Narrative shift: telling stories about climate

Last weekend, Robert Butler of the Ashden Directory, in associaton with Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace and writer Caspar Henderson invited 15 academics, writers and activists to explore the issue of how we create narratives around climate change. RSA Arts & Ecology blogger Caleb Klaces returned enthused by the debate and …
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What if women were in charge of cutting carbon?

Caleb Klaces writes: In December this year representatives from 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen for the 15th UN Conference of the Parties (COP15) to discuss international targets for the reduction of CO2 emissions. The roughly 1,500 delegates will mostly be men, as they always have been. During the period …
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End Games | review: The End of the Line

Caleb Klaces writes: The Age of Stupid uses a dramatic, fictional character to frame a series of apparently disparate contemporary documentaries. Pete Postlethwaite’s man on a chopper looking back from the future, as well as pithy animated sequences explaining the scientific, economic and sociological facts and figures, connects the people …
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Icebergs vs. art: the photographs of Frank Hurley

Caleb Klaces writes:
Frank Hurley, official photographer of Shackleton’s 1914-16 Antarctic expedition, went to great lengths to get the photographs he wanted. After the rescue and return home of the expedition members, Hurley went back to try and follow the route Shackleton and two other men had taken on foot across South Georgia to get help [...]

Interview with activist/video maker Leo Murray

I’ve just posted an interview that Caleb Klaces did with Leo Murray for on the main RSA Arts & Ecology website. Murray did the clever little viral video Wake Up Freak Out – Then Get a Grip which has been doing the rounds on the net.
Art has the ability to move people in a way [...]

Wake up freak out: movie that makes sense of the science

Caleb Klaces writes: The London-based philosophy fanzine Shoppinghour has been putting on monthly Evenings of Delight at The Candid Arts space in Angel, London, since the start of the year. April’s theme was Environmental Surrealism, explained in part by Mika Ebbesen in the event’s introduction with the good question, “what can we look to when [...]

When artists fail to read the small print

Caleb Klaces makes a point in his review of Marcel Theroux’s new novel, Far North, on the main RSA Arts & Ecology website: the moment when Theroux starts to try and create a plausible scientific scenario for the catastrophic future in which his novel is set is the point where you start going, “Umm. Really?”
It [...]

G20 protests: does the lack of iconography = a lack of vision?

Guest blogger Caleb Klaces writes: In Everything that rises: a book of convergences, Lawrence Weschler compares graphic imagery used in Communist-controlled Poland’s Solidarity movement with later social justice movements in the US. He argues that the image of an angry crowd facing directly forwards was instrumental in really bringing people together in both cases. In [...]