I am Sharon Zou, Longitude fellow from Boston University, and today I will be presenting a sound byte by Ian Garrett, an associate professor at York University in Canada. He will be speaking to us about the need for the presence and practice of artistic forms in our society today.

My name is Ian Garrett. I live in Toronto, in Ontario, Canada.

I wear a few different hats. I am director of an organization called the Center for Sustainable practice in the arts. I’m an associate professor at York University where I teach ecological design for performance, and I’m the producer for mixed reality production company called Toaster Lab.

The thought that comes back to me a lot, especially in these strange times, is in regards to the importance of creativity, art and culture, to our society. My work revolves around the idea that the arts are a central part of what will lead to sustainable societies. I do a lot of work in theater and I am attached to this idea that comes out of or I know it to come out of Yuval Harari’s “Sapiens” (referring to this book: https://www.ynharari.com/book/sapiens-2/), which is the idea that all of civilization is made up.

It’s a performance. And as a performance, I think, conversely, that we can use performance or use many creative practices in imagining what we would like civilization to be, if we’re making it up. Our performances, whether or not they’re literally theater or something else, are ways of us modeling how we would want the world to be and how we would like to see it as much as it reflects what we do see. And so they give us an opportunity to reimagine what we would like society to become.

And I think that this is also important because the work that I do shows that the arts have important social impacts, environmental impacts, and economic impacts, especially in terms of local communities, and in terms of individual and community identity. And in terms of bringing people together, and sharing experiences that also share the impacts that we have both positive and negative. And so what this work has shown is that if we put the investment, but take away the agenda, put the investment into artists and art making, for anybody who might be an artist, that this creative practice can function as a driver of sustainable societies. That we can achieve sustainability, not just through our approaches to a metric reduction of carbon emissions, which are important, but also to the way that we articulate what we would like society to be and our shared values through creative practice.

And I think that we’ve lost a lot of our ability to think about that as it’s hard to commodify the arts. So in a market economy, it’s hard to articulate its value. And each of those different parts of it that I mentioned, have different ways of expressing a value.

Whether or not it’s about us individually, or the way that it impacts, you know, local businesses, or the way that it impacts the way that we come together as a community, and bond together and create social cohesion that allows us to feel responsible for each other. All of those things have different values that it’s hard to exchange between each of those and it’s hard to then also put a monetary value on it. So I think that’s part of what has created the peripheral idea of the arts as a leisure time activity. But I think that for the adaptations that we need in the world, they’re going to be something that we need to be in back to the center.

Sharon Zou, Longitude fellow, Boston University: