Producing for the Anthropocene: the Creative Producer as contemporary environmentalist

Abstract

Throughout the modern history of the West, creative production has served humanity as a moral signpost, enforcing and instructing social and cultural movements. The environmentalist movement grew through creative production in response to industrialisation; lead by poets, artists, theatre makers and writers. A complex set of sociocultural circumstances has led to the obstruction of the environmental narrative in contemporary mainstream discourse, heavily impacted by the industrialised creative field which has been coopted by dominant consumer powers to engage audiences in cyclical, fossil fuel heavy lifestyles. The post-industrial shift toward more fluid models of work and our evolution into a digital society can support the deindustrialisation of the creative field, allowing for creative production to reestablish its place as an affective source of environmental consciousness. Within this nascent field, new workers have risen to facilitate interdisciplinary, part-digital modes of working, one such actor is the Creative Producer. What role can this worker, who is emblematic of the new economy, play in restructuring the creative response to the Anthropocene?