Climate Change + Art
ARTISTS & WORKS
Maria Thereza Alves’ – who co-founded Brazil’s Partido Verde (Green Party) in 1987 particular interest lies in the phenomenon of so-called ‘ballast flora’, a marginal area of botanical study that she herself has effectively pursued under the auspices of an artistic enterprise and which encroaches on mercantile histories and colonialism, global commodities trading and displacement. Today modern cargo ships take on water as ballast to stabilize an unloaded vessel, but in previous eras of maritime trade sailing ships would use earth, stones or sand as ballast if their load of colonial goods was too light – material that could easily be discarded to free up the ship to pick up profitable slaves. For her ‘Seeds of Change’ projects in Marseille, Liverpool, Exeter, Bristol, Dunkirk and other sites – always where no previous studies of ballast flora have been undertaken – Alves sought the location of ballast spoil sites through old maps, port records and rumour, taken earth samples and endeavoured to germinate whatever archaic seeds have been lying dormant in the substrate.
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Iain Baxter&, Animal Preserve #8
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The Canary Project
Keywords: photography, landscape + climate change
http://www.canary-project.org/mission.php
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.
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Brian Collier: Pika Alarm
From Art in America article: Suzaan Boettger “Global Warnings”
The Pika Alarm consists of a pole with a motion sensor and speaker, accompanied by a box of illustrated informational postcards; several units were placed around the park bordering Boulder Creek. A visitor’s approach caused the pika’s squeak to be broadcast. The postcards ask, “Why is the pika worried about climate change?” The answer is that its extreme sensitivity to temperature fluctuations and shifting patterns of vegetation make it vulnerable and place it potentially in danger of extinction. Only the most jaded esthete could resist being educated by the adorable pika, seen sunbathing on a rock but wearing a
slightly anxious expression.
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Mark Dion: Neukom Vivarium
Keywords: installation, nature + culture, science + culture, multimedia
http://www.pbs.org/art21/multimedia/index.html#dion
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/dion/index.html
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/dion/clip1.html
Mark Dion in an interview on Art 21 about the project:
I think that one of the important things about this work is that it’s really not an intensely positive, back-to-nature kind of experience. In some ways, this project is an abomination. We’re taking a tree that is an ecosystem—a dead tree, but a living system—and we are re-contextualizing it and taking it to another site. We’re putting it in a sort of Sleeping Beauty coffin, a greenhouse we’re building around it. And we’re pumping it up with a life support system—an incredibly complex system of air, humidity, water, and soil enhancement—to keep it going. All those things are substituting what nature does—emphasizing how, once that’s gone, it’s incredibly difficult, expensive, and technological to approximate that system—to take this tree and to build the next generation of forests on it. So this piece is in some way perverse. It shows that, despite all of our technology and money, when we destroy a natural system it’s virtually impossible to get it back. In a sense we’re building a failure.
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Free Soil
http://www.free-soil.org/index.php?post_id=602&cat_id_rel=21&feat=1
Description of ten mostly interesting art projects that deal with climate change and links to the projects.
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Helen and Newton Harrison
Keywords: ecoart, activism, installation, environmental art
http://www.theharrisonstudio.net/copy_greenhouse_britain.html
http://www.greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-81.html
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Christina Hemauer’s and Roman Keller’s current project, A Moral Equivalent of War: A Curiosity, a Museum Piece and an Example of a Road not Taken (2006–7), also concerns a manifestation of power and, like the work of Greenfort or Ukeles, offers itself not as a didactic polemic but as a reordering of energies, resonance and Conceptual nutrients. The project revolves around the artists’ search for the solar panels that former US President Jimmy Carter had mounted on the roof of the West Wing of the White House.
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Natalie Jeremijenko: Feral Dogs, Bit Cab, One Tree
Keywords: activist, electronic & time-base, urban space, science + art, intervention, social conditions
http://www.bureauit.org/bitindex.html
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.
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Beverly Naidus, Brought to You by ‘Men who Plan beyond Tomorrow’
Keywords: culture jamming, interactive site-specific audio installations, books
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Andrea Polli, “N”
Keywords: science + art, sound art, data sonification, installation
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Sabrina Raaf
Keywords: electronic & time-based, photography, installation, comparative data visualization
http://www.raaf.org/projects.php?pcat=2&proj=4
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.
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Phillipe Rahm, Climate Uchornia,
Keywords: architecture, installation, light, conceptual
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/09/philippe-rahm-1967-pully-ch.php
Rahm is an architect of the invisible and physiological aspects of space.
Additionally, the website we make money not art and the Manifesta Festival are worth checking out.
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Joel Sternfeld (2008): When it Changed
(p.109 in Weather Report)
Keywords: photography
Project Description:
Of the impetus to create the photographs in When It Changed, Joel Sternfeld writes, “Future generations are going to wonder about us, the inhabitants of the Earth when the climate began to change.” These 55 portraits document attendees at the eleventh United Nations conference on climate change held in Montreal in 2005, each accompanied by the subject’s statements about the evidence of shifts in his or her home country’s weather and wildlife. A detailed chronology of what has been termed “humanity’s greatest challenge” offers an efficient means to grasp the scientific and governmental response to global warming, as well as its projected consequences. The testimony here is dark, but Sternfeld’s title When It Changed may also refer to a more hopeful scenario: At the Montreal conference, the United States worked, as it had for years, to undermine discussions about the Kyoto Protocol. Leading newspapers predicted the end of the international effort to mitigate climate change. But one night, after the U.S. delegation had walked out of a late meeting, the nations of the world joined together without them and agreed to take a step forward. In his testimony, Mohammad Reazuddin, the delegate from Bangladesh, says, “My voice may be small because I am from a small country. But those who will be washed away, their voices must be heard.”
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Ruth Wallen, Preserving Paradise [a project about suburban expansion in San Diego, CA]
Keywords: installation, multimedia, photography
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The Yes Men: Exxon’s Climate-Victim Candles, SurvivaBall
Keywords: activism, performance, media intervention, hoax
http://theyesmen.org/
http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/iceage
Petitioning Cleveland for global warming as a solution, not a problem.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrews, Max (June-August 2007). “The Whole Truth” in Frieze Magazine, Issue 118,
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_whole_truth/
Flannery, Tim (2006). How Man is Changing the Climate and What it Means for Life on Earth. Atlantic Monthly Press.
Description:
The arguments, evidence, and conclusions should surprise few readers in Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe and Flannery’s The Weather Makers. Given existing scientific knowledge, neither author (and no critic) doubts that global warming is real, with terrible consequences looming ahead.<P>The difference between the books largely comes down to tone and style. Kolbert, a reporter for the New Yorker, provides an excellent primer on climate change. Praised for her elegance and accessibility, she offers a loose travelogue with “the clearest view yet of the biggest catastrophe we have ever faced” (Los Angeles Times). She takes her science seriously—from sulfate droplets to recarbonization—and rarely lets her belief in impending catastrophe cloud her objectivity. Flannery’s book may appeal more to activists. However, the Chicago Sun-Times thought that his passionate clarion call to action undermined sound arguments; others criticized scattered information and incomplete discussion on ways individuals can counteract climate change. Still, like Kolbert, Flannery elucidates complex concepts in climatology, paleontology, and economics. In the end, both books ask a crucial question: “Will we be lauded by future generations for heeding the advice of our best scientific minds, or remembered hereafter as counterexamples—as paragons of hubris, of a colossal failure of the imagination?” (Los Angeles Times).<BR>Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Kolbert, Elizabeth (2006). Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change. Bloomsbury
From Scientific American:
In the 1990s the inhabitants of Shishmaref, an Inupiat village on the Alaskan island of Sarichef, noticed that sea ice was forming later and melting earlier. The change meant that they could not safely hunt seal as they had traditionally and that a protective skirt of ice no longer buffered the small town from destructive storm waves. Shishmaref was being undone by a warming world. To survive, the villagers recently decided to move to the mainland. Soon Shishmaref on Sarichef will be gone. Pithy and powerful, the opening of Elizabeth Kolbert’s book about global warming, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, echoes that of another book that also originated as a series of articles in the New Yorker magazine. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring starts in much the same way, with a fable about a town that lived in harmony with its surroundings and that fell silent. The question is, Can Field Notes galvanize a national movement to curb global warming in the same way Silent Spring sparked one to curb the use of pesticides? Silent Spring’s success as a transformative force came about because of Carson’s scientific authority, the way she shaped her argument, the immediate nature of the threat, and the many movements afoot in American society in 1962. Carson was a scientist, and she had credibility when she described how synthetic chemicals, DDT in particular, affect living things. That authority convinced her readers and withstood critics and attacks by the chemical industry. Carson’s writing was direct and her rhetoric carefully chosen, as her biographer Linda Lear and other scholars have noted. Carson appreciated Americans’ fears about nuclear fallout: something invisible was contaminating their food. She made clear DDT’s similar qualities: “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.” Concerned that her audience might be solely women–mothers worried about the health of their children–she also spoke directly to hunters, outdoorsmen. She deliberately sought, and got, the widest possible reach. Although Carson was describing something people could not see in their food, she was writing about something they could viscerally understand: they saw pesticides being sprayed. They could connect their health with their surroundings, and that kind of connection can lead to powerful activism. It did after Silent Spring. It did in the late 1970s in Woburn, Mass., as Jonathan Harr describes in A Civil Action, the story of families whose children were dying of leukemia. It did in 1978 at Love Canal in New York State. It continues to do so in communities around the world. If we can see the problem–in our family, in our neighborhood, in the natural world we are intimate with–it is not necessarily easier to tackle, but it becomes more immediate, more mobilizing. Just as important as Carson’s credentials, her literary brilliance and the tangibility of her topic was the time at which she was writing. In the 1960s Americans were energetically exercising their freedom of transformation. As Adam Rome, an environmental historian at Pennsylvania State University, has written, the environmental movement that blossomed after Silent Spring owed a great deal to the Democratic agenda set in the mid-1950s, to the growing activism of middle-class women, and to a counterculture raised in fear of the bomb and the planet’s end. The power of Silent Spring lay in what people and politicians did with it. Field Notes from a Catastrophe is not arriving on a similar scene. There is not much widespread U.S. protest about anything–not about the war with Iraq, not about the administration’s links to oil and other industry, not about the diminishing of our civil rights. It is strangely quiet here. Americans are also burned out on environmental catastrophism. Many people have noted that with each new catastrophe that has not appeared–the extinction of nearly everything by the end of last year and food shortages, to mention two examples–doomsayers have lost more of their clout and their audience. The problems grow, but apathy has set in. Kolbert is also writing about something most of us cannot see clearly. Despite reports of melting glaciers, changing ecology, shorter winters and other critical indicators, global warming remains hard to grasp. We can see breast cancer cases on Long Island. We can see high asthma rates in inner cities. And we can see nongovernmental organizations struggling on those fronts. We are not good at seeing big, wide and far away; our sense of scale has not evolved in tandem with the scale of our lives. And yet. After Katrina, newspapers around the country explored the question of whether there was a link between the ferocity of the hurricane and global warming. (Answer: No one hurricane’s force can be attributed to global warming, but trends of increasing intensity might, in time.) Maybe climate change is becoming more personal to more Americans–those in the lower 48. Kolbert’s book contributes more important images for us to personalize. Fairbanks, Alaska, is losing its foundation; as the permafrost melts, huge holes are opening in the earth, under houses, in front yards. Twenty-two English butterfly species have shifted their ranges to the cooler north. The Dutch are busy developing amphibious houses. Burlington, Vt., has tried to reduce energy consumption and has been only modestly successful; without national political will, any one plan hits a wall. Field Notes has scientific authority as well. Kolbert is not a scientist, but she reports regularly on science, and she may well have talked to every researcher on the planet studying global warming. There are names and characters in Field Notes that even a climate-change obsessive may not have seen in other press articles or books. It can get dizzying at times. Yet the enduring impression is of deep, sober, rooted authority–the same impression Silent Spring conveys. The book is a review of the scientific evidence and of the failure of the politicians we chose. The details are terrifying, and Kolbert’s point of view is very clear, but there is no rhetoric of rant here. She is most directly editorial in the last sentence of the book, and by that point, she has built the case. Other books on global warming have not had much widespread social or political effect. There have been many–and even Field Notes arrives at the same time as The Winds of Change, by Eugene Linden (Simon & Schuster), and The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly Press). In 1989 the much celebrated The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben, for example, catalyzed debate–is nature really ending?–but not a national movement. Perhaps Field Notes can’t make a movement where there’s little concentrated activist juice. But something about this book feels as though it might. For a friend of mine, Kolbert’s New Yorker series was an awakening–the first time, she said, she really understood what was happening and why we must act. Let’s hope this powerful, clear and important book is not just lightly compared to Silent Spring. Let’s hope it is this era’s galvanizing text.
Marguerite Holloway, a contributing editor at Scientific American, teaches journalism at Columbia University. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Gore, Al (2006). An Inconvenient Truth.
Lippard, Lucy (curator) (2007). Weather Report: Art and Climate Change, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Arts
Mau, Bruce (2004). Massive Change. Phaidon Press.
Utopianism is not dead; it has migrated from politics to materialism. This book, says Canadian industrial designer Mau (who founded Toronto City College’s Institute Without Borders), is “not about the world of design; it’s about the design of the world.” In a form that is part Apple ad, part Powerpoint presentation and part architectural pastiche à la Rem Koolhaus, Mau’s volume brings together designs and theories (mostly Western) and photographers (global) that “tap into global commons,” “distribute capacity” and “embrace paradox”: superstrong fibers modeled on gecko hairs; “sustainable business” that embraces corporate accountability; the “redesigning” of Third World property law; genetic engineering, macro- and microimaging technologies; virtual reality technology that allows collaboration over large distances; a “cyberneticized” military that paradoxically has more nonviolent options. All of these ideas (some of which are now reality) are here in words and pictures, often further explained through q&a’s with leading researchers. The result reads, intentionally, like a friendly corporate prospectus or catalogue, except that the “product” on offer is a radically hopeful vision of the future. With 250 color and 50 b&w photos in a fractally chaotic layout, and a text that speaks in affirmative sound bites, this book offers a vision of the world in a package designed to get readers excited about stoves that burn peanut shells, superlight gels that can protect flowers from flame, and plants and microbes that turn open sewers into water supplies. It succeeds beautifully.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Naess, Arne (1973). “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements” in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, ed. George Sessions, Boston: Shambhala, 1995: 151-155.
Rivken, Andrew
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/andrew_c_revkin/index.html?s=newest&
Andrew Revkin has spent nearly a quarter century covering subjects ranging from Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami to the assault on the Amazon, from the troubled relationship of science and politics to climate change at the North Pole. He has been reporting on the environment for The New York Times since 1995, a job that has taken him to the Arctic three times in three years. In 2003, he became the first Times reporter to file stories and photos from the sea ice around the Pole. He spearheaded a three-part Times series and one-hour documentary in 2005 on the transforming Arctic.
Wohlforth, Charles (2004). The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change. New York: North Point Press (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux).
From Publishers Weekly
“I love the winter. It’s when I fly through the birch forest like a hawk.” So begins Alaska-based journalist Wohlforth’s beautifully written study of global warming’s impact on Arctic weather patterns. He does a magnificent job of writing about two disparate cultures—the Inupiaq Eskimos who live and hunt on the coast of the Arctic Ocean and Western scientists attempting to comprehend climate change—and demonstrating just how much they have in common. His goal is “to try to understand different ways of seeing the natural world,” and he successfully moves between both groups as they acknowledge that significant change has already begun: “Average winter temperatures in Interior Alaska had risen 7 degrees F since the 1950s…. Alaska glaciers were shrinking, permanently frozen ground was melting, spring was earlier, and Arctic sea ice was thinner and less extensive than ever before measured. Winter was going to hell.” The changes mean a lifestyle shift for the Inupiat, who depend for their livelihood on traditional methods of whaling that are being severely affected by the climate changes. Moving with ease from whaling boats to seminar rooms, Wohlforth brings excitement to the quest for information about global warming. Part adventure story, part science writing accessible to the general reader, this thoroughly engaging volume provides rich insight into ways of dealing with climate change. The issues Wohlforth raise go well beyond the Inupiaq Eskimos, he notes, and are certain to affect all of us in the coming years. Disregard the book’s unfortunate title—it’s worth reading.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
INTERESTING? | RESOURCES | PLACES
Q: What is Mess Hall?
A: Mess Hall is an experimental cultural center. It is a place where visual art, radical politics, creative urban planning, applied ecological design and other things intersect and inform each other. We host exhibitions, discussions, film screenings, brunchlucks (brunch + potluck), workshops, concerts, campaigns, meetings (both closed and open) and more.
Mess Hall is located in Chicago:
6932 North Glenwood Avenue
Chicago, IL 60626
‘Morse’ stop on the Redline
Email: info[at]messhall[dot]org
Tel: 773-465-4033
Smart Museum of Art University of Chicago
Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art
http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/displacement/
Description of Current Exhibition:
The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangzi River in China is a massive project entwined in controversy. When finally completed, it will stand as the world’s largest generator of hydro-electric power, with a yearly output equal to that of fifty million tons of coal or fifteen nuclear power plants. However, the dam’s 375-mile reservoir has already displaced over one million people and submerged over one thousand towns and villages.
“This exhibition presents work that four leading contemporary Chinese artists—Chen Qiulin, Yun-Fei Ji, Liu Xiaodong, and Zhuang Hui—have created in response to the Three Gorges Dam. Despite differences in backgrounds and artistic practices, these artists have engaged with the theme of displacement, responding to the movement of people, the demolition of old towns and construction of new cities, and the astonishing changes the project is bringing to the local landscape. The powerful works on view represent four major branches of contemporary Chinese art: ink painting, realist oil painting, conceptual photography, and performance and new media art. Moving beyond any single medium or trend, Displacement offers nuanced, thought-provoking perspectives on a project of great social, environmental, and global concern.”
The Green Museum
A repository of information on environmental art over several decades.
www.thegreenmuseum.org
The Pew Center on Climate Change
http://www.pewclimate.org/
The Environment Report
http://www.environmentreport.org/about/
“The Environment Report is a free news service committed to revealing the relationship between the natural world and the everyday lives of people. This is accomplished by thoughtful and provocative explorations of the environment in a way that reaches the widest possible audience.
The Environment Report was established to meet the need for more and better coverage of the environment for public radio stations. In 1993, a diverse group of public radio outlets began planning for an environmental news service to help redefine environmental reporting in the Great Lakes region. National Public Radio�s Living on Earth, Michigan Public Radio, and the Superior Radio Network partnered together to develop the structure for this weekly news service. The goal was to establish a news feed of high-quality environmental features that could be inserted into the local news programming of public radio stations. In September of 1995, The Environment Report’s predecessor, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium (GLRC), produced its first environmental news feed for public radio stations. At that time the news service was based at the studios of Michigan Public Radio in East Lansing, MI and was carried by 23 stations.”
The World Climate Report
A skeptical view of the effects of climate change. As they say on their website:
Acclaimed by those on both sides of the global warming debate, World Climate Report has become the definitive and unimpeachable source for what Nature now calls the “mainstream skeptic” point of view, which is that climate change is a largely overblown issue and that the best expectation is modest change over the next 100 years. WCR is often cited by prominent scientists and lawmakers and is a surprisingly enjoyable read—which may account for its broad appeal.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/about-us/