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Transformer Framework Panel #13 – BUILT TO LAST? truths & myths of sustainable cultural production on Vimeo

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Transformer Framework Panel #13 – BUILT TO LAST? truths & myths of sustainable cultural production from Transformer on Vimeo.

June 3, 2010, 6:30 – 8pm at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

**Please note: the duration of this panel was 2 hours, but video cuts out at 1 hour and 45 minutes. Apologies!**

Presented in tandem with Sustainability Lab & Cornfield, this panel will look back and look ahead at the ever-evolving Do-It-Yourself ethic and inherent aesthetics as it relates to cultural production. Timed with the 30th anniversary of Washington DC’s Dischord Records – an internationally recognized independent record label supporting punk rock music that has been artist run since its inception – this panel will examine the DIY organizing model that grew out of punk rock subculture and is tied to punk ideology and anti-consumerism. How is DIY being redefined as aspects of that culture shift from being an underground mantra to a cable TV station slogan and Urban Outfitters commodity? What can cultural producers learn from sustainable food producers? How can a volunteer-run operation be sustainable?

Panelists: Nancy Bannon, artist, DC & NYC; Bryce Dwyer, InCUBATE, Chicago; Ian MacKaye, co-founder of Dischord Records, DC; Eve Mosher, Seeding the City, NYC; Abigail Satinsky, InCUBATE, Chicago

Moderator: Jeff Hnilicka, cultural worker, Member of Hit Factorie and organizer of FEAST, Brooklyn

via Transformer Framework Panel #13 – BUILT TO LAST? truths & myths of sustainable cultural production on Vimeo.

Evergreen Brick Works is looking for the best short videos from across Canada!

Evergreen, a national charity, has transformed the former Don Valley Brick Works from a collection of deteriorating heritage buildings into an international showcase for urban sustainability and green design. Evergreen Brick Works is open year-round, and includes permanent and temporary art installations responding to the site’s geological and industrial heritage. A looped compilation of videos is part of the new media program that will introduce a wide range of environmental issues.

Independent filmmakers, animators and video artists are invited to submit works that deal with environmental issues such as climate change, water, food, transportation, waste, energy, sustainable development, etc.

deadline: June 15th, 2010

Artist fees will be paid for videos that are chosen to be included in the compilation.

We accept submissions via YOUTUBE, VIMEO or your own website.

Submit: Name/contact, your bio, brief synopsis, length of video, and link to your video to: kmcbride@evergreen.ca In the subject line please put: Evergreen Video Art Submission

via Contingent Ecologies » Blog Archive » call for submissions: eco-art video.

Ice Bear by Mark Coreth, for WWF, Copenhagen Dec 10

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.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

RETHINK Contemporary Art & Climate Change

Finally got to see some of RETHINK; it’s a wonderful exhibition. The Saraceno is gigantic, but the human biosphere, suspended high in the air, was closed for repair today so I wan’t able to go in it, which saved my vertigo.

Allora & Calzadilla’s A Man Screaming Is Not A Dancing Bear (2008) is stunning. Filmed in New Orleans, post-Katrina, it’s strange and elegaic. Repeating through the film are moments in which a barely-glimpsed man drums on some abandonded Venetian blinds. It lends an angry, jumpy soundtrack to the slow pans across water-stained walls.

Kerstin Eregenzinger’s Study for Longing/Seeing (2008) was unsettling in a very different way. Sheets of dark, lifeless rubber suddenly twitch unexpectedly, driven by strange spider-arms beneath them. It feels like a landscape that’s coming alive, animated by some strange pulse. “The work,” says the catalogue, “Is a reactive installation using data from seismographs and sensor-based structures to simulate a landscape and its changes. The installation responds partly to movements in the earth outside the exhibition building, and partly to audience movements in the exhibition room itself…”

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Ghost Forest by Angela Palmer, Trafalgar Square

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

Ghost Forest by Angela Palmer, Trafalgar Square

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

Charles Clover: “environmentalists are very boring”

How 2009 became the year of the campaign movie from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.

Charles Clover energised the campaign to alert the world to approaching fish stock collapse earlier this year with the film The End of the Line. It was a great example of how a single coordinated attack using the right media can produce a quantum leap in awareness. I spoke to him and  the Guardian’s Environment Editor John Vidal about how an imaginative, passionate and above all clever approach can galvanise action and force suppliers and politicians to rethink their strategy.

But he’s scathing about how the broader environment movement has failed to grip the public imagination. Responding to a recent IPPR survey that said the public were “bored” with climate change:

It’s because environmentalists are very boring, he says. They used not to have jobs when I got into this business. They had something very burning and interesting to say which quite a lot of people wanted them not to say, and people tried to shut them up. They were very exciting people to know, and they didn’t have a pension fund. Now they have pension funds and sit around in offices and try and think of something interesting to say, and not a lot of them achieve it.

Has the professionalisation of the climate movement creating a beast that feeds itself? Is that part of the reason the public finds climate activists, in the words of the report “smug”?

Charles Clover and John Vidal were in the house to discuss The End of  the Line at a screening organised by RSA Events who run the best public lectures series you’ll find in London – and you don’t have to work here to think that. Follow them on http://twitter.com/RSAEvents

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology