Hi [New friend/follower]
We are pleased to welcome you to our mailing list, and hope that you will quickly see that Interstitium is much more than a band. For one, we are not at all interested in 'making it' by the conventional standards of the music industry, or any current creatvity industry. Instead, we are helping to provide the soundtrack to an international arts collaboration known as the 'Songs of the Interstitium' story project.
Songs of the Interstitium is a transmedia (or multi-platform) avant garde story project that features almost 50 songs, four novels, several poetry collections, a number of website-hubs, various social media feeds, dozens of nonfiction articles and essays, music videos and live performances, public talks and, perhaps most importantly, a well-worked out philosophy of "species creativity" (linked to the Zoetics Institute's imperative/challenge to re-imagine human creativity for our fraught times).
We are currently linked to almost 20,000 emerging and established musicians, writers, poets, creative thinkers, journal and ezine editors, artists, game designers and music producers from over 90 countries. Many have already contributed to the project in meaningful ways - some simply be liking or retweeting messages, others by reviewing project novels, poems, songs etc., still others by producing some of our songs or even publishing/laying out/ illustrating etc. key works.
However, this is a reciprocal project for us - we also wish to promote the works of hundreds of creatives (i.e. people who share our sense of the dramas of the species moment and its special challenge to creative people everywhere on the planet) across our numerous platforms.
1. THE STORY that is MORE THAN A STORY: Songs of the Interstitium
Seven versions of the story's main characters 'bleed' between seven story lines, as per contemporary new science, Quantum-based, understandings of reality (realities?) as found in the: 'many words/many selves'' theory, 'retro-causality' (time-travel) theories, the 'simulated or computational reality' theory and current thinking on universe cosmology.
"Rowan Sweeney", for example, is various people in various worlds/timelines: poet, musician, teacher/performer, sportsman, transpersonal psychologist, editor/publisher and novelist ... his job, the task of several parallel life-times, is to 'bleed' insights from all of these creative lives/specialists (living in their various worlds) into one creative self living in our 'real world/time-line' ... But to what end?
The story explores the key dramas of our time: the rise of 'A.I. / VR / MR / cloning / quantum computing etc. technologies; the rise of a vast economically oppressed "precariat class" in many countries; the existential threat posed by biosphere/environmental degredation/collapse; the rise of species threatening Nationalist ideologies and fundamentalist religious perspectives (that offer simplistic but frequently divisive, oppressive and life-threatening ways of coping with the uncertainties of our epoch) and, finally, the plague level 'chronic ennui/ alienation/ dis-empowerment/ angst and melancholy etc. many of us experience as we simply go about their lives in the shadows of above pressures.
The various stories set in the various worlds will converge in the fourth novel of the project - to be set in the mid 2020s - i.e.as the species/planetary crisis reaches critical mass (in our reality).
As a band Interstitium writes songs that seek to balance the epic challenges of the times with the intimate/personal challenges we all face, on a daily basis, simply by being alive in such an interconnected period.
2. "Songs of the Interstitium", "Interstitium Band" and "Zoetics" as SOURCES of INSPIRATION
Although we obviously hope that you will engage with the music, poetry, fiction, ideas, etc. linked to this project, our larger goal is actually to inspire you to explore, via your own creative pursuits, some of the themes highlighted above. If we can INSPIRE you to write/create a song, poem, story, art-work, nonfiction book, film, video game, dance routine etc. that can somehow increase our ability as a species to 'select a best-possible future' for the planet, we feel that we will have done out job!
Feel free to peruse the project sites listed further sown this page. We also invite you to link with us at our three main twitter feed sites, especially if you share something of our concerns, philosophy etc. (see our Zoetics website below).
3. CONNECT (and DRAW OUR ATTENTION to CREATIVE PROJECTS THAT EXPLORE OUR KEY CONCERNS)
We are very interested in forming loose, non-legally binding creative associations with people producing work that explores similar themes to those discussed above. To this end we are particularly interested in EMERGING, SEMI-ESTABLISHED, NEGLECTED/UNDER-PROMOTED, AVANT GARDIST and MARGINALISED musicians, artists, poets, novelists, etc. operating outside of (or actively rejecting) the various celebrity-based based 'Star Systems' that dominate most creative fields at present and are linked to hyper-capitalist and highly competitive (i.e. Social Darwinist) ideas about 'success'.
Main Project/Interstitium Twitter Feed:
https://twitter.com/InterstitiumAu
AND (for the Zoetics Institute):
Click here
First Novel from the Project:
Click here
Project website:
Click here
Project Coordinator's twitter feed and website:
Click here
Click here
Zoetics and Creativity website (the Foundational philosophy/psychology behind the project):
Click here
CONCLUSION:
So welcome to all of this, i.e. a multi-art form global creative community, collaborating around themes and challenges worthy of the great protagonists of SF, Fantasy, Thriller etc. stories! Our challenge/quest, is perhaps to birth a new paradigm for creativity that can contribute to a brighter future for ourselves, for other human beings and for other forms of organic life on the earth ... before it is too late.
When you think about it, why else would we ever want to become creatives? Either way, creative artists from all disciplines (and emerging arts discipines) and all nations will play a crucial role in coming decades if our species and the many other life forms we share the planet with are to survive our current interconnected, transnational challenges without significant trauma to the earth's life support systems (the 'bio-spehere').
As the Ancioent Egyptian scribes would have out it - under it must be said the guidance of Thoth and Seshet of course - 'We [creatives] Must Become A Support For Life ..."
Best wishes
Interstitium (band)