DOUGALD HINE

Category: Projects

  • Despatches from the Invisible Revolution

    Despatches from the Invisible Revolution

    A wave of networked disruption swept across the world in 2011, taking with it the idea that today’s social technologies are only about throwing sheep at each other, or hiding away in Second Life. The new social forms which ride the network now make their entrance on the stage of history; yet the grain of networked reality remains puzzlingly elusive. Much of the activity which makes up the network seems too loose and haphazard to be significant, by the standards of the world in which we grew up.

    This book began in December 2011, as a conversation over lunch, and soon became an invitation spreading along the network of thinkers and makers and hackers and activists with which Keith Kahn Harris and I had been entangled in the course of that year. Within three months, it was in print.

    The invitation was simple and open to interpretation: write a response to the events of 2011, no more than 3,000 words, not an essay written at leisure but a despatch from in the middle of where you find yourself.

    This was the year when it seemed to be ‘kicking off everywhere’ and the pieces that came back reflect experiences of the Indignados movement, the Arab Spring, Occupy and the UK riots, but also events on a smaller scale. Bridget McKenzie wrote about her daughter’s refusal to go to secondary school and how the experience forced her to rethink assumptions she had held through twenty years of working with education.

    In the Industrial Revolution, you could point at a steam engine and ask: ‘What on earth is that?’ What defines the Invisible Revolution is that there’s nothing to point at, no totemic object that conveys the power and the strangeness of the forces changing our lives.

    Pamela McLean

    Despatches from the Invisible Revolution was published with Pediapress. The book is available through their website, where you can also find links to the online versions of individual articles.

    Despatches from the Invisible Revolution book launch, Free Word Centre, London, 29 February 2012 (Photographs: Andy Broomfield)

  • Uncivilisation Festival (2010-14)

    We didn’t set out to start a festival, a festival happened to us. From those who came to it, we learned more about what Dark Mountain might be and what it might mean than we could ever have done at our desks.

    from A Farewell to Uncivilisation

    In the months after we published the Dark Mountain Manifesto, responses arrived from many directions. Among them was an invitation from a man called Michael Hughes to curate a festival at a venue in Llangollen – and so, before we’d even got our first issue off the press, we were juggling editorial and publishing responsibilities with learning how to organise a festival.

    Uncivilisation ran for four years and became the gathering point around which many of those who became firm friends and lasting collaborators met for the first time. I remember Charlotte Du Cann interviewing me for the Independent on the final afternoon of the 2011 festival; soon afterwards, she stepped into the team which curated the following year’s event, and by the end of the decade, she would be co-director of Dark Mountain.

    In one of the photographs in the collage below, you can make out Anna and me attempting to pin up a banner on the fence opposite the entrance to the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire, which became our venue from 2011 onwards. This was a fortnight after the two of us first met, so you could say she was thrown in the deep end.

    It felt good to have created it—and it feels good now to have brought it to an end. After all, there are reasons why no one tries to start a publishing operation and an annual festival as part of the same small new non-profit business in the same year.

    We brought Uncivilisation to an end in 2013 for all those reasons, but its absence was mourned, and its spirit lives on in the many larger and smaller Dark Mountain gatherings that have taken place in the years since.

  • Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

    Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

    The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

    In 2007, I read a blogpost from an environmental journalist called Paul Kingsnorth, declaring his intention to quit the trade of journalism – and then, in the final paragraph, voicing an idea he had for a new publication. There was something in his words that spoke to me and we began exchanging emails, then meeting up in the corners of pubs, and two years later the fruits of our conversations took shape as a manifesto.

    This twenty-page pamphlet was the starting point for the Dark Mountain Project and much of the work that I’ve done since. You can read the full text on the Dark Mountain website, order it in paperback or read the essay I wrote to introduce the fifth anniversary edition, telling the story of how the manifesto came about and what happened as it made its way out into the world.

    Paul and I at the launch of the manifesto in July 2009. (Photograph: Andy Broomfield)

  • COMMONSense

    COMMONSense

    A celebration of ‘the commons’ made in collaboration with the artist Anne-Marie Culhane and members of the Access Space media lab in Sheffield.

    The original call for submissions

    Access Space in Sheffield is seeking contributions for a magazine to be published this autumn. The issue will reflect a theme which connects the activities of Access Space to the wider world.

    The theme of the issue is COMMONSense. Not so long ago, the only people who talked about “the commons” were historians; today, the language of the commons is central to debates around intellectual property, environmental protection, and resistance to globalisation. These international debates find their echoes here in South Yorkshire – in the activities of Access Space, recycling waste technology and promoting Open Source software, or in Grow Sheffield’s efforts to build local food networks and seed city centre wasteland. Can talk of “the commons” help us find common ground between these kinds of projects? Does using the same words mean we’ve found a common language – or can it disguise different meanings and intentions?

    We’re looking for pieces of COMMONSense: prose (stories, thoughts, book reviews, bibliographies…), poetry, songs, pieces of code, photographs, cartoons, drawings, graphics or anything else you can think of. These might approach the theme in relation to green issues, land ownership, social relations, the internet, the music industry, copyright, software, or anything else that makes sense to you.

    The format of the magazine means that each contribution will take up a single A5 page. With that in mind, we’re looking for the following:

    * written texts of up to 200 words
    * or poems of up to 20 lines
    * or black and white drawings, cartoons, photos or other graphics

    Images should be at least 300 dpi and in JPEG, PNG or TIFF format.
    Texts should be in TXT, ODT or DOC format.
    We ask that your contributions be made available to us under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/ ) The magazine will be freely accessable from the web.
    Although we cannot pay for contributions, there will be a limited print edition and each contributor will receive a free copy.

    The deadline for submissions is 26 September 2008 [EXTENDED TO 17 OCTOBER 2008]
    Please send your contribution by email to collaborativecultures@googlemail.com
    Attachments should be no more than 6 Mb.

    The magazine will be edited by Dougald Hine and the creative direction will be by artist Anne-Marie Culhane.

    It will be launched at Access Space during the Off The Shelf literary festival on 24 October 2008

    Contact us at collaborativecultures@googlemail.com

    www.access-space.org/ccs

    Commonsense