BP is definitely splashing around the cultural sponsorship – there has been press coverage of the £10 million to cultural majors

in London, and now they are also sponsoring the Cultural Olympiad.

Art Not Oil want artworks for an online exhibition.  Send them before the end of February.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

Why are we so fascinated by the Arctic? Which impact has the climate change for the Arctic? Which problems are Inuit communities confronted with? Among others, these questions will be discussed in-between the screenings.

A special preview screening of the BBC Frozen Planet series programme 7 – On Thin Ice as well as  rare footage of early Arctic expeditions from the BFI National Archive will be shown and film experts, scientists and artists will be there to answer questions and discuss with the audience.

The event is organised in association with the BFI National Archive, Royal Anthropological Institute and Canadian High Commission.
In order to view the full prgramme see http://www.nmm.ac.uk/visit/events/high-arctic-film-weekend

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

- Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
- Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
- Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
- Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

June 18 Bloomberg — BP Plc, which has shed 45 percent of its market value after causing the U.S.’s worst-ever oil spill, said it will keep sponsoring the British Museum, the Royal Opera House, Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery in London.

“These are longstanding partnerships that we have with major cultural institutions in the U.K.,” BP spokesman David Nicholas said in a telephone interview yesterday. “They’re completely unchanged, as far as I’m concerned.”

BP Keeps Arts Sponsorship as Pressure Grows for Spill Damages – Bloomberg.com.

From May 3rd to May 10th, submissions are open for the 2010 Earth Awards—an opportunity for innovative designers to win between $10,000 and $50,000. Awards will be handed out at a ceremony in London on September 16th, 2010.

Submissions will be judged by an illustrious panel that includes Yves Behar, Richard Branson, David DeRothschild, Bill McKibben, and TreeHugger Founder Graham Hill.

Designs must fit into one of six categories—Built Environment, Fashion, Products, Systems, Future and Social Justice—and will be judged on achievability,

scalability, measurablility, usefulness, originality, ecological value.

For more information, visit theearthawards.org

The Earth Awards Launches a Global Search for Sustainable Innovations : TreeHugger.

The 2010 Art For Oil Diary is available now, price £5, full of illustrations like Squint Opera’s depiction of a man diving into the flooded ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral in a London flooded by rising waters. It’s a good snapshot of art as agitprop, containing works by Peter Kennard & Cat Picton Phillipps, Beehive Collective, Pedro Inoue and the Ultimate Holding Company.

If you want to argue that agit-prop strenghtens the resolve of the converted and increases the distance between them and those whose minds really do need to change then this is a casebook study, but hey, as a mass of work it does have real energy. The works that don’t beat you over the head with visions of a dystopian future often work better, like UHC’s trees breathe, ads suck taken from their Spring Shrouds series, originally commissioned by agit-comedian Mark Thomas, in which the Manchester collective covered 100 ad shells with plain white shrouds.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Feeding the 5000, London December 16 2009 from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.

This was a really, really well organised event; a great example of how actions change minds.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoKHyfRMq88

Go to Arcola Energy

There’s a lot of discussion about the role of dystopian art in creating new stories about climate and the environment. I have to say, if I was a kid, Mark Coreth’s sculpture of a melting polar bear would scare the bejayzus out of me.

Ice Bear is in London’s Trafalgar Square from today.

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Ghost Forest – London from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.

It’s an amazing achievement, to unlock this space for this kind of exhibit. The crowds I saw were drawn to the sheer strangeness and hugeness of the shapes of the trees, which are supposed to link the ideas of deforestation and climate change. Angela Palmer has done something remarkable in persuading the Mayor’s office to let her use this space for this work. Its scale and ambition makes the current occupant of the Fourth Plinth look rather irrelevant.

But, being honest, I’m not sure it works that well, either as a polemic or as art; I’m not sure it left people convinced. Palmer had originally envisaged the stumps as standing straight up, which would have made it easier to understand them as the leavings of human greed, rather than the lumber they look like. I’m guessing that it simply wasn’t practical to display the stumps like that. And the huge text billboards seemed to be as much about Palmer’s struggle to realise the work, with Antony Gormley saying “the project can’t be done”, as they were about the issue of deforestation and simply added a level of  Fitzcaraldo-in-reverse hubris. (This is like dragging the rainforest to the opera-house rather than vice versa).

When artists create events like this why don’t they let the art speak for itself and instead work closely with an NGO who can make the polemic explicit on site, and far more effectively?

Anyway, please disagree with me.

www.ghostforest.org

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

It’s an amazing achievement, to unlock this space for this kind of exhibit. The crowds I saw were drawn to the sheer strangeness and hugeness of the shapes of the trees, which are supposed to link the ideas of deforestation and climate change. Angela Palmer has done something remarkable in persuading the Mayor’s office to let her use this space for this work. Its scale and ambition makes the current occupant of the Fourth Plinth look rather irrelevant.

But, being honest, I’m not sure it works that well, either as a polemic or as art; I’m not sure it left people convinced. Palmer had originally envisaged the stumps as standing straight up, which would have made it easier to understand them as the leavings of human greed, rather than the lumber they look like. I’m guessing that it simply wasn’t practical to display the stumps like that. And the huge text billboards seemed to be as much about Palmer’s struggle to realise the work, with Antony Gormley saying “the project can’t be done”, as they were about the issue of deforestation and simply added a level of  Fitzcaraldo-in-reverse hubris. (This is like dragging the rainforest to the opera-house rather than vice versa).

When artists create events like this why don’t they let the art speak for itself and instead work closely with an NGO who can make the polemic explicit on site, and far more effectively?

Anyway, please disagree with me.

www.ghostforest.org

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

On Monday at the Roundhouse in London six musicans performed a version of the score of Jem Finer’s Longplayer. What they played, on 234 Tibetan bowls, was just a fragment of the complete score. Jem Finer may be a musician better known for his three-minute punk-folk masterpieces as musical lynchpin in The Pogues but  Longplayer, is no three chord wonder. It is designed to play for a thousand years. You can hear a fragment at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London, where the complete score is gradually being played out, note by slow note, by computer.

In America, The Long Now Foundation measures time in millennia. It was founded, as they say, in 01966 by Stewart Brand and a group of friends who included Brian Eno; (it was Eno who gave the organisation its name). They have built a clock [above right] which struck solemnly twice as the new millenium dawned, and will strike next three times at the dawn of New Year’s Day 3000AD.

In 2005 the artist Betinna Furnee set a time lapse camera up on the East Anglian coast. In eight months she filmed the relentless disappearance of land for her artwork Lines of Defense. Only by condensing that event into just under six minutes, by altering our perspective of  time, does the scale of the the erosion become awesome enough to hold our attention.

The paradox of the modern age is that we have been given the power to see for miles and miles, yet most of the time we can only look as far as the end of our nose – or to some apocalyptic future that is beyond our control. For 80,000 human generations we struggled through the Pleistocene era, honing our ability to cope with our immediate needs – food, shelter and sex; in the 500 generations since then we have utterly transformed the planet -  first gradually, then over the last dozen or so at a breakneck speed which now puts our own relationship with earth in danger.

Perhaps not a surprise, then, that we are having trouble with the immensity of the paradigm shift we need to get our head around this new era. Maybe those of us who campaign around climate haven’t quite got that paradigm right ourselves yet, either.

I thought about this when I read Matthew Cain’s recent blog, Climate Change: I don’t care enough:

I don’t care enough about climate change. I’m not proud of that. I believe experts when they say that it is the biggest threat to the future of civilisation. I pity the plight of poor farmers in areas of the world vulnerable to changes in the climate (Maldives, Bangladesh spring to mind). And I would like to live a responsible lifestyle, contributing more to society than I take out. But that’s not enough to make me care about climate change.

It’s a very honest statement. We may worry about denial buffoons like the Tory MP Douglas Carswell who blogged earlier in the week that the idea of “man-made climate change” was merely the product of the “lunatic consensus” but in truth, they are just the clowns. The real problem is the middle ground… the vaguely sympathetic. The IPPR’s recent report reminds us that there are large numbers of people out there who, far from being energised by the noise we all make on days like today – Blog Action Day, instead feel resentful about being made to feel guilty about their lifestyles. The difference with Matthew Cain is he’s big enough to own up.

We accuse them of being selfish. We pile dung on their driveways. [Don't get me wrong, I'm all for piling dung on Jeremy Clarkson's driveway, but... ] But all too often our grandstanding produces lethargy, not action.

There doesn’t appear to be much that’s self-centered about Matthew Cain – apart from an over-keen interest in his own web stats, perhaps. He’s as interested in social causes and progressive change as the rest of us – more probably. He shares with the rest of us that altruism that we know is encoded in all of us.

So why isn’t he as engaged with climate change?

It’s time to start asking whether that’s our own fault. When I say “our” I mean, us, the true believers… those who think it’s the most pressing social issue of our time.

Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, has a new book out, Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Hulme’s career arc has been a fascinating one. He is the scientist responsible for founding the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. If you’re remotely interested in the science of climate, you’ll know what major players they have been. But recently his place in the unfolding story of climate research has made him more interested in the social response to science than the science itself. He has watched with fascination as the news about impending climate change has been translated into panic, anxiety and inaction. He realises he has seen us handing over our ability to think about the future to people like himself.

Much of the rhetoric here at the RSA has been about allowing individuals to take control of their lives, yet Hulme suggests the narrative of climate change has been about surrendering our mastery of the future to numbers, to politicians and to scientists. Yes, I support the campaign to stabalise atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at 350 parts per million, but what does that really mean? I barely understand the science of it, let alone what it means for the way we will live.

Yes, I want to see significant progress at Copenhagen, but most of the political solutions on the table require a stronger state to enforce carbon reductions. In the Politics of Climate Change Anthony Giddens argues that we must return to an old style command economy. Is this really the future we want? Much of the silent middle ground, left and right wing, sees climate as the excuse the state is using for taking back the power they lost in the second half of the 20th century. And who’s to say they haven’t got a point? If activists like Matthew Cain, who have spent their political lives trying to give people power over the machinery of the state, don’t feel engaged in climate, is that really such a big surprise?

We tend to think those who do not share our need to act to make the future safe are short-sighted. They don’t understand the “long now” those artists have all identified.

But maybe it’s time for climate change campaigners to start thinking more seriously about the future themselves. Shouldn’t what we want our society to be like in the future be a lot more connected to what we want it to be like right now?

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Take a look at the site and find an action near you.

Meanwhile, we’ve created a site called Arts for COP15 which will be going live in the next few days. This site is still being worked on, and please note, the url you’re redirected to isn’t the one the site will have when it officially goes live, but you can still join the site, log in and upload information about any COP15 arts related events.

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RSA Arts & Ecology is teaming up with the RSA’s Connected Communities project to create a new garden based scheme in New Cross. More of that soon.

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The London Sustainable Development Commission (LSDC) launched London Leaders in October 2007 to inspire and catalyse positive change, demonstrate sustainability in action, and increase London’s capacity for sustainable development leadership.

By bringing together sustainability leaders from all walks of life across London, SDC’s intention is to demonstrate the power of crosssector partnership and innovation for tackling London’s sustainability challenges and delivering improvements in quality of life. The goal is to motivate and empower individuals, organisations and communities to take responsibility and make the changes necessary to realise the vision of making London a global benchmark for sustainable development.

To find out more have a look at:

http://www.londonsdc.org/londonleaders/

Future Arcola was part of Ben’s London Leader pledge

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Biomimicry is a new discipline that consciously emulates life’s genius.

It’s a design principle based on the genius of nature. The idea is not simply to utilise the natural world, but to learn from the exceptional aspects of its design.

It is the most radical approach to problem solving I have heard of.

And when architect Michael Pawlyn (FRSA) told me about it, I thought: ‘ Hmmm, it’d be good to learn how that works – not just ‘hear about it’ as something interesting – it would be great to understand the principles of it, then find ways to apply it.’ Then I drifted off into a daydream about the possibility of applying biomimicry in the arts….

So Michael has been developing games that can teach the principles of how biomimicry works – and we g0t to try them out with him and ecologist Dusty Gedge (FRSA).

The event is part of the Barbican exhibition Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009.

The genius behind the genius of biomimicry is Janine Benyus – she is an Ada Lovelace for the 21st century. If you want to see a short introduction to Benyus’s work, her latest TED talk is now online.

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This is A.T.R.E.E.M (Automated Tree-Rental for Emission Encaging Machine) by Nitipak Samsen, a student at the Design Interactions course at the RCA in London. Samsen’s artwork is a satire on the notion of carbon credits: by measuring the girth of the tree, this meter purports to measure carbon the tree is capturing over its lifetime. “Carbon credit brings the ‘convenience’ back to the ‘inconvenient truth’,” announces Samsen, enthusiastically on his website.

See also Francesca Galeazzi’s artwork about justifying carbon offsetting.

Thanks to Groundswellblog.

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Feral Trade Cafe, London from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
A Flip camera video.

It’s interesting to see how the best media art moved on from the idea of creating networks in the virtual world, to seeing how those networks could affect the real world. Early net communities were full of idealism; how far does that ability to change the way we interact with each other spill over into the physical?

Earlier this year I talked to Amy Francheschini about the way ideas from her art practice asFuturefarmers informed the creation of Victory Gardens 2008+ in San Francisco. On Friday I dropped into North London’s HTTP Gallery, where media artists/gallerists Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett have created the Feral Trade Cafe implemeting artist Kate Rich’s Feral Tradenetwork in their gallery space.

The cafe is sourced by real personal trade networks – artists bringing back Turkish Delight from Montenegro or discovering a source of honey in Rotherhithe. By using virtual space to record each trade route, every item you consume in the cafe comes with a  narrative. the bland, impersonal act of trade can suddenly come alive with stories, showing us how the items we buy under the normal rules of trade disconnect us from the world in which we live.

Read Ruth Catlow discussing Catlow and Garrett’s we won’t fly for art at the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre.

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It was a comment that injected an …

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The Green Sundays programme will feature music, games, films, speakers and readings based loosely on an issue under the climate change umbrella, such as food, travel, energy or politics.

Green Sundays are intended to demonstrate how a creative industry, such as theatre, can provide a space to discuss the environment and how people can work together to tackle climate change.

The March launch theme was food – growing, making, enjoying and sustaining food. The day included meals, short films and a screening of ‘Our Daily Bread’, a reading from The Hungry Cyclist: Pedalling the Americas in Search of the Perfect Meal by the author Tom Kevill-Davies, an open mic session and presentation of the Food Chain Campaign by Friends of the Earth,

Arcola’s partner for Green Sundays is Be The Change.

www.arcolatheatre.com 
www.arcolaenergy.com 

a: 27 Arcola St 
London, E8 2DJ 
Nearest station- Dalston Kingsland

Go to the Ashden Directory

Join us at the launch of Arcola’s Green Sundays, more details at www.arcolaenergy.com. 
Download full Winter/Spring 2008 Season Brochure Now:
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/SHARE/Arcola_Winter_2009.pdf

The Water’s Edge     3-28 Feb by Theresa Rebeck A modern Greek tragedy that explodes the American family from within.
With Madeleine Potter, Robert Cavanah, Mark Field, Cressida Trew and Kate Sissons.

Book Tickets Now: www.arcolatheatre.com or 020 7503 1646

South Bank Show Awards ‘Diversity Award’ Nominee 2008
WhatsOnStage.com Best Off-West End ‘Enemy of the People’ Nominee 2008 CBI Growing Business Awards ‘Green Award’ Winner 2008
Peter Brook Empty Space Awards ‘Established Studio’ Nominee 2008
Charity Awards Highly Commended 2008 
Arcola Theatre is a Regularly Funded Organisation of Arts Council England.

Peter Brook Empty Space Awards ‘Established Studio’ Nominee 2008
Charity Awards Highly Commended 2008 
Arcola Theatre is a Regularly Funded Organisation of Arts Council England.