The name is inspired by the tale of Perth the woeful blacksmith in Moby Dick. In the beginning it is a story about regrets… an old man who once enjoyed a life of pleasure and plenty, laments the self destructive actions that led to his ruin. But in Ishmael’s telling, it becomes a story about turning towards a flicker of possibility. His past is destitute, his future indeterminate. To go to sea is to enter into a state of potential, where his life may take a new and different form.

“…launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable… the thousand mermaids sing to them, Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural…”

When viewing our present through the lens of a slow motion extinction, what art is and what it is for feels like a more urgent question with each passing day. Without definitive answers there is value in asking the question. Art is a technology that somehow translates all we have ever seen, experienced, learned or mislearned into marks for the interpretation of another. It is connective and generative. It’s whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And where as a species we seem to be suffering the effects of systems built on non-functional structures, our suffering is compounded by a lack of imagination around inventing new ones. I don’t know if this is a problem for artists to solve but I know that where artists and thinkers come together there is social sustenance, and new, surprising, unforeseen, forms emerge. If nothing else, creative collaboration is a machine for optimism.

Melville, H. (1851). Moby Dick.