Thank you for visiting – and welcome to DIWO at the Dark Mountain.
I’m Dougald Hine and, together with Paul Kingsnorth, I started the Dark Mountain Project – “a new cultural movement for an age of global disruption”.
Over the next three months, I’ll be playing the role of host as DIWO at the Dark Mountain evolves, first as a mail art project, then into an open exhibition. I look forward to meeting many of you, on- or offline, during that process.
A bit of background
The Dark Mountain Project itself came about because of a blog post. In September 2007, Paul wrote a post announcing his “resignation” from journalism:
I’ve had it. The worst few months of my life have brought to a head something that has been long coming anyway… I no longer believe that the media can say the things I want it to, to the people I want to hear it. I think it is eating itself, and I don’t want to be involved.
Then he mentioned an idea he had kicking around for a new publication, something between a magazine and a journal, which would print the kinds of writing and host the conversations for which there was no room in the existing media landscape:
What I really need are collaborators; fellow writers and artists who see a space out there for something deeply, darkly unfashionable and defiant, and who would like to help make it happen.
I read that post and it struck a chord. I had left the BBC a year earlier, for similar reasons, and – although we’d never met – I shared Paul’s sense of the gap between the cultural conversation of Britain in the early twenty-first century and the social, economic and ecological disruption which was already overtaking us.
So I wrote to him and a conversation began, initially online, then face-to-face, usually over long evenings in pubs. As the months went past, with the global economy threatening to unravel faster than we could write, we realised that the thread we were pulling at led to more than just a journal.
Its first output would be a pamphlet, ‘Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto’, which we published in July this year. (That publication was made possible by all the people who contributed to our peer-to-peer fundraising campaign on Fundable.com.)
Welcome to “Uncivilisation”
The manifesto set out our sense of the global situation, of the roots of today’s crises in the stories we have been telling ourselves for generations, and of the central role of storytellers, writers, artists and others in navigating the journey ahead:
That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.
It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality…
If we are indeed teetering on the edge of a massive change in how we live, in how human society itself is constructed, and in how we relate to the rest of the world, then we were led to this point by the stories we have told ourselves…
In such a moment, writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to play…
We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.
The manifesto travelled a long way – tens of thousands of people have so far visited the Dark Mountain site, and we have had hundreds of emails from around the world, not to mention orders for the print edition. And while our message was certainly dark, a recurring theme in those emails was the sense of hope people felt behind the darkness. As we wrote in the ‘Principles of Uncivilisation’:
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.
The foothills
When we published the manifesto, we didn’t know exactly what would happen next. We were already planning a first issue of the Dark Mountain journal – a book-length collection of uncivilised writing, for which we are currently seeking contributions, incitements, indictments, stories, maps and dreams. Soon, we found ourselves being approached with ideas for other projects and collaborations. Among these will be a Dark Mountain festival in Llangollen next May, running head-to-head with the Hay literary festival. (Someone suggested we name it Straw…)
One thing that became clear as these invitations came in was that our original description of the Dark Mountain Project as a “literary movement” was too narrow. Paul and I are writers by background, but many of those who responded most strongly to the manifesto came from the visual arts.
So when Ruth and Marc proposed that we collaborate on an open project, using the manifesto as a provocation, it seemed like a great chance to take the Dark Mountain journey beyond the safety of words alone, into other territories.
DIWO at the Dark Mountain
I don’t know what direction DIWO at the Dark Mountain will take. Firstly, because that’s up to you – and secondly, because this is a new experience for me. I look forward to learning from those who participated in the original DIWO in 2007, and from everyone who gets involved this time around.
As host, I’ll try to highlight work emerging from the NetBehaviour list, as well as feeding connections into the discussions there. I’ll also use this blog to introduce work from artists I feel embody the spirit of the Dark Mountain – and hopefully encourage some of them to join us in Doing It With Others.
Finally, I hope we’ll all have a lot of fun over the next three months. Yes, there are dark times around and ahead of us. The world as we have known it is coming to an end – no one can predict just how climate change, resource scarcity and social and economic instability will play out in our lifetimes – but one thing I will predict is that the great human capacity for play and laughter will endure and will be part of what helps us make it through.
