http://www.free-soil.org/index.php?cat_id_rel=4
03 May 2007
Arts in (Climate) Crisis
By Joni Taylor
Part 1
There are 3 artistic strains in dealing with climate change.
One is reducing the co2 emissions produced by artists themselves - not flying to that next art fair or finding alternatives to energy sucking Plasma screens. Just like a UN delegate, an artist is accountable for his /her carbon footprint. Using recycled and green products is another indication of ‘Slow Art’.(The next art movement perhaps?) London’s seven meter tall WEEE man, made of the industrial detritus used in a typical lifetime, was a successful shock factor device standing on the River Thames.
Another method is making art that depicts the effects of warming and pollution. The most memorable tools in Gore's film were the postcards of glaciers in the Twenties, compared with the dried up and sandy images of today. Photographers relish travelling to exotic places to bear witness to both environmental damage and utopian beauty, and bring back images to share with a city bound audience.
The last, most innovative area is the collision of art and science to create visualising tools, or to quote worldchanging ‘making the invisible, visible’. By transforming data and graphs to a visual language, artists can demonstrate the bare facts with humour and delight. Some even use ecological systems in their work, mimicking nature.
Here are the ten art projects that deal with the subject of Climate Change, including free-soil.org(REORDERED IN RELEVANCE EG COUNTRY/DIGITAL MEDIA)problem: most are USA/Europe countries7. Free Soil ***international collaboration of artists:
CORE PLACE TO SEARCH-(like green museum)
Free Soil is an
international collaboration of artists, activists, researchers and gardeners who take a participatory role in the transformation of the environment. Members have developed art projects about greening cities (The Hot Summer of Urban Farming, Copenhagen); the pollution of the Baltic Sea and resulting ‘Red Tides’ of toxic algae (Selective Memory, Starlsund) and F.R.U.I.T, a travelling installation examining how the city is connected to the surrounding agricultural areas. For ISEA 2006 in San Jose, Free Soil conducted a bio diesel bus tour of Silicon Valley, pointing out the environmental consequences of the Hi-Tech industry, and offering alternatives, such as mycoremediation - cleaning soil by using mushrooms. They also foster discourse and give support for critical art practices that reflect and change the urban and natural environment via features and projects on their website. Free Soil believe art can be a catalyst for social awareness and positive change. F.R.U.I.T is currently touring as part of
Beyond Green: Towards a Sustainable Art.
8. Andrea PolliNew York /
digital media artist***Andrea Polli is a digital media artist living in New York City. She is interested in global systems, the real time interconnectivity of these systems, and the effect of these systems on individuals. She currently works in collaboration with
atmospheric scientists to develop systems for understanding storm and climate information through sound (a process called sonification). Her Queensbridge Wind Power Project presents a vision of a future when meeting energy needs can enhance the beauty of a city by investigating how clean, renewable wind power could be integrated into the landmark architecture of the Queensboro Bridge.
3. Hehe: Nuage Vert and PollstreamFrench / interactive environments ** Across a number of projects, the
French collective Hehe create a sense of constant rather than delayed feedback. Pollstream is an intervention in environmental ethics. It creates a series of
interactive environments in which the
audience are in a process of monitoring localised pollution at the very same time that they produce it. The audience is required to conceptualize themselves as responsible - collectively and individually - for their emissions. Using
visual, kinetic and sonic technologies, it undermines these typical defences of disengagement by speeding up the normal time it takes for our actions in and on the environment to have consequences. Another project,
Nuage Vert, uses lasers and a camera tracking system to project
colour coded information onto a waste burning plant/power plant within a local area that is visible to all residents.
4. Translator II: Grower by Sabrina RaafChicago /data readings of audience carbon dioxide - visualized**Humans also produce carbon dioxide. Sabrina Raaf is a
Chicago-based artist working in experimental sculptural media and photography. Translator II: Grower is a small rover vehicle which moves around the gallery drawing vertical lines up and down on the wall with a green crayon. The height of each line is determined by the level of
carbon dioxide present in the room, which the robot reads via a small digital sensor mounted on its shell. The carbon dioxide, of course, is
generated by gallery visitors, This piece makes visible how art institutions depend on their visitors to make them 'healthy' spaces for new art to evolve and flourish within. Watching the artistic output of a machine that is so sensitive to its environment makes people in the space more sensitive to their environment and its conditions.
10. Natalie JeremijenkoUSA / design and analysis of tangible digital media.Jeremijenko is an inventor and engineer whose work focuses on the
design and analysis of tangible digital media. She bridges the technical and the art worlds and her mission is to reclaim technology and apply it to the messy complexities of the real world, often with disquieting results. Her project,
One Tree, features the planting of 2,000 walnut trees in sensor-equipped planters around
San Francisco. The condition of the growing trees will reflect the region's surprising discrepancies in climatic, environmental and socio-economic conditions. Another project
Bit Cab inserts geospecific data directly onto
New York City taxi display units. Her much acclaimed
Feral Robot Sniffer Dogs were hobbyist kits made to modify commercially available toy dogs to potentially detect toxic substances in the air.
Fade to Black is a network of webcams oriented skyward. The images on the webcam fades to black as pollutant film accumulates on the lens. It provides visual and empirical information on air quality.
2. Cape FarewellARTIC - may have potential/ videoCape Farewell was conceived by
artist/filmmaker David Buckland and during the past five years he and a varying team of artists, writers, choreographers, filmmakers, environmentalists and scientists have worked on a 100-year old Dutch schooner called The Noorderlicht. Located in a
fjord near Longyerben, Svalbard, just north of the 79th parallel, they respond to the environment and reflect the earths change where its most sensitive, the
arctic circle. They draw attention to the role ocean currents play and the effect that rising CO2 levels and changing weather patterns will have. The team have already developed a major exhibitions programme, a
book Burning Ice - Art & Climate Change and the DVD A
rt From A Changing Arctic. On his last mission, Buckland invited novelist Ian McEwan, playwright Caryl Churchill, artist Antony Gormley and choreographer Siobhan Davies. Turner prize winner Gormley worked in conditions of -32 degrees to complete an ice sculpture that lasted only three months.
6. Precipice Alliance and Mary Ellen CarrollNew York /The Precipice Alliance (
commission projects : no other projects uploaded yet)
The Precipice Alliance is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting awareness about global warming through the visual arts. They believe visibility is the key to positive action and that artists can give form to the intangible and deliver a powerful message.
They commission projects that specifically address climate change in order to direct public attention to the urgency of the issue. Large-scale contemporary art will be executed in public venues.
The first commission is by New York-based conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll. It consists of a 900-foot-long window display in the buildings of the former American Can factory, comprised of eight-foot-tall neon letters proclaiming, ‘IT IS GREEN THINKS NATURE EVEN IN THE DARK’. It is ‘indestructible language’, focusing on the fluid, open-ended nature of words. The organization hastens to note that the art piece is ‘
carbon neutral’, employing low-wattage transformers and lead-free glass tubing, as well as using solar panels to offset the energy consumed.
5. Canary ProjectWorld /photographing
By
photographing landscapes throughout the world that are currently undergoing dramatic transformation or are vulnerable to predicted changes, Canary Project conveys the urgent reality of global warming. Their
team of scientists, writers and artists aim to present these images in ways that speak to diverse audiences and foster positive action. Project
co-founder Susannah Sayler will be photographing 16 landscapes selected in consultation with leading climate-change scientists and journalists, showing that global warming is already affecting the world in a variety of ways and affecting every place on earth. In the second phase of the project, they will photograph solutions to the problem, such as sources of alternative energy, preparations for already predicted changes and various green products. Sayler has travelled to
‘hot spots’ and her haunting images include glaciers in
Austria and bleached and dead coral in
Belize. So far the images have been shown on buses in Denver with the words ‘This is what Global Warming looks like’ and online publications such as
Polar Inertia.1 Halliburton SurvivaBallFlorida/performance‘The SurvivaBall is designed to protect the corporate manager no matter what Mother Nature throws his or her way,’ said Fred Wolf, a Halliburton representative at the Catastrophic Loss conference held in
Florida. ‘This technology is the only rational response to abrupt climate change’. It will include a sophisticated communications systems, nutrient gathering capacities, onboard medical facilities and a daunting defense infrastructure. The only problem is, the SurvivaBall was a fake, and so was the Halliburton representative. The
Yes Men are pranksters/performers who assume other identities - ‘identity corrections’ - to make fun of and bring attention to the serious issues of corporate accountability and global greed. They are invited to events and TV shows through their various websites and present ridiculous and unbelievable corporate strategies. No one seemed to doubt their appearance in Florida, and fellow representatives even asked about the
SurvivaBalls anti-terrorism capabilities. Other stunts have included the fake GWBush site and apologising on behalf of Bophal for their chemical spill disaster of 1984.
May, 2006 | "The SurvivaBall is designed to protect the corporate manager no matter what Mother Nature throws his or her way," said Fred Wolf, a Halliburton representative who spoke today at the Catastrophic Loss conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida. "This technology is the only rational response to abrupt climate change," he said to an attentive and appreciative audience.
9. PlatformLondon based / r
esearch campaign and cultural intervention project For over 20 years the
London based Platform has been engaging in making transparent that which corporations and companies wish to remain hidden. 90% Crude is a sustained investigation into the power and impact of transnational corporate trade and business. Other projects include a
research campaign and cultural intervention project on Shell and BP oil companies (Gog and Magog); a series of experimental interventionist walks in the London's financial district (Freedom in The City) and Desktop Killers which links corporations to genocide. In
Unravelling The Carbon Web, Platform works to reduce the environmental and social impacts of oil corporations, and And
While London Burns is a downloadable audio tour of London - a soundtrack for the era of climate change - in their words ‘a requiem for a Warming World’ . Their latest initiative is
Remember Saro-Wiwa and will be Britain's first Mobile memorial. It is in honour of Ken Saro-Wiwa, and his colleagues who were executed after anti oil campaigns in the Niger Delta.
Commissioned by
DAMn Magazinehttp://www.damnmagazine.be/all.php?nr=11
GLOBAL ISSUES: WARNING: ART / CREATIVE CLIMATE CHANGEArtists have had an enduring relationship with landscapes and never been at odds with outspoken views. This isa selection of some of the projects that are creatively responding to global warming and climate change.
Moving Towards a Balanced Earth: Kick the (Carbon) Habit
For UN World Environment Day 2007, the Natural World Museum in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme produced an exhibition that addresses the theme of Climate Change from a global perspective - the melting and thawing of ice, snow and permafrost are environment-altering changes taking place around the world- from the Andes to the Himalayas to the melting ice caps of the Poles. "Change" the transition that occurs from same to different, the moment of transformation, a change of position or action. Change used in reference to our environment can describe the transformation of material substance -- from ice to water, liquid to gas - the changing conditions of our rivers, our rapidly melting glaciers,, and the overall changes in the earth's climate. Change requires organisms and organizations alike to adapt to new environmental conditions. Metaphorically, change can also refer to the transformation of society's mindset to act in a positive way individually and collectively to work toward a more sustainable future.
