Schumacher College, RegenSW and the art.earth network invite you to submit a proposal for participation to the forthcoming summit Feeding the Insatiable to be held November 9-11, 2016 at Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EL, UK. This event is part of Schumacher College’s Arts & Ecology programme and is produced by art.earth. More detailed information can be found at feedingtheinsatiable.info.

Scope: Encouraging all manner of energy generation through creative intervention and invention and new approaches to scientific enquiry including the quirky, the impossible, the micro and the personal. Encouraging debate - practical, philosophical, metaphysical, and theoretical - bringing creative minds from many disciplines to bear on these pressing issues.

We explore ways in which creative makers and enquirers –– artists, scientists, philosophers, theorists and others –– can increasingly play a part in moving rather than cajoling, inspiring rather than scaring, succouring rather than scourging. The impassioned voice has an essential role to play in shifting the inert and entrenched thinking about how we live in the world, how we consume its resources and how we subvert and circumvent monolithic thinking. The danger lies not in those with abrasively negative views (as panic leads to stridency bordering on the absurd and numbers inevitably dwindle to irrelevancy under the growing weight of evidence), but those who have no views at all.

Topics of interest: Not intended to proscriptive or prescriptive, this list of topics suggests the areas we are likely to explore. However we are open to all relevant ideas, from the philosophical to the most practical and pragmatic.

  • visioning change
  • imaginative and invented narratives and technologies
  • micro-generation and body-derived energy
  • plant and other organic power generators
  • transformational potential of art
  • beyond communication
  • energy and metaphor
  • message and instrumentalisation
  • slow art, process
  • non-literal big data visualisation
  • the artist and the engineer
  • envisioning the profound
  • aesthetics of art/science
  • using imagination for social change
  • emotion / science
  • sensible / actual
  • new ways of seeing
  • new ways of knowing
  • evolving meaning
  • celebrating authenticity and ethos
  • energy in the animal world
  • exploring chasms between artists and industry
  • energy futures and questions of design
  • ethnographics, big data, climate change, understanding

The deadline for submission is 22.00 GMT on Sunday May 8, 2016. We are requesting 250-word abstracts or outlines, which must be submitted through the event website at feedingtheinsatiable.info/take-part/