Playing for Time

Making Art as if the World Mattered

This groundbreaking handbook is a resource for artists, community activists and anyone wishing to reach beyond the facts and figures of science and technology to harness their creativity to make change in the world.

Playing for Time explores the pivotal role artists play in rethinking the future; reinventing and reimagining our world at a time of systemic change and uncertainty. Identifying collaborative arts practices emerging in response to planetary challenges, it reclaims a traditional role for artists in the community as truth-tellers and agents of change. 64 experienced artists and activists give voice to a new narrative – shifting society’s rules and values away from consumerism and commodity towards community and collaboration with imagination, humour, ingenuity, empathy and skill.

Inspired by the grassroots Transition movement, modelling change in communities worldwide, Playing for Time joins the dots between key drivers of change – in energy, finance, climate change, food and community resilience – and provides ‘recipes for action’ for readers to take up and try.