What's Next?

The video below comes from the US based environmental journal, Orion. In many ways, it is a very immediate response to the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. But it also asks that all-pervading question that we do have to address.

What's next?

And it is a very pertinent question for makers, artists, craftspersons.


What's Next? from Orion Magazine on Vimeo.

As a number of the speakers said, understandings and ways forward are best articulated by art, literature, making. In these spaces can we imagine what we haven't yet imagined or made real - some are solutions, some are arguments, some are reasons why things can't just run along the same tired course.

And if we the makers, the artists, are going to contribute what I think we certainly have to, our bit of answering a part of that 'What Next' question in the here and now, what are some of the possibilities we might offer?

Shall we be Luddites? Shall we be ethical? Shall we be the jesters? Shall we tell our neighbours, our families, our children about the emperor's clothes? Shall we engage, finding new pathways through virtual worlds of possibility? Shall we make beauty? Shall we be the solution, not part of the problem?