︎Testimonies 



1 : Collective Statement
 

There is not one, but multiple pathways towards better futures.


The HIVE artists’ intentions were to explore ways of sharing stories and bending the perception of space/time. They experimented with how audiences could travel and feel through words, images and virtual environments.


In the 2010s, free developing software for virtual reality made it accessible for creators across the globe, who were attracted to the limitless space it offered. Physical spaces in the cities had become scarce and expensive. Artists saw the potential of reclaiming and inhabiting digital space...


At the same time, they were deeply troubled by how unsustainably technology was sourced. The globalised market meant that most of the technology used in the UK was at the expense of the manufacturing communities, i.e. the so-called ‘rogue states’ such as the Congo. Workers mined rare earth materials, used to constitute screens in most technology devices, which when disposed of, found themselves in the air and the oceans, even in ice.


The situation of 2019 put creatives in a double bind. The Systems Change HIVE’s intention was to explore systems of wellbeing and community with integrity, but the collective needed resources and space to support their work together. After the financial crash of 2008, austerity policies began to cut funding channels for the arts. Making spaces for collective creativity became fraught with difficulty.


There is a seldom spoken, but widely understood principle which goes like this: “As things get worse environmentally, the growth product is the one which provides escape.” The Arts Council was encouraged to favour the allocation of government funds to projects which involved technologies like VR. This provided a loophole for the HIVE to slip through. The HIVE found a way to work on Next Systems thinking with the support of the systems of 2019.

The Museum for Hidden Paths is a virtual and physical installation in active protest of the existent. The Hive collective created Hidden Paths as a space of solidarity with creative activists working for better futures.

Forms of world-changing creativity and activism are precarious, often driven by the tireless work of characters who live on the edge, who are ill-supported, who refuse to back down. Contemporary society has precious little room for supporting radical imagination and creative action. The Hive’s Museum for Hidden Paths experiments with creating a Virtual space for much needed solidarity, reflection and incubation.

Together a group of artists created this spacious world of colour and poetry designed to share knowledge, protect the new and encourage transformative creativity to keep on growing out into the real world.

As a collective it was vital to us that the virtual space connect to the real world and real work of communities. Creative activists generously gifted their stories of working for transformation.

Perhaps, though we did not know it at the time, it was an act of magic. At the start of the creative process we filled the museum with objects from our current broken system: objects like legal documents that granted rights to companies to extract from the lands. Once archived, these objects were completely buried and forgotten under the visions and voices that filled up the space.

The Museum took on a life of its own: it’s growth was uncontrollable. The virtual space grew in haphazard and accumulative ways, reflecting different artists enthusiasms, passions and experiences and constantly ripping up any one person’s creative plan. Our creative policy, that weathered dischord and misunderstandings, was to continually open to inclusion and stay with the trouble.

When we let the creative live on its own terms the virtual Museum began to transform into a vast virtual suprising colourful dimension of potential.

We created Hidden Paths as a place for all to be welcome, to breathe deep, to participate and to be inspired by creative community and the multiple pathways we have for change.

We work as part of a ‘Next Systems’ creative movement that is becoming more and more visible through the 2020s. This movement, that emerged from grief, fragile hope and great suspicion of Silicon Valley, is flourishing into a robust creative culture that includes economists, technologists, care-workers, space holders, and creatives of all kinds. This is a movement of people withdrawing themselves from the demand of the top-down globalised market to create resilient spaces, self-sovereign networks and prototypes for alternative tools for living in balance with the ecosystem.

We critique Virtual Reality, knowing that it will be used for escapism and to collonise experience, but through this engagement we allign with technologists who aim their work as service for a planet in transition, rather than for the ambition of epic scale and profit. Technology is part of the story of the next decades. So we choose to work for a culture of creative activism - digital and analogue - sharing knowledge about what works and in encouragement of independent and locally sourced technology-sharing spaces.
 



︎Creative Commons 2019