The First
Annual Story Field Conference The Evolving Storycology Project Tom Atlee reports from 2015... an
'imagineering' article |
What began eight years ago
as a "story field conference" has evolved into a multi-media, interwoven,
ongoing blitz of visionary stories emerging in all corners of society from a
highly collaborative, co-creative, chaordic network of hundreds of visionary
storytellers. They are novelists, actors, screenwriters, producers, publishers,
performers, musicians, artists, historians, psychologists, scenario consultants
-- even dreamworkers and city planners. Their purpose was -- and is -- to shift
the cultural narrative of the US and the world towards more positive futures.
And, uncannily, they seem to be succeeding. They call it a "storycology"
project because they don't think in terms of isolated stories. All the stories
together create a story ecology, just as all the animals and plants in a forest
create an arborial ecology. Thus they speak of a storycology. They also speak
of a "story field"
-- almost like a magnetic field, only it is narrative rather than magnetism
that gives the field its life-shaping power. Their first storyfield conference
of August 2007 was a freewheeling affair of about 170 storytellers and experts
in social evolution and sustainability. Using an "open space" format,
they created their own discussions and working sessions, out of which came the
idea for the Storycology Project -- envisioned actually more as a movement or
network than a project. During the next year, the network got off to a fast
start with dozens of collaborators using quickly created and disseminated modalities
like blogs, online videos and podcasts, short stories, songs, story-sharing
and visioning activities -- both online (even in SecondLife) and in person).
Meanwhile, the longer-runway modalities like novels, movies, online games, and
comics -- were being intensively developed in the background. When those major
productions began to appear in late 2010, the way had been well prepared by
their early-bird brethren, and they spread through the culture like wildfire.
The eagerness of consumers for this new media stimulated the creation of even
more initiatives. This year, more than a third of the major motion pictures
of the season have connections to the Storycology Project. Behind the scenes we find
the Storyfield Funding Collaborative -- a coalition of several dozen wealthy
people -- mostly dot-com milionaires and billionaires -- and three foundations,
spearheaded by Google's Larry Brilliant. They've been leveraging the movement
with targeted support for promising initiatives and enticing contests to channel
storytellers' efforts into collaborations and what they call "imagineering"
work. They consider a story to be "imagineering" if it is so realistic
and compelling that real people can and do live it out in their actual lives. To build long-term viability
of the movement, the Storyfield Funding Collaborative is also expanding their
program of popular funding based on MoveOn.org's powerful grassroots fundraising
efforts. They also have ties to Evolutionary Life, the rapidly expanding movement
for evolutionary spirituality that took off with the publication of Michael
Dowd's Thank God for Evolution! shortly after the first Storyfield
Conference. Evolutionary Life's leaders see this story field work as a human
manifestation of what they call The Great Story of Evolution. To them, the co-creation
of positive stories for society to live into is a form of "conscious evolution." With thousands of stories, songs,
and games now in the public mind thanks to collaborative nature of the Storycology
Project, we see the characters and events in one story showing up in other Storycology
stories, often in the background, in the past or future, or seen from some other
different perspective. These loosely integrated stories -- produced by diverse
collaborating artists -- carry the idea of William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha
County and Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon to unprecedented lengths.
Add them all together -- and they cover a period of decades into the past and
some 80 years into the future -- and we see an entire virtual world evolution
forming up -- a challenging, appealing, unfolding world of daunting complexity
and compelling possibility. The Storycology Project's innovation
of collaborative intertwining stories has generated an entire fan subculture
that tracks and shares interlinkages among stories, and tries, with varying
degrees of success, to model their lives on the characters and events described
in these stories. The resulting clubs, community programs, new enterprises,
activist movements, evolutionary politicians, emerging social phenomena and
technologies, and first-person testimonials traceable to these stories mark
the ultimate success of the "imagineering" genre: The stories are
coming to life, for real. This is no accident. Most Storycology
stories are set in the future, and look back to more current times. They are
designed to inspire people to live into them by making it clear how the positive
future they depict came about, and bringing to life the heroes and anti-heroes,
the teams and gangs, who played roles in that unfolding. The stories and characters
are not all upbeat, by a long shot. They include the challenges, doubts, failures,
sins, and complex humanity of often ordinary characters who are playing believable,
livable roles in how things unfold towards unexpectedly positive outcomes. Towards
this end, we find negative characters and events often ending up generating
positive outcomes -- a theme derived from the fact that most evolutionary leaps
arise from crises. Inspired by the evolutionary spirituality movement, many
of these stories explore what it means to be a conscious evolutionary agent
in a complex, nonlinear, rapidly changing world in crisis -- as well as chronicling
the lives of players who are swept along and buffeted around by the swirl of
critical events, playing their roles less consciously, but nevertheless -- as
we discover -- significantly. Nobody is actually a bystander in the evolutionary
drama these stories depict. Everyone is a participant, like it or not, aware
or not. We've described the fictional future
stories. But not all Storycology stories are futuristic or fictional. Many are
contemporary -- including not only fiction, but journalism, and documentary
stories clearly depicting the seeds of the futures that haunt or bless the imagineering
stories -- or highlighting the struggles we denizens of the present have with
today's challenges, often from an evolutionary perspective. Some of the more
interesting stories so seamlessly blend fiction and fact, past, present, and
future, that we don't quite know where to categorize them. But they do pull
us in. An intriguing grassroots
facet of the Storycology movement is the Storyseed Social Network, which links
1.5 million people into activities where they share stories, generate story
ideas, and imagineer themselves into action groups -- both online and in local
clubs. They started spontaneously as subnetworks of online social networks like
MySpace and Zaadz, but came into their own when open source programmers, funded
by the Storyfield Funding Collaborative, developed special software to help
them co-create -- and connect around -- compelling characters and stories. Some
of their productions have themselves been published or broadcast beyond the
Web, but their primary importance is otherwise. Their co-created worlds of storylines
and characters have become primary sources and inspiration for the professional
Storycology storytellers. And perhaps most remarkably, they are the leading
edge of people taking these stories seriously as an effort to create a new world
in reality. They are the growing legions of activists inspiring and organizing
others to live into and out of these stories. Nothing quite like this has ever
happened before: Ordinary people, professional storytellers, and experts of
all sorts, are now actively working together to create thousands of stories
that can bring about a better world, and together they are inspiring millions
of others to those stories to create that world. The fact that a growing number
of new-era politicians, educators, and corporate leaders are beginning to make
Storycology activities central to their own efforts suggests that our world
is about to shift into a different gear entirely. Evolution is turning into
a whole new ballgame. Return
to Story Field Conference Participant Story Blog Return
to Story Field Conference Home Page
Illustration credit: Dana Lynne Andersen, in From
Lava to Life: the Universe Tells our Earth Story by Jennifer Morgan -- Courtesy
of Dawn Publications