curious patterns #26

From violations of artistic freedom and meditations on extractive creativity to edible data and heritage algorithms.

Oct 03, 2023

curious patterns is an online publication of curated news around arts and culture, impact and evaluation, sustainable development and regenerative futures, and where these all intersect. My name is Kai Brennert, I am based out of Cambodia 🇰🇭, and I run the evaluation, research and policy consultancy edge and story.

Thanks heaps for subscribing, dear friends at Contemporary Nights 🇪🇹, Selaksa 🇮🇩, American Voices 🇺🇸, Cambodian Living Arts 🇰🇭, IFACCA, and AEA Consulting.

📣 25 October: Report Launch of The Missing Foundation: Culture’s Place Within and Beyond the SDGs

My brilliant co-researchers Dian Ika Gesuri, Francesca Giliberto, Katie Hodgkinson, Pedro Affonso Ivo Franco, and I will be presenting our research into culture and the UN Sustainable Development Goals on October 25 in a hybrid event. This research-reflection was commissioned by the British Council and hopefully provides some food for thought as we start negotiating the framework and underlying logics for the post-2030 agenda. If you’re curious, you can register here. See you there? 😊

🇨🇴 South America leads the way. Joining Bolivia and Chile, Colombia now also has a Ministry of Cultures. Yes, cultures – plural! Pretty epic if you ask me.

📐 Welcome to the world of heritage algorithms, ethnocomputing, indigenous design, and cultural STEM education. It’s like wearing a new pair of glasses to look at maths.

🇲🇬 Apparently, Madagascar’s visual arts are revolutionised by non-profits. But also, apparently, there is only one rich dude who solely funds one non-profit. I mean, what?

🎙️ Take 150,000 French rap songs, add a little AI, and voilà, here’s your arts database. Rapminerz turned this is into games, interactive dataviz, and even artificial rappers.

🇸🇴 Somalia is one of those places where my news-fuelled imagination fails me to produce something positive. Big congrats on bringing contemporary art exhibits back!

🏛️ The post-2030 lobbying engines are starting to rev up. Some countries advocate for a stand-alone culture goal in whatever will succeed the SDGs, others just ramble.

🇧🇩 I am not sure that a more sophisticated managerial class is needed, but this overview of Bangladesh’s music ecosystem does help us gain some perspective.

🏀 Activism – ok. Artivism – yes, please. Playtivism – now we’re talking. Fine Acts designs social impact campaigns and often incorporates the element of play. I like!

🇬🇧 Visas suck. Expensive visas suck even more. Expensive visas that get denied on the regular suck the most. Dear UK (frankly, the EU too), can you please fix yourself?

🇪🇹 The familiar tune of development, gentrification, and relocation has reached Fendika Cultural Centre in Addis Ababa. And again it’s the arts venues that make way.

🎮 Let’s give the science fiction cheerleaders some fodder: video games, too, can tell us about future imaginations! And this deep dive looks at museum futures specifically.

🇦🇪 Dubai was never really known for modesty, was it? Current mission: become the nucleus of the world’s creative industry. A whole support catalogue is the strategy.

🇹🇿 9% interest on up to $40k and a 88% loan return rate. I’m no finance pro, no idea how good that is, but I’m happy that banks come around to loan provision for artists.

☕️ Ban, Cancel, Jail or Tea

Stop everything and head over to the Southeast Asian Arts Censorship Database! Singapore-based ArtsEquator and Malaysian Five Arts Centre brought together a bunch of researchers (one of whom is yours truly) to document violations of artistic freedom across Southeast Asia to get a better understanding of how censorship works with all its local nuances. We ended up with some 60 data points for over 670 cases – a super granular dataset that is now waiting for researchers, journalists, activists, and other cool folks to make sense of and activate. Get in touch on the ArtsEquator website if you want access to the full dataset.

Here are some analysis appetisers that hopefully make you hungry enough to dig deeper into the regional and country reports, and explore the database itself:

🇻🇳 Vietnam: No surprise that arts censorship is alive and well in socialist Vietnam. They even have multiple different authorities deciding whether you can go ahead with your show. Just in case someone slipped up, if you know what I mean.

🇹🇭 Thailand: Thailand is going hard when restricting artistic freedom. Tools of choice include the incredibly vague lese majeste but also sedition and computer crimes laws.

🇵🇭 The Philippines: There is no censorship in the Philippines. Except, the Catholic Church didn’t get the memo.

🇲🇾 Malaysia: Malaysia has the highest absolute numbers of violations of artistic freedom in Southeast Asia. And these miraculously increase when elections are near.

🇮🇩 Indonesia: Indonesia has an Anti-Communist Law and made good use of it to censor artistic work for, well, severe cases of communism. Terrible diagnosis.

🇰🇭 Cambodia: Pop music and international feature films are most dangerous, especially when a British spy-comedy uses a vaguely Angkor Wat-looking temple as the villain hideout, lest we think the country harbours criminals.

In general, we found that in many cases, more than one actor was involved in violations of artistic freedom, sometimes to the extent of states effectively outsourcing outrage and censorship to a polarised public. This was especially visible when it was about moral policing, the main reason for arts censorship in Southeast Asia. Only in Thailand and Vietnam, political reasons featured more often.

If you’re ready for the main course, check out the full Southeast Asian Arts Censorship Database!

IMPACT

🌀 Ever wanted to eat your data? In a previous issues of curious patterns, we looked into data sonification and, quite extensively, data visualisation. Here’s a paper exploring the vast possibilities of data physicalisation, data edibilisation (hell yeah!), data visceralisation, and how to think beyond what is currently accepted by the scholarly complex. One of the examples in this paper 3D-prints the membership and lending activity of the Shakespeare and Company lending library and bookshop over a time period, another weaves citations in a Derrida chapter into a scarf. Perhaps my next evaluation client lets me experiment with ice cream data. You know, different colours, flavours, meltability and such…

📊 Is evaluation punk a methodological genre yet? As a Dark Matter Labs fanboy, I naturally ate this one up entirely: place-based indicators designed by the people, whilst utilising existing data and frameworks. And then towards the end of this three-blog series, they drop this banger of a commitment:

One of the defining features of the Cornerstones is that they embody feelings and a sense of vitality that cannot be directly measured. We see this as hugely important in the fight against the commodification of life; the Cornerstones represent a numerical buffer against further elements of the natural world and human experience being sucked into financial targets.

Just 😍

🇬🇧 And quick pointer toward new resources from Leeds’ Centre for Cultural Value: They have a new podcast and an online course around evaluation in arts and culture. I haven’t had the time or headspace to sample either, but I am almost certain that these are brilliant pieces of content many of you will appreciate very much.

📣 SHOUT OUT

Community is one of the most important things in any venture. And since there are so many amazing folks out there, I’ll be shouting out some of my favourite fellow consultants and friends in the culture++ space.

🇮🇩 Dian Ika Gesuri: If you need somebody to dig deep, and I mean take a backpack and tent and disappear into the forest for a few weeks to emerge weeks later with excellent research on all things arts, culture and development-kind of deep, Dian is your person.

🇩🇪 Linda Weichlein: Culture x cities x spaces x facilitation = Linda helps you through messy projects, messy conversations, and messy thinking. Absolutely your best friend when you’re stuck or know you definitely will be at some point.

🇬🇭 Ama Ofeibea Tetteh (Chapter54): Your one-stop shop for all creative industries consulting needs in West Africa. Ama should be your first call when exploring that region and you need somebody with proper design and contemporary arts cred.

🇮🇳 Manojna Yeluri (Artistik License): Looking for an intellectual property, copyright, and music industry pro who is also big on artistic freedom? Congratulations, you have found the perfect person – Manojna!

RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS

🔮 This is your 2023 McKinsey-like foresight bible for the creative industries. And yup, it’s almost 300 pages long. It’s a very worthwhile deep dive but also pretty damn overwhelming. Like inviting a McKinsey consultant in a way. But luckily it’s not McKinsey – Philippe Schneider and the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre really know what they are talking about in Tomorrow comes today. They look at CCIs in the context of several megatrend categories because if we don’t go with the time, we might be permanently at a disadvantage. The methodology also looks dope because it traverses academia, media, market intelligence, open data, policy documents, consulting reports, and ethnographic work – seriously, more reports should take such a broad view to really cover what’s happening (or might happen in this very case).

🇮🇳 What was catalytic capital again? In curious patterns #13, I featured the excellent Business of Handmade report with its beautifully woven case stories, exploring the various operational models and the new formal in India’s handicraft sector. Now, 200 Million Artisans is back with its the Business of Handmade 2.0 report. This time, they focus on the financing gap in India’s artisan industry and what kind of financing ecosystem is needed for the handmade revolution. Super important, not just for India! I also love love love how they manage to move away from the classic report format and lure us into many different rabbit holes by sheer pull of its great UX.

🛠️ When was the last time a UN agency reached out and asked to co-create? I know, right?! But it’s not entirely unheard of, as proven by ILO Regional Director for Africa, who asks in her foreword to a new ILO report on the state of creative labour in Africa for programme design collaboration to make decent work in Africa’s cultural and creative industries a reality. Avril Joffe and Ayeta Wangusa have put together an impressive deep dive, complete with necessary contextualisations, country and sector spotlights, and the right amount of cultural policy geekery. And while on the findings side there probably aren’t too many surprises (informality, precarity, weak IP protection etc.), this systemic baseline research is so important for careful programme design and collaboration.

ART IN BETWEEN

I am in the mood for overviews today, so here are some fascinating initiatives I have come across over the past few months:

🇮🇷 Iran Prison Project: A mix of original and AI generated art help to communicate an idea of it feels like to be inside an Iranian prison, based on first-hand accounts of survivors. It’s a very intense presentation with heartbreaking testimonies and an evocative 3D environment.

🇬🇹 Guatemala Festivales Solidarios: A festival for hope, for activism, for healing. It works against neocolonial structures and provides a space for other resistance movements to express themselves. It sure doesn’t make it easier when some members of the organising collective are in exile.

🇰🇪 Kenya Usiku Games: Culturally respectful mobile video games with a social mission you ask? Usiku Games employs various mechanisms to teach sign language, spread civic education, or nudge responsible water usage. Also, who could withstand the sweet pull of Battle Tuk-Tuks?

WHAT ELSE?

🫨 Brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible. Status quo or imminent future, what do you reckon? Either way, BANI is one way The Future Laboratory describes current societal fragmentation alongside other global drivers that will likely impact our nearer futures. Familiarising ourselves with these processes is probably a smart idea. And since technological advancement is also accelerating, research lab Envisioning put together a map of technologies that could/might/will affect our futures. Even if aerogel in fashion design, crowd-sensing platforms for festivals, or tactile response holograms for architects and dancers seem pretty far away in your daily life, you might want to check again.

And here are two very complementary essays, looking at life, labour, and intentions but from two distinctly different trajectories:

📉 Denial of Your Creativity Fuels Planetary Degeneration. Couldn’t have chosen a catchier title really. It’s a very timely piece as I recently had several conversations if art and creativity can afford not to work towards regeneration these days. In this reflective essay, Rūta Žemčugovaitė follows the flows of her creativity and what it contributes to. Her meditation on intentionality culminates in the realisation that we might make our creativity slave to investor portfolios and degenerative practices. No surprise really that she wrote this during her own journey of transitioning from corporate to freelance artist, removing her own creativity from extractive systems.

🌌 An insight view from a development worker experiencing a crisis of meaning. Zainab Kakal explores the conflicting realities of working development and living sustainability in a brilliant listing of experiences that at first glance appear dichotomous but exist in parallel nonetheless. This one resonated a lot with me: How is it that we extract the best for ourselves and deeply abhor extractive systems simultaneously? She then pulls together a manifesto with seven important points to find your way through this crisis of meaning. Explore them for yourself!

FIELD NOTES

📝 Malaya del Rosario went to Stockholm to join the IFACCA World Summit on Arts and Culture. Here’s what she came back with:

The 9th World Summit on Arts and Culture took place from 2-5 May 2023 in Stockholm, Sweden. Organised by the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA) and the Swedish Arts Council, this edition focused on the theme of safeguarding artistic freedom. It brought together policy makers, researchers, and cultural professionals to explore artistic freedom as a pillar of cultural policy, and more widely, the role of culture as a driver for sustainable development. It brought to light a situation that some artists are lucky enough to be in but often have to contend with – to be in a unique position of having something to say, a special ability to express it, and a captive audience to listen to it. It is this intrinsic power and influence of artists that disapproving entities often fear and try to disable. What can we learn from this gathering and what is its impact on cultural work? Read the key insights and watch special video interviews from UNESCO ADG for Culture, Ernesto Ottone Ramirez and Artist-activist, Katrina Stuart Santiago.

Did you know…

… that a large group of public development banks across the world just expressed their willingness to harness the power of Sports and Cultural industries for SDGs? I got excited there for a moment just to have the rest of the paragraph focus on sports and mega events 🤦

Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com