Yearly Archives: 2016

Opportunity for Students: Exhibition Works Needed

Creative Carbon Scotland, Open Calls

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

As part of the upcoming Glasgow Goes Green Festival, Jenny from R A D I A L, an artist and designer working with reclaimed materials, is co-ordinating an exhibition of the very best examples of reuse work from the creative student community.

We’re  looking for contributions of inventive, curious and interesting reuse work to showcase.

* It is also our intention to form a reuse collective based on a shared love of working with reclaimed materials and collective environmental values. This will be a space to share materials, skills, support and potentially: selling space.

If you are currently a student in Glasgow and have made something from reclaimed or salvaged materials then we’d love to hear from you. Jewellery, sculpture, models, furniture everything will be considered.

The exhibition is to be housed within the TV Studios at SWG3 on Thursday 11th February. We will be curating the best work for show.

Please send up to 3 images of your chosen work (.pdf .jpeg) along with a short discription text and material story to Jenny at j.fraser@gsa.ac.uk

Deadline for submissions is 5pm on Monday 1st February.

We look forward to recieving your submissions and potentially working together in the future.

The post Opportunity for Students: Exhibition Works Needed appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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Opportunity: Green Champions Training

Creative Carbon Scotland, Open Calls

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Resource Efficient Scotland are offering a free one day workshop at Edinburgh Zoo on the 24th of March (10:00-16:00) for influencers looking to gain the skills and knowledge needed to become the workplace’s Green Champion.

Get all the skills you need to develop a resource efficiency action plan for your organisation and identify the things you can start doing today to save money on energy, water, waste and raw materials.

Rising energy, water and raw material costs and increasing consumer pressure continue to challenge the way that businesses across Scotland manage their environmental performance.

Our online Green Champions training course is already helping organisations across Scotland prepare for this challenge by providing knowledge, tried-and-tested techniques, best practice examples, and free tools and templates.

This live event will pack the entire Green Champions Planning Modules into one day, and is delivered first hand by our team of business experts, guest speakers and one-to-one advisors.

Get the skills and knowledge other professionals have already learnt through the Green Champions online training course. Find out about available funding, understand the changing resource landscape and go beyond compliance to save money, grow profits and increase competitive advantage.

Book your place

Who should attend?

This workshop is designed for anyone in your organisation who influences or has direct responsibility for environmental performance, as well as members of your management team engaged in organisational improvement.

Particularly ideal for:

  • health, safety and environment managers;
  • environmental performance champions;
  • compliance managers;
  • facilities managers; and
  • office/general managers.

Agenda:

All of the Green Champions training course’s planning modules packed into one day…

09.30 – Registration and breakfast

10.00 – Welcome and introduction: the need to be resource efficient

10.20 – Getting started – identifying opportunities

11.00 – Break

11.15 – Collecting data on your energy, water and raw materials use

12.15 – Guest speaker – case study: the business benefits of improved resource efficiency

12.30 – Lunch

13.00 – Panda viewing / Pengun Parade / Explore Zoo

13.45 – Data analysis and action planning

14.30 – Break

14.45 – Gaining support from colleagues and senior management

15.45 – Next steps

16.00 – Close

Includes free parking, zoo tickets and panda viewing

Book your place

Resource Efficient Scotland

The post Opportunity: Green Champions Training appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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A Magical Cardboard for Forrest by French Artist Eva Jospin

MELD

This post comes from MELD

Sculptor Eva Jospin constantly reinvents the idea of what a forest is over and over again. She cuts, layers, arranges, glues and builds cardboard into different interpretations of The Woods. Her pieces range from smaller 2D pictures compiled from dense sticks, branches and flaky bits of wood, to life size 3D installations that you are invited into, and can move around within. For Jospin, cardboard is just the medium for a larger message; these trees express many things:

The forest – an incarnation of nature in the wild – is above all the setting in traditional storytelling of tests of courage, and can be a gloomy or initiatory place. The forest is also where one encounters oneself. This walk through the forest initiates the visit to ‘ Inside’, which is also an inner journey. (Interview with Eva Jospin Palais de Tokyo)

Jospin uses a material that is not only durable, robust, strong, and supportive, but also fragile, impermanent, raw and insubstantial. She plays on these two points of view – they mirror the actual qualities of trees, nature and our relationship to it. These poetic attachments to Josie’s Forest pieces isn’t lost on her critics either:

To look at a forest is an optical experience that challenges the typical laws of perspective in western representation. Facing visually the depth of a forest means to forget the horizon, it means to get lost. And is not the danger of getting lost the only risk tied up to that natural labyrinth that is a forest? (Interview Eva Jospi at Galerie Piece Unique)

The post, A Magical Cardboard for Forrest by French Artist Eva Jospin, appeared first on MELD.
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meld is an ongoing interactive global art platform and collaborative catalyst to commission, produce and present ground-breaking and evocative works of art embedded in the issues and consequences of climate change. meld invites exceptional artists and innovative thinkers dedicated to the moving image and committed to fostering awareness and education to join us in our campaign for social change. Through a collaborative dialogue, we hope to provoke new perceptions, broaden awareness and education and find creative solutions concerning climate change, its consequences and its solutions.

meld was formed by a devoted group of individuals guided by a passionate belief in the power of art to convey personal experience and cultivate social progress. meld is inspired by the idea that when art melds into the public realm, it has the power to reach people beyond the traditional limitations of class, age, race and education and encourage public action.

Go to MELD

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Street Artists and Muralists to Paint All 314 Threatened North American Birds

MELD

This post comes from MELD

The National Audubon Society estimates that there are more than 800 birds in North America, though it has only collected and analyzed data on just over 590 of these animals. Of these catalogued avian species, 314 birds are classified as threatened; much of this threat is attributable to human-caused climate change. These numbers are behind the National Audubon Society’s collaboration with gallerist Avi Gitler for the Audubon Mural Project, which encourages street artists and muralists to create works that feature the climate-threatened birds.

As Audubon Society Vice President of Content Mark Jannot tells GOOD, the mural project grew out of theAudubon Birds and Climate Change Report, published in 2014, which detailed how climate change is impacting North American birds. It has grown from a few dozen murals to hundreds, painted on security gates and building exteriors around Manhattan, with a vast array of street artists and muralists enlisted from New York City and beyond.

Jonnot and Gitler came to work together on the Audubon Mural Project when the two were introduced by Jonnot’s neighbor, artist Tom Sanford. Gitler told Sanford he had decided to ask artists to paint about 10 roll-down security gates in his Harlem neighborhood. He already knew that John James Audubon, the famed ornithologist and naturalist, had spent the last years of his life in this very same uptown area, so Sanford suggested Gitler talk to Jonnot about a possible collaboration with the National Audubon Society.

Sanford also suggested that Gitler ask street artists and muralists to paint only climate-threatened birds. But it was Jannot who upped the ante by hitting on the idea of painting all 314 threatened birds. Jannot admits the monumental task was undertaken with “gleeful abandon,” but that they were determined to find a way to run it as a cost-neutral enterprise.

Ultimately, there won’t be 314 murals, Jonnot explains. Instead, the team is committed to 254 murals that will include all 314 species of threatened birds. Currently, there are approximately 24 murals representing about 36 birds. As for the variety of street artists and muralists, Jonnot said they range between various locales and styles.

“Because we’ve been able to find recesses in sides of buildings where we can mount paintings that have been painted in studios, we’ve been able to work with studio artists who aren’t as comfortable painting in real-time on the street, as well as street artists and major wall-mural painters,” Jonnot explains. “It’s a pretty big range. We’ve had a lot of interest from artists all over the country when they heard about it. We tell them we can’t fly them in but to let us know when they’re coming through town.”

 

The post, Street Artists and Muralists to Paint All 314 Threatened North American Birds, appeared first on MELD.
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meld is an ongoing interactive global art platform and collaborative catalyst to commission, produce and present ground-breaking and evocative works of art embedded in the issues and consequences of climate change. meld invites exceptional artists and innovative thinkers dedicated to the moving image and committed to fostering awareness and education to join us in our campaign for social change. Through a collaborative dialogue, we hope to provoke new perceptions, broaden awareness and education and find creative solutions concerning climate change, its consequences and its solutions.

meld was formed by a devoted group of individuals guided by a passionate belief in the power of art to convey personal experience and cultivate social progress. meld is inspired by the idea that when art melds into the public realm, it has the power to reach people beyond the traditional limitations of class, age, race and education and encourage public action.

Go to MELD

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Fields of Green Launches EP at Celtic Connections

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Back in 2007, while on tour with cult singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan, sitting on her third aeroplane of the day in a holding pattern above an American city, Jo Mango had a revelation about the potential impact of her itinerant job on the world and on herself. That moment led to some serious decisions about her lifestyle and an ongoing fascination with exploring the unsustainability of the musical life.

The EP’s title is an extension of those thoughts into a research project for which Jo enlisted the help of leading Scottish singer-songwriters Rachel Sermanni, RM Hubbert, Louis Abbott (Admiral Fallow) and The Pictish Trail. The songs they have written together explore a gamut of emotions related to travel, the environment and music.

The title “Wrack Lines” refers to the name given to the waving line of detritus that is left on the beach when the tide goes out. It calls to mind images of travelling across the ocean, but also the unmistakable residue of waste that is left behind us when we do. It is also an image of the creation of music (which itself is made from waves).

There are songs that are an expression of the need to keep moving and to keep finding new audiences to gain the kind of catharsis that makes life worth living. Others explore the off-kilter rhythms of living on the road. There is the tension between the material and the ephemeral: loneliness and exhaustion of constant travelling versus the uplifting glories of musical performance; the concrete and objective nature of the resources that we use up in order to reach audiences versus the unmeasurable and immaterial aspects of the music that is given back in return.

Each songwriter was tracked as they travelled across the 2015 festival season. Maps of their movement were used as the basis for the artwork (created by illustrator and designer Helen Kellock).

It was in snatches of time between those miles that the EP was recorded, wherever the artists’ paths could cross. Between the five of them they travelled approximately 118,000 passenger miles and generated 19,314kg of CO2 emissions. It’s a carbon footprint for the songwriting quintet which will leave its mark, in song and in Wrack Lines.

Wrack Lines will be released on CD and on digital format through Olive Grove Records on 15 January 2016. Rachel Sermanni, Louis Abbott, RM Hubbert, The Pictish Trail and Jo Mango celebrate the launch of the new EP with a one-off performance at Platform in Glasgow on 21 January 2016 as part of Celtic Connections. Find out more and order tickets here.

All profits from the sale of this EP will go to the charity Creative Carbon Scotland in their work to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland.

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The EP forms part of a research project called Fields of Green: Addressing Climate Change Through Music Festival Communities. It aims to explore what audiences, organisers and musicians can do to encourage environmentally sustainable behaviour around music festivals. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Grant Number AH/M009270/1) and is a collaboration between researchers at the University of the West of Scotland, Edinburgh University, Lancaster University and the charity Creative Carbon Scotland.

www.creativecarbonscotland.com/project/fields-of-green/

For further media information, press photos and interview requests please contact

Lloyd Meredith on 07967037755 or lloyd@olivegroverecords.com

download

The post Fields of Green Launches EP at Celtic Connections appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

Future Scenarios – Applications surgery and networking event

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Join us for an evening exploring why scenarios are such a key element of climate change research and politics, and also why it is important to invite a wider range of perspectives on these themes.

In December 2015, University of Sheffield and the Open University launched Climate Change in Residence: Future Scenarios. This funded programme of work provides an opportunity for three artists to be ‘in residence’ for one year from June 2016 within key climate change networks and institutions. The project includes an award for each artist of £10,000. Through these residencies, artists will be able to research climate change, and spend time exploring and developing their own artistic practice. In this way we hope these artists will introduce a new cultural depth to public conversations around the future.

This evening event at ArtsAdmin will explore climate scenarios and be an opportunity to learn more about the University of Sheffield and the Open University’s programme to support three artists-in-residence to develop new work in response to climate change scenarios with lead researchers Renata Tyszczuk and Joe Smith and producer Hannah Bird. It will be an opportunity for applicants to develop their applications before the deadline on 15 February 2016.

This project is generously supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation, The Ashden Trust, The University of Sheffield and The Open University

WHEN
Wednesday, 27 January 2016 from 19:30 to 21:30 (GMT) Add to Calendar

WHERE
Artsadmin, Toynbee Studios – 28 Commercial Street City of London E1 6AB GB – View Map

Call for Papers: Ecologies of Socialism – German Studies Association 40th Annual Meeting San Diego, Sept. 2016

Open Calls

Jointly sponsored by the German Socialisms and Environmental Studies  and GSA Interdisciplinary Networks

In the past decade, the natural environment has come to occupy a central place in scholarship in multiple registers and in multiple disciplines. This has been especially true in the fields of American history and studies, as well as German history and studies. In fact, there has been a growing transatlantic connection between German and American studies through the bridge of environmental studies, with the newly inaugurated Rachel Carson Center in Munich acting as a key site of this exchange.

Recent important works have contributed specifically to our knowledge of the natural environment in the German Democratic Republic. Such works have sought to problematize the all-too-easy critique of state socialism as having degraded and polluted the natural environment as possibly its worst sin, and explored socialist nature in more nuanced grains and broader contexts. Recent works in the field of urban history have moved towards urban ecology, or ecologies, many inspired by Neil Smith, such as the work of Jens Lachmund, Matthew Gandy, Dorothee Brantz, and Bettina Stoetzer, combining an investigation of the city as a ecological space with both a critique of capitalism as well as a history of socialist Germany. Scholars such as Katharina Gerstenberger, Axel Goodbody and Sabine Wilke have also turned to East German fiction dealing with nature as refuge or site of catastrophe—epitomized by the contrasting pair of Christa Wolf’s Störfall and Sommerstück—to investigate the range of representational frameworks (feminist, regional, global, individualist, productivist, etc) for portraying the relationship of East Germans to nature.

At the same time, however, a new field of Eco-Marxism / Eco-socialism, or “Red-Green,” thought has been emerging, represented by the work of André Gorz, Murray Bookchin, Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster, Nancy Fraser, Ariel Salleh, Jason Moore, and others. Whereas before, Marx and socialism seemed inherently as in opposition to the environment, new trends since the end of the Cold War have focused on rethinking a critique of capitalism partially through its insatiable desire for and exploitation of resources. Even Marx himself has undergone a remarkable re-evaluation in this vein!

It is far from clear how to interpret this recent remarkable confluence—nature, capitalism, critical theory, socialism, Germany, the transatlantic context. In a way, these threads combine to form their own “ecology.” The German Socialisms and Environmental Studies GSA Interdisciplinary Networks therefore seek paper proposals that enter that ecology from any number of points, including:

  • histories of nature and the environment under German state socialism
  • views of nature in the German socialist imaginary, both before and after 1949
  • interactions between green and left-wing politics in Germany
  • new theoretical avenues of “red-green” thought, eco-feminism, or reinterpretations of Marx
  • “ecologies” as a concepts, including ecologies of humans, plants and socialisms
  • third world solidarity and notions of foreign ecologies during the GDR

Please submit a 250-word abstract and 3-page CV to Eli Rubin (eli.rubin@wmich.edu) or Scott Moranda (scott.moranda@cortland.edu) by January 25. We expect to create a sequence of 3 panels.

The GERMAN SOCIALISMS NETWORK is a vehicle for connecting the diversity of current scholarship on the GDR with a broader academic base that explores the impact and meanings of Socialism in all of its manifestations, from its beginnings in the 19th century to the present. Encouraging both speculative and empirical methodologies, the Network seeks to bring together scholars operating in all fields and time periods for a productive exchange that questions the world in which we live and the political machinations that created it.

The Environmental Studies Network, founded in 2012, is an interdisciplinary effort within the German Studies Association to promote eco-critical approaches to environmental issues through literary, historical, sociological, visual, and cultural perspectives. Scholars within the Environmental Studies Network are keenly interested in examining how these areas of study, which include political and philosophical questions drawn from deep ecology, eco-feminism, environmental justice, “new materialism,” and the Anthropocene, might inform our understanding of German culture and society. The German Studies Environmental Studies Network also welcomes debate and dialogue with the natural sciences and policy studies. Indeed, it is also our goal to show that environmental problems are always already cultural and scientific, ethical and technological.

Opportunities: Open Call – Twenty-Three Days at Sea: A Travelling Artist Residency

Open Calls

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Twenty-Three Days at Sea: A Travelling Artist Residency
Year Two 2016-17
DEADLINE: Monday, February 15, 2016

Access Gallery, in partnership with Burrard Arts Foundation, invites submissions for the second year of its Travelling Artist Residency Program, Twenty-Three Days at Sea. Twenty-Three Days at Sea grants selected emergent visual artists passage aboard cargo ships sailing from Vancouver, Canada to Shanghai. Crossing the Pacific Ocean takes approximately twenty-three days, during which time the artist will be considered “in residence” aboard the vessel.

There are many hundreds of residency programs worldwide. Twenty-Three Days at Sea follows the “aberrant” turn in artist residencies, in that it imposes specific conditions and constraints (the strictures of the port; the solitude of the freighter cabin; the expanse of the open sea) that will, in turn shape artists’ ideas and work. It offers the opportunity to integrate critical and creative practices into a new set of parameters, and the potential of challenging established routines, activities and assumptions. At its base, Twenty-Three Days at Sea asks artists to question what constitutes creative space, and to consider how time is experienced over the highly charged, yet largely invisible, spatial trajectory of a trans-Pacific shipping route. It offers a profoundly generative time and space—in the unconventional studio space of the cargo ship cabin—for focused research and the creation of provocative new ideas and work.

For the 2016-17 year, successful candidates will sail on separate freighters between the months of June and September, 2016.

The Objectives
The aim of this residency program is to generate a new work or body of work (which, depending upon the artists’ practices, may take place aboard the vessel or in the months following) in response to the sea voyage, which will then be exhibited before audiences at Access Gallery in the following months. For the extent of the residency voyage, artists will also be requested to keep a daily “log.” Subsequently published by Access, these logbooks will accumulate as an ongoing collection of bookworks, chronicling diverse responses to a shared experience of being at sea.

The Proposal
In keeping with our organizations’ mandates, proposals will be considered from emergent visual artists working in any and all media. Submissions will be adjudicated by committee and successful candidates will be notified in late March, 2016.

Applicants are encouraged to propose projects that consider issues resonant with sea travel and with the ubiquitous but, for most of us, largely invisible world of the global shipping industry. These may include, but are by no means limited to, matters of trans-Pacific connectivity, traffic and trade; maritime histories and culture; and, significantly, notions of time and space, since crossing a great expanse of water is experienced far differently on an ocean vessel than by more conventional air travel.

The Logistics

  • The Residency will cover the cost of travel aboard the freighter (single cabin and all meals), accommodations for four days in China, and return airfare back to Vancouver
  • Residency artists are expected to fund their own travel to and from Vancouver (the point of departure)
  • Residency artists must prove their own purchase of international travel insurance and to secure all necessary travel documents
  • Artists are free to travel at their own cost within Asia following disembarkation, provided details are arranged in advance for the purpose of booking return airfare from Shanghai
  • Residency artists are expected to arrive in Vancouver prepared to work independently on his/her work for the duration of the residency in whatever capacity that is possible or to use the voyage to gather research in order to produce the new work independently following the close of the residency

Conditions at Sea

  • Artists must understand that there is no internet connectivity aboard ship. Email is often reserved only for ship’s business
  • Residency artists must produce medical certificates proving good health. There are generally no doctors on board. The vessel has a well-stocked ship’s dispensary and a treatment room. The Captain and officers have the necessary skills to give first aid and are also able to provide further treatment
  • Since this is a working ship (with no elevators), there are unfortunately no facilities for individuals requiring wheelchairs, walking sticks or crutches, etc.
  • All meals are taken in the officer’s mess
  • Sea voyages can be unpredictable and the artist must prepare for and manage any unexpected obstacles resulting from his/her time at sea (ie. Seasickness). Access Gallery and Burrard Arts Foundation cannot be held responsible for delays in the production of work due to these obstacles. The artist assumes responsibility for all costs of the research, production and shipment of any work produced while at sea.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
In keeping with our organizations’ mandates, this residency invites emergent visual artists, or artists entering an experimental phase of their practice, to submit proposals. They accept work in all forms of media, time based, process, research based, exhibition focus, social practice etc.

Access will accept ELECTRONIC submissions in the following format ONLY:

  • one page cv
  • artist statement (maximum 250 words)
  • a residency proposal (maximum 250 words) accompanied by a maximum of 5 images (if applicable)
  • maximum 10 images (or hyperlinked videos) of relevant previous work
  • please format your proposal into a single pdf (under 20 mb)

SUBMIT to: submissions@accessgallery.ca

DEADLINE: Monday, February 15, 2016
Please title your email subject line “23 Days at Sea 2016”