Announcing 'The Dark Mountain Project'

Today is an exciting day. After a year or so of meetings in pubs and emails backwards and forwards, it is time to announce the Dark Mountain Project - a literary and artistic movement for a time of massive global change.

The project grew out of a conversation with Paul Kingsnorth, started by a blog post in which he proposed:

a new publication: not a magazine, exactly, not quite a journal either, but something between the two and somewhere else as well. A publication which will match the beauty of its writing with the beauty of its design. A publication whose mission will be to reclaim beauty and truth in writing, but without sounding too pompous about it. A publication which will reject both celebrity culture and consumer society with equal vehemence. A publication which will celebrate our true place in nature in prose, poetry and art; which will hunt down ancient truths for modern consumption.

Gradually, that idea has taken a fuller form, and between us we have written a pamphlet which is intended as a first step towards that magazine. Over the next three weeks, we aim to raise £1000 in donations towards the costs of publishing that pamphlet as the Dark Mountain Manifesto and building a website to support the movement.

Why are we doing this? Because of the times in which we find ourselves. Because a collapsing economy and a collapsing environment are turning all our assumptions on their heads. Because nothing that we currently take for granted seems likely to come through the 21st century unscathed. Because civilisation as we have known it is coming apart at the seams.

We don't believe that anyone - not politicians, not environmentalists, not writers - is really facing up to the magnitude of this. We are all still wedded to the idea that the future will be an upgraded version of the present. It is in our cultural DNA. Perhaps this is why, as the warning signs flash out ever more urgently, we still go shopping, or plan for more economic growth, or campaign for new energy technologies, or write novels about the country house or the inner city.

A civilisation is built not on oil, steel or bullets, but on stories; on the myths that shore it up and the tales it tells itself about its origins and destiny. We believe that we have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are: the story of 'progress', of the conquest of 'nature', of the centrality and supremacy of the human species.

We believe it is time for new stories. The Dark Mountain project aims to foster a new movement of writers, artists and creative thinkers, a new school of writing and art for an age of massive global disruption. We are calling it Uncivilisation.

Very soon, we will be launching the Dark Mountain Manifesto, as a hand-crafted pamphlet and online. At the same time, we will launch our website. If enough people seem interested, we then plan to begin publishing a journal of Uncivilised art and writing. And if that takes off, there is much more that this nascent movement can be doing to help create the stories that will define these new times.

For the moment, though, we are looking for help. The Dark Mountain Project is not a prescriptive attempt to tell people how to write or think, but the raising of a flag around which we hope like-minded people will gather. So we are looking for people who might want to be involved: writers, artists, illustrators, designers, thinkers - anyone with whom this strikes a chord.

The other kind of help we need is money. Zac Goldsmith has already generously donated £1000 towards the cost of publishing the manifesto and launching the full Dark Mountain website. We are looking to raise the same amount again in donations over the next three weeks. If you can afford to contribute towards getting this project off the ground, please visit our fundraising page on Fundable.com. (Everyone who donates $20 or more will receive a copy of the manifesto and an invitation to our launch event.)

The challenges of the 21st century are too often framed only as technical problems requiring solutions. I believe that this is a form of denial. What we face is a challenge to the imagination - the challenge of imagining a liveable future in a changed world. I hope that the Dark Mountain Project can help place the imagination at the heart of our response.

Call for submissions - COMMONSense

*** We've now extended the deadline for submissions till 17th October - so there's still time to contribute... ***

I fear this blog is starting to gather dust. Sorry about that! It has been a busy and exciting time - not least with the official launch of School of Everything and us getting boingboinged!

On the off-chance that anyone has been missing my ramblings, you might want to check out the post I wrote for the Everything blog last week - How I stopped worrying and learned to love the market!

Meanwhile, I'm editing a little magazine for Access Space in Sheffield - and looking for contributions from around the world on the theme of COMMONSense. Here's the details - do pass them on, as appropriate:

Collaborative Cultures // COMMONSense

A 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

Pick Me Up (Again)

How many people can say an email changed their life?

Probably quite a few these days, actually - and some with more dramatic stories than mine. But, for what it's worth, the email in question was Pick Me Up - a weekly newsletter of stories, events listings and requests, run by volunteers and held together by a DIY approach to life.

Made up of two or three line snippets, each with a link to a longer article or a website, it married culture and activism with a hopeful, playful attitude. Nothing got written about unless it involved someone actually making something happen, then telling the story in their own words. Over two years, that included:

- providing air hostess service on the London Underground
- grazing cows in the city
- stealing a concert hall from the Sarajevo mafia
- installing a street piano in Sheffield
- and naming at least one baby!

So did it really change my life? Well, by the time I became an editor for Pick Me Up, I already had form as a journalist and an activist. But working with Charlie Davies - who started the email after the demise of The Face - challenged me to raise my game, and to push at the limits of those roles.

If I hadn't got involved with Pick Me Up, I'd probably still be working in a BBC newsroom. I certainly wouldn't have left to start the School of Everything, since it was through the email that I met three of my co-founders.

Pick Me Up founder Charlie Davies (right) with sMary from the School of Everything

After reaching its hundredth issue last summer, Pick Me Up went to sleep for a while. As editors, many of us had become busy with new projects. It felt like we'd graduated from the email, and to keep it going out of a sense of duty would have been missing the point.

Still, I was excited when a brand new issue arrived in my inbox earlier this year - and recently, it seems to be returning to something like its original frequency. (As you'll gather, I'm not directly involved at the moment.)

My only concern is that, where three years ago Pick Me Up felt incredibly fresh and distinctive, today the attitude it embodied seems to be all over the place! Every time I pick up an issue of Time Out, I find stories like this, about the "Guerrilla Benchers" who reinstall seating where local councils have taken it away. Where our relationship with our readers - who often provided the best stories - felt like a contrast to the cynicism of some BBC colleagues, now "user-generated content" is all across the media. Such cynicism is hardly dead, yet just tonight I was struck by BBC2's new series Power To The People, in which a Newsnight reporter turns activist - in the first programme, leading the villagers of Lanteith on an invasion of Islington, complete with echoes of Eike's urban cows.

I'm not saying we started it all - and I'm certainly not saying it's stopped being cool now everyone's at it. But I am curious as to what Pick Me Up should do next. (Any suggestions...?)

As it happens, I'm speaking on a panel with Charlie in Sheffield this Friday, so I shall ask him what he's got planned! (If you want to come along, it's a discussion called 'Free vs Open', as part of the Lovebytes digital arts festival - and we're on at the Showroom cinema at 4pm.)

You can sign up for future issues of Pick Me Up here.