DOUGALD HINE

Category: News

  • Convivial Tools: The Design Museum, London, 13 October

    Convivial Tools: The Design Museum, London, 13 October

    During the next several years I intend to work on an epilogue to the industrial age…

    With these words, Ivan Illich opens Tools for Conviviality (1973), one of the series of short books written at the height of his fame. This month, the Design Museum in London are hosting a day-long symposium to explore the possibilities for Convivial Tools today. There’s a great line-up – and I was delighted to be asked to offer a reflection as part of the day’s programme.

    In the early 1970s, Illich could write that ‘two-thirds of mankind still can avoid passing through the industrial age’. As his friend, the historian Barbara Duden records:

    He gradually moved away from assumptions that sparked so much of his writing in the 1950s and 1960s, a vision of salvaging a life worth living for human beings by protecting “communality” and what he called “the commons”, by calling to mind the “tools of conviviality,” by preserving traditional and customary ways of living. Even he was amazed by the breathtakingly rapid disappearance of “traditional” orientations and practices in Third World villages, and he shed his own illusions that the social critic could help protect the fabric of these villages.

    The Illich of Tools for Conviviality is not as conservative as Duden’s summary makes him sound, but there is throughout his work an attentiveness to what is being lost – and also to the past as a mirror in which we come to recognise the strangeness of the present.

    In my contribution to the Convivial Tools symposium, I want to bring in some of Illich’s thinking about the past, to see if it can help us make sense of ‘the shadow that the future throws’, more than fifteen years after his death. I’ll draw on my own journeyings with Illich’s friends and co-conspirators, from Cuernavaca to Tuscany. And I’ll try to give a glimpse of the hope that I find in work which has often been dismissed as negative or pessimistic.

    Tickets are available for the event here.

  • Coming Down the Mountain

    Coming Down the Mountain

    After ten years of holding the space of Dark Mountain – the space between stories, the place you come when things you once believed in no longer make sense – it’s time for me to move on. I won’t be leaving overnight, but I’m now working to finish up or hand over the bits for which I’m responsible, and once we’ve celebrated the tenth anniversary of the manifesto next July, I’ll wander off to join those friends and collaborators who are already part of the project’s past. (more…)

  • Dark Mountain: The Online Edition

    Dark Mountain: The Online Edition

    So many of my working hours in the first half of 2018 went into the new Dark Mountain website. It was a strange experience to have it “go live” while I was offline and away from work of all kinds last month. But also appropriate, a reminder that there are others who will take this project forwards.

    I got back to my desk two weeks ago – and it’s taken most of that time to steady myself, to find the balance between the things that came into focus while I was away and the things that were still waiting here on my return. But I think I’m getting there.

    Meanwhile, if you haven’t found it already, let me share the site with you. It’s by no means finished – if there’s one thing I learned over the past year, it’s that no website is ever “finished”. But already, I think, it fulfils two of the ambitions with which we set out: to create an online home for our work that approaches the beauty of the books we publish, and to go back and tell the stories of the work we’ve done over what will soon be a decade as a project. I hope you agree.

    Oh yes – and to celebrate me finally getting round to trumpeting the news of its launch, today we’ve published Childish Things, my essay on the ways that art gets tangled up with the sacred (originally written for last year’s SANCTUM issue).

  • Embracing Our Dark Reality: Interview with Frontier magazine

    Embracing Our Dark Reality: Interview with Frontier magazine

    We see things in the daylight, but in the night we have dreams and we process the things that we’ve seen and try to make sense of them, try to find a way of weaving them into our knowledge of ourselves and our ideas of ourselves in the world.

    (more…)

  • Introducing a school called HOME

    Introducing a school called HOME

    Well, it’s not a “school of everything” – and it doesn’t promise to be the future of the university. But a lot of heart has gone into this little school that we’re launching today. And I’ve never felt more grounded, bringing a project out into the world, than doing it alongside Anna.

    Our first course runs from 4-8 June – and you can read the invitation that we’re making on the school website.

    If something in that invitation that we’re making speaks to you, then get in touch soon, as places are already filling up for our first course in June. And if there’s someone you think of when you read it, then pass it in their direction.

    This isn’t just about filling places on a course, it’s about growing a community and creating a home for the invisible college that has sustained our work over the years. Thanks to all of you who have been and continue to be a part of that.

  • SANCTUM makes its way into the world

    SANCTUM makes its way into the world

    Over the past three weeks, SANCTUM, the twelfth Dark Mountain book has been making its way into the world. To mark its launch, the Dark Mountain website has run a series of pieces about the rather extraordinary collaborations that went into the making of this book – and I wanted to share those with you.

    • To start with, you can read the full text of the editorial which Steve Wheeler and I wrote to introduce the book. What led us to make a Dark Mountain book about ‘the sacred’ – and how did we approach this territory?
    • The next post introduces the unique artistic collaboration which brought this book to life. Thomas Keyes started out as a graffiti artist in Belfast – and has since combined his mastery of street art with a fascination with the craft of the medieval illuminated manuscripts. For this book, he assembled a crew of fellow artists – somewhere between a graffiti team and a monastic scriptorium – who brought colour and flow to the words of the book’s contributors, working on parchment which Thomas made from the skins of roadkill deer from the Highlands of Scotland, where he now lives.
    • In The Snake in the Margins, Sylvia V. Linsteadt introduces the other unique collaboration at the heart of this book. When Steve and I invited her to take on the role of Marginalian, we didn’t know exactly what that would mean, except that we wanted a strong female voice to run as a counterpoint to the main text – and to our own role as editors – before claiming the final word with the piece that would close the book. In collaboration with the artist Rima Staines, Sylvia brought magic to this role, summoning the voice of the Sibyl of Cumae to inhabit its pages and foretell its destiny.
    • With a normal issue of Dark Mountain, we would run a series of pieces taken from its pages on the website – but this time around, instead of the usual range of forty or fifty stories, essays, poems, conversations and artworks, we commissioned just twelve long non-fiction pieces to form the backbone of the book. The fourth post in our launch series, Twelve Pieces, introduces each of these and gives a flavour of the book as a whole.
    • Apart from being the most fully-developed artistic project I’ve had the chance to do with Dark Mountain, the best thing about SANCTUM was the people I got to know along the way. Believing in Holidays is a conversation with one of those people, Elizabeth Slade, who is working among the ruins of the institutional forms of religion which lost their hold on countries like the UK or Sweden a couple of generations ago. It starts with an extract from the essay she wrote for the book, The God-Shaped Hole.
    • Finally, Coda rounds off the series with some reflections from Steve and myself on the initial reactions to the book – and our own feelings about finally seeing it in the world.

    There will be more announcements and events around SANCTUM over the next few months. Meanwhile, if you’re anywhere near Devon on Saturday 9 December, you can join Steve, Thomas, Elizabeth and others for the book’s official launch.

  • Three Seasons at CEMUS

    Three Seasons at CEMUS

    I’ve been a guest lecturer at many institutions across Europe, but nowhere has come to feel more like home than CEMUS – the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University.

    In 1992, the autumn after the Rio Earth Summit, a group of Uppsala students challenged one of their professors as to why there were no courses on which they could study the huge questions arising from the ecological crisis. With his support, they created a student-led teaching and research centre nestled within Sweden’s oldest university.

    Now CEMUS is celebrating its 25th anniversary – and I was delighted to contribute to the CEMUS Diaries series which they are publishing to mark the occasion. You can read the whole thing on their site.

    Here’s a taste, from the first talk I gave to CEMUS students:

    ‘What can we say about the future?’ I ask. ‘This talk won’t involve any charts or projections. I don’t have one of those scenario planning models with four different ways the world might look in 2035. I’m not going to wrap things up with a list of ten things we can do that will make everything turn out OK. I only have one prediction for you, and I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it, and it’s this…’

    Click to the next slide, huge letters filling the screen behind me:

    WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE.

    A ripple of laughter passes around the room – and I go on to talk about the need to come to terms with the undramatic reality of personal extinction that waits for all of us, somewhere down the road, if we’re going to see clearly when we try to talk about the larger kinds of loss which frame the time in which we’re living. This seems like a good place to start, for a room full of people who will spend the year ahead thinking hard and learning from many different disciplines about the mess the world is in.

    Read more…

    Image: A conversation in the tropical planthouse at Uppsala Botanical Gardens as part of the Framebreaking Fridays programme I hosted with CEMUS in 2015.

  • The Grounds for Hope, FSCONS 2017, Oslo

    The Grounds for Hope, FSCONS 2017, Oslo

    In the English language, we speak about hope in a way that suggests foundations, the starting point for whatever you are going to build. I want to say that there are two stories about hope going around. You can choose which of these to build on – and that choice has implications, for what you build, and maybe for the kind of world we end up in…

    In 2013, I was invited to speak at FSCONS, a convention of hackers from across the Nordic states and beyond. I used that first talk to invite them to question the deep cultural logic which so often frames the way we talk about technology – not least, the cultural logic of progress. To my surprise, they kept asking me back, and this year the invitation took me to Oslo.

    The organisers asked me to speak about hope and so I took this opportunity to lay out a question that seems central to any attempt to make sense of the mess the world is in. Should we put our hopes on more and smarter measurement, pricing and contracts (as with the promises being made right now by evangelists for the blockchain) – or might it be wiser to put our hopes on those aspects of reality which elude measurement, pricing and contract?

    I’ll be writing up these thoughts in the months ahead, but meanwhile I’m open to invitations that would provide the opportunity to think further about this, whether as a speaker or a participant.

  • SANCTUM is here

    SANCTUM is here

    As soon as Steve Wheeler and I began work on SANCTUM, we understood that it wouldn’t be possible to make a book ‘about’ the sacred, as though it were a topic to be taken up and examined at arm’s length. This had to be made out of our experience, our beliefs and our doubts – and we had to ask the same of our contributors. In all kinds of ways, that intention has been fulfilled.

    This morning, four boxes of this issue arrived here in Västerås – and, in between getting the book launched on the DM website, I couldn’t resist taking some pictures to show you quite what a thing of beauty it is. Thanks to all the amazing collaborators who made this possible.

    SANCTUM is available now from the Dark Mountain website. And here’s a video where I read from the editorial that Steve and I wrote to introduce the book.

  • We Can Stay Here While We Wait

    We Can Stay Here While We Wait

    Here’s a fine thing that just arrived – We Can Stay Here While We Wait – a new bilingual anthology of writings in the Anthropocene, including a Danish translation of the principles from the Dark Mountain Manifesto.

    Thanks to the folks at The Independent AIR. The book is available from their site.

    Here’s a video they made of someone browsing through it:

    And here’s what they say about it:

    The Independent AIR has edited this anthology with poetic, literary, scientific and philosophical texts to accompany the artistic exploration of the Anthropocene. The book is conceived as a choir with different voices, that while singing in different tones and depths, comes together in unison to comment and expand on the Anthropocene as a living and critical subject.

    The Anthology is divided into 5 chapters, each dealing with different elements that relate in a vital way to the way we interact with the planet. The Plasticsphere deals with plastic and its pervasive presence; Sentient Beings is a chapter about animism and the interconnected spirit. Seeds explores plants and trees as locations of ecological disruption, Political Ecology highlights the connections between economic development and marginalisation and lastly, Radium and Polonium is a chapter which crystallizes the philosophical weight and geopolitical importance of atomic power.

    With contributions by among others Polly Higgins, Tim Jackson, Timothy Morton, Amartya Kumar Sen, William Wordsworth, Slavoj Zizek and many more.

    You can purchase the book for 30€ or 225DKK by sending an email to info@theindependentair.com