ABSTRACT
Chapter 10 introduces Sustainability in an Imaginary World (SIW) as a follow up to our Artists of the Floating World project. A continued exploration, that is, of the challenges and opportunities that arise when engaging sustainability not as a problem pertaining to ecological systems, but as a crisis of culture. Sustainability in an Imaginary World was an ambitious attempt to integrate broad themes: the ontological dimensions of art; the ontological dimensions of sustainability; ‘future scenarios’ as a context of public engagement; digital interactivity; and, perhaps most challenging of all, an interest in positing a layer of sustainability that involves the fundamental level of worlds. It is possible to tell the story of SIW as a success, having generated much of the data one might have hoped it would. And yet, in trying to collect this success into neatly written form, our conclusions began to feel thin and uninteresting, blind to some larger implications that haunted the project. Had we ourselves failed to escape our own Modernist compulsions? With this, some of the most transgressive energy SIW managed to generate was focused directly on the research team itself and the story of SIW became far more interesting as a story of deeper failure than one of shallow success.
