WHY US? WHY NOW?

We are: poets, authors, musicians, muses, thought leaders. Our members work across the arts (theater, film, dance, installation, etc etc), law, science, business strategy, technology, and social entrepreneurship. As a community, we try to forecast what the world will look like – in the fictional worlds we build as well as to inform the work we focus on. We try to solve the problems of this emerging world in new ways, and we believe that problems can be solved more effectively through the wisdom of the manifold crowd.

One of these problems lies at the heart of how we value the arts in our culture today. There are large challenges and questions surrounding the future role of the 'artist' as both the soothsayer and the clown. How do we harness the creative capital of these unbridled incarnations?

Great value is carried in a small part of the industry. But, for the most part, a longer tail of work is sustained off a potent mix of philanthropy, passion, and persistence. How do we drive sustainability across the kind of work that drives the zeitgeist, feeds our identities, teaches us something, makes us laugh – work that doesn’t always find a natural home in the more commercial landscape of entertainment, and (even when it does) is becoming increasingly commoditized? How do we take back power as creators? What do stories do that other things cannot? 

 

 

AN AGENCY IN SIGHT

At SIGHTLINE,  we use new models to structure stories, performance and media. We draw from other disciplines (behavioral economics, the scientific process, business strategy frameworks) to inform the format and structures of our own work.

Aristotle penned the poetics; could we pen the economics of the artistic endeavor? If there are rules to story, could we take a step back, and figure out the rules of expression in the larger context of culture, of capitalism, of a global world?

As an organization, we ask these questions, challenge our audiences, and brainstorm new models and solutions to inject value back into the craft. Social progress is seeded by the way we communicate with one another. We must seed it. To that end, sustainability is our aim and, we create work in so far as to also understand how to continue to create that work.