our space. But I mean, even in—I guess it’s the same in daily life, the private space, public spaces is always there, but it’s whether we are conscious about it and so, we tried to actually consciously work with people we want to engage and that includes the government. So, before, when we had our own space, it was really just, we just worked in our space. It was a private space. We rented it from a landlord and we didn’t get money from the government. So, it was really very much our own thing. But now we actually make more effort to work with government agencies. We work with schools, we work with companies and all these private entities. So, there is maybe a different focus in the way we work. Yeah, actually, when we were running the space, we were so busy with the space. It was like a baby. We had to take care of it every day. But actually, once we closed the space, there were lots of other things we could really look at and work with. So, one of the very big things that happened, the same year we closed, was this thing called the Bukit Brown8 incident, campaign: B-U-K-I-T, that means hill in Malay. And brown, as in B-R-O-W-N. Bukit Brown is a huge cemetery in the middle of Singapore and in 2011, the government announced that they are going to build a highway through this cemetery and it really isn’t so much of a problem because throughout the history of Singapore, we have been taking our cemeteries. We’ve been building housing estates. We’ve been building lots of stuff over cemeteries. So, I think the government thought this was just another cemetery that we were just going to build something over. But then somehow, something ­happened, there was a big hoo-ha and everyone got involved. We wanted to stop the highway from happening. So, this was actually the first time in the history of Singapore where thousands of people have come together to try to stop a government project. And of course, we didn’t succeed, but it was really interesting because this cemetery, it has about 200 years of history so it actually touched the time of British colonial days and also, the part when Singapore became independent. So, a lot of the people who our roads are named after—roads, schools, hospi https://www.singaporebiennale.org/art/post-museum

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tals—they are actually buried there. And a lot of these people also were travelling in Asia because they were traders so they went from China down to Singapore and maybe to Indonesia. Some of them were really famous. For example, this guy who introduced Anna to the king in Thailand, he actually is buried there. There are also different people. Of course, there’s normal people and beggars and stuff. But the thing about the cemetery was that actually most people didn’t know it existed, including us. So, I have never actually stepped into this place, until 2011 when it happened. And because the Nature Society and the Singapore Heritage Society, the two very strong civil society groups in Singapore, they did a conference to talk about why this place was important. That was the first time I actually found out about this place. And it was only after that that we went and then we thought, ‘Well, we have to try to save this place.’ And the very fact that it is so old means that it’s also quite heavily forested, because the trees just grow, and so to lose it would mean the loss of endangered birds and animals staying there as well. So, it’s a really nice nature place. It’s a huge space and you can treat it like a park, basically. But because in Asia, most people don’t actually use cemeteries as parks, the government actually thought that this place is abandoned, nobody’s interested in it. So, they’re just going to go ahead, but we created so much noise it became a—it actually became quite a ground-breaking campaign and it started—already in those years, people were already thinking that Singapore’s changing so fast, because there’s a lot of construction. Old places are torn down all the time to build new ones. So, at that time, already people were feeling the loss and then when Bukit Brown happened, it was an explosion. We started working on this project and we wouldn’t have been able to do it if we had the space, and part of the project was also to pull people from different walks of life together to say something about it and there wasn’t actually any existing platform where people could voice their opinions, so we took to the streets. We asked Singapore to sign a letter that we wrote to the government and so we spoke to thousands of people. We started a Facebook group where people could just say whatever they want about this, we posted news and then we posted information. And then, after that, we did tours of the cemetery for three years. Actually, right now, there’s still a group of people who are doing the tours, but it’s not regular anymore. So, the group of people started in 2011, but for us, we stopped after three years when the government decided to build our highway. So, now, if you go there, the highway’s there. It’s already opened. So, people are driving through.

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It’s just cut the cemetery into half. So, you can still walk in the cemetery. It used to be you could hear the birds and everything but now because of the highway, you can’t hear anything anymore. Towards the end of that three years when we were doing the tours, we started making artworks. It was really hard to make something, although a lot of artists actually did. They did performances. They did improvs and things in the cemetery and people went to take photos. And even until now, we are still making artworks from this, because there’s so many things that’s really interesting. One is called Bukit Brown Index. So, one of the ideas is to index everything in this campaign, in this case, so it includes newspaper articles. It includes the names of people who are exhumed. It includes the photographs of places and actually, so many things, seeds that we found there, cultures of the activists. Last year, we did a virtual reality performance based on this story. We had three characters; a bureaucrat, an activist and a ghost. The three of them performed the case, basically. And then, we made a wayang stage.9 You have that in Hong Kong as well; outdoor theatre, opera theatre, Chinese traditional theatre stage. We made one that is three-quarter original size and then we had the performers perform on it with lots of other extras as ghosts, because we have this thing where it’s outdoor performance, and then we put rows of chairs. And always, the first row is left empty for the ghosts so that they can come and sit and watch. People would know not to sit on the first row. For this work, we actually put rows of chairs and then we got forty people to dress as ghosts and they all sat on the chairs and then we did the performance once and we filmed it with the VR cameras. So, then, later on, when it’s the exhibition time, when we go in, you see the stage and the chairs which everything is empty. But once you put on the VR goggles, you see the ghosts performing and the ghosts around you. That is the latest thing that we’ve done with Bukit Brown. And this work is actually in Netherlands right now. I’m supposed to be there, but they didn’t have money to fly me, so I’m still here. We’ve done different things, like a simple one of just portraits of activists. Actually, we showed it in Taipei a few years ago.

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 https://www.roots.gov.sg/places/places-landing/Places/landmarks/ubin-heritage-trail/ wayang-stage

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I finish the day visiting my new friend Annabelle Tan at National Gallery Singapore. Y-Lab is their new art and tech start-up lab embedded within the Gallery and offering space to innovators, ‘start-ups, patrons, museum professionals, investors, culture sector talents and visitors alike to co-­ create the future of cultural production and consumption in Singapore and beyond’.10 The Gallery is an amazing place in scope, size, and grandeur. Culturally, creatively, the facilities are awe-inspiring. I wander around before our meet-up, thinking about some of the artists who have talked about the gap between mainstream arts/cultural precincts and the local artist scene. National Gallery Singapore is five years old in 2020, and everything just feels so new.11 Annebelle greets me at the entrance to the Keppel Centre for Art Education, a bright and interactive centre for creative learning, and takes me on a tour. It is a beautiful and dynamic space which invites self-guided experiences, and while it’s meant for young visitors to the museum, and school groups, I am quickly immersed in its creative stops and playful stations. That evening, I board the plane back to Melbourne, with the colours and sounds of the Centre ringing in my ears. * * * We return nine months later, in December 2019, in order to conduct the devising and verbatim performance workshop. What a joy to be able to work with professional actors, in the aesthetically stimulating rooms of a world-class arts training centre. For the first time, Kel and I have a dancer in the cast, and their skills are brought to life in the physicality of the work we devise. The fluid threads of modern movement ignite the beautiful work by the other three actors, and bring a beautiful grounding to the body—everything returning to the body in all creative events— that gives this piece a presence that some of the others don’t have. In the audience discussion afterward, though, there are some concerns about the ‘animating’ element of the work being brought by an Anglo  https://www.nationalgallery.sg/content/national-gallery-singapore-extends-positive-impact-artbroader-audience-it-turns-5 11  https://www.nationalgallery.sg/content/art-spaces-across-singapore-come-together-new-artinitiative-support-local-art-community 10

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Fig. 2  Singapore devised performance

performer, when the rest are all ethnically East Asian actors. The discussion is dynamic, curious, passionate, and defensive at times, all of which Kel and I love, welcome, heartily engage with, and feel privileged to experience. We wonder between ourselves at how hard it is to break conventions: to offer a performance that is maybe too arty for typical research, and too ethnographic for typical workshop performance. And of course afterward, we all go out for more debate, delicious food, and drinks and drinks and drinks. Ah, Singapore. I may never know you fully, but I can still love you. The playscript is included here, as with the other sites in this book, but keep in mind the many levels, actants, and reverberations—aural and physical—that are missing (Fig. 2). Singapore performance Characters: 1: Eurasian dancer/choreographer/professor 2: Chinese theatre director 3: Malaysian fashion designer 4: Dancer [music clip #1]

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* (ALL): I return to my body. 1: I return 2: to my body. (beat) (soundscape #1) (ALL): Time, space, money. 3: I’m Malaysian, and I’m what we call Chindian (I’m half Chinese and half Indian). My husband and I are designers—I’m a fashion designer, and he’s a tailor. We had a shop for about four, five years. Then we decided to fold because rental in Singapore is very expensive. That’s probably one of the reasons why we moved back across the border to Malaysia to set up a space and so we work out of there a few—well, when we can until we start new projects. Then we’ll come back to Singapore. And it’s not too far. I mean, it’s 30 to 45 minutes’ drive across the border. 2: I’m 62. Male. I’m Chinese. Singapore Chinese. Forever. Since I was born. I’ve lived in Singapore for 62 years, and been an artist for 30-­something years. When I first opted for theatre, it was about being competent in skills, for example, in playwriting, acting or directing. But I think over the years, what happened was I become more interested in thinking about the ideas behind the work. I’m very—how do you say it? I think about the context of my work a lot more than I used to. So creative skills. There are a lot of factors that feed into my creative space. Seeing the paradigm shift in the way theatre, or art in general, is being made or produced, seen, exhibited. It’s about what art is. Singapore has transformed over the past 30 years. It’s a creative space. I guess we’re always struggling with the idea of who we are, where we are, through our work. 1: Okay, so gender male, age range is…I’m 44. Nationality is easier, I’m Singaporean. Ethnicity is I’m of mixed parentage, so that’s—culturally I will be known as Eurasian, culturally, yeah. I’ve lived in Singapore all my life. The big one now for me is presence, and that of course is huge on so many levels. It’s physical, it’s psychological, it’s emotional, it’s virtual. But really, because I do practicum, I go into schools and watch teachers, somebody walks into a room and they have presence, and of course this is an actors’ thing, right? Students respond. In all forms and guises. So what comes with presence is a range of things: focus, energy,

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confidence, stillness, voice. How to understand, how to read the space, all kinds of things. [end of beat #1] 3. This idea of ‘multiracial’ is important because that’s where the whole Singapore spirit is. They call it the kampong spirit, the village spirit. But I think in terms of fashion it’s different. Fashion is a universal language. It doesn’t really define what kind of race you are. I have Malays. They wear white gowns even though they have their traditional costumes to wear. One thing about Singapore is that even though we have the different ethnicities, they have the freedom to wear universal bridal gowns. Everybody wants to look good in white, so they do. Indians, not yet. Maybe due to the ceremonial process being super long, I’m not sure if they can change that or what. But I haven’t got an Indian customer yet. Malay, Chinese and some Eurasians, yes, but no Indians. 2: I find the ability to be fluid is tough. The actors are always telling me, “Where do I stand?” And I will always tell them, “Where does your character feel that he or she should stand?” They were lost. They’re used to a very Western way, Broadway Western model of directing, in which you stand there and your emotion is this. Directors giving very, very precise direction and actors go back and do homework and they will try and get to that point. In the training that I got, which is mostly Asian, I worked with the masters in Chinese opera, great dance masters of Noh theatre. We used to invite a lot of masters from around Asia and Southeast Asia and work with them in workshops. And there are two parts to that. One is technique and the other one is “go with what you feel”. It’s the “go with what you feel” that’s lacking in the academic training that a lot of actors get. So, actors working with me often get a little confused at the beginning but subsequently they understand there’s another kind of creativity. 1: My classroom is the entire Singapore. Because the moment that our students go out for placements, even if they’re doing front-of-house work for a festival, that in itself allows them to see so many things. There are similar situations or issues in other countries. But we also talk about how different Singapore is versus other countries. Is the situation in Singapore different if you compare it to countries within the region, within Southeast Asia? Take for instance the amount of funding that’s been given to the

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arts…how is Singapore placed in a bigger eco-system? Or even within Singapore, how one specific thing, let’s say an arts festival, placed in the eco system of Singapore, as well as the eco-system in a global picture or scenario. 3: Singapore is really not a trendsetter kind of place. It’s more of an end-consumer, trickle-down kind of place. Singapore needs to work harder to make its own iconic influence. When people talk about Singapore fashion, it’s T-shirt, bermudas and slippers. Instead of being too much influenced by the outside world, we need to find what is us. ALL: I return to my body/time, space, money [end of beat #2] * 1: I use improv techniques with business leaders to understand spatial awareness, your body, your movement, your voice, all the things that we know in dance or in theatre that’s so common, like common lingo, but for the executives, it’s kind of new to them. So those who do my workshop, they really enjoy it, because they realise that they’re more present. Because leadership presence has got to do with projection and reception, just like audience right? Audience reception. 2: Unfortunately Singaporeans are not so creative. It’s kind of a rare trait because our education system, like maybe our system of efficiency and meritocracy, makes us very cookie cutter in a sense. The way things are taught, the way things are done here, there is always a most efficient and preferred route and anybody who says no to it is often rendered as rebellious or not team players and therefore they’re not valued by society or the company they work for. Maybe it’s just that people in Singapore are afraid of confrontation and conflict. 3: When you look at artworks from the Philippines or Indonesia or Thailand, you can recognise where it’s from. I think in Singapore, there is still quite a global look to the artwork. Some of our regional countries have more identifiable traits. For example, Philippine art tends toward a lot of social commentary, especially about poverty. I can’t say that Singapore has quite the same signifiers, and they’re not particularly unique or identifiable, unless the artwork had specific scenes from Singapore, like food, flats or something. Ours is—I don’t want to use the

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word Western, because it’s blurry, between Western art and what comes out of Japan, what comes out of Korea, what comes out of China today. 1: The notion of creativity has had a funny past in Singapore. Maybe 15–20 years ago, we were doing well, so the arts was looked at for how to be culturally refined, once you attain your industrial wealth. And then that waned, and we went through a phase where it was ‘let’s just concentrate on the technological things’, and math and science too. And the arts became an entertainment industry. Then we saw a shift toward the gaming and film broadcast industry. It’s gone from cultural refinement, to tourism, to gaming and film industry. Now, it’s kind of shifted toward AI, stuff like that. [music #3] (ALL) Time, space, money. [end beat #3] 2: Confrontation and conflicts are so important in creativity because if you have a team of everybody saying yes, how is that creativity? It’s just a plan that has been formulated that everybody follows. And there’s instances where some team players may think something otherwise but they’re not spoken out loud, and so things happen and there’s cover up or don’t get reported to the top because then? You’re probably seen as a troublemaker. And eventually something will derail the whole project because there are not enough naysayers. There’s nothing wrong with being a naysayer, just be a positive naysayer rather than a negative naysayer. 1: I was invited to speak at a technology symposium at a local university, about my work as a choreographer. At the end of my presentation I said ‘Are there any questions?’ and nobody asked a question. And I said ‘May I ask a question?’ And there were all these digital media people in the audience, and I said ‘Have any of you, or do any of you, desire to work with dancers?’ And a couple of hands went up, and I said ‘May I suggest you do?’ I said ‘Because this is our work, you know, our work is understanding embodiment and you’re talking about liveness, you’re desiring this.’ I said ‘Work with us.’ And this German professor came up to me afterwards and said ‘Thank you for that’ you know, because they’re in these silos doing these things and not talking to people who have this daily practice.

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2: I was just in a symposium presenting about this folding research practice that I do with a colleague of mine, and the first question was ‘don’t you want to work with biologists?’ And I said, ‘Well yes, but we’re more interested in the creativity, the making, how it can stretch the languaging of the body into “other”.’ You know? I mean, why does everything always have to align itself with science to be important. 1: Having bodies in space and seeing them perform, it helps us to understand our spatial awareness, our relationship to each other. And then yes, if we can parallel with scientists and biologists and urban planners, that’s fantastic too, but we shouldn’t have to necessitate it in order to be validated. 2: Improv as a strategy, as a methodology, is not really used in Singapore. We have traditional techniques, but there’s no open classes that are focused on improvisation, that are creative sessions. 3: Lately I’ve been teaching in schools. I’m hoping my students will be ones who make a change in the landscape, especially in south-east Asia. [end of beat #4] 2: I was directing a production in Manila. Now Singaporeans are very time-conscious. But in the Philippines they are professional but they’re relaxed: so if it’s a two o’clock rehearsal, people will stream in at 2:30 or three o’clock. And I’d be very frustrated and flustered by all that. But that’s culture. I asked my producer, “Where’s my kite?” I had a kite prop that was coming in. And he said, “Okay.” About two weeks later the kite prop is still not there. Two days before opening the kite prop is still not there and I said, “Where’s my kite?” And he turned around and he told me, “Don’t colonise us. We’ve had enough of that.” And it just woke me up that in my mind my requests for competency, my request for things being done on time may be thought of as colonisation in my collaborator’s mind. Whether that is a good thing or bad thing, it doesn’t matter. Because in their culture they never say no, they always say yes, but they will never tell you that he had problems delivering that kite. So, I learn that colonisation may not be about physical invasion or occupation of another person’s space, but it can be emotional and it can be psychological as well. So since that project I’ve been very, very careful about cultural colonisation. I even apply that to my local projects.

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3: I mean we need to be innovators and creators, so now that’s the arts. That’s Singapore. I lament that art was not developed, especially in primary and secondary schools for just developing the human. One of the ministers said recently at a talk, that while we are leading in PISA scores, we have not much innovation to show for it. So obviously PISA is not a good measure for the success of a country, because we are developed, so we have developed world problems. We’re now to an extent like the US: we are not very cheap for manufacturing, we’re expensive, and then we have land scarcity and we have a shortage of manpower. The way forward for us is essentially creative innovation in all aspects of industry, but we’re not doing that either. 1: A lot of people move to Hong Kong. It’s nearer to China. I think compared to other Asian countries, for example, Hong Kong or China have a high employability rate. So students can graduate and then they start to look for a job. But in Singapore we don’t have a lot of big companies stationed here and the amount of students that are graduating are too much for the companies to take. But we’re not training these people just to work locally; they should be able to go to international countries and survive. 2: And I think it makes me a better director: I’m able to tackle a script that has got Malay cultural influences, Indian cultural influences, other cultural influences or Singaporean context, Chinese family speaking English, Chinese family speaking Singlish to a Malay person, to me it’s not a cultural code that I have to switch on, it’s very embedded in me and therefore the way I direct it, the way I envision it is informed by the fact that I am Singaporean. I think the Singaporeans are the glue to the rest of the Asian cultures because we blend in so easily. [music clip #1] ALL: I return to my body. I return to my body. [all exit]

Intermezzo 4: Land

Monday, 5 March 2018: Eno Yim established and runs the School of Everyday Life in Tai Po, a district of Hong Kong. Eno is well known here as a creative and activist trailblazer, a visionary. Ka Lai says I simply have to meet her, so we go. She takes me up up up to the school, which sits at the very northern part of the New Territories, at Tai Po (market) station. It is a beautiful, green, lush environment. The school is a long walk still further up from the station and is a huge old set of buildings built in the 1940s right after the end of World War II as a free school to help the children who were left parent- or family-less after the war. It seems aged and weathered but grand and is a cool welcoming presence in this humidity. It is adjacent to a convent which long ago established trees, vegetable gardens, and other craft/clothing/recycling/more industries to help fund the school. Nevertheless, it has been abandoned at various times throughout the past 75 years, and it shows its age. We find Eno in the maze of rooms and hallways, who takes us on a grand tour of the grounds, classrooms, and programme installations, before sitting down to share lunch with us. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Harris, Creative Agency, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77434-9_7

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She is a small, spritely, and generous woman who narrates her journey to working at this school which is not actually a school but a kind of extra-curricular place of learning sustainability and life skills. It is staffed by artists. There are a number of installations that are aesthetically amazingly beautiful and also provide interactive and experiential learning for school groups that come here. It operates on Buddhist principles and our lunch is vegetarian, which they provide every day. They grow their own food and educate about the perils of petroleum and global food production practices. I learn from her today that Hong Kong is per capita the highest meat-­ consuming city/nation in the world. Her project is a political and revolutionary one, and for the first time I discuss so many political and social ills with a local who comes from the intersecting worlds of arts, education, and activism. Our discussion ranges widely from Philipina guest workers’ precarity, colonialism’s history (and future), the future of education, art in Hong Kong, and collectivism versus individualist orientations to the world and the best age for educating about such issues. It is an awe-inspiring day. She gives me and Ka Lai a tour around this somewhat empty facility today (seven staff, and intermittent school groups, not an everyday school attendance), where much is covered in mildew from the higher-elevation moisture and constant demands of maintenance. There is a resident ten-year-old African (land, not water) turtle roaming freely who had just come out of a four-month hibernation, left by a previous staff member who could no longer accommodate the turtle in his toilet (the usual practice!)—and a cat called ‘Boss’ or ‘Queen’ who had also been adopted by a previous employee and when the employee left, the cat was abandoned with the school, only to be re-­ adopted by Eno and the current staff and is now spoiled and thriving. It is an inspiring and magical yet also ghostly place, with the hint of both future dreams of education and culture reform and the feeling of a lost city or abandoned factory. A very evocative and beautiful and still hopeful place. Everyone I have met in Hong Kong has mentioned Eno in hushed reverential and glowing terms. She is an icon, an avant-garde visionary who helped established the School of Creativity and then moved on to this project, trying to exemplify new and creative forms of social cohesion and education and how they might work together.

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She has an amazing calm, and laughing presence. She never leaves my gaze as we speak. I can see why people speak of Eno as an open, solid, calm, and inspiring presence, underlined by my guide Ka Lai recounting how when she was at university, Eno was exactly the same. Ka Lai undertook Buddhist teaching lessons as a result of Eno’s impact on her. I’m mesmerised and re-inspired to continue working for non-standardised, non-globalised education underpinned by arts, creativity and sustainability. I include some images of the School here, with Eno’s permission. But it is also important to say that when we speak again (via Facebook) in January 2021, Eno tells me she is happy to have the school captured in this book because it is now closed. The landlord took it back in order to make a high-end international school, and the School of Everyday Life is now looking for a new home, hopeful as ever.

 ducational Ecologies (Hong Kong’s School E of Everyday Life) After ten years working to establish the well-known School of Creativity in the Kowloon Tsai neighbourhood in Hong Kong, Eno moved on to establish the School of Everyday Life (garden, pictured below). She says of its origins (Fig. 1): We were just a group of friends, all of us working in the university, I was working in the School of Creativity, and then we just felt like there are a lot of limitations and problems that we can’t handle, can’t tackle in the normal schooling. So we think if we had this place, then we would like just to do something that we can’t do in the normal schools. So that’s just back to the very basic things, that’s how we can learn and be better people in our everyday lives, so we got the name School of Everyday Life. What we are doing here is just very normal, very daily things. Just like cooking, farming and doing handcrafts, reading, something like that.

Yim describes the School as a ‘learning centre for the community’, welcoming students from 3 to 90. Students can bring their families with them. When I asked her what the connections or differences are between

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Fig. 1  A section of the gardens at the School of Everyday Life, 2019 (courtesy of the author)

the School of Creativity and the School of Everyday Life, what is at the core of living and learning creatively, she responds (Fig. 2): Most of the time the first step is just to observe what’s happening, what I’m thinking, what is my connection with the people around me and what’s happening in society. This is a very important first step I think. What we do in the School of Creativity also, because I was responsible for the creative programme there, is they will always start the programme first by just getting the students concerned about people, the teachers, and the students next to them. What are they thinking, do you know what they’re concerned about? So they do portraits for teachers and students, to ask teachers, “What can I do for you to refine or to help you to improve your teaching?” Something like that. Or to ask the student, “How can I improve your learning in this environment?” Generally in Hong Kong, I think they still think creativity is the same as many years ago. I think the Creative Industry Report research, more than ten years ago, and I think the government, they’re still using that report to think up their policy, how they

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Fig. 2  One of the wooden murals showing a more sustainable ecology in Hong Kong

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should nurture the creativity of the next generation; and they’re still using the report to design the curriculum. Which is even worse I think, because they promote STEM in Hong Kong now. Young peoples’ values in Hong Kong are changing, because they can’t see their future if they follow the old way, how they just stick to their company, or to stick to one job for their whole life is impossible for them now. So now they just want to live a more meaningful life, many of the young people, so they choose to do things their own way; and then they’re not thinking of earning very big money because they can’t buy the flats anyway. You wouldn’t dream of buying an apartment for your own because in Hong Kong it’s impossible, so they forget this dream and choose other dreams. If you don’t have the burden of a family, or the burden of an apartment, then you can just free your time for different things. If you don’t use the land for farming, people will use it to build buildings. But there are still farm lands, mainly in the rural side of Hong Kong. If you want to do farming you can hire some land. It’s not difficult, because many friends are just like, “I want to do farming.” Then they can get farming land. But the problem is before not so many people are aware this is an option for them, but now they realise. If the lands are still here, if you don’t use them for farming, as I said, developers will come and use it. I know some young farmers they made a statement, they do the farming as a statement against the status quo. We are reclaiming a Hong Kong identity as we do farming here. It’s a local thing that we can produce local food and that, so we’re concerned about the local developments. Because the political situation in Hong Kong is getting more difficult, young people are very concerned about their future and freedom in Hong Kong. So they want to make changes, and especially in their daily choices, because their way of their living can make a statement about how they oppose the Chinese government. This is very important for them now: they don’t want to get into the system, because the system is very much controlled by the mainland government, so they opt out. It’s a statement to protest what is happening. The political side in Hong Kong is more, you need motivation for the young people to make their choices I think, and also to build up creativity. Where there’s oppression, you will find a way out just to…resist it. This way of creativity. If you met more young people they would say they’re very tired of the situation, because they go to school, or to the street to protest for the past few years, and then they keep protesting, and then when they go back to their everyday life, everything is just the same. If things are like that then it’s meaningless for them. So they need to maintain the spirit of resistance in their everyday life; so they need to do

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s­omething not just to change jobs. Alternative ways of living can be a very good statement for them. Still many people can’t see different choices, alternatives in society, so here at the School of Everyday Life we help them to get back to nature, because many people in Hong Kong don’t have the chance to get into nature. Students are very busy in Hong Kong, too busy. I think creativity is never separate from the sensory. How can you think of different ways, or develop new ideas, if you don’t have the sources for creativity? Diversity, too, stimulates creativity. Because the culture of Hong Kong is unique in the world. I think I should say every place is different, every culture is very different. In Hong Kong because I’m so familiar with, and I grew up here, I think it’s very different from the western culture, and also the Chinese traditional culture. Here it’s very much mixed together. How we approach relationships with people is different. The traditional Chinese way of relationship between family or friends is quite different from the western, and then in Hong Kong you receive both kinds of concepts, in how to get along with different people. Also the way of writing and speaking is different, and how we approach space, and time, and relationships I think is unique in Hong Kong. I grew up in the 1970s, so we experienced how from the very poor, the Hong Kong economy just got stronger. The space of the city, from the very old district to now, you have these very developed, high rise buildings, so the sense of space is very different. But as for the food we eat every day, that’s merged also, like the way we have breakfast, and then have our lunch and then our dinner is all mixed up with the western ingredients and ways of cooking. And then also the very Chinese, Cantonese way of eating different food, how we handle the ingredients and do the cooking is a way of affecting how we approach our way of thinking. It’s difficult to describe. Like milk tea, because milk tea is from England, but we use a very traditional Chinese way and also the tea leaves are different from the English one. We develop our own milk tea, and then the taste is different from the English one. Also in Chinese they won’t bring tea with milk. That’s a very English way, and toast is a very western thing as well. We don’t have bread in Hong Kong, and in China they don’t have bread, they have dumplings. Buns, they have buns, a kind of pork bun, but the way of doing with the flour is different. Yeah, very different. We don’t cook with flour. It’s from the north Chinese. So they have, we call it the wheat culture and the rice culture; because in the south we have the rice culture here. Even language, dialect is individual. Ours is very much a Hong Kong-ese and Cantonese. Yeah,

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but now they’re (the mainland Chinese government) trying to make all the students speak English and Mandarin in schools, in primary schools, to change culture starting from the language. In Guangdong it’s worse because all schools, even from kindergarten to university, are only allowed to teach in Mandarin in schools. So maybe after 100 years we don’t have Cantonese in the world. It’s very sad. I don’t know how to change it. If nothing changes in the education system I don’t see what will happen, and also because politically the rules from mainland China are getting tightened. We foresee control in education, like in the subjects even, and the management of the schools getting more tense in the coming years. We don’t see there’s a loosening or opening up for the education system, so I’m not so optimistic about the future, in creativity. We have a subject, liberal studies, that was set up to help students to open up their minds to the world, and then to open up their way of critical thinking. But now the government thinks the subject teaches students to be more critical and to be more anti-government. Some Chinese government officials said they will try to tighten up, or even close the subject maybe. So they think that subject is a problem for education.

* * * The time with Eno is so motivating and inspiring that I go back to my hotel room and read over some of the team’s contextual work on Hong Kong and its ongoing (and increasing) problem with space. The first thing my eyes find is that Hong Kong has the dubious distinction of a tenth consecutive year ranking as the most unaffordable housing market in the world. The sheer density and scarcity of land has a profound impact on the kinds of creative work that get done here, where and how. Hong Kong has a population of 6.9 million people over a teensy 1104 square kilometres, and its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita ranks among the world’s top 20. Hong Kong has undergone dramatic industrial restructuring in the past 25 years: its industry sector now constitutes less than 15% of Hong Kong’s GDP, of which 3.3% is originated from ‘electricity, gas and water’, 4.9% from construction industries, but only 5.1% from manufacturing industries (and this was in 2001–2002, now nearly two decades old). In contrast, the service sector now consists of

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more than 85% of Hong Kong’s GDP, with the Hong Kong government pointing out that the industrial and service sectors should turn to ‘service-­ enhanced manufacturing’ (SEM) that they hope will sustain a dynamic and creative economy in future. The core workforce in Hong Kong is predominantly male (68.8%), highly educated, are mostly employees (94%) with 64.7 % achieving HE degrees.1 Closer attention to the larger economic profile highlights that mainland Chinese companies now make up 40% of market capitalisation in the Hong Kong Exchange in 2017, growing from only 16% in 1997.2 Hong Kong’s economy is characterised by free trade, and a small-government philosophy, conducive to its famous small business character and friendliness, but which many feel is now under threat. Hong Kong’s economy excels in several sectors: It is the world’s busiest port in terms of throughput; it is the top Asian financing centre and has Asia’s secondlargest stock market.3 Hong Kong has become the third-­largest auction market in the world, after New York and London, pursuing large commercial creative enterprises such as the rebranding of Art Basel in Hong Kong in 2013 and the prominent development of the ART HK Hong Kong International Art fair in 2011. Institutionally the Hong Kong government’s investment in M+, a 400,000-square metre specifically dedicated institution to visual culture, the Art Asia exhibition and conference complex, and the hosting of the 2015 Event Horizon place Hong Kong as the central hub of art commerce and industry4 and promote Hong Kong as a dynamic and forward-looking cultural and economic hub of global significance in the twenty-first century. Yet this unparalleled positioning and promotion of Hong Kong as a high-status global nexus is challenged by its increasingly hostile relationship with mainland China (PRC).  Hui, D. (2007). The creative industries and entrepreneurship in East and Southeast Asia. In C. Henry (Ed.) Entrepreneurship in the Creative Industries: An International Perspective (pp. 9–29), Edward Elgar Publishing, p. 24. 2  Yeung, C. (2017). Promises and Reality. In A PEN Hong Kong anthology. Hong Kong 20/20 Reflections on a borrowed place. Blacksmith Books, Kong Kong, p. 50. 3  World Federation of Exchange (2006) Ten Largest Domestic Equity Market Capitalisations at Year-End 2006 and 2005 Annual Report, p. 28. 4  Renfrew, M. (2017). Uncharted Territory: Culture and Commerce in Hong Kong’s Art World: Penguin Specials. Penguin UK. 1

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Uncertain Times Uncertainty continues to grow over the sustainability of Hong Kong’s competitiveness, especially in the light of recent economic growth amongst other tiger economies (Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) in East Asia, as well as Hong Kong’s specific and increasing troubles with mainland China. While most of Hong Kong’s manufacturers have shifted their low-end operations to China, high-end operations and management in Hong Kong maintain higher costs compared to the competition in mainland China. Hong Kong manufacturers competing in global markets are unable to pass on higher costs whilst mainland Chinese manufacturers continue to gain in production quality and international business connectivity. Hong Kong is losing port revenues to lower-tariff Chinese ports in Shenzen and Shanghai, and bigger and more advanced airports are springing up throughout the region, posing direct threats to Hong Kong’s regional leadership. Financially, Hong Kong is at a crucial juncture, with China teeming with capital and accelerating its liberalisation of financial markets. In the face of increasingly intense competition, Hong Kong is struggling to find or create an uncontested marketplace. The Hong Kong economy will need to look for ways to differentiate itself from the competition and cultivate advantages unique to the city, instead of persevering in a losing game of price and cost—all of this while continuing its cultural and political conflict with mainland China. Observers both in and outside Hong Kong have noted the importance of creativity for Hong Kong’s next stage of development. Leaving this creative task to what Hong Kong deems its creative sector of the population—those working in the creative industries (advertising, architecture, art, antiques and crafts, design, digital entertainment, film and video, music, performing arts, publishing and printing, software and computing, television, and radio)5 amounting to only about 5% of the working population— raises significant questions about the future of the remaining workforce.  Hong Kong Trade Development Council (29 June 2007) “Hong Kong’s Creative Industries— Partner and Trendsetter for the Chinese Mainland”, http://www.tdctrade.com/econforum/tdc/ tdc070605.htm (accessed 7 September 2017). 5

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In a 2005 policy address, Hong Kong’s then-Chief Executive Tung Chee Wah, shortly before the Hong Kong Creativity Index was launched, claimed: Hong Kong is well positioned to develop cultural and creative industries: we have a highly open providing effective protection for intellectual property. We are a pluralistic and inclusive society, a confluence of eastern and western cultures, and a cultural cradle for overseas Chinese. We have a rich variety of cultural activities conducive to inspiring creativity. We stand to benefit from the many opportunities now arising in the Mainland following its own promotion of cultural industries in recent years. We have people who have always been good at learning, skilful at adaptation and strong on creating things. Yet there are apparent limiting factors in some key areas and financing the establishment of creative industries which have held back the full development of cultural and creative industries in Hong Kong. Obviously, there is still scope for growth.6

To support this, over the past 15 years the Hong Kong government has funded major industry organisations to advance workforce capabilities (worth HK$2.6 billion, 2006). The Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Commission was tasked with spearheading Hong Kong’s drive to become a world-class, knowledge-based economy,7 by funding the Innovative Technology Fund (ITF) and the DesignSmart initiative. Its aims were supporting the fostering of an innovation and technology culture in the community, promoting technological entrepreneurship, and providing technological infrastructure that facilitates the development of innovation and technology. Other initiatives included the Science Park (design and tech), ASTRI (technological transfer from industry for commercialisation), and Cyberport, a US$2 billion landmark project housing about 100 IT companies and 10,000 IT professionals. The Hong Kong Design Centre (2001) is a multi-disciplinary, non-profit organisation that holds year-round seminars, workshops, and  HAB & CCPR (2005). A study on Creativity Index, http://www.hab.gov.hk/file_manager/en/ documents/policy_responsibilities/arts_culture_recreation_and_sport/HKCI-InteriRepoprt-­ printed.pdf. 7   Innovation and Technology Commission, The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (2005) “Our Mission”, http://www.itc.gov.hk/en/about/mission.htm. 6

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conferences to promote awareness of upgrading the business and design expertise of design professionals and students. The Hong Kong Arts Development Council (ADC) promotes and supports the broad development of the arts, acting as a link between the government, arts sector, and the public. Finally, the controversial West Kowloon Cultural District, which took nearly 20 years in development, now houses the Xiqu Centre, Art Park, M+ Pavilion, and FreeSpace, with more to come. Hong Kong has traditionally been a trading economy, playing the middleman in commerce ranging from manufacturing and contracting to financing. As a result, Hong Kong businesses have not focused as much on either end of the product cycle (product design and consumer contact). Without these precursors to innovation, Hong Kong businesses can feel the constraint of leaning into these new areas of global economics given their unique position as the ‘gateway to the East’ is now dissipating. Some feel Hong Kong businesses are seen to be less adventurous than their counterparts in developing economies because they tend to favour the traditional and the familiar over the novel and untested, a mindset that can be attributed to ‘a combination of Confucian influences and a fault-phobic education system’.8 Hong Kong’s business culture is one that is highly top-down, not conducive to start-ups, and government funding is largely siloed and tech-specific, insufficiently promoting cross-­disciplinary pollination of ideas and multi-function clustering.

Education Hong Kong’s mainstream school system has remained fairly heavy with rote learning, which is thought to be better suited for exams than for proactive and creative learning. With an emphasis on exam results and ranking from an early age, competition among students is fierce because upper-class placement and advancement to tertiary education are  Lai, R. (2008). From creative industries to creative economy: The role of education. Hong Kong Design Centre and the Asia Case Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong. 8

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rigorously filtered by test scores and rankings. Students are seldom given the opportunity to think independently or encouraged to investigate matters on their own through trial and error. Although there are provisions for more creative subjects such as art and design-and-technology, the grading system is nonetheless rigid and outcome-focused. Following secondary education, students with Hong Kong Examination and Assessment Authority (HKALE) results that satisfy university entrance requirements are admitted to one of the eight universities, which have a combined undergraduate population of over 50,000. Apart from certain specialised courses such as medicine, undergraduate education spans three years and specialisation is immediate, with students assigned to respective schools and faculties from the beginning. There are very few degrees that deal extensively with creativity or innovation, apart from specific courses on design outside the mainstream.9 Hong Kong has 18% of the age cohort entering university and another 12% or so entering other forms of short-cycle higher education, significantly lagging behind other East Asian cities like Shanghai and Singapore, where nearly 60% of young people enter some form of postsecondary education. Internationalisation, proximity, and cultural affinity have seen over 80% of non-local students being from the Chinese mainland (2012–2013). World-class cities like Hong Kong now face formidable economic challenges in the global economy, requiring a refinement of unique products and creative services provision to the world market, and in some cases like Hong Kong to reposition themselves in the global ‘creative economy’. Some commentators (including some of those interviewed for this project) believe Hong Kong needs to widen its scope of cultural policies, with arguments ranging from abandoning a ‘patron’ model, which focuses solely on funding the arts, to an ‘architect’ model which regards cultural policy as a way to develop national culture in a global landscape. Others argue a more holistic approach to governance, involving discarding the bureaucratic thinking that dichotomises the market and the state by not only subsidising arts and regulating the commercial creative  Lai (2008).

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sectors, but also cultivating an environment that facilitates the growth of existing cultural and creative industries and the development of new ones. Tonight, I can’t help but wonder what Eno Yim thinks about all this, and where her next iteration of the School of Everyday Life will appear. The need for these and other activist, ecological, and creative interventions here in Hong Kong (and elsewhere) is only growing stronger.

Chapter 4: Hong Kong

There are a lot of white people in Hong Kong. That may be evident to most people, but as I walk through the airport and then through my hotel lobby and then out to dinner, the faces my eyes stare into as we pass are mostly white-presenting, including those who identify as ‘Anglo-­ Chinese’ or ‘expat’ or the more newly arrived like me. There is historical reason for this of course, but there is also the moment in which my visit takes place: the first time for this project, just a few weeks before the anti-­ extradition protests begin. There is also my business here: arts and creativity. There is still a preponderance of anglo or part-anglo players here in the ‘mainstream’ arts, creative, and cultural industries. That is not to erase the scores of gifted Chinese Hong Kongers who are pushing forward the avant-garde arts scene here, but what qualifies as ‘local’ remains a debate. In this project, I’m looking for people to talk with and get to know who are working in the creative and cultural industries, people in higher education teaching in these or related areas, and independent artists. I find it isn’t just the airports and hotel lobbies full of anglo-Hong Kongers, but the mainstream creative and cultural industries, as well as many teaching in higher education. There are more independent artists who are Chinese Hong Kongers. Over the course of 2020, many of the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Harris, Creative Agency, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77434-9_8

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‘local’ Hong Konger university teachers are being replaced by mainland Chinese, part of the dominant political flow towards the contentious ‘re-­ China-­fication’ of Hong Kong. I try to find a spread of multiple diversities: age, gender, ethnicity, discipline, sector. Of those from large multinational companies or organisations, almost all of my participants are white. I start on a Wednesday, trying to find my way around the generally user-friendly Hong Kong train system. To convey the pace of my time in Hong Kong on that first visit, I will share a cast list—sketches—of some of the people I meet and their first impressions, because this kind of breakneck speed is what’s required of fieldwork in this project, and the very pace of it (in addition to all the other border-crossings) makes me wonder how the hell it is possible to connect at all, even to listen at times, as a contemporary researcher. I’m uncomfortable before I begin. The longer I’m a researcher, the more uncomfortable I become. And yet, is abandoning work that confronts difference the answer? I don’t think so. I have a strong espresso, write an email to Stacy, and begin. My first interview is with a high-level executive at a multinational tech firm.

February 2018—Cast of Characters Laurene: She is a white-presenting Australian-sounding regional manager in her 40s, but she makes it clear that her mother was from Hong Kong so she grew up with both cultures, which—she points out several times—is a big reason she got the role she is in. Intercultural competence is primary. That is, at least when it’s local plus white Western competence. The building and the office are impressive in a Western way: colour abounds, as with all offices of this company anywhere in the world; it’s their ‘brand’. Bright colours, lots of digital and screen displays. High security front desk, bilingual signage. Large loud office, lots of activity. It looks something like a childcare centre. I glance around while waiting (of course I’m waiting). Soft colourful spaces for yoga, play, relaxing. Communal areas. Ping pong and other games tables (read cool tech company). A large kitchen with someone to make

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coffees for employees. Also notable because it’s a high (25th) floor of a major downtown area—very expensive real estate. This tower is part of a big retail and business complex. It’s loud—there’s music playing over the loudspeaker. How is anyone working here? The interview itself is super interesting and she is able to speak (like all good globally mobile managers these days) about the local as well as global needs, goals, and victories of this company-as-­nation. It’s so interesting and so predictable that I can’t actually bring myself to include any of it here. Interview anyone from an American/global tech company and you will know everything she said. Near the end of the interview, others come and start eating lunch altogether nearby, in the small lunchroom where (the same) lunch was served by helpers. They are provided with lunch every day, she explains, and asks me if I want to stay. Not sure why she does not take me into her office for the interview, which is hard to hear at times over the loud innovation happening all around us. The employees are mostly younger than her, I’d say in their 20s or early 30s. The participant talks very fast, is very confident, very direct (she never picks her hands, shuffles, pauses very long, or betrays any signs of indecision, insecurity, or reflection), and her direct manner of engagement and speaking seems to reflect the ‘high energy’ and confident surrounds. The signage around us seems to want to reflect Hong Kong—the hallways and arrows have street signs or neighbourhood signs from Hong Kong—in both Cantonese and English—but the style, layout, and branding is consistent with this American multinational company’s offices anywhere in the world. She thinks that’s good—gives it consistency. There is also a sign on the back of the toilet stall door that is a ‘toilet game’ sort of like a mind game or brainstorm game. It’s cute but also makes me feel like there is nowhere to rest—everything has to be purposeful, ‘fun’, ‘cool’, active, and iterating, even when you’re taking a shit. Neville is a white-presenting British man raised in New Zealand who has lived in Hong Kong for 25 years. The film company offices in general are drab. It’s an old Telecom Building near the Hong Kong waterfront area, a posh nice area, and the first thing he does is point out that down

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below and next to us (we are on 12th floor) is the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts (otherwise known as APA to locals). It is a stark difference from the multinational tech company offices I’ve just left. It feels old, small, colourless, and threadbare. Quiet, not much happening. Only a couple of young people drifting in and out of the office slowly. All of the surroundings reflect a kind of disengagement with what might be called a ‘creative industries aesthetic’. That is, the office seems cut away (it is down two different corridors and behind a corridor door) both physically and interpersonally. No good signage. Hard to find. My questions are very much about connections with tertiary or other contexts like the national context, the international context, and both the office and his responses feel decidedly disconnected. His manner of answering the questions is a match for the environment, in that they are slow, hesitant, open. The complete opposite of Laurene, which I think he wears as a badge of honour, to be honest. Anne and Ben (married, interviewed together) He is a Chinese Hong Konger, she is a white Canadian. They met at University of Toronto and were introduced to me via a mutual Canadian friend. We meet in a hip newish restaurant called ‘Lee Lo Mei’ which means ‘Your Mum Is a Bitch.’ Very loud place but great (fusion) Chinese food and cocktails. The restaurant/bar is like them—hybrid. It’s in a cool part of the ‘Central’ neighbourhood which is, well, central. We talk for 90 minutes or so on tape, then turn it off, and (as usual) our conversation over dinner is much more dynamic than the actual interview. They are globally mobile in every way, and seem so at ease in this place but aware of their privilege. Ben is entertaining the idea of going to a Berlin university programme which is an MBA in ‘Creative Leadership’ although he couldn’t really say what that was. Walking me to the train, we discuss how he is the ‘black sheep’ of his family for doing the arts, others being all in business or more conservative jobs. She is the over-achiever in hers. He talks a lot and I find it hard sometimes to keep him on point. She defers to him and lets him talk; although she has opinions, she does not often offer them. It’s so loud in the restaurant, and he talks so much, I find it hard to interrupt him, and consequently we don’t stay very well

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on topic, but it’s a very interesting dinner anyway, and they kindly paid for me. A nice evening that keeps bringing me back to social mobility and class, and its intersections with ethnicity/race, in this ‘creative economy’ and global culture/s. Elaine is a British white woman who has lived here for 30 years, introduced to me by another white expat. I have a strong feeling of this being the elite of the expat community here in Hong Kong—physically we are meeting in Quarry Bay. Her offices are amazing—huge and sprawling spaces in a warehouse building in which she is the expansive and warm (hugging everyone) director and doyenne. It’s a whole floor through, including the front office, two dance studios, a vast costume room, and an art-making/scenic design  room. This itself is highly unusual in Hong Kong due to the relentless space/real estate issues. What is notable is the difference between the way she portrays herself, and her youth arts organisation, and the way, for example, others portray her. She is clearly a very powerful political figure in Hong Kong, an OBE (Order of the British Empire), but also a very ‘New Yorky’ kind of socialite who is obviously a very talented fundraiser and networker which admittedly this work requires. Yet when others in youth performing arts have talked previously about there being no real ‘devising’ scene here, Elaine completely contradicts that and says she’s been doing it for 30 years. To listen to her, she has been doing everything for 30 years. She would not answer questions about the creative ecology of Hong Kong, despite me trying many times to steer her that way—instead she promotes her long history of work here, and her organisation (understandable), but it is quickly clear she is not going to make any analytical statements to help understand the scene either within Hong Kong or regionally. In fact she mostly sounds like a media release, or like she’s at a dinner party with Hong Kong funders: ‘our work is made by and for the community of Hong Kong’; ‘we hold Hong Kong society at the centre of our work’, that kind of thing. Her physical space is amazing and ‘rather than tell you’ about the organisation, she keeps summoning young Chinese women to play promotional videos for me. She gives off the air of a slightly hippie/arty

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‘grand dame’ of Hong Kong society (in fact, everyone local who hears that I’ve been able to meet with her are shocked, because of her fame), and when I ask about Chinese leadership succession plans (she herself mentions she has recently handed over the Directorship to a long-time Chinese employee), she says she feels local herself (with complete disregard for race and racial politics). Which in some ways, she is. And kind of isn’t. More than anything? Her space, her talk, and her performance of self feels like the community arts version of the multinational tech company interview: follow the money. Ken is a community artist introduced to me by a local Chinese Hong Konger, my friend Ka Lai Chan. His English struggles a bit, at times making me think we could have had a much more nuanced interview if I had an interpreter (which he declined). Yet it’s a joy to talk politics (the first interview really like this) with a native Hong Konger who has never lived or studied outside of Hong Kong, and one who is politically frank with me. We meet and talk at a Starbucks near the Hong Kong Polytechnic, and across the street from a gallery he works at (which for some reason wasn’t open). Ka Lai came to introduce us, then left before the interview to teach a class. It feels good to be out of an institutional setting, but also slightly cloak-and-dagger, to be meeting in a coffee shop. But Starbucks is yet another American multinational corporation, so it’s not so subcultural really at all. I wish our conversation can go longer, but he cuts it short. He is very kind about making sure I can get back to my university stop ok. Peter is a really interesting and smart guy who somehow comes across as really slippery and political at the same time. We meet in a university office given to me by my friend and host on the campus of Chinese University of Hong Kong, my work home for my two-week residence. He is young (37) and introduced to me by my friend, who knows him from Singapore, and also teaches at Chinese University like my friend. He talks a lot about looking to China and how great it is, how much opportunity is there, views that are at extreme odds with—or somehow apolitical compared to—several of the other interviews, which commented on how Hong Kong is becoming more ‘red’ since handover from Britain 20 years ago. It feels impossible to pin him down on anything much. His neutrality is kind of an academic version of Elaine, who runs

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the mainstage youth performing arts company. He is very confident, doesn’t really ‘offer’ much, seems to me (sort of under the surface despite superficial pleasantness) as completely dismissive, and completely patronising about my investigations. More than a discussion about Hong Kong, he talks mostly about Singapore, knowing that context better and even Malaysia which he says he only worked in for a few years. Yet he keeps saying it’s impossible to make regional statements, comparisons, or comment. He did in the end make an interesting comparison about the ethos and student body of a private university, like CUHK (theoretical, resistant to empirical learning like the festival he introduced), versus public institutions, where  he taught in other places which have more of an ‘employability’ focus rather than a philosophical one or ‘holistic’ one. But in the end, I never felt like I had really ‘met’ this guy, which is a loss. I meet May in my office at CUHK. She is young, passionate and sweet, and we meet here, which feels right. She understands and accepts traditions, institutions, and rules. She speaks very respectfully, lovingly, and humbly about the great tradition of Cantonese opera, her artform. She sees it as cultural maintenance, which she talks about in the interview. Like many of the others, Kowloon Cultural Precinct (now District) features large in her narrative. June teaches in Creative Media at one of the universities, and to whom I was also introduced by Ka Lai. She is an artist who is doing her masters at the same university. The Creative Media building is a long uphill walk above the campus. This university has the feel of a technical college, like the one where I work—‘working mens’ colleges’ in the old days, that would train for trades like electricians, plumbers, and so on, and have since become hot spots of technology and design studies. As I climb the long hill (apart from enjoying the beautiful view over this stunning city I have come to love so much), I think about space again, and the placement of these various universities, the hierarchy of where the various disciplines are located (as with my own—Education is always out the back somewhere), and the ways in which it is possible to know these university ecologies almost just by reading the layout. I also think again about the School of Everyday Life, and the farming reclaim of real estate, and the islands that make up this place, and how much vitality (if not ‘power’) there always is in the margins. It’s where innovation (i.e. risk) can actually

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occur. I think about the relationship between margins and creativity, and it makes my working class heart smile. This university campus is new, has funky architecture, and is a rabbit warren giving the feeling (and history) that it has been added onto over time. I interview June in her shared studio and throughout the interview other students come in, ultimately four others. It’s a space that feels full of energy—colourful and lively and creative, and being there and seeing all the protest posters, the arts and design works in progress, gives me the idea that we should be photographing all participants in their own workspaces. Why didn’t I think of that before? It’s a project about creativity, after all. So I take a photo of June with my iPhone, and also speak with Ka Lai about using a better camera for this visual element if it seems like a good idea. She tells me about an arts ed/happiness study she is currently working on and how they are using an Instagram account for participants’ self-generated images. I think this is a great idea and she will help me set it up. I feel the thrill and satisfaction of when a project starts to take on its own life. The space is dominated by a big yellow banner in Chinese with the words in English in the lower left corner: ‘Umbrella revolution’. This strikes me because in all other conversations when the protest has come up, I use the word ‘revolution’ and the local person always changes it to ‘umbrella movement’. At the end of our time here, Ka Lai gets June to photograph the space more beautifully, and she includes this banner. She also gives me a kind of chapbook from an artist’s residency she did in Iceland a few years ago on happiness. In this book she has photographs of each participant, and photos she took of the environment, and of nature-­based artworks she made and photographed. And it includes a little description of the project and some narrative about the data. I really love this output and artefact style and think it could be great for this project too—a chapbook for each of the six sites. Why didn’t I think more creatively about this international large-scale study in the beginning? I think about whether it’s some kind of belief I hold that I’m being co-opted by the university, or government funding doesn’t like to see such creative expressions of ‘data’, which I know isn’t strictly true. When did I start thinking like this? I do create projects when they are small scale and ‘relational’, but when I started getting

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funding for these big projects, something in my mind switched to ‘straight’ research and the creativity (ironically) evaporated. Travelling home on the train, I feel debased, like I’ve somehow slid over to the dark side of academia without knowing when or why. The next day I’m off to interview Mark, a Professor of Management. He is North American, has been here for 30 years and is quite brusque at first but then really warms up—a great interview. He is a very large, imposing man. He doesn’t look at me at all for about the first 20 minutes of the interview; he looks down or sideways or anywhere but my face. Eventually he looks at me once he becomes more comfortable. He, like the woman at the multinational tech company, has a great overview or meta-view of the ecology here, within his own field but more generally. These two are really the only ones who seem to be able to do this, and I feel uncomfortable with that, given they are both outsiders and non-­artists. It makes me sad about the in/ability of artists, educators, and others who might not be able to get out of their own human-centred and artform/discipline-centred views and think about the big picture. Why these financial people? I wonder if there is indeed something about their respective roles/fields, or maybe it has something to do with being ex-­pats, migrants, mobile subjects? I wonder then about the relationship between the macro and micro—the levels of the creative ecology here (or anywhere), and whether it is necessary to be able to have the bird’s eye view or not. I interview him in a restaurant at the top of one of the buildings at his downtown university (in the ‘centre’ of things, of course). It was an interesting environment although not his own workspace. This university restaurant was empty when we started and then filled up throughout the interview, and both the way people responded to him, and the way he behaved said much about him. He certainly seemed like ‘lord of the  manor’  and I wonder if he orchestrated this location for just that impression. In the end, I think we both got over our bias against the other and I really learned a lot about how the changing role of Hong Kong in its current situation, moving beyond being the ‘gateway to Asia’, is putting it at risk economically and culturally.  Of course, he doesn’t touch on the growing tensions with mainland China. Next I conduct a joint interview with two Education scholars (Martin and Lana) at a university high on a hill in the north of Hong Kong

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island, which has breath-taking views. This university’s campus is more like a community college, not fancy like some of the others. These two colleagues (one white British, one Indian) sit side-by-side in adjacent offices and I interview them together due to  time constraints. It is  an interesting conversation and also reflects the class and demographic differences between my host at the more elite university and the students they get at this one, but also seemed to reflect a difference in terms of Education faculties getting lesser top-tier students than, for example, the Business Management Schools (no surprise there, a global pattern). Lastly for the Wednesday, I interview an Asian American Education scholar there, who is a hip-hop DJ from Los Angeles and teaches critical pedagogy. He has this understated cool dude vibe and he’s attractive which he wears prominently, but his office is an interesting mix between critical race theorists, hip-hop stuff, and a wall full of the greatest number of awards and certificates I’ve ever seen, all prominently displayed. It makes me laugh, so when I ask to take his picture, I take it in front of those certificates. I think it says a lot about his compelling contradictions, although he says many times that it is a challenge to be taken seriously here by his colleagues, as a hip-hop guy, so maybe that accounts for the neoliberal display. I think about how hard it is to be cool and relevant to students, and to be taken ‘seriously’ by colleagues, in faculties of Education—a frustrating conundrum that doesn’t seem to plague those who work in Design, for example, or Media Studies or even Cultural Studies. After so many years in Education, I still feel flattened by its conservatism and contradictions. I say goodbye to the great view and remote campus and wind my way back down into the ‘centre of things’ for dinner and a swim. * * * Today is Thursday, 1 March, and I go to yet another of the over 201 education institutions in Hong Kong to interview a Music Education  There are 8 universities in Hong Kong, but almost 20 degree-awarding higher education institutions. All eight public universities in Hong Kong use English as the medium of instruction for the majority of courses, and all are well known and respected well beyond the locality. 1

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professor (Linda). She works in this small office in a rabbit warren of buildings and offices at this university, and is unwell today, so very softly spoken. She has very narrow definitions of creativity and really doesn’t see it as terribly relevant to her work as a music professor. Her office is small and crowded with books and tchatchkas. I feel I never really get an inside view of this woman. She is reticent and considered in her responses, but then about three or four times throughout the interview, bursts into loud laughter! A compelling enigma. Jana is a ‘gifted and talented’2 Education scholar at a prominent university who has been doing giftedness research for more than twenty years. I met her when she came to a public talk I gave. She introduced herself afterward, and identified as someone who researches creativity, and asked to meet. So to start today’s visit she gives  me a tour of her creativity-­ specific centre (exciting!) and tells  me about her various Hong-Kong-­ wide projects well-funded by the Jockey Club (Hong Kong’s premier charity and community benefactor) on ‘talent development’ and creativity with Hong Kong teachers (both primary and secondary). A very interesting conversation, and centre, that is bridging the different goals of ‘talent development’ and creativity education for all. Tin is the principal of the School of Creativity, a friendly and charming young guy who has worked at the school since it started, 12 years ago. He was a teacher there first and then recently became the principal, and he is dynamic, passionate, and totally committed to these students (and is also a yoga teacher). It’s a beautiful atmosphere and talking to him, it’s easy to see why. As an ecology, this school is creative in material, processual, and relational ways. There are public exhibition and performance spaces here, and all the classrooms are overflowing with works in the making. The walls themselves seem porous, linking the inside and outside of this community of makers and thinkers. It’s exciting just to be here, and every square inch of space is used.

 This is the old terminology used by developmental ed. (psychology) researchers to describe those students who show an aptitude for creative or innovative excellence. Most of the old psychometric tests (some still in use!) for identifying ‘gifted’ students (i.e. smart and/or creative) use this language and it’s still considered a field of study within education, although this individualist, human-­ centred approach is now considered part of creativity studies. 2

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I meet Zhia at White Cube Gallery in the  Central  neighbourhood of Hong Kong. She is a young but already-accomplished artist and web interface designer who talks about the hybrid generational identification of ‘slash’ (‘I want to be slash’) which means to work in multiple ways/ places (not just for a company). But there is also an ethical side to it: slash means to be diversified in one’s pursuits, for self-actualisation. While others have described the necessity for this kind of approach these days, it’s the first time I’ve heard the term. But when I repeat it to others both in Hong Kong and back in Australia, most people under forty are like ‘oh yeah, slash’. I love that she helped me to understand slash as a life choice, rather than an economic inevitability. She also talks about the Umbrella Movement like many others  do, in a relatively apolitical way, but it is interesting from a web design point of view. But then again, maybe she was being cautious with me as a relative stranger (friend of a friend) and I didn’t see her true feelings.

Tuesday, 6 March 2018 I meet Ka Chun at the train station near my hotel and we walk to one of the university cafes near the bookstore where I take his photo. He is young, chatty, and manages a community men’s band. He takes his band around to other countries (has gone so far to Brunei, Singapore, China, and Malaysia—going to Indonesia this August) to perform and do cultural exchange. His wife is Malaysian, so he has lots of contacts there, and he has a good friend at Brunei airlines, so he gets cheap fares. A very passionate community-minded guy, a very sweet disposition, and really committed to the social programme of this wind band and jazz/general orchestra. He says some interesting things about the regional differences in the music scene between here, Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, but of course after the tape was turned off. Of course, it’s only one person’s perspective, but he says how particularly Malaysian and Indian musicians used to be the preferred musicians for British ‘police bands’ 100 years ago, and now they don’t even have their own ‘programme’ of music education. That they have fallen behind countries like China, Korea, Taiwan, and most dominant of all, Japan, a situation about which he expresses regret.

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Fei is a political activist/visual (installation) artist who works with women’s groups. She describes how her migration from China as a child has informed her life and work so profoundly. She provides a great overview of the visual art scene in Hong Kong from the non-commercial perspective. Anna is a young Chinese performance artist who came to Hong Kong from mainland in order to study Cultural Management, which she thought was really good. She describes how it opened her mind to the censorship and other cultural conditions in China, and how her work still works across those profound differences between Hong Kong and China. She does political performance work, sometimes performing herself but also sometimes curating, producing, and currently is researching about art and borders/migration with partners in Budapest. Both Anna and Fei talked extensively about how they have no permanent arts space in which to work, which is common amongst politically oriented artists in Hong Kong. Jackie is a young instructor at a central university, where she studied, then became a sessional, now is on staff but wants to do a PhD in Australia or elsewhere. She was interesting but perhaps too young to be able to comment much on the ‘meta’, which this project is really focused on. What she did do was take me on an awesome tour of the campus, and the new design building there. It feels hip, young, international, and aesthetically/materially compelling. Focused on design, media arts, and communication, this university also feels so much more like a community, with young artsy people hanging around, working indoors and out, debating, computing, you get the picture. I reflect a bit wistfully as I follow her around that none of the Education schools/campuses that I’ve visited here have this contemporary feel. Or in Australia. Or in any of the other sites. Ah, Education. How can we educate for the future, when we seem so stuck in the past? It’s a long train ride to my last interview of the day. I’m grateful for my tracking device supplied by the hotel, which makes it easy to walk around this dynamic city and its myriad diverse neighbourhoods. I find a tall, thin, fairly non-descript building (from the outside), and take the elevator to the ninth floor.

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May is a 65-year-old legend in Hong Kong arts circles. She’s pretty full on when we first start talking: she knows it all, she’s been on the scene for, well, over half a century. She’s a master of the ‘that’s what it is!’. She is dynamic, across many sectors, complete egomaniac, and lots of fun to talk with. No falling asleep here. I get particularly excited that she used the term ‘arts ecology’ (a course she created at a local university), and that she referenced the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ of creative and cultural industries in Hong Kong—she is speaking my language. Most interesting, perhaps, is the building and ‘outreach’ organisation she has established and currently runs in  this 14-story building in the coolest district around, between Wan Chai and Causeway Bay. It is amazing. She has curated the building itself as a ‘creative ecology’ without too much intervention, but a place where multi-artforms can organically intermingle and collaborate or just help each other or come into proximity. It’s a compelling place, right from entering the tiny elevator plastered with stickers from a range of arts collectives that are, or have been, housed here over that time. May has been running it since 2003. It’s a real launchpad for artists before they find independent funding. I think about the School of Creativity while she shows me around (which she also helped to establish). As I make my way back to the hotel that night I think about arts activists like her and Eno Yim at the School of Everyday Life, and how their commitment to the arts drives them into new projects where the need for creative spaces leads them. Of the 26 people in Hong Kong who were formally interviewed for this project, they identified in the following ways: 47% identified as being ‘Hong Konger’, 8% as Australian, 8% Canadian, 11% Chinese, 15% American, 4% British, 4% Singaporean, and 4% from New Zealand. Another melting pot, but so different from Singapore, these tiger economies of East Asia.

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Fig. 1  Hong Kong workshop with the verbatim script

* * * HONG KONG PERFORMANCE (Fig. 1) (invitation flyer) In February-March 2018, I collected interview data from stakeholders in higher education, the arts and creative industries in Hong Kong. In March 2019—just over a year later—we return to work with local actors to develop a performance drawn from the transcripts of some of the interviews. This workshop performance will be followed by a group discussion to reflect on the topic, the power of performance in research contexts, and the exploration of ‘Hong Kong creativity’ from this data set. The intention is to creatively engage with the data, in order to gain deeper insight into how creativity is taught and enacted in Hong Kong. We hope you will join us! The details are: Date: Wednesday 20th March, 2019 Time: 4 p.m.–5:30 p.m.

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Location: Hong Kong University, Runme Shaw Building, room 205 OPERA SINGER: Cantonese opera is a person-to-person art. CORPORATE MANAGER: It’s always business first. HIGHER EDUCATION: Gifted education is talent development. CULTURAL INDUSTRIES EDUCATION: They don’t see me as taking sides ARTIST: If they have no space, then what do they do?

Actors Perform Hong Kong Soundscape OPERA SINGER: Opera Singer: I’m female, 23 years old, and I was born in Hong Kong. I learned Cantonese opera, and hopefully it it will be my career. I went to the Hong Kong Chinese Association. They have an academy of opera. We went to the school on Saturday every week, from 11 o’clock in the morning until 4 o’clock PM. It’s kind of an extra-­ curricular activity, it’s not the regular training like in the mainland China. They have regular schools and whole-day training. But in Hong Kong we don’t have that. So, I have four years training in the academy, and after graduating from that, I went to the Yau Ma Tei theatre venue partnership scheme. I’ll still be in the scheme until like forever, maybe. We don’t really belong to certain troupes. When we have a show, they will contact you if they think you’re suitable. For girls, for female roles, it’s kind of competitive because there are many plays that have acting female roles. I don’t think I will be as competitive as my teachers were, because they were trained from when they were four or eight or six years old. But for us—I went to the academy when I was 16. It was very late. Our problem is we don’t have a fixed income. We don’t have a professional troupe. We don’t have a Hong Kong Chinese orchestra which are supported by the government, and that’s why we need to keep performing, to sustain our living. But in the mainland China, they are mostly supported by the government. So, they don’t really have to care about their income, so they can spend more time just on their artistic development. But we don’t. Because rehearsals cost money, you have to call musicians, you have to call all the actors. Our veterans are the old teachers. But the audience is changing. You need to try more new blood in the audience, or maybe like students. So,

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we need to rejuvenate some new plays as well. Our audience base is pretty old. CORPORATE MANAGER: I’ve been in Hong Kong for six years, and I’m the Managing Director of Sales and Operations here. It’s difficult to find people qualified to do the kinds of roles that we have because there’s an intersection between technology and creativity that isn’t trained for currently. So, it’s technology, it’s data and then actually understanding creative process. A lot of the graduates, particularly if they’ve come from a business discipline, don’t understand creative process. The practical arts application, but also the creative thinking application, isn’t always there. Their resilience and failure-tolerance is zero when they hit us. They’re used to succeeding. They’re attached to it. We interview around four key criteria and it’s well documented about how we hire. We look for team play and saying, “We,” more than saying, “I.” A generally good, caring collaborator, community minded. We look for general cognitive ability. You’ve got to be smart and can think creatively about problem solving. Then the last one is we will look for leadership capabilities, so evidence that you can start a movement and people will follow you. We advertise just about every role globally, so I think we have 10,000 jobs a year that are vacant. Two million applications per year. Then we actually have algorithms that check the applicants first because it’s so scale, and then streamline them based on the criteria that we’re looking for. The previous team that I had, two of the girls were graduates from Taiwan in Design Thinking. That was their thing. They’d actually written their own book in Chinese which sold out of its first edition, 10,000 copies and they were in the second print run at 23 or 24 years old. Yeah, we hire over-achievers. We set up our environment to try and encourage collaboration and creativity because we know that’s where the good ideas are going to come from. We understand that we need to create the culture that we want to have. Where we have intersections, things like design thinking seem to fit into both camps because if it goes too far to one end of the creativity spectrum, it kind of gets too far away from the technologists and the language that we use in our business. There are other forms of creativity and within team-building events, they do everything from cooking classes, learning how to paint signs together. We used to have a budget for

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ski trips. They stopped that one, it’s too dangerous. In two and a half weeks’ time, I’m flying to Israel and Palestine to do leadership in conflict training. If I think about the definition of creativity from an agency or an arts perspective, we’re probably not at that end of the spectrum. If I think about creativity as more of innovation related to getting things done, production and engineering, we’re very much at that end of the spectrum. CULTURAL INDUSTRIES EDUCATION: I’m 37. I’m an assistant professor in the Arts in Cultural Management program here. When I first came to the university, the first course that was given to me was called Curating and Managing Cultural Festivals. It was mainly taught in the classroom, and I thought that it shouldn’t be that way. I started this festival which is alongside the course. Students have to take part in the curatorial process and the management process. I think this is one way to promote critical thinking and creativity. This year we’re running the fifth festival, it’s already a fixture of the department. A lot of students join our program because of it. We focus on creative industries, but we take a more critical approach, which means we’re not just talking about the outputs and numbers, we also focus a lot about what goes behind in trying to churn out these numbers, and also things that are being neglected in the process of doing so. We view creative industry as more of a problem. Industry can only tell us the now, the present, or maybe the next one or two years. But in education and research we should also think about what is going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years. The performing arts in Hong Kong would have to look towards mainland China in the next five years. China is now really hyping up their so-called cultural industries. They don’t have the term ‘creative industries’. IT is a really big thing in China. HIGHER EDUCATION: I mainly take charge of a gifted program, [in] which we provide support services for gifted students in primary and secondary school in Hong Kong. We also do research to understand the needs of gifted students and keep along with the development of gifted education in Hong Kong and in the world. We are lucky that our project is the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charity Trust Fund Project in the area of teachers. They gave us a big sum of money. There’s a need for primary school teachers to [start] gifted

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education earlier, rather than when the student becomes an adolescent. That’s why we’re focusing more on the primary schools. One of the main areas of work for gifted education is talent development. Because when we want to allow students to develop their potential to the fullest, we should allow them to become creative, to have analytical thinking skills, and also to have positive wellbeing at the same time. A lot of students are not satisfied with the traditional kind of curriculum. They are more creative. Students in junior secondary levels also tried to work on the technology kind of thing or set up a company. There’s really a strong gap between the education system and [how] we prepare students for future society. The education system is still very traditional. Teachers have a fixed mindset that their role is to complete what they are assigned to teach, instead of what the student needs. We try to encourage them to allow flexibility and also remind them the importance of the needs of the students. It’s important for the government to look at how we can change the examination system to allow teachers to focus more on students’ creativity. OLDER ARTIST: I call myself a video artist, but actually I have been involved in a lot of things. In the 80s and 90s I was very active in making video art, but then gradually I got into being an advisor and teacher. I’ve lived in Hong Kong since my childhood. I’m now 65. Work space is so important, it’s lucky that some people asked me to do this building, because in the past 12 or 13 years many emerging artists had no place to go and they came here to do some experiments and they really got something out of it. We set up this building to just let artists use it. Some need more time to get funding, and there’s not much space. And now, at last, they get it, and they go out. They are financially viable. If they had no space, then what do they do? So space actually is a very important thing. And it makes the interaction between different kind of art forms possible. Here they try to collaborate with each other; so its organic. We try to fill the gap. It has been going since 2003. Hong Kong is getting more elderly who have longer lives because of better living conditions. Depending on how you look at it, they can be a burden. A professor next door, he came here and formed a group, and he does things that are so interesting, you know? He is so creative, even

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[though] he is not young anymore. He creates a lot of energy, so I let him in. There are fewer opportunities for older artists. CORPORATE MANAGER: Once you understand the Eastern ways of doing business and decision making, which is a collectivist mindset, you get it. The Western way, which is individualistic and a little bit table thump-y and, ‘My opinion’, and ‘I disagree’, is completely at odds with the Hong Kong mindset. This is really interesting in terms of how you make decisions, or how you get to a creative solution. How you make a decision is you want your boss to say yes to something. You have a few meetings first and you lobby. You lobby all of the various teams and then collectively, you come up with an A and a B option. You really want A, but you’ll put B in front of your boss as well, just in case. You’ll go through this long process of all of this consultation and you’ll come to the boss with A and B, and if the boss says B, everybody nods and walks away, and then they have another meeting, and then they delegate to go back to the boss and say, “No, no, the correct answer was A.” So, that’s how a decision will get made. How they actually get to the A and B options is also very interesting. In the west, or in Australia, brainstorming is a very noisy process. “Hey we’re going to do brainstorming.” Everyone goes, “Yeah, yeah, and this, and this,” and we talk across the top of each other and yeah, Post-it Notes. In Hong Kong it’s silent. You give everybody a sticky note pad and you say, “Okay. So, you’ll have five or 10 minutes individually to think about what you would like to say,” and then it’s a very structured, very facilitated, very respectful, very thoughtful process, which for me was completely mind-blowing, and it works very well right across North Asia. So, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China, all work very well with a silent brainstorming technique. It’s a very different way and at its root, I think it really comes from the Taoist, Confucianist, Buddhist system of the self is lesser than the sum, and the sum is always about your family, your community, all of those sorts of things. CULTURAL INDUSTRIES EDUCATION: Singapore hosted the Youth Olympics and I was involved in the so-called creative committee. We were supposed to go into the room and debate what should be the opening and closing event of the Olympics. But everything is really structured. It’s always like that here. It’s still creative brainstorming, but it has its limitations. Maybe we are a more collective society, or maybe we also

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give more respect in that team. So, they break us down into four or five teams, and maybe in one particular team there is someone who is more vocal, or someone who is more highly respected in the creative sector, so we tend to listen to the person a bit more. We tend to keep quiet if this happens. OPERA SINGER: Some of the veterans are very stuck to their own beliefs in certain costumes, because we have rules in what you wear as some characters, and some of the veterans think it’s okay to change. It’s never a bad thing to promote your own local art to the world. I think to attract international audiences is important, and for Cantonese opera in Hong Kong we are going to have the West cultural district, which claims to be an international stage, so as [a] very local [artform in] the city centre, [it’s a chance to] really package ourselves. How we present it to the world I think is important. The Cantonese opera is the most lucky artform, amongst other artforms in Hong Kong. The government is very supportive, besides money. They always say, Hong Kong Cantonese opera is a local art, so they are very proud of that. It’s very hard to lure people to choose Cantonese opera as their career. We have limited people, maybe 300? It’s a very small industry. HIGHER EDUCATION: We try to encourage students who have a flexible mindset and think more in ways of solving problems; creative problem solving is what we are encouraging. To become creative, students have to have a willingness to take challenges, to try something new. Because of the world’s focus on talent development and gifted education, the [Hong Kong] government saw the need to allow higher ability students in the school to function better rather than have lots of problems. But in this 20 something years, I don’t think there’s been very big development in this area. Another driving force is to be connected with the mainland China. They try to maintain the international image of Hong Kong. But as a smart city, we are not as smart as Singapore. We are not as smart as Beijing or Japan or Shanghai. ARTIST: Everyone is talking about cultural economy, about creative industry, so even the government, you know has an office called Create

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Hong Kong, try to give people money to make big things, to run huge programs on design, the annual Design Week. They get all the resources. Whether they believe it or not, its a world trend and also the hard reality that Hong Kong is facing. We have no other resources except human beings. We have no manufacturing anymore. We have no agricultural lands. We have buildings, but then buildings, its not just one thing to let us have revenue. So what are the other things? The cultural development of West Kowloon is also about that. It does make more people aware of art and culture. I can say that none of the officials are really understanding what it is. I try to say creative cultural industry, or cultural creative industry. I think in a way they have to be together. So when we are talking about creative industries, one of the key concepts is how a city to make good use of its culture. When you try to globalise a product you still want people to know where it comes from. Like McDonalds, its USAs McDonalds. Like Japan, they never talk about creative industry. You like Japanese things, you go there and then you look at those ceramics, everything. And you want to buy it. And you can still see that it’s from Japan, so they don’t need to advocate creative industry anymore. After the umbrella movement in 2014 in the way we felt, you know, we felt—we could not change the government, and the government has become tighter; it defeated us very much. We are going to have bi-­election this weekend and things are very quiet. Its different from before and not much people discuss it. We don’t have much hope, just keep on living, or go to other places.

 ctors Reprise Sounds from Hong Kong A Creativity Soundscape OPERA SINGER: My goal isn’t just getting to be the main character. I just want to learn the old classic Cantonese opera pieces, because our veterans are getting old, it’s very scary if they die and those pieces are lost. And because Cantonese or Chinese opera, you have to learn in person. You can’t learn by reading or computers. You have to really demonstrate to the youngsters so that they can learn, and you have to talk to them. You have to really see people demonstrate. You have to learn many times.

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So, it’s very hard to learn the pieces completely, you have to take time. So, I just want to learn those classic pieces. It’s really a person to person type of art. Performing arts is all about people. CORPORATE MANAGER: One of the things that Hong Kong laments now is the net loss of creativity here. I think this fixation on the financial markets and on the past for Hong Kong, has actually meant that the net creativity has gone backwards. Our ability to adopt technology, which is related to net creativity, is so far behind here, compared to just across the border in China, where everything is digital. It’s got to be global and local. Communication, collaboration, creativity, but it’ll always be business first. CULTURAL INDUSTRIES EDUCATION: The Hong Kong performing arts is getting more and more inward looking. The problem now is that some Hong Kong people don’t want to explore. I mean, they don’t even understand what is happening in China. I’m in a very good position because people don’t see me as taking sides. I have colleagues who are from Hong Kong and when they say something good about mainland China immediately they get questioned and, in the end, people accuse them of being someone who betrays Hong Kong. We have some colleagues from mainland China and situations where the Hong Kong people are against the mainland Chinese, and the professors are suddenly accused, if they don’t step up and say something for mainland China. Things like that happen, this kind of politics in Hong Kong. I think I’m in a very good position. I have never been accused of anything. HIGHER EDUCATION: I prefer our students to be global citizens, because sometimes for those who have a musical talent, artistic talent or very innovative ideas, Hong Kong is not a place for them to develop their potential or their talents in this area. Hong Kong students have a privilege of a good language ability in English. It’s easier to connect with other areas of the world, and Hong Kong people travel a lot. Hong Kong is a city with freedom of information, freedom of speech. Maybe not in the future, but at least at the moment. We just encourage students to become creative, to have a willingness to take challenges, to try something new. ARTIST: It’s getting redder and redder—not exactly communistic, but capitalistic, very authoritarian. We are facing a cooling period, just trying to be rational. People can still maintain the freedom to speak up, but in a

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creative way without being caught by the government. We can still think independently. I think art could do more because art can always be very subversive. Just keep doing it. OPERA SINGER: It’s very scary if they die and those pieces are lost. CORPORATE MANAGER: It’s always business first CULTURAL INDUSTRIES EDUCATION: I’m in a very good position HIGHER EDUCATION: Hong Kong is not a place for them to develop their potential or their talents in this area. ARTIST: Just keep doing it (Fig. 2). * * * It’s a warm afternoon in this classroom at Hong Kong University, and the large crowd has been attentive. There are university students, interview participants, members of the public. This post-show discussion is the first one to be conducted, and it turns out to be one of the most dynamic.

Fig. 2  Actors perform Hong Kong Creativity Soundscape

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They seem to enter into the experience, enjoy it, have emotional responses to it. Are curious. In hindsight, we realise of course that this 20 March 2019 performance and discussion are occurring only three months before the first anti-extradition bill protest on 9 June 2019. The deep emotion and anxiety of the Hong Kong people is present in this discussion, which reflects that nostalgia, fear and frustration present throughout the interviews. While the protests hadn’t started yet, there was a mounting sense of sadness and fear about the ‘re-China-fication’ of Hong Kong, and the slow loss of local culture that was being incrementally replaced by mainland Chinese culture driven from Beijing. The Hong Kong sense of separate identity, politics, and unique culture was already under threat, and this becomes not only a pervasive thread throughout the interviews, but of course present in the performance and discussion as well. Someone asks: ‘I can see your endeavour in encouraging local languages; there’s girls speaking Cantonese, Mandarin, but for speakers that are not so familiar with those languages, do you think it’s also a barrier for them not to understand what the thing is about? Like, I can recognise some songs they sing, they’re talking about the elevator being closed, these are all day-to-day things, but I’m worried that if someone doesn’t really live here, would that be a barrier for them to understand what you’re trying to express.’ We talk about it at length and partly I say: …I had the opposite worry, which is that I think it’s a limitation that I do the interviews in English. I worry less about the audience who doesn’t understand Mandarin or Cantonese than I do about the fact that I know— I mean, everyone spoke English very well, and I offered translators and people said no—but that’s really not the whole picture, is it, because if you’re trying to talk about a complex cultural phenomenon like the changing role of creativity in contemporary society in Hong Kong which is so culturally fluid right now, and in which there’s a lot of anxiety about culture change, then probably speaking in a second or third or fourth language is not really going to get to the heart of what you want to say.

Kel responds from the perspective of the devising process: ‘So these emerged out of warm-ups that we were doing. So typically when you

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walk into a space, particularly with a new group of people, you will run through a series of activities to get everyone sort of working together, collaborating, and also I think it was really important from my perspective to anchor the study in a place. So one of the first warm-ups we did was creating a soundscape of Hong Kong. I knew it could be something that we might use, but it was initially just part of that process of us as a group of people who have never worked together before. That was the first warm-up on the first day with the birds in the morning and traffic and all that stuff that you heard, it went really fast. And then the warm-up on the second day was ‘what does creativity in Hong Kong look like?’ The male actor adds his perspective that ‘so most of us grew up in 90s, and during that period, I don’t know if you guys know Stephen Chow or something, he was basically the Hong Kong Jim Carrey at that time. You just look into the translation of the words—it’s actually like mean nothing. Sometimes—it’s actually like—during a song it’s just like A, B, C, D, E and like that literally means nothing and so we didn’t care about that. We were brave enough to just do whatever we think that it’s possible to do. Within that limitation actually Stephen Chow is trying to walk a fine line. One step further, it’s something obscene and one step backward, it’s something not really funny. And Hong Kong is always like walking on a line and that’s how we do it. And amidst lots of knowing laughs and nodding heads, an audience member chimes in: ‘Hong Kong is quite special creatively in the sense that it has this really tongue in cheek creative comedic element. And I was actually curious in relation to your other interviews if the idea of language and comedic creative language came up at all? Because it’s quite prevalent, especially when you look at the theme of resistance. I think specific and unique to Hong Kong is this idea of like creativity and resistance through how we comedically construct the language in Cantonese. Female:

Hong Kong have the Hong Kong way of humour. Like Australia, the firemen saving the animals. Like Taiwan is like cool guys, India is Bollywood style and saving a woman. But we think Hong Kong is like ... the ideology of like being a hero, it’s like okay, we are like that, this kind of cultural face, it’s like it’s funny in a way and then it’s the other way.

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I think it’s even better if we can do it in Cantonese if we have more time. Actually I’d like to say as a resident of Hong Kong who does not really understand Cantonese, I mean the sound of Cantonese is the soundscape of Hong Kong and how many times since I’ve been living here have I sat at a table drinking beer with people speaking Cantonese all around and the way that people are expressive in Cantonese, the way they draw out syllables. The way they’ll use the tones to be expressive is just very beautiful. So I really appreciate it. And the soundscape, the Cantonese is really Hong Kong style Cantonese mixing English, it’s very local. Because Cantonese, the whole Canton region is also being the mainland, part of mainland China. So I think that part, is very local. I thought that the four stories and the way the themes that you chose to put it together really brought different aspects of creative life in Hong Kong together and that as a longtime resident here, but as an American, I could kind of connect with different things. So like the educator, I’m a teacher educator, my area’s English language teaching and so the kinds of discourses that were coming out of your story were really familiar to me. And then I lived on Peng Chau, a little island, for many, many years and every year there was a Cantonese opera and it was for the elderly community. Where I live now we don’t have that. It doesn’t kind of come into my life in the way that it did living on a small island and yeah, so kind of touching on issues of space and academia and of course the business thing. When I came to Hong Kong in 1990, there weren’t that many international artists here and I just bought like thousands of dollars’ worth of tickets to the arts festival and the arts festival has grown so much, like it’s just so huge. So I think one of the things is that it’s bringing different aspects of creative life together. But I also feel that one aspect of Hong Kong life is that my encounters with creativity is very limited to—like, I feel they

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kind of happen in these pockets and then those pockets don’t—they don’t intersect. So you kind of have all these— like this ex-pat world of English speakers who kind of do particular things and their kids do regular things and then there are all these kind of local artists doing creative stuff in a really micro way that I would only encounter if I went out on a Sunday to an area that I don’t live in, and something that I kind of encounter, like creative stuff on the street, on the pavement or in a corner, in places that I don’t even expect. So I feel like there’s creative life around that I often I don’t know how to encounter and I encounter it in kind of middle-class Western ways, by buying expensive arts festival tickets to see international artists. You know, this kind of thing. And then the other thing is—sorry, I get emotional, but just the love for Hong Kong, (starts to cry)—I deeply love Hong Kong. Yep. Well, you know, in these 25 interviews there’s so much love for Hong Kong and I think as a transnational person like you, I think that gentrification happens and cultural change happens and is a constant, right, but in a place like Hong Kong that’s been such a pivotal, geographically pivotal and politically pivotal place and the ways in which it’s changing just seem so profound right now that it is a really—I feel really fortunate to—you can’t get every view about that but there is—my sense, as an outsider, is that there is some great sorrow and that there is great apprehension at the moment. And that’s why when the older artists says, “It’s a cooling period and we’re trying to be rational.” I mean, it’s heartbreaking. And then she goes back to her 60-year practice, which is: art can be subversive and can comment on how every culture goes through these expressive, and then repressive, times. And yet that passion and that commitment, like in the young Cantonese opera student performer, I think those things do rise because you’re just like no, I’m going to fight for these parts of it—and that’s why I think work in creativity is so interesting right now, because it’s that tension

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between the globalisation of creativity, which is a genericisation, right, making the  unique generic. The multinational corporate manager, that’s just a global nation state, that company. And then this beautiful resilient cultural specificity that always remains in every place. Recently I just got back to Hong Kong and I’m trying to get into recruitment and as I get to know more about the different job natures, I realised that it’s always a thing that we compare ourselves to Japan, Singapore and Malaysia as like recently China and the problem of Hong Kong and China, like the conflict between them is actually getting even more serious in recent times because the new generation is actually not seeing the reason why we have to study China. We still believe that we have some sort of better parts because we compare Hong Kong to old China and we compare to different countries in a way that—we have this pride. It’s a very important topic for us to teach because it’s basically the problem of our—I don’t want to say this but from our education system, from how we teach our students, we taught them to obey the mainland Chinese. …all this play on words, that is something we try to implement, incorporate as well. And that is the—as a native Hongkonger, that is something that we really want to keep and document and just as before we were getting emotional about the situation, the culture of Hong Kong—I hold that dear to my heart because even as a Hongkonger all my life, I did feel this urgency to document everything because I feel that, as others have said, Hong Kong culture is a culture of disappearance and I did worry but after these three days, working with these young people, it really gives me this hope and there’s this—coming back to the resistance, the idea of resistance. It’s a little bit cliché but honestly, honest to my heart, these young people, they are our resistance. Yeah. They are the resistance against disappearance. It doesn’t have to be political, it’s just the resistance to our disappearance.

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I would say that this is part of Dan’s thinking is sort of coming back here. We could’ve made a piece out of the transcripts back in Australia. But the idea of coming back and working with local people allows that kind of perspective to be generated, to be in there, so the Cantonese speaking about—mixture of Cantonese and English language and a bit of the subversive stuff that was kind of present within I think the second soundscape in particular, and of course your responses now, these are all incredibly important parts of the conversation that without this particular work that we’ve done here now, wouldn’t be able to be present in the overall research. It’s fantastic that Dan saw to do this kind of process in this way so that these perspectives of what is truly Hong Kong creativity can be brought to life. There’s something about the creative form, working with people who know Hong Kong and then presenting it back to you today. I understand both the Cantonese and the English, so that was quite powerful. I was waiting for someone to make the noise of drilling. But then these sounds also change as you move through Hong Kong. So this morning I went to the New Territories to visit and then I find that as I move from one end of Hong Kong to the other, that sounds change. And also Cantonese, the language, Cantonese is just one of the dialects here and if you move say to the New Territories and you’ll hear old ladies using the dialect and yeah, so it changes and shifts. I’m really interested in this notion of how creativity also informs, and the temporal, so this notion of you’re capturing something which is this moment, then next year changes. So rather than seeing something that’s disappearing, maybe it is evolving. But part of that change is—performance helps us understand what’s going on so then it triggers for me, as a piece of data and research, it’s invited me to respond authentically and that’s unique. Most times whenever I read a journal article, you don’t get that kind of emotional response which I

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think is really important. That’s what human research is all about. So thank you for that. The other thing is that I notice when we collect data from participants, often we’re told that we have to anonymise them, they have to be invisible and somehow as a researcher, it’s such a huge responsibility, we speak for them and I think this way you can actually hear the data, hear the voices and I think that really connects with you and I think makes it more appealing to different people. So it’s very powerful.

Intermezzo 5: Water (badu)

Sydney is a city known for its harbour. The Harbour Bridge, the Sydney Opera House, Darling Harbour, the ferry to Manly Beach—for most visitors and many locals, it is these manufactured elements of the site that are most iconic. But it wasn’t always this way, and for many, the water itself is still the most important focus. Since 2017 though, a new initiative draws clearer focus between Sydney’s Indigenous histories, resilience, and relation to water. Through a curated series of Aboriginal stories, the in-development Sydney Harbour Walk presents an innovative way to inspire the public to experience the harbour foreshore in a way that is not currently available. Aboriginal curator Emily McDaniel is providing recommendations for the storytelling Harbour Walk, outlining ways to present the Harbour Walk as an Acknowledgement of Country. It aspires to weave a story about strength, survival, and continuity, using a range of different artistic media. The nine-kilometre walk will be named using a Gadigal word—the name of the area’s traditional custodians. Visitors will be led around Sydney’s famous foreshore by stories of water, reminding both locals and visitors of the long-standing Indigenous histories here and the creative and cultural significance of those lives, practices, and relationships (both © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Harris, Creative Agency, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77434-9_9

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human and non-human). The Gadigal were one of 29 original clans here, collectively known as the Eora Nation, and water was at the centre of their lives (Fig. 1). This is about you seeing what we see. “You feeling and hearing what we hear,” Indigenous curator Emily McDaniel says. “It’s important to feel a place, not just visit a place. We think of Country and water that is living and breathing; you have to take time to get to know it,” says Indigenous curator Emily McDaniel. The plan is unusual, not just in joining Indigenous artists with universities, industries and marine museums, but in its focus on celebrating the harbour’s diverse sea life, with a proposal for installing a hydrophone to hear sounds from the seafloor. “We’ve become detached from the harbour and our relationship has

Fig. 1  Six ways First Peoples’ stories define Sydney’s Harbour Walk, City of Sydney website (https://news.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/articles/6-­ways-­first-­peoples-­ stories-­define-­sydneys-­harbour-­walk)

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suffered,” she says. “We want people to dip their feet to remind them they are standing on the edge of this sunken valley, many thousands of years old.”1

The harbour walk seems not to be open yet, but has received government support since 2017 and hopefully will be available in 2021. The 12 featured ‘sitelines’ along the walk will be framed by text and audio installations. Sitelines are relationships between sites of historical and cultural significance, including ‘hidden histories’, which recognise the connection between Indigenous acknowledgements of Country as land, water (badu) and sky. It makes me wonder why I don’t talk about land, water, and sky when I say where I’m from, or what makes New  York New  York, or thinking about the ways in which I’m creative or uniquely understand the world from that place. But why, I keep wondering, is it hard to see the Gadigal connection to water at the most famous foreshore area in this country? I mean, I know, but also I don’t know. And what does it mean to provide non-Indigenous people and outsiders with sitelines when, as Emily McDaniel says, what’s important is to feel this place, not just visit? Will we experience the water as living and breathing when we visit there and walk this walk? And what does it mean to walk a walk and be helped to maybe see this place more as they did (as if that were possible), over 200 years after our hosts have been violently displaced or murdered and still suffer as a result? Is there any danger in suggesting to non-Indigenous people that we can experience something like they are, after at least 40,000 years of continuous habitation of a place and its waters? If the marketing claims that ‘these sitelines allow an intimate insight into the harbour’s cultural landscape as people walk from one major site to another’, how does the land, and air, and water feel about that? To try to impart a greater appreciation and respect for badu is a start. As McDaniel explains, for First Nations peoples, the concept of Country includes badu (water), and access to water is integral to cultural practices and spiritual and physical wellbeing. But even today, Indigenous elders are having to fight for access to the traditional lands and waters of the  https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/indigenous-harbourside-walk-gets-green-light20191128-p53eyw.html.

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Murray-Darling basin, Australia’s largest river system, which is in rapid decline due to the harms of salination and over-farming. And the Gadigal people certainly don’t have free access to the exclusive and iconic tourist hotspots around Sydney harbour, as they once did, sitelines walk or no. For coastal Indigenous Australians, water encapsulates an identity, with many referring to themselves as freshwater or saltwater peoples. Like the Gadigal, they originally lived completely off the water and foreshore, an ancient bond. Will an ‘environmental’ project that offers artistic renderings of these ancient human and posthuman creative relationships really change the material conditions that have so impacted this land, water, air, and peoples’ lives? Much of what I have read about this project attests to the creative works serving a ‘resilience’ and celebratory narrative about the violent history of this place, an invasion that came by water. The sites of the proposed artworks of the walk include: Pirrama, adjacent to the Australian National Maritime Museum, The Hungry Mile at Barangaroo, and Ta-ra (Dawes Point)—the site where Patyegarang ‘gifted’ the Sydney language to William Dawes, and the site of the old Boatshed at Circular Quay. * * * I come back to myself as the plane taxis towards Sydney’s airport terminals, heading into our performance workshop week. I’m remembering one of the interviewees (interesting, not a white western one), who kept reminding me that the most important thing about creativity is that the sum is greater than the parts. She said, Going back to your Asia Pacific question, there’s this notion that people aren’t separate over there. And it’s very hard to get for a Westerner, who is ingrained in this kind of notion of competitive human beings, we can’t support each other and help each other and we can’t raise the level of the water together so that all the boats go up. In the taxi, I ride once again past the barracks at The Rocks, between Walsh Bay and Circular Quay, and every time I go under that amazing bridge and catch sight of the bay out before me and all the glitter, I lose my breath. Just for a minute. I think about the guy who told me what it was like to work down there and how there’s just something inspiring

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about being down and on the water. There’s something great about those old—I mean, the old spaces—we all used to whinge about it because there was no soundproofing, in either office, between the spaces and the studios. They were cold in winter. They were hot in summer. It was hilarious. But they were working spaces. You were in and about—and ironically, even though that was loud and annoying, there’s something really powerful about being able to—when you’ve got a bunch of people working in a youth theatre and you can hear a bunch of kids out your window creating something and doing a workshop and a workshop tutor telling for the 12th, 15th time, be quiet. In actual fact, given the choice of that and this, where you’re removed from it; we all would much prefer that. That’s creativity, and the water shimmers through it, is part of it. * * * Astrida Neimanis writes in favour of expanding the imaginary of what water can be, of what water might need, and of human implications and responsibilities within a more-than-human aqueous (creative) ecology. She uses posthumanist feminist theory as a means of troubling the anthropocentrism, individualism, and nature–culture binaries of which human rights may not be able to divest itself, even when acknowledging community, relationality, and the rights of nature.2 She characterises water as unruly, lively, and straining against discourses and cultural moves that seek to contain and control it. She marks the inability of human rights movements to go beyond a human-centred use-value of water (much like contemporary creativity discourses), and I think about the harbour walk project in Sydney. It manages to use aesthetic and discursive public pedagogies to educate and make intelligible, perhaps, long histories of displacement (both human and non-human), but it is largely a descriptive, discursive, and representational proposition: the water itself is no more at question of being reclaimed, recast, or recovered than it was before. Neimanis talks about the possibility of ‘an ecology in which humans and other bodies of water (animal, vegetable, meteorological,  Astrida Neimanis, ‘Alongside the right to water, a posthumanist feminist imaginary’, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 2014, pp. 5–24. 2

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geophysical) are always already implicated, as lively agents, in one another’s well-being’.3 She notes that Indigenous cosmologies often have more expansive understandings of water, so what work could a posthumanist feminist approach do that hasn’t been done? That is, are human rights and environmental rights not entangled projects? And how might creativity play a more agentic role than just describing a utopian not-yet or used-to-be? It requires going beyond thinking of water in a ‘use-value’ way: water on this planet is not only crucial for human life, it is needed for all life. As with creative ecologies, natural ones too require all components of the ecology to maintain the ability to function in a robust and agentic manner. Not just water, in other words, but clean water. So thinking about Sydney’s harbour walk is, in itself, a way of continuing to preference human-centred value of the water and its intersecting ecologies, over a more intersectional hydrocommons. Not unlike taking a consideration of creativity beyond its use-value or creative economic benefit to society, but rather building a posthuman approach to creativity studies that facilitates a more complex collective understanding of the need and power of creativity for mutual existence and recovery in the Anthropocene and beyond—and rejects the western individualist and human exceptionalism arguments that currently drive these interrelated dialogues. For Neimanis, water is denied the liveliness and agency that animates it as a life—and yes, also death—force…the point is not to imbue water with human agency (which would be anthropocentrism in yet another guise), but to rethink agency in a way that does not begin (or end) with the human.4

Rethinking agency—natural, ecological, creative—is what this book sets out to do. But how to set creativity free from the contemporary imperialist cage of use-value, instrumentalisation, and human-centred pacification, and return it to the wild and unknowable affect state from which it has come? A start is to practise thinking of all non-human entities as here for more than  human need and as equal co-habitants in a creative ecology of inter-dependency. This is, in many ways, the project  Neimanis, p. 6.  Neimanis, p. 7.

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of posthuman thought. The move toward a globalised and abstracted discourse of creativity renders it unresponsive to specific creativity in unique times and places with particular characteristics, expressions, and needs. Like water, and other natural entities, creativity has become a commodity that supports the industrial complex and national and corporate apparatuses, thus rendering it lifeless5 and generic. This move toward recognising the agency of non-human entities is beginning, but it is a slow and complicated mindset shift. A move away from anthropocentrism, not only in material ways, but in matters of practices as well—starting with creative practice, and acknowledging the creativity of non-human life. There are now multiple examples of ‘legal personhood’, that is, agency and legal protections granted to environmental entities. Starting with Christopher Stone’s 1972 essay ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects’,6 six additional countries have acknowledged natural entities as having personhood and environmental legal agency. In 2006, the small town of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania drafted legislation to protect it from toxic sewage dumping. In 2008, the town of Shapleigh, Maine, moved towards granting rights to the bodies of water surrounding the town to protect them from corporate development and pollution. Similar steps have been taken across the United States to protect against the extraction of gas and oil, and to preserve the natural ecosystems. Ecuador came to global note in 2008, by enshrining the rights of nature in their 2008 constitution, following a national referendum. The first test case was water:  the Vilcabamba River as plaintiff was brought to a provincial court in 2011, in an attempt to halt a highway construction which would negatively impact the river’s health. They won. Bolivia passed the awe-inspiring constitutional change ‘Law of the Rights of Mother Earth’ (2010), giving aspects of legal personhood to the natural environment. The change cites, in part, ‘Mother Earth is the dynamic living system made up of the indivisible community of all living systems, living, interrelated, interdependent and complementary, sharing a common destiny.’7  As I detail in my book The Creative Turn (2014).  Christopher D.  Stone. “Should tree have standing—toward legal rights for natural objects.” Southern California Law Review 45 (1972): 450. 7  Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra, December 2010, article 3. 5 6

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New Zealand’s Te Urewera National Park (2014), and its Whanganui River (2017). In 2017, New Zealand also took similar steps toward granting legal personhood to Mount Taranaki, Te Urewera National Park (2014), and its Whanganui River (2017). In India, the great Ganges and Yamuna rivers gained legal entity status (2017). In November 2016, Colombia next moved to grant agency and protection to the Atrato River basin. The court referenced the New Zealand precedent and ordered that joint guardianship would be undertaken in the representation of the Atrato River basin. Similarly to the New Zealand declaration, the representatives would come from the national government and the Indigenous people living in the basin. In April 2018 the Supreme Court of Colombia issued a decision recognising the Amazon River ecosystem as having agency and deserving of rights. The lead negotiator for the Whanganui iwi, Gerrard Albert, said, ‘We consider the river an ancestor and always have…treating the river as a living entity is the correct way to approach it, as an indivisible whole, instead of the traditional model for the last 100 years of treating it from a perspective of ownership and management.’ James D. K. Morris and Jacinta Ruru suggest that giving ‘legal personality to rivers is one way in which the law could develop to provide a lasting commitment to reconciling with Maori’. This was the longest-running legal dispute in New Zealand. The Whanganui iwi (people or nation) had been fighting to assert their rights in harmony with the river since the 1870s.8 Having lived here in Australia and in proximity to New Zealand now for over 20 years, I have come to understand the depth of Indigenous connection to land and the ways in which it is truly family, not just stories. Not just history, like for us. I remember when I first experienced the Roman roads in northern England and couldn’t really even feel that truth of encountering something that had been created 2000 years ago. White Americans struggle with time and collectivity, it’s true. So to experience the kind of kinship that Indigenous Australian, Maori, Pasifika, and others in these parts have with their non-human ancestors and iwi is humbling. Water and the natural environment are not just metaphors, backgrounds, or unique places  “New Zealand River is given status as a ‘legal person’”. Metro. 2017-03-16.

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‘with value’ (if we go by Ken Robinsons’ definition). I get out of yet another taxi, pay the driver, and pull my bag into this next engagement. Exhausted yes, but full of wonder and excitement. I’ve been rereading As I Lay Dying, one of William Faulkner’s finest. He writes through water too, drawing the reader into the world of a child’s view of his mother’s death, with Vardaman’s exquisite ‘My mother is a fish’ (1930, p. 74). He is trying to make sense of his terror and her passing, likening her to a fish he has caught earlier that day, and the abandonment he feels in her unrecognisability. Of course, literature is replete with such heart-wrenching and everyday examples of affective sensemaking where logic fails (like Lost Dogs’ Homes). But let’s be clear, a child saying ‘My mother is a fish’ is not innovation. And it’s not critical thinking. It’s creativity in storytelling, and creative in the doing, a natural kind of creativity that happens when we need it or get swept away by it, or when our mental, emotional, and sometimes physical lives depend upon it. This is the instantiation of a creativity that is timeless, posthuman, and outside of the human-centred social structures of capitalism, neoliberalism, and the late industrial complex in which we now find ourselves. The elements and atmospheres explored in these intermezzi are also examples of word-painting pictures of the ways in which additional non-­ human elements contribute to the overall ecology of a place, including the ways in which natural elements are creative. So as I walk along the harbour to dinner, I think about the proposed  harbour walk and McDaniel’s call to feel this place, not just visit it. The First Nations Harbour Walk might not take us all the way there, not yet, but it’s a start. It might help those of us who are non-Indigenous to return to the ‘student’ or curious mind so needed for creativity, and for unity. The idea hums in my mind and cheers me up. Shimmering a little, like the water.

Chapter 5: Sydney

August 2020 I’m trying to train baby Hazel to leave Tasha alone. Poor old Tasha is so confused now. Sometimes she just stands drinking from her water bowl in the kitchen and her legs just slide out spread eagle beneath her. She lays there. Looks distressing to me, but doesn’t seem particularly distressed. Her radical acceptance is part tragic, part inspiring to me. This is around the time puppy Hazel, who is now chewing and biting everything as she teethes, starts to latch on to Tasha’s tail and pull her backwards through the house. I’m surprised at her strength, but kind of panicky-horrified. Hazel, stop it! That’s your sister! Leave her alone!

Tasha is confused and doesn’t react. I detach Hazel and pull Tasha back up to her feet. She looks around, shakes, and heads back to the water bowl. Oh Tash. They are my ‘bubble’ during this pandemic. Melbourne is still in hard lockdown, our second wave of COVID-19 worse than our first. Some people have people in their bubble, but my fur companions

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and daily walking meditation make me think about my bubble as my creative ecology, and certainly humans are not the only ones in it: seaweed, cockatoos, dogs, wine, jellyfish, sand, waves, clouds, weather systems. Of course Stacy comes when she can. Tasha lays against me with a comforting spaniel heaviness, while baby Hazel chews my toes. Flashback, to ‘before COVID’ times:

15 October 2018 Post-interviews (Fig. 1), 5:30 p.m. I’m sitting in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art at ‘tourist central’, Circular Quay, and watching the end of day and the ferries going in and out and the light (finally out from behind day-long rainclouds) washing this place and reflecting on how it imbues the work—creative and otherwise—that gets done here. Like Los Angeles, it is both aesthetically beautiful on the water and highly urban and ‘fast’ as a local culture. I spent some of the day in the Rocks area nearby, the rows of converted colonial barracks where the industrial, historical yet glass-walled and corporate feel reflects the valuing of these top-tier Australian arts institutions, set against the calling-card Sydney Opera House and harbour views. It reminds me of Hong Kong down on the wharf.

Fig. 1  Sydney creative ecology performance

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How do these ecological components co-constitute the creativity that emerges from here? The water, the light, the bustle? Sydney was the site of first contact between the Gadigal people and Captain James Cook’s English sailors in 1770, and as is often the case in first meetings, Cook totally misjudged the locals, to disastrous effect for these resilient people who had sustainably lived with this water and land for 80,000 years or more. Apparently, The Admiralty in charge of Cook had instructed him to strike a treaty and obtain permission from the local inhabitants in order to explore the place, but instead he proclaimed it terra nullius (empty land) and simply declared that he was taking it for the Crown. The result, after great decimation of the Indigenous population by British-­borne diseases, was of course an appropriation of both land and water, despite their ignorance of those entities. I wonder as I sit here what colonial Australia might have been like had Cook been more curious about the creative ecology of this area, rather than taking a ‘use-value’ approach. So much has been lost, and still the Gadigal people are, 250 years later, willing to share knowledge for the good of the collective. It’s a familiar story worldwide. I think about one of my most exciting and also heartbreaking conversations here with one of the co-creators of an award-winning new Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation, earlier in the day. We meet outside of her office in Ultimo, which she informs me is the most creative postcode in Australia as an ‘industry precinct’. We walk by both reclaimed buildings and new structures, a mish-mash of styles and materials, and deep within the hustle and bustle near Central train station, her building is new, with shards of glass walls, a textured brick and curved structure that denotes a new, creative and contemporary hybrid place to be. A dog runs by her office and people greet each other warmly. Her office is large, with neat piles of paper carefully organised across the length of the wall. She is measured and articulate in her discussions of both her professional writing career and the innovative new course she is leading here and its connection to industry. We talk a lot about the urgent need for creative ecologies that consciously involve human, non-human, and environmental collaborators. She tries to maintain and foster this speculative but entangled not-knowing in their course:

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The ecology is really important because you don’t have a very strong idea of what’s going to emerge, so you have to design for emergence. You have to create an environment for emergence. I don’t know what my students are going to come up with. We say create your own project by the fourth year and come up with it. And every single semester we use a new brief for our winter and summer schools. So everything’s new the whole time, mostly because it’s boring if you don’t keep it fresh. But we need to keep it current as well. So yeah, with that emergence happening, you have to have this beautiful ecology happening permanently. You need people who understand how to structure the enabling conditions. You need people to understand what it takes to create not a safe space, because I find that a little lame, but a brave space, where people can take risks and really shine.

She reminds me that, like the false bifurcation of (non-human) nature and (human) culture, that creativity doesn’t have to be an industry/spiritual either/or: Industry organisations are going to develop their own courses. I mean, they already are. We’re seeing that with industry partners all the time. They’re developing their own universities. It’s very common now. So that’s going to change the future of education as well. And with the whole shift to just-in-time learning, lifelong learning, the relevance of post-grad, particularly, will diminish, I think. So we’re looking at embedding courses within organisations, bespoke courses as well as having these micro-credentials that people can fit in and that their workplaces can pay for. I think I could run this degree anywhere in the world. I’m really keen to work with some colleagues of mine who run a creativity course in India, where they teach dropouts, people who—and they’ve had amazing success story with—in a barefoot university kind of environment, going in and working with students who are leaving school, keeping them in there, doing creative projects, keeping them engaged, keeping them absolutely wanting to deliver results. That’s the power of creativity in education. And people are doing it over there, people are doing it in Sydney, people are doing it in interesting ways all over the place. They’re doing it in interesting ways in the US. You look at that beautiful film, Most Likely to Succeed, for example. You see it everywhere, but yeah, I think I could run this course anywhere, so it’s not to do with Sydney. UTS prides itself on being in the most creative district, and that’s one of their strategic pillars, or was in the last 10-year plan that they’re going to engage with precinct. So we

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have I think three times as many creative industries in our post code as the next post code down in Australia. So we’re in a unique position. So culturally, yes, that might mean something, that our industry partners walk over the road, I want to talk to the CBA Innovation Lab to go and make a film for them, I walk across the road and I do it, it’s just there, or short cycle ride and I’m Barangaroo, whatever. So there is a locality thing that UTS has played on, and I think it has to be unique and different from a Silicon Valley. It can’t be the same. And I think it’s a very, very interesting time, but we have one university trying to change the environment to the place. There’s a lot of work still to be done.

We drift into that inevitable relationship between informal creative experience, education across the lifespan, and culture. Both of us having been born in other countries, I ask her if university creative education in Australia is different from other countries. I’d say it is because I’ve had experiences elsewhere. So for example, last year I took a group of students on a global studio to a utopian community called Auroville in Tamil Nadu, which was a very creative—what Modi calls one of the most innovative places in India, innovating with architecture—they have the units there, they have innovative farming, they have innovative education. They have an incredible form of learning called integral learning. So yeah, look, it’s different everywhere. Our students were so incredibly transformed by that school in Auroville, we had such beautiful feedback, because they were really touched by the risks that were taken. If you go and live in an eco-village and decide to work for the ideals of lived human unity, for example, you’re going to have a different set of people involved with a different kind of integrity and purpose. That was very important to see rather than just the kind of blank, aimless creativity that can exist just for its own sake.

But what is different about creativity in Australia? I ask. She laughs: You know, I think that we’re willing to take risks. We’re on the edge of the world. We can actually be a pioneer in this space. In fact, I feel we are, and this particular tiny area, it’s just not big enough and not visible enough and we don’t have enough time to lift our heads up and breathe air. We don’t get enough time to actually get the work out there and share it. We’re doing amazing things.

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Getting it out there is so important these days though, with this mythology of a global economy or a universal creativity that we seem to always be playing catch-up on. Is there an Asia Pacific approach to creativity that’s unique to this region? I think that there is a very strong tie between spirituality and creativity in the Asia Pacific region beyond—I mean, I’m half-Indian. I’m very interested in creativity as an inner process. My PhD was tied to creativity and transcendence, so I’m really interested in the consciousness aspect of creativity. And I don’t think there are many people interested in that in America, for example. They’re interested in process, the neuroscience, how do we measure this, how do we understand this. India, India, India. Spiritual nation. I mean, if you’re going to be involved in any concept about creativity, it will always switch to notions of the divine, consciousness, transformation. It doesn’t stay in one place. It’s kind of a secular process and it doesn’t involve the individual on what we call an integral level. It’s a yogic art, actually. It’s not just about sitting back and doing the method, doing the five-step design thinking method and getting to an outcome. …what we’re trying to get away from is that idea of separation. This is a thing that—going back to your Asia Pacific question, there’s this notion that people aren’t separate over there. And it’s very hard to get for a Westerner, who is ingrained in this kind of notion of competitive human beings, we need to compete with each other, we can’t support each other and help each other and we can’t raise the level of the water together so that all the boats go up.

* * * I’m thinking this morning as I walk to the beach about all the inspiring creative people in this project who have taken time out of their ‘slash’ lives, their necessarily hustling for work, for the next thing, for comradery, to share their experiences with me and my team. I think about which of them has a sense of the ecological, the communal, the boats going up together. There was the famous jazz musician and improviser who lives in the Illawarra, south of Wollongong (south of Sydney). His house spartan, minimalist. Beyond in the next room were sliding doors leading to bushland and eucalypts waving and rustling in the breeze. He grew up here,

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and then returned after a decade in Sydney. He seems at one with this local landscape, both creatively and personally. How can they be separate? These kinds of conversations seem diametrically opposed to the kinds I have in education, but I still don’t want to think or feel that, 13 years into this life of talking to people about creativity; 22 years in Education. I think about my  many ‘creative industries’ conversations with flagship institutions and how they seem so much more able to talk about the need for—and benefit of—cross-sectoral cross-pollination in creative practice and business. About internationalisation (either regional or global), about the role of digital media. The education sector interviews just keep falling short. It used to make me frustrated, but feels more sad these days. But it’s like any social ill: the longer one sticks around, the less one knows how to fix it. This morning I am thinking back to one in particular: The campus is made up of dominating brutalist architecture: quirky designs, but big spaces. I’m escorted to the office of a professor of Education. The room is warm, like her. She has been here for a long time, and worked at every level both institutionally and nationally. She speaks like a tommy gun—fast and rhythmic—and never once drops eye contact with me. She is formidable: I think the rhetoric has changed. I think that everybody talks about creativity and innovation. I have to question how much attention was being paid to what it actually means in practice in teacher education because on the one hand we have that rhetoric, we know that life is changing so much that all our graduates need to be flexible, creative, resilient, confident in who they are, learners for their whole life. But by the same token, at my institution anyway and I think lots of others, we’ve moved to so much that’s done online so the relationships, it’s harder to develop those relationships. In teacher education for example, so much emphasis on ticking off on a set of standards which of course leads to a narrower and more reductive approach than what we’re trying to do creatively. As well, the pre-service teachers now have literacy and numeracy tests, so in a sense that’s mirrored in what’s happening in the classrooms for children because again there’s this huge talk about being creative but at the same time there’s a narrow and more reductive curriculum where high-stakes testing is putting huge pressure on exactly how to teach and what to teach.

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I find it incredible that so many people talk about creativity and innovation and don’t look at the arts processes and see the similarity between their list of creative indicators and the processes that are embedded in all of the arts disciplines. I don’t know whether it’s because they have a concept of the arts that’s only for those who are highly cultured or highly gifted in a particular arts area and so then they close off but—perhaps there’s a whole lot of these things that come together.

Ah, the arts. The persona non grata of creativity education. We have a unit that we run in our undergraduate courses called Learning and Creativity. It’s trying to really open up what is personalised learning, and what’s group learning, and how can that learning be creative? Let me go back…what we have in our school, which started off in the School of Agriculture back in the 1980’s, is social ecology. Social ecology looks at the person, the society and/or culture, the ecology of how we align ourselves and the environment. It’s all about the relationships of those things and sustaining that. Including things like critical feminist pedagogy, critical psychology, environmental units, there were at times some spiritual courses, all sorts of things. So really what that does is it tries to break down all the borders and boxes that we’ve set up and how we make connections. One of the things I think is in our social ecology field at this university, it stems from systems thinking. So everything that we do is involved with the system in some way. But back, probably about 20 years ago in one of the academic restructures of the university, all schools had to merge with one other school. So we merged with the school of social ecology, and we’ve always kept that alive in postgraduate work, we have a postgraduate degree in social ecology. There was a Bachelor of Education Social Ecology, but now it’s just in particular units and we have lots of connections with the community. The alumni for that course is amazing: editors of book companies who run all sorts of international refugee organisations, to lots of artists that run things—like the Festival which is near Canberra, which is poetry and all sorts of things. They are absolutely everywhere but embedded in every part of society.

She sounds like the professor of creative industries I had talked with not long before. I get hopeful. I ask her then if she thinks they are keeping up with the needs of creative workforce demands.

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I would have to say that the key trajectory for teacher education in the last five years has been towards accountability, not creativity, not innovation, and that’s at a national and a state level. It has had a huge impact on the unit coordinators’ delivery of units which have become constrained because there are more standards. Whether they’re program standards, or teacher standards, or university Learning and Teaching standards, they have to make sure that they tick the box off in each of their weekly schedules. So that is constraining the field of teacher education.

Teachers feel blocked, I commiserate. It is clear from the numbers of early career teachers leaving the field, and the number one reason given? Lack of autonomy. For teachers, this also means an almost-complete lack of opportunity to be creative, individual and spontaneous. This professor agrees: When they go out into schools for their professional placements whilst they’re still at university, some of them get so disillusioned. They feel as if they’re not allowed to do anything that’s innovative or be creative with the resources that they’ve been given to use in their lesson next week.

Nobody wants to work in that kind of environment, surely. And the standardisation of education work? It’s so obviously not good for students or their teachers. What can we do to shift these mindsets, I ask her? It’s making sure that teachers feel that they’ve got the agency to influence. If you don’t feel you’ve got agency to influence, your creativity is stifled. If you feel as if it’s an open field, you are accepted, you are welcomed, you are valued, then you take more risks. And creativity is about taking risks, and if it’s a peer supportive culture in the school, you cope with the values because the values are shared. I’m not saying that creativity can happen in every discipline and in every different area, but the research is unequivocal that the arts processes are so closely connected to what it means to be creative.

I wonder aloud if it’s partly the far-reaching government control over education, the relentless reviews, restructures, and government reporting. She agrees:

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Yes indeed. And it’s the profession that is so much more highly controlled by people who aren’t educators, and so many people have a concept of what learning should be that is linked to their own experience, because they were successful in that particular way of doing things. I don’t know how many of the other professions would allow themselves to be as controlled as education and I think we have to take responsibility for that. We haven’t been proactive and strong in asserting our rights around all of that and perhaps that’s part of the story.

We talk for awhile about how design and design learning are increasingly popular in so many areas, across both higher education and industry. But where is the funding for that in education? Often, creativity and design are outsourced to design scholars and consultants even within our field. Something is terribly wrong there. Is it because in education we make separations between technical skills’ mastery and pedagogy? I think again there’s a rhetoric problem. People would SAY creativity is more valued than the technical skills, but in terms of what actually happens I think the technical skills are more valued. So for example, if you look at writing, having wonderful ideas is not assessed as highly as your spelling and punctuation in the NAPLAN (Australia’s National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy) test and that’s what everybody seems to pay attention to, NAPLAN which nobody— everyone seems to value that much more highly than where your students, where your young people are when they leave school or when they’re at university. We value much more the technical because it can be measured, but of course we know that just because it can be easily measured, it doesn’t mean it’s more important.

She tells me about another one of their innovative courses, which she helped found some years ago: One of the principles of the Master of Teaching was collaboration and so the Master of Teaching still, at least in principle, doesn’t have competitive grading. We’ve had to fight for it again and again over the years. We also are now having a big fight in our own school because some people believe that it should be graded. But our whole premise was that if we were truly going to develop a community of learners that lasted way beyond the pre-service teacher education, we needed to develop true collaborative learning communities…where there is that genuine collaborating, learning together, sharing of ideas and working as a team and where that’s worked best truly creative things can happen.

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Sounds like all the boats rising together. But why does it seem easier to do in creative, industry, design and arts courses than in education? It’s got to be reflected structurally and it’s being undermined now by people who are giving the marks because of course they come out of competitive first degrees with your normative grading and all of that stuff. So at the beginning they’ll say things like, “I work better if I’m competing” or “If I just get a ‘satisfies requirements’ how are they going to know that I’ve done really well,” et cetera? We talk about how it’s through the actual comments and how you’ve met the criteria and that just because it’s about meeting a range of criteria, rigorous criteria, it doesn’t mean you’ve done less. In fact, you’ve probably done more and by the end of the first semester my experience was that they understood—but it’s a different kettle of fish now 20-plus years later. I think we’re getting more and more conservative ironically. Rather than developing truly creative graduates, I think they’re more constrained. We must engage more deeply in the Asia Pacific region and it doesn’t mean that that precludes the global. But there’s still a lot of colonial cringe here. It’s not an either or. I think it’s got to be both. It’s really important that we are more openly embracing our Asian neighbours, but I think we are still a deeply racist country and that is a barrier. I think we have so much to learn from our Indigenous culture here, so much, and they have so many creative ways in looking at the world and yet again, there’s a barrier there for some people. Those are the kind of I think creative practices and products that get put into this cultural industries package that’s not seen as the creativity and innovation agenda. It’s relegated to the manual arts, the quaint traditional craft stuff or theatre as manual arts so it’s not digital media, so it’s not ‘creative industries’. It’s like, well if we’re going to talk about what’s specific to our culture, it is going to be those things. Every country can’t be a world leader in games development, for example, and I don’t know that Australia is going to do that. So what is our creative culture?

* * * I wander around near the water on my last day: the Sydney Fox Studios, the piers at Walsh Bay, some of the leading cultural institutions in Sydney (and in Australia), the spectacular Hickson Road drive under the Sydney Harbour Bridge and around Dawes Point into Circular Quay, with all the

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ferry traffic and glistening views in every direction. Between and after tours, interviews, dialogues, walks, and commiserations, I think about the creative and cultural precincts in Hong Kong, Singapore, here, Melbourne, and others—and how they are similar and different. Is creativity really unique in every place, and why does the ‘global creative economy’ even want it to be? I mean, visiting Fox Studios (Sydney) or other multinational creative organisations is not exactly seeking out the most site- and culture-specific ecological elements. The Fox Studios is a huge complex, which also houses the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRAS), as well as temporary lodgings for the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) while it undergoes renovations (it has now moved back to the Walsh Bay pier which is its permanent home). This precinct, like others in Sydney, is very ‘Hollywood’, with little go carts zipping about everywhere, and large sound stages. Yet (as elsewhere it seems no matter where you go) these theatre company offices are quite cramped, with most open plan, and everyone shoved in together which I guess has its pluses and minuses. The people I interview express a feeling of missing the wharf which is ‘so beautiful’ and a ‘more creative environment’, despite the film set feeling here. It makes me think of the impact of aesthetics here, of beauty, of the outdoors. Of light. This is not the same in Melbourne, and not so much in Singapore, but more like the kinds of visual and aesthetic influences expressed in Hong Kong. I leave this visit to Sydney remembering my first visits here, more than 20 years ago, and how I immediately related to Sydney as like Los Angeles, and Melbourne like New York, with the same kinds of competitiveness and tensions as we have back home. Melbourne doesn’t think about beauty, it thinks about sociality, about coffee, live music (even during COVID), about culture, like New  York. Sydney thinks about the weather, about business, about international markets. When Sydneysiders say they’d rather live here than Melbourne because the weather is better, Melbournites say ‘there’s more to life than weather’. Can cities think? Can landscapes dictate the culture of a place-to-come? So long for now Sydney, we’ll be back in six months for the week-long devising performance.

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* * * In September 2019, which now seems a lifetime ago (BC: Before COVID), we return to Sydney for the devising. Through good friends, we are invited to do the workshop at Sydney Theatre Company in a beautiful rehearsal room on the main premises, across the street from the pier. The beauty imbues our work. At breaks we stroll along the water; after sessions we have a glass of wine looking out at Walsh Bay. Beautiful Sydney. The actors too seem more beautiful than in other places. Kel and I talk about the difference made by working in a beautiful evocative rehearsal room, upstairs from one of the most famous mainstages in Australia, with skilled actors. This contrasts with some of the other places and people we’ve worked with, I think again about all the elements in a creative—or other kind of—ecology. Why else do people go to nature to calm down, to reconnect? That interior design is not just a field of aesthetics, but of atmospheres, moods. Kel and I talk about the ‘mastery’ part of creativity, and how it matters, and what a joy it is to work with courageous, experienced, and passionate actors. The final script below reflects the excitement of this one, and the creative passion present in the Sydney theatre creative ecology that we may have missed through the other forms of engagement, as outsiders. The bubble of love is material, processual, interpersonal, and aesthetic (Fig. 2).

The Script: Bubble of Love (Sydney) Professor: …Okay here’s an example: one of our students, he’s on a video interview for one of these corporate jobs, he’s at his fifth stage of interview, he’s asked to solve a problem with a team of other graduands. And he said what was really weird was, he’d been doing this since first year of this degree, he knew exactly what to do. And so he naturally took leadership in it because everyone else with their higher ATARs and high-­ performing degree was unable to think on the spot creatively and solve the problem. How good is that?! Theatremaker: I directed a show earlier this year with a group of teens between 13 and 18. There was this 17 year old actress who was head and shoulders the strongest in that cast—at the other end of the spectrum,

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Fig. 2  Bubble of Love

was this gorgeous young girl who had literally never been in a play before. And when the girl that was really good did her first scene, you saw everyone panic and look at her, because they realised that what she was doing was extraordinary. And what they were doing was a bit demonstrative and a bit clumsy. She seemed to be genuinely feeling the feelings she was saying and she was genuinely thinking of the things. And you saw, over that eight week process, them learn off each other. Then someone else would start to get it and someone else would start to get it. It’s that kind of peer to peer learning that is so powerful. Advocate: Look, I’ve met a lot of philanthropists, and those who are motivated to support the arts are actually quite sophisticated. I think the offering of new—and the uncovering of good art?—actually the money is not all about furs and tinsel. The real people who support the arts love this idea of creating possibilities. I’ll give you an example: To me, the orchestra is an ecology. I remember one person who wanted jobs for musicians, said ‘why do they all have to be full-time employees; couldn’t they just be freelance to share the love?’ And I went ‘no, because they are like an organism of their own—there’s a lead, who develops and

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supports the artistry of those in there, and the relationship across the orchestras, the way they sound’. I remember Rory Jeffes, when he was CEO of SSO, he said ‘you can tell when the orchestra’s been on tour overseas; when they come back there’s more air in their sound, it changes the shape because they’ve been uplifted and out’. Musician: So I guess, I use this example of walking, and walking where I live, the way that place organises my activities. I walk out of my house. I can either walk uphill, quite a steep hill, or I walk downhill, quite a steep hill. And how does that affect my feeling or my homeostasis? Or if every day—if I walk up the hill, if I do that every day, then that’s going to have a—an effect on my body. Effect on the hormones and my cardiovascular fitness and my orientation, my understanding of what my neighbours are doing. And all those things are because of the way the place is organising my body. I’m interested in those aspects of playing music or using place. I consider it to be an embodied engagement in place. And how we think of the difference between looking at a picture of where I live, Mount Keira, versus me walking up Mount Keira. Two very different things. Two valid things, but different. Theatremaker: Growing creativity here… so much of it is about finding your own voice. One of the things that makes youth arts organisations so powerful and important is that they break down the age hierarchy that exists in education. Because they’re professional artists working with young people in this environment, as opposed to people who identify themselves as teachers, they’re not marking. They’re not grading. They have no outside measure of quality that they need to be able to demonstrate. Professor: The high school certificate needs to be detoxed. The methods and concepts that we introduce to students really early on are complexifying their problems in order to get to richness, before just jumping to that easy solution that unfortunately the HSC has taught them to seek. Advocate: A lot of what I do is policy, advocacy to senate or committee enquiries, back into Australia Council and arts policy, but I also work with parts of the membership. I provide industry input on vocational training needs, to inform certificate and diploma-type courses for the creative industries. We look at employment trends and outcomes. There’s

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a need for resilience in my role, because I’m constantly dealing with politics that are not necessarily uplifting. It’s a very fraught place. Theatremaker: Arts careers are not structured or hierarchical, so our company’s philosophy is the same. We would never commission a playwright, regardless of what course they’ve come out of, unless we knew them, see their work and knew how they worked. Young actors, I feel sorry for, but we will always pay more attention to—well you expect to see more from a graduate of NIDA, VCA or WAAPA and, to a certain extent, Flinders or QUT or ACA, than the others. I would draw a circle around them and go ‘those are the ones we’ll always be interested in’. Professor: Time is our greatest challenge. Students will say to us, “if it’s so important, how come we get such little time in creative arts, yet we have truckloads of STEM?” A lot of the work we do around creativity and creative practice is what I’d call a curriculum for being. Musician: Now if I’m riding my skateboard up or down the hill, then intuitively and biomechanically, I will be doing certain things to harness the gradient or the energy or the momentum—same as if I ride my bike. Professor: If you ask me what students really need as they go out there, it’s an understanding of themselves and how you don’t just go ‘out’ and do your work out there unless it’s going to be transformational on the inside as well. Musician: Now I need to do that on the instrument, as well. It’s a homeostatic instrument. I mean, we breathe in, we breathe out, and we make sounds to the limits of our exhalation. Professor: You need people to understand what it takes to create not a safe space, because I find that a little lame, but a brave space, where people can take risks and really shine. Musician: And the difference—there is an energy gradient or, kind of, a pressure gradient in the instrument. And so there are ways to think about creating and sustaining momentum—musical momentum, that’s very much a physical response to the feeling of the instrument. All: …a physical response to the feeling. (beat) Theatremaker: I had a really funny conversation years ago with Debra Oswald, the playwright. My cousin’s daughter was doing her HSC and was doing drama and was doing an assignment on Hamlet. I went in to

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help her and I started to talk about how I’d approach it, having worked in the industry for years. She just looked really confused. Then she very gently explained to me that whatever I was saying was not at all what was required for her assignment. And I was saying that to Debra, saying it was just really weird that a drama assignment for school could actually not seem to correlate, from what I could see, with professional practice at all. And Debra said, yeah, yeah, you can’t. You mustn’t. You should never try and support school drama as someone that works in the industry. And that was her experience as well; was to stay out of it because it’s a completely different way of learning to what we do in the industry. I think there’s a fundamental problem somewhere in that. I think it’s around the need to be able to break down, articulate, and grade a performance. Somewhere in that process, big things get a little out of whack. Because everyone starts to gear the performance towards what they think is going to get a good grade and we start to just lose track of the heart of it and spark of it. Advocate: In Sydney, it’s the location that drives the interest in the activity, from the performance side and also for the audience. Because the symphony performs there 35 weeks a year, it’s highly likely that tourists will buy a ticket to see the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in the Concert Hall. So then if we’re performing somewhere else, be it the Town Hall, be it Parramatta, are there still going to be that many people interested in the activity, or does the concert itself need to change? Should it be a shorter format, or only popular works. Then there’s also a Sydney-centric geographic thing. When our outdoor concert moved to Parramatta, initially there was reluctance by the musicians, there was a much smaller audience, and there was a lot of commentary from north shore patrons who would have attended, who said ‘we don’t go there. We love our orchestra, but why are you putting them out there?’. Professor: Every time I drive under the bridge to come here on my scooter it’s like I go ‘wow’. You don’t get sick of it. I go to the wharf to see Sydney Theatre Company or to the Opera House, and it hits you as part of that experience. There’s something different for me than when I go to the Arts Centre in Melbourne where I go downstairs, down the red carpet and the gold balustrades. Or the Malthouse, which has got that lovely brick—so has Queensland Theatre Company. I do think what we see,

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where art happens, has an impact on the art. A creative ecology is a complex system. Musician: Now it generates pitch, it generates melody, it generates sound. So sometimes I’m conscious of the sounds that are being made. But often, I’m just conscious of the feeling of playing the instrument. That conscious experience of the phenomenon of playing the instrument. Advocate: Out in Western Sydney, there seems to be some really interesting voices and work, in literature, performance, music, and some of it’s not connecting with the traditional view of Sydney, which is the Opera House, and CarriageWorks, which is great. One thing I’d say about Sydney style is that it’s less parochial, but saying that makes me sound parochial [laughs]. There’s an international sense of self, like you see some of our work going to New  York and Europe, and it’s like ‘yeah, so it should!’ sort of thing. (all laugh, beat) Professor: What is it about Australia that’s different? We’re on the edge of the world. We can be a pioneer here. There is a very strong tie between spirituality and creativity in the Asia Pacific region. My PhD was tied to creativity and transcendence, so I’m really interested in the consciousness aspect of creativity. Most people are more interested in neuroscience, how do we measure this. For me, creativity will always return to notions of the divine, consciousness, transformation. It’s not just about sitting back and doing the five-step design thinking method and getting to an outcome. Even the notion of the ‘individual genius’ has been debunked a bit by the focus on collaborative creativity now. We must understand the unity as well as diversity, that we are all in this together. In the Asia Pacific there’s this notion that people aren’t separate. It’s very hard to get for a Westerner, who is ingrained in this notion that we need to compete with each other, we can’t support and help each other, and we can’t raise the level of the water together so that all the boats go up. Musician: There was year-long period when I tried to avoid any fun playing at home. I would just do my physical work there, and save the creative side of playing, the improvisational work, for different situations around where I live. Which included on the side of a highway or in a drainpipe or—you know, at a dam or near a steelworks. All of those varied situations are all within a couple of kilometres from where I live.

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Advocate: When we were in Shanghai, we were contacted by an expat Korean-Australian, who heard we were coming and said can I bring my students, and she put the students on a ferry and then a bus. They were based on some island outside of Daegu and they came to the rehearsal, and then after the rehearsal I enabled them to meet some musicians, and then they saw the performance. In that time when they met the musicians, every time a musician walked into the room, those students knew exactly who they were. They had scoured the webpage, they had Google-­ searched each person, it was beautiful. And the musicians in the symphony just glowed. People say we have ‘an Australian approach’. There’s this energy, and joy; I want to say the air or whatever. Now, I’ll take that as Australian, I like that; I like to be projected in that way. Professor: Australia hasn’t recognised the importance of creative education yet. Our biggest cohort of international students is from China, so that adds another dimension to the creative education debate. I’ll give you an example: we’ve just had a request from fifty principals from important Chinese schools, and they’re going to be here for two weeks. We’ve already got the list of what they want, and well, creativity’s nowhere to be seen. It’s about enrolment, assessment, leadership. There was nothing there about creativity, nothing about the arts. No critical thinking, none of that. HERE, we’ve got some of our staff working over in the Business School, doing oral storytelling because research says that successful CEOs, there are two things that they have: they’ve got a good sense of humour, and they can tell a story. So the Business Schools now recognise creativity as a really important thing, but this long shopping list from the Chinese consortium, it wasn’t even there. (beat) Musician: So practising at home, obviously I do it. One of the great pleasures playing the trumpet is being able to move around whilst you’re playing. And so my daily—one of the great joys for me is just sensing the sound of the trumpet in the different spaces of my house. And I’ll often just walk around and play in different rooms. And I’m always amazed at that phenomenon—the feeling of the instrument in different spaces. And in its most simplest ways, that’s the thing that I love most about the trumpet, that sense of extension. (beat)

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Theatremaker: In Sydney, everyone’s scrambling for this limited number of slots in theatres, no matter if it’s like a room with a couple of chairs, that’s Sydney. We used to talk about this bubble of love that arts companies can get around them. You look at healthy theatre companies that are doing really well; there’s often a really strong bubble of love. People enjoy being in and about that company. They enjoy being in and about those shows. They feel like what that company does and represents is important. And then there becomes a sense of—within that bubble of love, people become quite trusting. People want to stay with your organisation because they believe in it. That’s the bubble of love, and that’s what we’ve got here. Advocate: Every time I drive under the bridge it’s like I go ‘wow’. Professor: You don’t get sick of it. Musician: We breathe in, we breathe out, and we make sounds to the limits of our exhalation. (end) * * * The post-performance discussion is dynamic and well-attended. We feel the power of performance once again, and the potential and excitement of non-representation. The discussion is more relational than any of the others so far, with audience members talking about social ecology, the social networks that support the arts and creative and cultural industries here in Sydney, rather than the discussions that usually dominate about funding, government policy, and economics. As we pack up to go back to Melbourne, (and shortly thereafter into COVID lockdown), I think about how white and European it all is. I think about what used to be here, and the different kinds of shimmer that echo but are no longer visible in these Western aesthetics and markets now known as Sydney. A bubble of love for some, a haunted landscape for others. Time, place, action.

Chapter 6: Creative Agency: A Manifesto for Posthuman Creativity Studies

In 2017, I started the Creative Agency research lab at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. I had just received some additional research funding and wanted to establish something that would be sustainable beyond my four-year research fellowship. I also wanted to create a local transdisciplinary community around the emerging field of creativity studies, and link more systematically to my collaborators and other researchers around the world doing this work. I asked friends and colleagues what they would do if they were me. Friend and creative researcher Francesca Rendle-Short suggested I establish something called the ‘Collective Breathing Centre’ to counteract the neoliberal productivity agenda of the university. I loved that idea and came back to it many times, but wanted something that would continue beyond the boundaries of my own work and funding. I didn’t think I’d find wide institutional support for the Collective Breathing Centre. The idea of Creative Agency seemed to fit many interlocking goals: it was playful, sounding like a detective agency, it held the double meaning of agency and avoided the word ‘lab’ or ‘centre’ which are loaded units in my university, and it was non-disciplinarily specific. It allowed us to offer ‘play dates’ for our ‘creative agents’ twice a year, to share creative work © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Harris, Creative Agency, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77434-9_11

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Fig. 1  Creative Agency

within and outside of the academy, and explore further ways of transcending the walls of the academy, schools, neoliberal institutions, and formal assemblages in general. Creative Agency it became. Now, four years on, we are expanding in both membership activities and conceptual work. We have a larger core group at the local level, but a much more international group of affiliated ‘agents’ worldwide as well.1 Lately I’ve been more concerned with what the notion of ‘agency’ might mean as a future-focused provocation and affirmation. But ironically, as with most future-focused speculation, it draws me back to the past. I return to the evolution of thinking about creativity and how it has morphed, grown, shrunk, and had its own life, at least in the West which has made an artform of colonising all it encounters. I return to thinking about how creativity has resisted discourses of analytics, explanations, definitions, and use-value. How it has resisted apprehension. Or, in philosophical terms, ‘prehension’: the involvement of the subject in an interaction with an event or entity which involves perception but not necessarily cognition. If creativity is the subject, what is the event? And what if the event-subject-becoming-with is creativity? No before, no after. History must be the context, but never the focus. * * * Potted history of creativity through a white, mostly male, mostly European lens (as a means of demonstrating why a posthuman creativity studies is so urgently needed):

 For more on Creative Agency and our co-creative projects, see www.creativeresearchhub.com

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Pre-Enlightenment creativity meant ‘god’ or the god principle, divine aspect, god as creator, god impulse. During the Renaissance it changed from this notion to ‘great men’, not as conduits for the divine, but as ‘geniuses’ themselves. During and following the Renaissance, considerations of creativity slowly turned to creativity, aesthetics, and imagination in various combinations. Of note were: Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) who, like John Dewey and William James later, was an empiricist (believed everything derived from sensation) and wrote on the imagination. William Duff (1732–1815) wrote Essay on Original Genius (1767), a foundational text examining the cognitive makeup of individual genius and creativity, including imagination as central. Duff also distinguished between productive versus reproductive thinking, which would play a greater role in twentieth-century thinking about creativity. Henri Poincare (1854–1912) was a polymath and philosopher of science, who argued for the limits of logic, and the efficacy of free will, creativity, and aesthetics. Henri BERGSON’s Nobel-prize winning text Creative Evolution (1907 in French, 1911 in English) was an anti-Darwinian argument for the unity of life and ecological solidarity among all living beings, and argued that creative evolution, not biological evolution, could explain the source of new biological forms (a major flaw in Darwin’s theory). Bergson’s explored free will, critiqued Kant’s theory of knowledge, argued for metaphors rather than concepts, and articulated duration as a theory of time and consciousness (foundational to Deleuze’s ‘becomings’). The influence of Bergson’s process philosophical thinking on Whitehead cannot be underestimated, as has been well documented, particularly his articulation of creativity as a process of intuition at the interval. He has also been compared with William James, although they differ on the relationship between action and truth. William James’ radical empiricism (Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912) influenced a generation of other philosophers. He was a co-founder of the pragmatist school of philosophy, as well as a foundational psychologist in the United States. He contributed to understandings of so-­ called creative genius.

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Graham Wallas wrote the influential book The Art of Thought in 1926  in which he proposed a four-stage model of the creative process (Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification) in which he drew on Poincare and others. Nearly a century later, leading creativity scholars like Mark Runco and James Kaufman attest to its usefulness and foundational role in contemporary creativity research, and the temporally stepped model can be seen in contemporary versions like Design Thinking. Alfred North Whitehead—In Process and Reality (1929), Whitehead deployed the term ‘creativity’ to best express the mode, character, and ubiquity of the role of novelty within existence. He also wrote extensively about being and becoming, and the need to reject a bifurcation of nature from human culture—ideas which have gone on, through the field of process philosophy, to influence a great many contemporary philosophers include Gilles Deleuze, Erin Manning, and Brian Massumi. I have discussed John Dewey earlier in this book but his place in the potted history is within the pragmatist tradition and philosophy of education, particularly his classic text Art as Experience (1934) in which his theory of expressive acts presages Erin Manning’s notion of pre-­acceleration when talking about affect. Dewey’s understanding comes from a naturalist perspective, and involves the whole organism, is always also temporally located and materialist. Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) is known for his work on productive versus reproductive imagination, following Kant’s notion of ‘productive’, and on the function and potential of creative imagination. Maxine Greene (1917–2014), another philosopher of education like Dewey, has explored aesthetic imagination, which is also discussed earlier in this book. See, in particular, Releasing the Imagination (1995). She is widely known for her notion of ‘wide-awakeness’ as both an aesthetic and activist orientation, a concept partly influenced by Dewey. Isabelle Stengers is a philosopher of science who writes on/with/about Whitehead (as referenced in this book), as well as other continental philosophers like Gilles Deleuze. She also importantly has engaged deeply with the foundational posthuman philosopher Donna Haraway, and with the posthuman entanglement work of Bruno Latour.

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Susanne Langer (student of Whitehead’s) was a philosopher of art, aesthetics, and symbolism, who believes in a creativity that blends science, feeling, and philosophy. Significant work: Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942). In the second half of the twentieth century, the areas of cognitive psychology, design, creative practice, and creativity in education advanced research into creativity, but it is only in the first two decades of the twenty-first century that an emerging and coherent field of creativity studies is starting to coalesce, and it is strongly characterised by these earlier philosophical influences and network theoretics which lead to an expansion into and uptake of posthuman creativities as a leader in this newly articulating field. This book appears at this juncture, and I hope it has modelled some ways to think about humaning, emerging, becoming-­ with all other affects and elements in our own specific ecologies in order to re-attune to a more expansive, a more sustainable, and a more agentic creativity. Start with intention, and a manifesto never goes astray. “My” non-human attachments in the time of COVID: Letting go of the ‘my’ the dogs the bed The bay The autumn leaves the spring leaves the leafless trees The canal the couch the kayak the bike the garden

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September 2020 We are once again in hard lockdown due to second wave of COVID in Australia, particularly in my home state of Victoria. In hindsight, Stacy and I are even more grateful that I was able to drive to New South Wales to pick up baby Hazel, just days before the state borders closed for months. Hazel’s done well, but Tasha has deteriorated more quickly than we thought she would. Now she drinks obsessively, and sometimes her diaper doesn’t quite hold everything. She is more restless at night now, increasingly uncomfortable, and wanders around the house a lot, just looking off into the distance. We take her back to Raquel, her vet. ‘It’s too soon, right?’ I ask. ‘I don’t want to lose her, it’s just hard to see her like this.’ ‘It’s not too soon’, Raquel says gently. ‘But it’s up to you.’ One of the worst things about loving animals is that one often has to choose when they die. It was hard to see my mother die a slow, agonising death, but it was equally (or more) excruciating to have set a death date for my first dog Luna (a Friday), and then march through each day of that week with increasing anxiety and sorrow. Letting go is never easy, no matter how it comes. We set the day and try to make Tasha comfortable until then. On the morning of our goodbye, I hold Tasha in my lap on the short car ride to the vet, and Stacy drives. Tasha is calm, quietly looking out the passenger’s seat window as the neighbourhood slowly goes by. She is calm when we go into the vet, calm when I sit on the floor with her in my lap, calm as Stacy pats her and Raquel shaves her leg for the injection. My sweet Tasha is calm until she is gone, until I hand her lifeless body over into Raquel’s arms and we turn, heartbroken, and go home. * * * Tasha is my second dog. I used to be a cat person, until Luna came into my life when I was living in Alice Springs. I’ve never looked back. Maybe it’s being an academic, with so much time spent sitting in front of a computer, a contrast to my formerly physically active life. Dogs make you go out. Dogs demand that you look away from the screen in a different way

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than cats do. In this living-by-the-sea, COVID-still world, dogs are the kinds of companions that sometimes humans and cats cannot be: constantly there, constantly willing, constantly close. I feel blessed by my dogged non-human assemblage here at home, as I do by the materiality of my home, my kayak, the bay, the canal, the sky. And lest I go too far down the rhetorical rabbit hole, Hazel is barking indignantly that it’s time to go outside, even if it’s cold, and even if I have to carry her because she has not had her final shots yet. I thank her for keeping me moving, for helping me remember that my own creative ecology is so much more than human. * * *

Posthuman Creativity Manifesto Natalie Loveless invokes the practice of manifestos by referencing her mentor, Donna Haraway, and Haraways’ two famous manifesti (1985 and 2003). She does so, she says, ‘not abandoned to professional justification and defensive metrics, but of a feminist university of creativity, experiment, and what I will frame in the pages to come as a mode of eros that is committed, cathected, and sustaining’.2 She also, however, offers the caveat: ‘or perhaps this is a love story, filled with the ambivalence that constitutes all stories of love’. I agree with Loveless that love is always ambivalent, as are creativity and artistic vulnerability. Does any relationship, artistic act, or creative investment eventuate in the perfect formation of it we envisioned initially, in our minds’ eyes, in our imagination? And if not, does that diminish it in any way?3 And so, drawing on the key points this text has tried to model, and also on the desires, love, and aesthetic commitments I have shared with you, I propose here a creativity studies manifesto/manifesta that adheres to a recognition of the need for a more expansive and nuanced creativity in  How to make art at the end of the world: A manifesto for research-creation. 2019. Duke Univ Press.  For another creativity manifesto, see: V. Glaveanu et al 2019. ‘Advancing creativity theory and research: A sociocultural manifesto.’ The Journal of Creative Behavior, Vol. 0, Iss. 0, pp. 1–5, https:// doi.org/10.1002/jocb.395 2 3

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the Anthropocene, and rejects the bifurcation of human ‘versus’ non-­ human creative agency beginning with a commitment to: 1. Creativity beyond the human:4 That5 ‘posthumanist orientations are more interested in problematizing the bifurcation of human and non-human nature as part of a larger feminist project of challenging the naturalization (and concomitant subjugation) of otherness, while at the same time developing an ethics and politics that would challenge human exceptionalism’….that is primarily anthropocentric. That is, an approach to creativity studies that prioritises human “culture” over “nature” and sees them as separate.’ In Neimanis’ words, a recognition that  ‘that which we usually consider eminently cultural—i.e. human beings—are hardly removed or separate from the biological, ecological, and otherwise material milieu we call “nature”. We, too, are dirt made flesh; iron made blood; water made tears, sweat and urine.’6 Or, as in this book, we are creative collaborations with all elements in our histories and environments, including the foundational elements of fire, water, air, and land. 2. Creativity beyond use-value: That a posthuman approach to creativity studies rejects definitions based on use-value.7,8,9  Astrida Neimanis, ‘Alongside the right to water, a posthumanist feminist imaginary’, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 2014, pp. 5–24. 5  Neimanis, p. 15. 6  Neimanis, p. 16. 7  See Donna Haraway’s Staying with the trouble in which she writes “What is needed is action and thinking that does not fit within dominant capitalist cultures…collectives capable of new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning” (2016, p. 51). 8  Drawing on Erin Manning, who explains the mechanics of research-creation thusly: ‘New forms of knowledge require new forms of evaluation, and even more so, new ways of valuing the work we do.’ Her four propositions about art (as research-creation) can be applied to my conceptualisation of creative relational studies or posthuman creativities. She offers: ‘1. If “art” is understood as a “way” it is not yet about an object, a form or content. 2. Making is a thinking in its own right, and conceptualization a practice in its own right. 3. Research-creation is not about objects. It is a mode of activity that is at its most interesting when it is constitutive of new processes. This can happen only if its potential is tapped in advance of its alignments with existing disciplinary methods and institutional structures (this includes creative capital). 4. New processes will likely create new forms of knowledge that may have no means of evaluation within current disciplinary models’ (Manning 2015 Non-representational theory ed Vannini, pp. 53–54). 9  Manning says, ‘The unquantifiable within experience can be taken into account only if we begin with a mode of inquiry that refutes initial categorization’ (p. 54). 4

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3. Creativity beyond hierarchies: That we begin to consider natural and human creativity as naturecultural creativity in a non-­hierarchical and non-use-value way. It might begin to expand our vision, our curiosity and our collaborative approaches to things like, ‘a glacier’s long-term memory; the social promiscuity of bodily fluids; the river writing the canyon, in a slow-motion, cursive script. All of these processes attest to creativity, culture and “language skills” before or beyond something called the cultural human.’10 4. Creative ecologies: That a creative ecological (or intersectional, collective) approach to the study and doing of contemporary creativity is the most effective way forward which prioritises sustainability (in all its manifestations) over individual, national or industrial exceptionalism, human over non-human exceptionalism, or educational exceptionalism over fostering holistic and lifelong learning approaches. 5. Creative agency: That a contemporary creativity studies recognises, in philosopher Donna Haraway’s words, ‘there is no border where evolution ends and history begins, where genes stop and environments take up, where culture rules and nature submits, or vice versa’.11 Nothing is outside of nature, including creative agency and creativity studies. 6. Creative difference: A rejection of the abstraction of ‘the global’ drive to genericise all for economic circulation, and a respect for difference at the micro level, a renewed valuing of the unique. A discarding of the bifurcation between ‘craft’ or manual arts and creative economies/industries, a late twentieth-century turn which is no longer effective to meet the needs of this new century. This includes differences in onto-epistemological notions of what constitutes a contribution to knowledge in academic work, and the necessarily different and new methods that must accompany this new work.12  Neimanis, p. 17.  Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader (Routledge, London and New York 2004), 2. 12  St Pierre, E. A. (2019). Post Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal of Method, and the Risk of the New. Qualitative Inquiry, https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419863005 10 11

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7. Creative relationality: A rejection of the focus on products and a refocusing on relationships; a rejection of creative innovators and an expansion into creative relationality.13 8. Creative wilding: That creativity has its own life and agency, and must be released back into the wild, and its cage of use-value discarded. By extending the principles of creative agency, that not all material, processual, and relational activities can or should be apprehended, or profitable,  and that this is a form of neo-colonialism. That attempts to assess, measure, and rank creativity are misplaced and ill-informed, and instead are measuring something related to but not actually creativity (like prime rib is from but not a cow-being). 9. Creative co-existence: By extension, that it is more sustainable for all human and non-human beings to recognise and celebrate that which is undefinable, unseizable, and perhaps incomprehensible, and that these differences can help build understanding, resilience, and curiosity rather than fear; that for this reason, creative entities, processes, and relational encounters (intra-actions) powerfully and positively progress and enrich life, and remain at the centre of peaceful co-existence across all species and atmospheres. 10. Creative humility: That creativity has always been and always will be outside of human endeavour, and as such is beyond the dominion of human control, economic rationalism, and jurisdiction. * * * What is it you’re trying to do in that book? I ask myself one morning on my walk. Am I trying to ‘do’ anything? What is any artist trying to do? People ask those kinds of questions of researchers, academics, not artists. Artists, even if they do get asked the odd question like that have the good sense to say something like I prefer to let the work speak for itself. But academia likes to explain. So what am I doing here?

 Jonathan Wyatt, (2018). Therapy, stand-up, and the gesture of writing: Towards creative-relational inquiry. Routledge; Vlad Glaveanu et al 2019. 13

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I grab my paddleboard and head down to the beach. I decide to let the water help me think this through. I think better when I’m in motion, and when I’m in nature. Closer to the waves, I think better. The texture of the water on my legs as I paddle out using this board like a kayak, paddling alternate sides, is mesmerising. The sun burns my head. The noise of happy humans falls behind. The rhythm of the board on these small bay waves brings me back. I’m coming home. I’m coming back to storytelling creativity in a way that I would like to listen to, or to read it. I’m universalising my experiences during this project, not as research but encounter. Not as representation, but as experience. Not as foreclosure, but as opening. What does it take to crack the objectifying relationship between the white West and East Asia? Do we have more in common than we do apart, or should that even be a goal of any kind? The concept of ‘research-creation’14 has continued to develop as a way of expanding the conceptual and ontological possibilities of creative and artistic academic research. What began as a government funding category in Canada has now become an invitation to think differently about the work of the academy, and the limits of traditional ‘knowledge creation’. This will come as no surprise to artists, but it does to many academics. By choosing to conduct research in collaboration with our participants, by writing up in forms like autoethnography, autotheory, and creative non-­ fiction, by sharing the relational work done in these research contexts through more accessible means both digital and vernacular, we invite the non-academic community to engage with our activities, curiosities, and creativity in ways that have been happening now for some time in fields as diverse as physics, neuroscience, and medicine. It’s not that this hasn’t been happening in the social sciences, humanities, and philosophy before or elsewhere (also known as practice-as-research, arts-based research, and  McCormack, D. P. (2008). Thinking-spaces for research-creation. Inflexions, 1(1), 1–16; Loveless, N. S. (2015). Towards a manifesto on research-creation. RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne| Canadian Art Review, 52–54; Chapman, O. B., & Sawchuk, K. (2012). creation: Intervention, analysis and “family resemblances”. Canadian Journal of Communication, 37(1); Lupton, D., & Watson, A. A. (2020). Towards more-than-human digital data studies: developing research-creation methods. Qualitative Research, 1468794120939235; Riddle, S. (2017). An experiment in educational research-creation using music as diagram. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 732–740; Loveless, N. (2019). How to make art at the end of the world: A manifesto for research-creation. Duke University Press. 14

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practice-led research), but philosophical and creative scholars are taking research-creation further as a politico-ethico-onto-epistemological exploration.15 * * * One of the questions this book asks is: do I need to be doing anything at all?16 This too is not new, in scholarly research or elsewhere. You know that old Buddhist chestnut, ‘human beings, not human doings’. But people (like me) like to do. It feels propulsive. It feels agentic. More than 30 years ago, travel writer Bruce Chatwin penned his iconic but culturally appropriative The Songlines (1987) book with a description of the ways in which he believed human beings to be biologically oriented towards movement, specifically towards walking. His obsession with restlessness and nomadism captivated my attention when I first read it in my early 20s, when I too was preoccupied with such things. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be moving, but that I didn’t want to be sitting still. I lived in Alice Springs, where Chatwin went on his Songlines trip, for almost seven years when I first arrived in Australia (I won’t say emigrated, because at the time migration couldn’t have been further from my mind; I was after an adventure, and a change). I’m always grateful that Central Australia was my introduction to this great and complicated country that has allowed me to stay. I wonder what it would be like for migrants or visitors to the United States to go first and live on First Nations reservations or towns nearby for their first seven years. It presents a very different picture than the dominant one, in most countries I would wager. Yet the longer I stayed, the more I realised I knew nothing. When people tell me that they lived there for six months or a year (or a week) and they start explaining culture wars to me, I don’t say anything. When white people or urban Aboriginal people explain to me about skin names and white ‘culture vultures’ who appropriate Indigenous culture, I don’t say I was given a skin name. Nobody wants to hear that except  Manning, E. (2015). Against method. In (Phillip Vannini, editor) Non-representational methodologies: Re-envisioning research. Routledge. 16  St Pierre, E. A. (2019). Post Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal of Method, and the Risk of the New. Qualitative Inquiry. https://doi.rg/10.1177/1077800419863005 15

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white people. I know that now. Anyone who lives in Central Australia for long enough has stories about being accepted by Indigenous people, communities, or  organisations. Given skin names, collaborating on something, teaching something, being taken out for ‘womens’ business’, being ‘painted up’, and so on. These stories really mean nothing to me now, because while I value my relationships and experiences there, (and also my skin name),  I am observant enough to realise that people use what they have at hand. Sometimes it’s stories, sometimes it’s material wealth, sometimes it’s belonging. Like my trips back to Hong Kong and Singapore and elsewhere for this latest project, the wanderer, nomad, researcher, artist, writer, traveller, pilgrim, or sadhu must realise that they only encounter individuals, sometimes in a group, sometimes in a long line, sometimes one at a time. But the idea of speaking about or for large groups of people—cultures, families, communities, nations, or sites—is at an end. Never was, never will be, accurate. It is just a story someone tells an audience hungry for a shortcut. Sometimes emotions get the better of me and I make the mistake of trying to assert some of my story, like I did recently at a dinner party talking to an Indigenous friend about Central Australia. Thankfully, I finally shut up and listened. It’s not for me to assert my fleeting experiences in such conversations. That’s hard for white people, but I keep practicing. That’s not a lesson Chatwin seems to have ever learned. Now, more than thirty years later, it’s good to have Indigenous writers like Melissa Lucashenko, Tony Birch, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Terry Whitebeach, and others help us to understand Indigenous Australian experience from the inside; and also local non-Indigenous writers writing more nuanced stories about Alice Springs and Central Australia, like Rod Moss, Jo Dutton, Monica Tan, and Leni Shilton.

5:14 p.m. Here comes the rain. It’s been 40+ (celsius) degrees like only it can be in Australia. In Alice Springs, where I first laid my head in this provocative and heart-touching country, 40 is no big deal. In Melbourne though, it is. We are not built for it. It’s like snow in Atlanta—it throws the whole

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city into chaos, because they aren’t prepared for it. I am sitting on the red velvet couch with baby Hazel who is now ten months old, and the sound of the rain blowing in mingles with the childcare centre songs next door (aftercare goes till 6) and it’s beautiful and I thank my lucky stars I somehow ended up here in Australia, like Chatwin, who suffered from AIDS and controversy, but was a curious and passionate writer nonetheless. In The Songlines, which he called a novel, admitting he got much of his pseudo-ethnographic account ‘wrong’ and is really a book about nomadism, Chatwin writes the character of ‘Russian Arkady’ (probably a composite of all the non-Indigenous informants he met and talked with), who introduces him to a version of Central Australian Indigenous cultural frames: Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had walked over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path—birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes—and so singing the world into existence.17

Chatwin is a controversial figure, and always has been, yet he understood the relationship between story and belonging. He spent most of his adulthood pursuing global examples of his obsession with nomadism, wandering, and human restlessness: characteristics that are pathologised in contemporary subjects but which, Chatwin argues, are endemic to humans throughout history. Like Elspeth Probyn, who calls it the principle of movement within belonging, and ways of getting about differently: movement that seeks not a straight path but rather revels in the inbetween, that picks up things along its way, that is derouted by small ethno-autobiographic shards—a tumbleweed of a theoretical project that gathers up memories, wishes, dreams, anecdotes, or sayings scribbled on city walls.18

He includes many and varied examples of wandering from spiritual as well as cultural sources in The Songlines, including:  Chatwin, p. 2.  Elspeth Probyn. (1996). Outside belongings. Routledge, p. 40.

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Psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that the wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour; a neurosis; a form of unfulfilled sexual longing; a sickness which, in the interests of civilization, must be suppressed….yet in the East, the still preserve the once universal concept: that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.19

We live on storytelling. Perhaps, though, not only humans do. What is a posthuman story? Is knowing territory a kind of story? If Chatwin failed to truly comprehend the meaning of the Dreaming, Tjukurpa,20 he is not alone in either his failing or his seeking. In our search for meaning, we too often objectify other people and places in order to make sense of ourselves. The controversy about Chatwin is that he lied, or made up, some of his narrative. But what of the white Western audiences that popularised the book, in their need for shorthand about others whom they could not experience directly, but were curious about? What about the countless anthropologists and colonists and other outsiders who offered less accessible and compelling accounts of Central Australia and Indigenous peoples (or anyone/anyplace) for that matter? What is the goal of academic research, and who defines what constitutes a ‘contribution to knowledge’ that supposedly defines it? One of the great limitations of Chatwin’s (and other anthropological and ethnographic accounts) story is the bifurcation of nature/culture, logic/empiricism,21 native/civilised, human/non-human, us/them, as these tales so often do. What if ‘knowing’ were not the measure of knowledge, but instead ‘listening’, ‘asking’, ‘sitting’ were? What if innovation were not the measure of creativity, but rejection of the known? Chatwin died of AIDS-related symptoms in 1989. He never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality nor his diagnosis of AIDS/HIV. How much do  Bruce Chatwin. (1987). The Songlines. Penguin, p. 178.  Tjukurpa has many deep, complex meanings. Tjukurpa refers to the creation period when ancestral beings created the world. From this came Anangu religious heritage, explaining their existence and guiding daily life. For Anangu, Tjukurpa provides answers to important questions, the rules for behaviour and for living together. It is the law of caring for each other and the land that supports them. Tjukurpa tells of the relationships between people, plants, animals, and the physical features of the land. It is the past, present, and future—all at the same time. Source: https://www.environment.gov.au/topics/national-parks/uluru-kata-tjuta-national-park/culture-and-history/tjukurpa 21  Or what A. N. Whitehead called ‘the bifurcation of nature’ (1938, p. 32).

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truth-claims have to do with the resonance of creative relational gifts which instead claim ‘I experienced this. I wondered about that’: What if Chatwin’s legacy is not his compelling writing and romanticisation of Central Australia, but his (even unintentional) lesson to beware of truth-­ claims, to venture, to be curious, and to tell—and to listen to—stories that might help us connect to something greater? Such is the power of creative wilding. * * *

January 2021 Hazel and I walk around the loop now, my meditation playing in my ears. The sulphur-crested cockatoos glide down, the jellyfish in the canal billow, the fish come and go. The waves have their own weather system. It is summer now in the southern hemisphere. After twenty-three years in Australia, I still can’t get my head around it—January as summer, not the dead of winter. Is anything really dead? When everything is blooming and different elsewhere, but nearby? Atmospheres. As we walk, and sniff, and observe, and duck to miss the swooping magpies, I think about my own restlessness, wandering, nomadism. Because migrants (and adoptees) are never really home. And we understand places and people and belonging differently than those who are rooted and belong in a place. I recall Probyn highlighting the ways in which queer modes—non-dominant modes—of being, moving, desiring—are embodied and can ‘after Deleuze…call modes of becoming, becoming-horse, becoming-bicycle, becoming-swimmer: the ways in which one becomes fully part of a machinery of movement’.22 I think about my becoming-with creativity, or becoming-creativity. I understand now how that is different than ‘becoming creative’, which is still at the mercy of the use-value equation.

 Probyn (1996, p. 41).

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In becoming-creativity, I am back home in New York, back home in Alice Springs, back on my relational travels through Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, elsewhere. She, and others, ask, and I ask you: Not what is a body, but what can a body do? Not what is creativity, but what can creativity do? What can a creative body that is becoming-with do?

Some non-human attachments in the time of post-COVID:23 Becoming-dogs Becoming-bed Becoming-ocean becoming-waves Becoming-autumn leaves Becoming-spring leaves Becoming-summer leaves Becoming-leafless trees Becoming-canal Becoming-couch Becoming-kayak Becoming-bike Becoming-garden Becoming-creativity Becoming-creativity Becoming-creativity

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 A speculative time which does not yet exist but also does exist and also never existed.

Index1

A

Aboriginal, 50, 51, 135, 176 Active/activity, 9, 10, 12–14, 19, 28, 32, 59, 65, 71, 99, 104, 105, 118, 121, 128, 159, 161, 166, 170, 172n8, 174, 175 Actors/acting, 18, 19, 42, 43, 47, 81–84, 100, 117–133, 157, 160 Aether, 1, 2 Affect, 15, 17, 19, 21, 31, 33, 66, 140, 159, 168, 169 Agency, 2, 5, 17–21, 24, 33, 35, 39, 41, 54, 57, 78, 120, 140–142, 153, 165–181 Agentic, 19, 140, 169, 176 Air, 2, 27, 35, 57–60, 74, 75, 107, 137, 138, 149, 159, 163, 172

Alchemy, 2 Alice Springs, 170, 176, 177, 181 Amazon River, 142 Ancestor, 142 Animal, 2, 5, 23, 26, 27, 33, 34, 57, 70, 79, 139, 170, 178, 179n20 Anthropocene, 36, 140, 172 Aqueous, 139 Art Basel, 97 Artificial intelligence (AI), 16, 86 Art/s, 3, 8–12, 21–23, 23n30, 39, 41, 51, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 72, 75, 77, 78, 81, 83, 85, 86, 88, 90, 91, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 106–110, 115–121, 123–126, 129, 130, 146, 150, 152, 153, 155, 158–160, 162–164, 169, 172n8, 173

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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184 Index

Arts ecology, 116 Asia Pacific, 51, 62, 138, 150, 155, 162 Assessment, 15, 163 Atmospheres, 4, 5, 20, 41, 57, 113, 143, 157, 174, 180 Australasia, 18, 62 Autotheory, 5, 21–24, 23n30, 175 B

Beach, 5, 17, 26, 27, 32, 35, 37, 38, 73, 150, 175 Becoming-with, 5, 169, 180, 181 Beijing, 75, 123, 127 Bergson, Henri, 10, 15, 167 Body/embodiment, 1, 5, 19, 23, 38, 39, 41, 58, 81, 85–87, 109, 139, 141, 159, 170, 181 Boonwurrung, 37 Bukit Brown, 78–80 Bushfire, 26, 27, 55 C

Cantonese, 95, 96, 105, 109, 118, 123, 124, 127–130, 132 Cantonese opera, 109, 118, 123, 124, 129, 130 Censorship, 61, 63, 68, 73, 115 Central Australia, 176, 177, 179 Chatwin, Bruce, 176–180 China, 7, 8, 8n9, 28, 51, 79, 86, 88, 95–98, 108, 114, 115, 118, 120, 122, 123, 125, 129, 131, 163 Circular Quay, 138, 146, 155

Climate change, 28, 57, 59 Co-create, 5, 20, 81 Collaborate, 116, 121 Collective, 4, 15, 20, 21, 64, 72, 76, 78, 116, 122, 140, 147, 172n7, 173 Colonialism, 61, 64, 90 Commerce, 97, 100 Commodified/commodification, 12, 39, 65 Community arts, 108 Cosmologies, 11, 140 COVID, 16, 17, 20, 23, 31, 40, 41, 70, 146, 156, 157, 164, 169, 170 Creative ecology, 3–24, 54, 62, 65, 107, 111, 116, 139, 140, 146, 147, 157, 162, 171, 173 Creative relational, 172n8, 180 Creativity Index, 99 Cultural industries, 63, 64, 99, 103, 116, 120, 122, 124, 125, 155, 164 Cultural precinct, 81, 156 Culture/cultural, 5–8, 21, 22, 28, 45, 46, 48, 51, 54, 61–65, 67, 68, 73–75, 77, 80, 81, 86–88, 90, 95–97, 99–104, 107, 109, 114–116, 119, 120, 122–125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 135, 137, 139, 146, 148, 149, 152, 153, 155, 156, 164, 168, 172, 172n7, 173, 176–179 Curious/curiosity, 21, 35, 37, 40, 82, 127, 128, 143, 147, 173–175, 178, 179

 Index  D

Data, 27, 74, 110, 117, 119, 132, 133 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 167, 168, 180 Design, 15, 40, 49–51, 54, 65, 94, 98–101, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 119, 124, 148, 150, 151, 154, 155, 157, 162, 169 Devising, 41–43, 81, 107, 127, 156, 157 Dewey, John, 10–12, 167, 168 Digital, 22, 49, 66, 67, 72, 86, 98, 104, 125, 151, 155, 175 Diversity, 95, 104, 162 Dogs, 5, 13, 17, 20, 24, 28, 33, 34, 38, 40, 41, 49, 70, 76, 146, 147, 170, 171 E

Earth/land, 1, 16, 18, 23, 57–59, 88–102, 124, 137, 138, 142, 147, 172, 179n20 East Asia, 5, 7, 8, 17, 62, 98, 116, 175 Ecology, 2–24, 28, 51, 54, 57, 62, 65, 68, 72, 91–97, 107, 109, 111, 113, 139, 140, 143, 146–148, 152, 157, 158, 162, 164, 169, 171, 173 Economy/ies, 3, 6, 8, 13, 15, 17, 20, 32, 63, 95, 97–101, 123, 150, 173 Education, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 21, 39, 40, 51, 54, 63, 66, 74, 85, 90, 91, 96, 100–103, 109, 111–115, 112n1, 113n2, 117, 118, 120–123, 125, 131, 148,

185

149, 151–155, 159, 163, 168, 169 Emotion, 4, 15, 71, 84, 127, 177 Eora Nation, 136 Epidemic, 31 European, 28, 35, 37, 38, 74, 164, 166 Experience, 3, 5, 12–15, 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 42, 43, 57, 68, 74, 81, 82, 127, 135, 137, 142, 149, 150, 154, 155, 161, 162, 172n9, 175, 177, 179 F

Farming, 91, 94, 109, 149 Film, 42, 86, 98, 105–106, 148, 149, 156 Fire, 1, 18, 25–29, 37, 172 First Nations, 137, 143, 176 Floyd, George, 37 G

Gadigal people, 138, 147 Gallery/ies, 21, 41, 51, 81, 108 Ganges river, 142 Gentrification, 130 Gifted education/talent development, 113, 120, 121, 123 Global/globalised/globalisation, 6, 25, 50, 54, 55, 58, 59, 70, 71, 74, 85, 90, 97, 98, 100, 101, 105, 107, 112, 125, 131, 141, 149–151, 155, 173, 178 God, 2, 4, 9, 167 Greeks, 2, 8

186 Index

Greene, Maxine, 10, 11, 15, 168 Guilford, J. Paul, 10 H

Hierarchy, 109, 159, 173 Higher education, 3, 101, 103, 112n1, 117, 120, 123, 125, 126, 154 History, 3, 4, 6–11, 16, 22, 25–27, 36, 37, 73, 74, 78, 90, 107, 110, 135, 138, 139, 142, 166, 168, 172, 173, 178 Holistic, 101, 109, 173 Hong Kong, 5, 8, 17, 24, 64, 74, 75, 80, 88, 90–133, 146, 156, 177, 181 Hope, 19, 54, 55, 97, 117, 124, 131, 169 Humour, 128, 163

Interviews, 8n7, 18, 19, 41, 43, 65, 66, 70, 72, 74, 75, 104–106, 108–113, 115, 117, 119, 126–128, 130, 151, 156, 157 Intra-action, 12, 174 K

Knowledge Economy, 63 Koalas, 27 L

Land/earth, 1, 16, 18, 23, 57–59, 88–102, 124, 137, 138, 142, 147, 172, 179n20 Legal personhood/legal entity status, 141, 142 Love, 9, 17, 20, 36–38, 54, 82, 109, 110, 114, 130, 157–164, 171 Lukasiewicz, Jan, 10

I

Imagination, 9, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 167, 168, 171, 172n7 Improvisation, 37, 42, 87 Indigenous, 36, 135–137, 140, 142, 147, 155, 176–179 Individual, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 15, 21, 62, 75, 95, 150, 153, 167, 173, 177 Innovation and Technology Commission (Hong Kong), 99 Innovative/innovation, 3, 7, 8, 20, 32, 40, 49, 50, 60, 88, 99–101, 105, 109, 113n2, 120, 125, 135, 143, 147, 149, 151–155, 179

M

Mallacoota, 26, 27 Management, 58, 59, 63, 96, 98, 120, 142 Mandarin, 96, 127 Manifesto, 165–181 Manning, Erin, 15, 24, 168, 172n8 Maori, 142 Massumi, Brian, 13, 15, 168 Material/ism/ist, 2, 14, 17–19, 21, 48, 72, 74, 75, 113, 138, 141, 147, 157, 168, 172, 174, 177 Mathematics, 11

 Index 

Matter, 2, 19, 22, 31, 40, 48, 50, 58, 64, 68, 70, 87, 101, 141, 156, 157, 164, 170, 179 Medieval, 2, 9 Meditation, 5, 38, 41, 146, 180 Melbourne, 4, 5, 16, 17, 20, 24–29, 31–55, 81, 145, 156, 161, 164, 165, 177 Mindfulness, 32, 33 More-than-human, 14, 74, 139, 171, 175n14 Music/ian, 41, 82, 86, 88, 98, 105, 113, 114, 118, 150, 156, 158–164, 175n14 N

NAPLAN, 154 National Arts Council, 63, 68, 69 National Gallery of Singapore (Y Lab), 81 Nature, 1, 6–8, 10–12, 15, 16, 19, 22, 32, 36, 40, 41, 55, 65, 70, 75, 79, 95, 131, 139, 141, 148, 157, 168, 172, 173, 175, 179 Neuroscience, 10, 150, 162, 175 New Territories, 89, 132 New Zealand, 26, 105, 116, 142 Non-human, 5, 12, 18–21, 36, 37, 57, 136, 139–143, 147, 148, 169, 171–174, 179, 181 O

Observe, 92, 98, 180

187

P

Pandemic, 16, 17, 20, 23, 33, 41, 55, 145 Passion, 22, 74, 130, 157 Pedagogies, 112, 139, 152, 154 Performance, 5, 12, 19, 22, 23n30, 41–43, 49, 55, 66, 75, 80–82, 108, 113, 115, 117, 127, 132, 138, 146, 156, 161–164 Philosophy, 10–13, 15, 69, 97, 160, 167–169, 175 Pleasure, 13, 23, 76, 163 Pollution, 58, 141 Posthumanism, 33 Post-Museum, 76, 77 Pragmatism, 15 Printing/print making, 66, 67, 98 Probyn, Elspeth, 178, 180 Process, 12, 13, 15, 19, 21, 26, 84, 119, 120, 122, 127, 128, 132, 150, 152, 153, 158, 161, 167, 168, 172n8, 173, 174 Process philosophy, 15, 168 Product, 7, 15, 23, 41, 58, 71, 77, 100, 101, 124, 155, 174 Protests, 94, 103, 110, 127 Psychology, 4, 10, 113n2, 152, 169 R

Relationships, 3, 10–12, 18, 21, 22, 51, 54, 61, 64, 72, 74, 87, 95, 97, 110, 111, 135, 137, 138, 149, 151, 152, 159, 167, 171, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179n20 Renaissance City Plan, 62, 63

188 Index

Renovation, 156 Research-creation, 172n8, 175, 175n14, 176 Robinson, Ken, 39–41, 143 Robots, 70, 71

Stengers, Isabel, 13–15, 168 Stewart, Kathleen, 6, 24 Sydney, 5, 24, 51, 135, 136, 138–140, 145–164 Sydney Harbour Bridge, 155 Sydney Opera House, 135, 146

S

Sarbiewiski, M.K., 9 School of Creativity, 90–92, 113, 116 School of Everyday Life, 89, 91–97, 102, 109, 116 Science, 2, 6, 9–11, 15, 86, 87, 167–169 Secondary (high) schools, 88, 120 Sensory/senses, 2, 20, 24, 25, 49, 57, 62, 68, 73, 74, 85, 95, 127, 128, 130, 143, 150, 151, 162–164, 174, 179 Singapore, 5, 8, 17, 24, 26, 57–88, 98, 101, 108, 109, 114, 116, 122, 123, 131, 156, 177, 181 Singapore Heritage Society, 79 Sitelines, 137, 138 Social media, 41 Soft/WALL/studs, 69 Space, 1–2, 18, 45, 48, 57, 62, 63, 65–70, 72, 73, 77–79, 81, 83–87, 95, 96, 104, 107–110, 113, 115, 116, 118, 121, 128, 129, 139, 148, 149, 151, 160 Spirituality, 2, 4, 7, 150, 162 Spot, 16, 38, 70, 71, 109, 157 Standardisation, 153 STEAM/STEM, 11, 94, 160

T

Tech (companies), 104–106, 108, 111 Technical, 8, 109, 154 Theatre, 19, 21, 31, 41, 42, 49, 52, 53, 80, 82–85, 118, 139, 155–157, 164 Tiger economies, 8, 98, 116 Time, 4, 6, 15, 17, 19–21, 23–26, 28, 33–35, 37–40, 48–50, 52, 61–64, 67–70, 72, 75, 76, 78–83, 85–87, 89, 90, 92, 94–96, 98–100, 103–105, 107, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118, 120, 121, 125, 128–132, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 145, 146, 148–152, 160, 161, 163–165, 167, 169–172, 175–177, 179n20, 181, 181n23 Transdisciplinary, 11, 65, 165 Trees, 15, 17, 32, 36, 54, 79, 89 U

Umbrella revolution, 110 University, 9, 17, 20, 27, 45, 53, 54, 71, 86, 91, 96, 101, 104, 106, 108–116, 120, 126, 136, 148, 149, 152–154, 165, 171

 Index 

Urban/urbanisation/urban density, 32, 57–60, 72, 87, 146, 176 Use-value, 10, 15, 139, 140, 147, 166, 172, 174, 180 Utopian, 140, 149 V

Vaccine, 32 Values, 6, 9, 10n14, 22, 39, 41, 48, 66, 68, 94, 140, 153, 154, 173, 177 Verbatim, 18, 19, 42, 43, 81, 117 Video/video arts, 5, 42, 55, 66–68, 71, 72, 98, 107, 121, 157 Virtual reality, 80

Water, 1, 16, 18, 24, 27, 34–38, 40, 58, 60, 75, 90, 96, 135–143, 145–147, 150, 157, 162, 172, 175 Western/westerners, 7–11, 16, 28, 50, 51, 54, 61, 74, 84, 86, 95, 99, 104, 122, 130, 138, 140, 150, 162, 164, 179 West Kowloon Cultural District, 100 Whanganui River, 142 Whitehead, Alfred North, 9, 10, 12–15, 167–169 Wildlife, 27, 28 Wild/wildness/wilding, 16, 17, 38, 40, 140, 174, 180 Winter, 33, 40, 41, 139, 148, 180 Workspace, 42, 67, 72, 110, 111

W

Walking, 5, 13, 106, 128, 146, 159, 176

189

Z

Zoom, 41