ABSTRACT
We conclude Part II with a summary chapter of the work developed within Artists of the Floating World. Was this a compelling way to connect art and sustainability? And what of our evaluation strategy? Is it enough to simply situate compelling new work within already-enfranchised genres? With these considerations in mind, we review the ways each genre—poetry, theatre, and music—wrestled with their own Modernist trappings and find ourselves puzzling over an emergent paradox: a surprising inverse relationship between levels of interactivity and levels of audience engagement across the works. Struggling to make sense of this, we turn to recent thought from sustainability’s stakeholder engagement literature and find an important lesson for any efforts—artistic or not—to restructure thematic and practical processes beyond the parameters of the Modernist world.
