Working in the cultural and creative sectors and industries has never been anything but challenging. Artists and creatives have been acting on intangibles and adding value indirectly to all traditional economic measures, as disruptors, actors of social innovation, urban rehabilitators, inventors not of tools but of new uses of said tools, you name it. Although it does not often pop up in a spreadsheet, it is arguably impossible to find arguments that contradict the insurmountable value creative work has in our lives. Despite all this, we must now consider changing quickly and add it to an already long list of hurdles for a creative professional.
This is exactly why the CROP project came to life: to help shape the paths of up-and-coming artists, designers, and performers according to the social, technological, and environmental mutations our lives have been going through, making them present and future compatible. Naturally, the first step to take in this process is to assess where these changes have been happening and in what capacity.
Over the past few months, the consortium has been reaching out to professionals to understand how they have been adapting to the current times and assess what skills have become more essential to harness to remain relevant. These challenges focus not only on specific sectors but also span across the whole creative field, like a general lack of visibility or recognition of creative work, concerns regarding sustainability and climate change, retention of talent, and managing mental well-being. These issues came up in over 30% of the surveys we did, alongside less pressing, but also worth considering socio-economic disparities, unemployment, and market changes.
There is a trend biding all challenges together, one that is very much common to creatives, but also to society at large, that is technological as much as sociological — and also one that, curious enough, might have answers within the creative sectors. The current state of technology democratizes content generation tools but has an undeniable extractive approach to creative work, namely when considering automatization and how artificial intelligence has been employed. Despite the fact commercially available and more popular AI models rely on creative work to build their data sets, the lack of recognition is becoming more and more pressing among artistic and cultural professionals. The idea of “replacement” has come up too often, in many shapes and forms, often out of ignorance.
This new material reality trickles down to many other challenges, such as artists and creatives considering career changes, the precarity of artistic endeavours and how it becomes ever more exclusive with fewer opportunities to disenfranchised communities, and all subsequent consequences of it. From climate change being accelerated, instead of stopping, by these new technologies, to mental health becoming more difficult to manage among all the before-mentioned challenges, there is a need to recognise that “times, they are a-changing” and that these times need to be handled with change. Or, as someone once said, from desperate times come radical minds.
These are the minds CROP is trying to form. Artists, designers, architects, performers, and producers who have harnessed the right skillset to deal with a more technological material reality, and are thus able to be active voices in reshaping it. We have mentioned before the need to be compatible with the present, but our actual goal is to enable this community to be compatible with the future, taking part in forming it. We need to rethink not only how creativity is taught, but also how it is being employed so that up-and-coming professionals can learn it in safe, empowering contexts, and not when dealing with the harshest realities. It all starts with education.