Giles Lane

Category: Propositions

  • Reciprocally Entangled

    This statement of my current thinking on the topics of agency, data and quantum computing was originally presented to the Human Centred Computing research group at the University of Oxford on October 1st 2015. The group, with whom I have been developing a dialogue since Spring 2014, is led by Professor Marina Jirotka and has a particular focus on Responsible Research and Innovation. They are involved in embedding RRI into NQIT – the Networked Quantum Information Technologies Hub based at Oxford. I have made a few changes to the original text inspired by the group’s extremely thoughtful comments and discussion.

    Introduction
    At the core of all my work and projects over the past 20 years is the theme of agency. By that I mean our ability as humans to act on our own initiative, to make informed decisions and choices. To be willing actors rather than directed subjects in all areas of life. In my experience open and transparent communications are fundamental to such an aspiration, and many of my projects explore ways and means of enabling people to communicate and interact with other people and systems to achieve this.

    Looking back, there is a clear trajectory in my work which emphasises that systems should engage people and empower them, not seek to condition their experiences or shape their lives. From my work on the convergence of mobile phones with wireless internet and GIS mapping technologies in the early 2000s which has been described as a kind of proto-social media (Urban Tapestries), to experiments with sensors and platforms for citizen science style pollution mapping (Feral Robots & Snout), as well as experiments in data manifestation as a critique of the quantified self meme (Lifestreams). In my opinion, too often the technologies that are deployed across society are not intended to benefit all, but are contingent on bringing benefit to a privileged few – those who build them and those who commission and own the systems being built.

    I believe that human individualities and different people’s idiosyncracies of learning and understanding are crucial social assets that enrich our collective experiences of life. I want to explore how we can design systems that adapt to these values and incorporate their dynamic into their very fabric. I want to find alternatives to the expanding deployment of systems and technologies that shape and manage behaviour by imposing rigid and inflexible decisions or choices. I believe that we need to question and challenge the mindset that sees the efficiency of algorithms and data-driven inference as the pinnacle of how human societies should be run.

    One of the ways I think we can begin to revolutionise our relationship to data is by bridging the biological and digital. If we can design ways to utilise the whole human sensorium (not just vision and hearing) for sense-making and interpretation, then I believe that we can make complex information tangible and appreciable in richer and more nuanced ways. This means departing fundamentally from normative data representations on computer screens. It means embodying them in reciprocally interactive engagements that afford us greater use of our highly developed senses – what I have been calling “data manifestation”. This could allow us to experience data in ways that reveal things we have hitherto not considered possible. It may also reveal contingencies and limitations in what kinds of data are being collected – and may lead us to collect different kinds of data that have perhaps been overlooked.

    How might we enliven relations between humans and machines so that they can be mutually influential rather than unbalanced in favour of one side or the other? I suspect that the promise of quantum computing, with its multiple states, may offer something along these lines, but only if we, as researchers and designers, have the courage of our imagination to make such a future possible.

    Entangled Engagement & Quantum Computing
    I have been thinking recently about the nature of entanglement – as far as I can understand it as a lay person not a scientist – and how the highly metaphoric language itself suggests an unintentional or, at least, ambiguous state. If we think about how we use the word ‘entangled’ in everyday situations it is to describe something, or some things, that have become entangled accidentally – without the deliberate decision to do so.

    I have titled this statement “reciprocally entangled” because I think that the promise of quantum computing is one we must have agency with and choose to engage with, rather than unwittingly becoming caught within. That we might deliberately choose to enmesh ourselves with a system that, like humans, can be more than a cascade of rules and simple on/off decisions, would be a significant revolution in how we decide to run our societies.

    I think that this idea of ‘unwitting entanglement’ characterises many of the fundamental problems we are experiencing with the so-called Big Data revolution, where we have suddenly begun to find ourselves subject to systems that are ruled by inference and not by balanced judgement. My proposition is that just as we might think that our society and civilisation has become enmeshed in a complex set of interlocking inference systems which define people’s lives in ever more intrusive ways, so might we begin to think of quantum computing – and being reciprocally entangled with such a system – as being closer to the kind of complex and consciousness-driven judgement that previously defined our choices and decisions (since, say, the Enlightenment).

    More and more, the effects of decisions made by data-driven inference are coming to pervade aspects of our everyday lives. It is not always clear how such systemic decisions are arrived at, but it is undeniable that people are both shaping and having their choices shaped as an affect of the increasing reliance on so-called Big Data systems. A kind of blind self-governance that could so easily tip over into forms of self-censorship, self-privation and self-denial.

    Such choices are most visible to us on an everyday level in the recommendations we see in internet shopping (“you’ve bought this and might like that”) and what social media systems select to populate our profile feeds (both adverts and posts by our connections). Their use in electronic financial services is widely known of, but little known about – obscured behind a veil of exclusivity, secrecy and the disparities of wealth and power. The role of such systems in health is also increasing, driven as much by attitudes towards risk and liability in the health insurance industry as by advances in medicine, wellbeing and disease prevention. These opaque applications remain worrying precisely because they flow against the transparencies of fairness and democracy that our society has been implementing over the past few centuries.

    But what if we can rethink how we interact with systems as reciprocal engagements? And what if we were to see them as entangled relationships at the same time?

    Perception is more than simply seeing
    How humans perceive and create meaning is an associative process that is fundamentally different to inference from data. It is an expression of the difference between consciousness and a structured system; and, furthermore, it is more than what is offered by systems that mimic ‘neural nets’. Aesthetics and how we make meaning from artworks gives us a concrete example of how this operates in practice. Aesthetics cannot be taught, but flows from a dynamic interweaving or perhaps an entanglement of our memories and experiences with our physical senses. At each moment of experiencing something in an encounter with an artwork – writing, painting, sculpture, music or performance – we are existing in an entangled moment blending the now with the summation of our conscious sense of self. We are not inferring meaning (as a structured data-driven system might), but actually making meaning from the experience itself.

    So-called neuro-aesthetics has sought to find a physical explanation of this process in the chemical reactions in the brain. But so far it has not been able to,

    “ Objects are not triggers for internal events in the nervous system; they are opportunities or affordances for our continuing transactions with them. …
    Art is experienced in the setting of argument, criticism, and persuasion. This is all compatible, Kant realized, with the fact that there is no way of adjudicating disputes in this area, that there are no decision procedures, no rules, no way of proving who’s right and wrong.”
    Alva Noë, How Art Reveals the Limits of Neuroscience, The Chronicle Review

    Beyond Visualisation : Embodied Entanglements
    What if we can bridge the digital and biological by utilising the whole human sensorium for sense-making and interpretation – going beyond just vision and hearing? What if we could make complex data tangible and appreciable to a range of human senses? Embodied and felt instead of just seen and heard. In turn the experiences could be fed back in to data systems as a new set of parameters that could adjust the nature of systems that use the data. This was the theme of my Creativeworks residency with the Computer Science department at Birkbeck in Autumn 2014. The workshop I devised to help communicate the potential of multisensory expressions of data has been a crucial step in continuing to develop the ideas begun with the Lifestreams collaboration with Philips Research in 2012.

    What I hope to do next is to embark on a journey of collaboration and discovery to demonstrate the potential for social change that could be unleashed by developing multisensory interactions with the digital data that is increasingly measuring, being analysed and governing our daily lives. Humans have extraordinary sensory capabilities which are not currently being used in how we encounter data – principally through screens (sight), occasionally sound and, rarely, through haptics (touch). I believe that this leaves us impoverished. By expressing digital data in new forms we could unlock entirely new modalities for recording, sharing and understanding how we live our lives : from experiences of illness and rehabilitation via biosensors to how we make sense of the Big Data that now shape and govern our society.

    I hope to explore this theme along a series of trajectories and to demonstrate – to scientists, technologists, designers and policymakers and to the wider public beyond – how we could create transformational ways for people to engage with and make sense of data. I aim to work collaboratively (with old and new partners) to develop projects and experiments that express digital data in different ways that engage human biological senses other than just sight and hearing – such as touch, smell, taste, balance, temperature, proprioception and time etc. I am particularly keen to engage with researchers in the biological and life sciences (and hybrid fields such as computational biology) to create a bridge between how people interact with and make sense of the biological world around us, and with digital systems.

    Documenting Traditional Knowledge in Papua New Guinea
    Alongside these concerns I am working with Professor James Leach and a community of indigenous people (from Reite village) living a traditional way of life in the jungle in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. There we are co-developing a simple hybrid digital/physical toolkit for people to self-document local traditional knowledge of plants, customs, design and productions techniques (TK Reite Notebooks). The tools and techniques we are co-designing there are based on my pioneering work since the late 1990s in hybrid digital/physical publishing. It uses the Diffusion eBook format, a unique paper folding method invented in 1999-2000, as well as the bookleteer.com self-publishing platform which was created and launched in 2009. This is another form of what I have called “public authoring” – making it possible for people to communicate things of value in open and shareable ways.

    What is clear is that Reite people’s culture doesn’t consider knowledge as a series of static objects – in the Cartesian tradition of Western Knowledge – but as relational. Knowledge is constructed and exists in the relations between humans that hold it, share it and pass it on to future generations. It is always contextual and situational. To me, this establishes a conceptual link with what I have been exploring in my data manifestation work – that how we develop understandings of information and the ways it can be encoded in forms or media is located in the experience of the encounter, and our conscious ability to reweave our experiences in the present with those in our memories of the past.

    One of the most striking things about this project is the difference between traditional anthropological ethnography and self-documentation that emerges from its results. What people choose to value and document may not necessarily be intelligible to outsiders, or of any interest. This flows against the mainstream of anthropology and ethnography which seeks to observe, understand and explain a culture to others. I feel that my conception of public authoring is akin to the aims of the originators of Mass Observation, who proposed an “anthropology of ourselves” back in the late 1930s. They thought that it was important for ordinary people to document ordinary life, and developed a framework that encouraged people from all walks of life to record and submit reports on things, customs, events and behaviours which they observed. Mass Observation and public authoring are both creative activities that seek an audience beyond their immediate community, yet at the same time they are the outputs of people attempting to record their own world and values for themselves.

    In a similar way, the lifecharms, or data shells, which we created in the Lifestreams project were expressions of data manifested into material form. As such the data itself ceased to be directly readable (as it might be in a graph or chart), but was embodied in the actual form and shape of each shell. No longer intelligible to anyone but the person whose data had been the source of the shell’s growth pattern, the lifecharms signify something without revealing exactly what. As a type of self-documentation this translation of digital data collected from biosensors and life-tracking devices begins to mirror the output of our public authoring notebooks of Reite village : fascinating to outsiders, yet unintelligible if not directly explained by someone within the community that generated them. Open to interpretation, inspirational and allusive, but never didactic. Where knowledge and communication are reciprocally entangled, not inferred.

    The trajectory I sketched at the beginning of this statement – linking human agency as the core of many projects I’ve led – now connects all these thoughts on the nature of what kind of future we want to build. Is it to be one where we devise systems to manage our societies that are responsive and dynamically adapt to our interactions with them, or a future where our decisions and choices are increasing defined and shaped by algorithms designed by and for the benefit of an ever more remote elite?

  • Reciprocities of Trust

    From Informed Consent to Reciprocal Exchange

    At the heart of working with communities, indeed anyone, is the issue of trust. In this piece I am setting down some of my thoughts about how collaborative practice can be built upon reciprocities of trust and why that is different to some of the established models I have encountered in research and practice stemming from the ethics of informed consent and how they are often applied.

    At the root of how someone behaves is their ethos – not a checklist of ‘ethical guidelines’ to be adhered to, but the fundamental characteristics of who they are as well as why, and how, they do what they do. A person’s ethos is not merely a set of changeable beliefs but the core that directs their actions on both conscious and subconscious levels. If a person’s own ethos is not in alignment with the ‘ethical’ guidelines they are required to follow for a project, then it seems to me that their adherence to an ethical framework and use of informed consent is unlikely to be more than an instrumental procedure that does not necessarily guarantee the reciprocity of trust that is implied.

    In my experience, the mechanisms by which trusted relationships can be established between participants in a project have to be tailored for each specific instance. Sometimes it is possible to use well-honed mechanisms and processes whereby each party can validate the others to establish a basis of trust on which to proceed. In other situations individuals have to build up trust through demonstrations and actions that directly establish their trustworthiness to each other. How we create these kinds of reciprocal relationships is critical to our ability to realise cooperative and collaborative creations of value between people.

    Below are some notes on formulations that trace my own path from informed consent to reciprocal exchange. My reason for writing this is not to suggest that all uses of informed consent are wrong or badly applied, but to articulate and explore my own approaches to formulating something analogous to the rigour of well-applied informed consent that works within the particular contexts of independent engagement practices.

    Informed Consent

    Since first entering the world of academic research in the late 1990s I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the mechanisms and procedures of how I have often encountered ‘informed consent’ being applied. My feeling has always been that the language of ‘informed consent’ tends to pre-suppose a top-down hierarchy, where research ‘subjects’ are studied, acted upon or have information or knowledge extracted from their situation without always the concomitant return. The principle of engaging people in research on an informed and consensual basis is clearly fundamental to any practice that strives to work on an equitable basis. However, often the processes and application of ‘ethics’ appear instrumental and unsound – focused more on limiting institutional liability than truly safeguarding those whose consent has been sought. To me this smacks of an acceptance, even comfortableness, with unbalanced power relations that extract value in one direction only.

    As an artist working independently of (although often in partnership with) institutions I have rarely been subject to the requirement of seeking approval for my work from an ethics committee or having to justify my methods and approach in this way. These structures simply do not exist. In their absence artists and arts organisations have to develop their own idiosyncratic ways of working that reflect ‘ethical’ positions and best practices. As such these are often hard to evaluate because they are not so codified or even designed to be measured in the ways that institutions are obliged to provide evidence of to comply with policies, law and other conventions. Both approaches have much to offer – standards can be agreed upon and evaluated against, whilst the dynamism of more individual and idiosyncratic ethos-driven processes can be more fluid and adaptable to specific situations and contexts.

    In 2008 a four year national programme, Beacons for Public Engagement, involving over twenty UK universities started which sought to address historic imbalances between research culture and the public (and often those being studied) in order to “change the culture in universities, assisting staff and students to engage with the public”. The programme defined engagement as “a two-way process, involving interaction and listening between all parties, with the goal of generating mutual benefit.” Changing attitudes and behaviours within well established systems can only be achieved over long timeframes, therefore it will be interesting to see whether any sustained evaluation of this programme is undertaken, for instance at five or ten year intervals, that may demonstrate not only the value to universities of engaging with the public in mutually beneficial ways, but also to what extent communities have been able to identify and articulate value from such engagement too.

    The emergence of the Free, Prior & Informed Consent (FPIC) model of working with indigenous peoples (and enshrined in 2007’s UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) is also a hugely significant development along these lines, applicable in the development of trusted relations between any parties where there is a discernible imbalance of power.

    Informed Disclosure

    This concept emerged during the early stages of a collaboration with Dr Lizzie Coles-Kemp on what became the Pallion Ideas Exchange. This project was sited within a deprived ward of the city of Sunderland where, in the face of massive benefits change and the erosion of the welfare infrastructure on which this largely deindustrialised area depends, an intergenerational group of locals had expressed a desire to create their own online ‘knowledge network’ to address the growing lack offered by the State. As we explored with the group what they meant by this, it became apparent that we were looking less at a database of fixed information points and much more at a process of documenting and sharing what people knew and had experiences of that could be shared with others who needed help with specific problems.

    Growing out of the VOME research project led by Lizzie, it was obvious that this process would need to engage with the use of social media as well as the web and mobile technologies at various levels. Among the general issues relating to privacy that affect any use of social media and the internet, there are ofttimes specific reasons where the identification of individuals within localities and communities presents proximate dangers. In Pallion this was an issue that required the close attention of all participants as, either through forgetfulness, ignorance of the potential consequences or a kind of carelessness, there was clearly potential for individuals to experience harm (such as benefits sanctions as well as other issues) as a result of participating or sharing what they knew. Lizzie and I attempted to address this in the project through reiterating a rubric of ‘informed disclosure’ at each workshop and meeting, and building prompts and reminders into the tools we co-designed and created with the group to consider potential consequences before sharing. As part of a generic toolkit which was developed out of this project we also created a visual guide to choosing online services that works as a perception axis between private/public and open/restricted. This was a practical attempt to help someone think through the consequences of choosing and using different online services and social media before adopting them, embedding the concept of informed disclosure at the starting off point as well as along their online journey.

    For me, the principle of informed disclosure went much further than this pragmatic example; it encompassed how my colleagues at Proboscis and I collaborated with Lizzie and her co-researchers as well as the community in Pallion. It meant being open about what we each hoped to achieve from the project, what we were each getting from it as well as what we were each putting into it. It meant being open about our roles as paid professionals engaging with unpaid volunteers in a community that has experienced multiple deprivations since the UK Government agreed to the closure of the key industry in North East England back in the early 1980s – shipbuilding – and the consequent disappearance of the subsidiary industries that relied on it resulting in cross-generational long-term unemployment, loss of skills, hope and aspiration for the future. This kind of openness was crucial to establishing trust and maintaining it not only during the project but long afterwards too.

    Engaged Consent

    Whilst in Reite village in Papua New Guinea with James Leach during November 2012,  James and I wanted to push the concept of informed consent further as we co-designed some initial TEK Notebooks with several community members. This was an initial experiment intended as a proof-of-concept for the discussions we had had with James’ longterm Reite collaborator, Porer Nombo, both before and following our participation in the Saem Majnep Memorial Symposium on Traditional Environmental Knowledge at the University of Goroka in PNG the previous month. A number of the delegates had discussed their approaches to informed consent and working with indigenous people in PNG in their presentations, some of which were really admirable.

    Once in Reite village itself, we felt that it was important to establish what was actually meant by consent in this context – and this then informed how the whole experiment was shaped. The notion of engaging the consent of the participants who filled in the TEK Notebooks was relevant not just to demonstrate our ‘ethical’ approach to outsiders (such as academic and NGO colleagues), but was woven into the nature of the prompts used in the notebooks themselves. The participants were asked not just to give their consent to their notebooks being digitised and shared online, but also to indicate what rights they had to share the knowledge they were including, essentially linking back to the community and heritages of which they are part. This seemed a crucial way to ensure that what was being done was relevant and respectful to the internal relationships of the communities of Reite and Sarangama (a nearby village some of whom also took part). It provided declarations that the kinds of knowledge being shared were not secret or privileged, were given freely and with a description of the author’s right to do so. The prompts themselves emerged out of discussions with a number of community members (in which I was mainly an observer) which provided a strong sense that what we were doing was truly co-created, emerging from a process of open collaboration.

    As a time-limited experiment, our formulation of engaged consent was necessarily only partly developed but points, I think, to how we can do research with people, not just upon them.

    Reciprocal Exchange

    Since completing both the Pallion Ideas Exchange project and following on from my first Indigenous Public Authoring field trip to Reite I have found myself moving more and more towards articulating my personal aim of ‘reciprocal exchange’ with the people and communities with whom I work. My goal in entering into collaborations is to learn from others, experience things I cannot (or would not) make happen on my own – to stretch myself in a continuous process of becoming. It would be a selfish or at least self-centred process without the sense of obligation to reciprocate with others, to offer whatever knowledge, skills and experiences I have in a way that enables others to adopt and adapt them for themselves.

    Perhaps this is why I have often felt uncomfortable with the use of ‘ethics’ and ‘informed consent’ as I have seen and encountered it applied in some research contexts. My research work is not based on creating objective studies so much as engaged directly in working with people to effect social and cultural transformation. For this I believe that more is needed than just consent – it requires active participation, mutual trust and reciprocal exchange.

    This value of reciprocal exchange also underpins the work I have been doing with Oxford Brookes University on developing a process of engaged participatory design for a new kind of rehabilitation measurement tool which survivors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) will be asked to use to share their rehab experiences. Previous methods and tools have primarily focused on what clinicians and researchers needed to know. However we have started from the point of also trying to understand what benefits may derive from the activity for the TBI survivors themselves – as they see it – and how the process of contributing information to help clinicians better understand their experiences can be part of their own rehabilitation. This is a challenging step in developing tools within a medical context – embedding the patient’s perspective at the heart of designing a process intending to learn from their information and data is not as common as many may think.

    * * * * *

    James and I are now gearing up for the next stage of our Indigenous Public Authoring collaboration : a field trip in early 2015 (and another in 2016) back to Reite to work further with community members and explore methods and tools appropriate to their situation and context – ultimately aiming to put together a kind of simple, adaptable toolkit and process for recording and sharing traditional environmental, cultural and ecological knowledge that has been co-designed and co-created in situ with the community.

    At the heart of this project, for me, is this question of reciprocal exchange – what is each participant in the process bringing and taking away? How does it bind us into relationships of exchange and obligation to each other? The disparities of our ways of life and the worlds we inhabit mean that establishing an equitable relationship is unlikely to be based purely on material exchange – as it might be in the industrialised world of goods and money – although undoubtedly this will be involved. More likely, it seems to me, an equitable relationship will emerge out of shared acceptance of obligations to each other, and the articulation of these obligations through processes of collaboration and making things.

    And the only material that these relationships can be forged with is trust.

  • On Public Agency

    For some time now I have been engaged in a process of transforming my way of life and ways of working. In doing so I have continued to muse on the problem of communicating to others what it is that I do. I have never felt entirely comfortable describing myself as an artist, nor as a designer, nor as a researcher nor any other one thing (they never quite seem enough). And it is such a mouthful to always have to say that I am an “Artist, Designer and Researcher” (my long time favourite personal soubriquet, “maker of mischief”, is also not always suitable for attracting potential sponsors, funders and clients when trying to earn a living). I have been pondering on the nature of who and what I am as much as what it is that I do, and in doing so I’ve begun to think of a description that encapsulates my aspirations as much as the way I work across a variety of fields and disciplines.

    What drives me is my fiercely independent desire to enact and enable conditions for change : to co-create and co-design processes that help other people to feel empowered to assume agency for themselves. As a counterpoint to the many kinds of agent who are empowered by the state (and increasingly by private interests and corporations) to act on their behalf, I feel that our society also needs people to act as self-determined public agents for the public good. Citizenship could well be conceived as how far we are actually able to be autonomous beings, empowered and acting with agency not just acted upon by those we continually devolve power and agency to (politicians, agents of the state as well as the often faceless machinations of bureaucracies and big business).

    Such a role would combine the capacity for visionary thinking with the ability to observe, analyse and interpret the conditions we inhabit and with the ability to design tools, processes and solutions for action. It would be animated by a conscious ethos clearly set out and shared, not straitjacketed by moralistic codes of conduct. It would have to be fluid, flowing around obstacles and changing with the landscape without altering its essential nature.

    I’m not enough of a writer or speaker to consider myself a public intellectual and I have never been an activist nor attracted to activism per se, so I don’t see this role as being quite the same as those, despite being founded on a clear ethos of working for the public good and sharing many commonalities. I’m more of a pioneer than an entrepreneur and, whilst I’ve always been attracted to analysing problems and devising solutions, I’m not enough of a scientist or a detective to be a consulting …, well, what exactly?

    In my practice over the past two decades I have often framed the bigger picture, devising the overarching strategies that bring together all the elements (people, resources, organisations etc), whilst leaving some of the tactical decisions to those better able to make them at the point of need. I’ve blended this with designing and making tools and techniques; creating ways to express and share ideas, insights, observations and discoveries; creating spaces and facilitating collaborations between unusual or unlikely partners; and creating opportunities for others. In the role of transdisciplinary and disruptive innovator I have sought to introduce artistic practice into unfamiliar and unorthodox situations as a means to achieve uncommon insights. This kind of delicate interplay between people coming from all kinds of backgrounds leads me to think think that the role of the public agent might be contrapuntal to those sanctioned for itself by the state (or other institutions) – neither in opposition nor antagonistic, but interwoven as a separate melody within the whole musical structure of state, private interests and the public.

    Some aims a public agent may have could include,

    • to seek intelligence on the forces that act upon the public and make transparent that which is obscured;
    • to analyse and interpret the conditions of society and culture to enable reflection and realisation;
    • to act for change that empowers people to assume agency for themselves by helping to design tools, processes and situations that enable this;
    • to act consistently within the frame of a stated ethos, but not to be above employing subversion and subterfuge in achieving their goals;
    • to remain fiercely independent whilst constantly collaborating with others… alert to attempts at co-option and resilient enough to engage constructively with people and entities that may not be working for the public good themselves;
    • to never be afraid to change yourself, or to go into unfamiliar or uncomfortable places and situations, or to simply be when action is not needed or possible.

    This concept of the public agent is very much a work in progress, indicative of my current thinking rather than a definitive statement of intent. In fact the modest contribution I have made to the public good is probably not enough to have earn’t me the right to style myself as a public agent but it remains what I aspire to achieve. There are, indeed, many other people who have a far better claim to being a public agent than myself, people whose examples shine through as beacons of inspiration and hope.

    Over the past few days I’ve had an opportunity to discuss some of these ideas with other participants at Blast Theory’s Act Otherwise seminar which has reinforced my sense that artists and artistic practice have a special place in our society for working in this way. It is not so much an obligation or responsibility as a really exciting challenge to live up to. That so many others, in their own ways, share that excitement and commitment to making positive change makes all the difference, reinforcing the feeling that it is an effect of community not just individuality.