Innovating Contracts in the Arts and Beyond (2026-2027)
Innovating Contracts in the Arts and Beyond innovates, prototypes and share contract-building models that expand cultures of equity and resilience in the arts & adjacent sectors, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
| Overview: Gaps, Goals & Outcomes |
Transforming Contracts in the Arts and Beyond empowers co-creative agency in our agreement-building culture within the Arts and adjacent sectors to transform legacies of inequity, inaccessibility, extractivism, exploitation, disengagement, and anthropocentrism in our practices of contract creation
This project transforms agreement-building cultures in service of equity and sustainability through a three-phase education, prototyping, and knowledge-sharing process wherein we engage in education and knowledge stewardship with the broader public to grow equity-driven, innovative agreement-building approaches to support organizational resilience
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Practical gaps in the sector addressed by Contract Transformation in the Arts and Beyond include:
(1) Contract-signing processes in the Arts in which disengagement, misunderstanding and inaccessibility are endemic
(2) Contract-signing processes influenced by colonial histories in which written agreements were created in inaccessible ways to create conditions for predatory/inequitable relationships that enabled land dispossession and extraction
(3) Increasing prominence of AI technologies in the arts and adjacent sectors that call for us to grow in our awareness of how to build ethical agreements and protocols around AI
(4) Systemic lack of somatic education to cultivate embodied awareness around consent in agreement-building processes
This project is catalyzed by our experience as both
(a) project leads for Greenhouse Theatre and various organizations over the past decade tasked with the responsibility of onboarding multiple workers within the arts and adjacent sectors
(b) contractors who have been onboarded by other organizations
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For over a decade, we and our partners have worked with and for artists and arts organizations as both contractors and clients. In this time, we have experienced how a majority of the organizations we have worked with have largely inherited onboarding and HR models that
(1) do not offer a clear understanding of terminology normalized on contracts, reproducing colonial norms of contract building in which obscure and inaccessible language is used
(2) leave contractors vulnerable to disempowerment and a lack of confidence to ask questions or negotiate working conditions
(3) reproduce colonial anthropocentric norms that do not acknowledge the diverse ecologies of creation that we are responsible to as treaty peoples
(4) lack awareness and protocols around emerging AI technologies that increasingly impact the arts and adjacent sectors
(5) do not invite or empower skills for contractors to learn about skills for building awareness of consent in a somatic, embodied way
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After identifying these gaps, we prototyped a project in 2023 with the support of the Toronto Arts Council (TAC) Digital Solutions Incubator to work with VR artist Spatial Esk to generate a contracting process prototype that involved meditation on body and land intended to ground contractors into an onboarding process attuned to our bodies and the land-based indigenous contexts we work in. During this time, we also began to realize how deeply AI continues to transform questions around how we create, leading us to commit to long-term research on the implications and ethics of AI in relation to our bodies, the land, and the creative sector at large.
At the end of our prototyping project with the TAC, we facilitated a needs assessment based on insights gained from the project. In the assessment, we identified the usefulness of continuing to catalyze contract transformation and innovation through the three-phase education, prototyping and knowledge-sharing project proposed in this grant.
Our project responds to intersecting questions around the body, land, AI, and creation to cultivate deeper cultures of consent, equity, decolonization, and ecological care in contracting processes by prototyping models that:
(1) optimize consent, equity, empowerment, transparency, and embodied awareness in relation to
(a) the impacts of AI on our creative processes
(b) our treaty responsibilities (and therefore to the land) when signing contracts. We desire to envision best practices for optimal engagement, relevance, co-participation, and agency for both employer and contractor.
(2) address patterns of inequity, hastiness, and limited attention paid in the contract signing process, especially impacting contractors already systematically marginalized by virtue of race, class, ability, status, gender, sexuality, etc., in a largely contract-based sector due to the precarious nature of work within the Arts.
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| Innovation and Sector Collaboration |
This project offers an innovative opportunity to collaborate with educational and organizational partners to:
(1) rebuild, redefine, and practice decolonial methods of agreement building that honour and deepen connection with our human and beyond-human beings, and land-based relationships as much as and alongside our anthropocentric ones
(2) honour and uplift the diverse and powerful ways that original cultures within our ancestries and that of the land on which our organization is based (T’karon:to) hold artistically rich methodologies of agreement building such as the Two-Row Wampum
(3) learn how to build contemporary cultures of agreement-building in sustainable, regenerative and ethical ways that reconcile the increasing impact of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and invitation for new protocols in relation to AI
(4) develop skills to tap into our innate embodied wisdom for attuning to consent and ethics in agreement-building
ROOTS
This project started in 2023 in this collaborative project with the Toronto Metropolitan University (through the Digital Solutions Incubator with the TAC), we are currently generating a prototype for a Virtual Reality and guided meditation model of contracting and onboarding artists optimized to support accessibility, enchantment, clarity, and empowerment in the HR contract-signing process