Sustainability in an Imaginary World explores the social agency of art and its connection to complex issues of sustainability.

Over the past decade, interest in art's agency has ballooned as an increasing number of fields turn to the arts with ever-expanding expectations. Yet just as art is being heralded as a magic bullet of social change, research is beginning to throw cautionary light on such enthusiasm, challenging the linear, prescriptive, instrumental expectations such transdisciplinary interactions often imply. In this, art finds itself at a treacherous crossroads, unable to turn a deaf ear to calls for help from an increasing number of ostensibly non-aesthetic fields, yet in answering such prescriptive urgencies, jeopardizing the very power for which its help was sought in the first place.

This book goes in search of a way forward, proposing a theory of art aiming to preserve the integrity of arts practices within transdisciplinary mandates. This approach is then explored through a series of case studies developed in collaboration with some of Canada's most prominent artists, including internationally renowned nature poet Don McKay; Italian composer and Head of Vancouver New Music, Giorgio Magnanesi; the renowned Electric Company Theatre, led by Kevin Kerr; and finally through a largescale multimedia installation aiming to reimagine the relationship between climate, culture, and human agency.

Sustainability in an Imaginary World will be of great interest to students and scholars of arts-based research fields, sustainability studies, and environmental humanities.

David Maggs carries on an active career as an interdisciplinary artist and arts-researcher. He is the founder and pianist for Dark by Five (darkbyfive.com), has written works for the stage, and collaborated on large augmented reality projects. David is the artistic director of the rural Canadian interarts festival Gros Morne Summer Music (gmsm.ca), founder and publisher of a digital arts magazine (oldcrowmagazine.com), and the director of The Graham Academy, a youth performing arts training academy. He initiated and co-produced the CBC documentary The Country. As an academic David focuses on arts practices and the challenge of sustainability. His doctoral thesis Artists of the Floating World led to the SSHRC-funded Sustainability in the Imaginary World led by Principal Investigator John Robinson (www.imaginesustainability.today). His research attempts to understand sustainability as a cultural challenge, and to make sense of art as a driver of social impacts. He has been a featured speaker at the Canadian Arts Summit, The International Transdisciplinarity Conference, the National Valuing Nature Conference, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), and elsewhere.

John Robinson is a Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School and Visiting Professor at Utrecht University in 2019. At U of T, he is Presidential Advisor on the Environment, Climate Change and Sustainability, and heads up the Sustainable Built Environment Performance Assessment (SBEPA) research network. His research focuses on the intersection of climate change mitigation, adaptation and sustainability; the use of visualization, modelling and citizen engagement to explore sustainable futures; sustainable buildings and urban design; the role of the university in contributing to sustainability; creating partnerships for sustainability with non-academic partners; the history and philosophy of sustainability; and, generally, the intersection of sustainability, social and technological change, ways of thinking, and community engagement processes.

Sustainability in an Imaginary World explores the social agency of art and its connection to complex issues of sustainability.

Over the past decade, interest in art's agency has ballooned as an increasing number of fields turn to the arts with ever-expanding expectations. Yet just as art is being heralded as a magic bullet of social change, research is beginning to throw cautionary light on such enthusiasm, challenging the linear, prescriptive, instrumental expectations such transdisciplinary interactions often imply. In this, art finds itself at a treacherous crossroads, unable to turn a deaf ear to calls for help from an increasing number of ostensibly non-aesthetic fields, yet in answering such prescriptive urgencies, jeopardizing the very power for which its help was sought in the first place.

This book goes in search of a way forward, proposing a theory of art aiming to preserve the integrity of arts practices within transdisciplinary mandates. This approach is then explored through a series of case studies developed in collaboration with some of Canada's most prominent artists, including internationally renowned nature poet Don McKay; Italian composer and Head of Vancouver New Music, Giorgio Magnanesi; the renowned Electric Company Theatre, led by Kevin Kerr; and finally through a largescale multimedia installation aiming to reimagine the relationship between climate, culture, and human agency.

Sustainability in an Imaginary World will be of great interest to students and scholars of arts-based research fields, sustainability studies, and environmental humanities.

Table of Contents

Section 1: Realigning the art-sustainability relationship

Chapter 1 - An Introduction to Sustainability in an Imaginary World

Section 1 - Realigning the art-sustainability relationship

Section 2 - Artists of the Floating World

Section 3 - Sustainability in an Imaginary World

Summary

Chapter 2 - Sustainability as a failure of ontology

What kind of problem is sustainability?

A problem for Modernism or about Modernism?

The Subjects of Sustainability: Information Deficit Models and the Modernist Problem of Personhood

Social Practice

The objects of sustainability and the rise of complexity

Methodological or Ontological redress?

A banishing of science?

Or Modernity?

Flattening Ontology

Procedural Sustainability

Flipping the Predicate

Regenerative Sustainability

The joyful climate crisis?

Conclusion

Chapter 3 - Art as the Attention we Pay

A risky proposition?

Value-add or Trade-off?

Transformative vs. Co-optive?

Two Cautionary Tales

A descriptive swing and a miss: The Mozart Effect

A prescriptive swing and a miss: Art and science communication

Gauging the risk

Why do we think art has agency and where does this instinct typically lead?

A theory of art for transdisciplinary work?

Instauration and the nature of construction

Beings capable of worrying you?

George Steiner and the 'Unmastered Thereness'

Heidegger and the ontological agency of art

world/earth tensions

Tools vs. Art

Indirect, Mediated, and Frustrating

The agency of the work of art

Conclusion: Art as the quality of attention we pay

Chapter 4 - Does It Need to be Good to be Useful? Art, Aesthetic Merit, and Research Design

In search of the full promise of artistic agency?

Tackling a 'meta' problem

Aesthetic Priorities in Transdisciplinary Art Practices

Leavy's resolution

Resistance is fertile?

Aligning descriptive and prescriptive…