Monthly Archives: October 2016

Building into Water

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

by Guest Blogger Lisa Reindorf

Hurricane Matthew blew into Florida the same night as my exhibit “Building into Water” opened at Galatea Gallery in Boston. The installation, consisting of aerial view paintings, is an interpretation of the coastal ecosystems of Florida.

The aftermath of the storm demonstrated the very issues that I was depicting in my work – the clashes between building and nature that are exacerbated by climate change. Climate change has resulted in floods, waves, and winds that inundate infrastructure and wash away beaches, land, and buildings.

The art that I find most intriguing involves artists confronting social, political, and economic issues. I’ve been an architect, artist, and teacher and I put a lot of thought into why we do things and what is the meaning of our work. My art has been concerned with architectural structures and systems, and their intervention in the natural world. Formally, a grid system is often overlaid with free flowing organic shapes.

Content-wise, I’ve begun focusing on climate change because it is vital to our planet’s survival. As an architect, I dealt with creating structures and considering their impact on the land. My practice has been to minimize negative effects, emphasizing energy conservation and utilizing the land and natural systems in a beneficial manner, such as siting to maximize daylight, reusing water, and minimizing disruption of ecosystems. Now that I am a full time artist, I’ve taken some of these ideas into my artwork.

Artists have a long history of landscape painting, but I wanted to explore current human impact on the land. Land is being drastically reshaped by human intervention and affected by climate change. My work visually addresses the inherent conflict of built infrastructure and ecosystems. Natural systems that have been disturbed by the expansion of man-made structures apply counter-pressure in response to disturbances. In other words, man intrudes into nature and nature strikes back.

Sand, Sludge and Sea

In these aerial views, I depict some aspects of this conflict and its confluence with climate change. By building into natural habitats, we interrupt ecosystems, pollute water, put carbon into the environment, and raise temperatures. Nature responds with storms, flooding, and rising tides. Rampant development has invaded and distorted that natural land formation and the systems that keep it healthy.

I begin by looking at aerial views of coastal areas and maps of cities. While these are my inspiration, the works are visual imaginative interpretations. Each piece portrays a specific issue. I decide on the scale, where some areas are zoomed in close and others depict a larger landscape. These square panels are in multiples that can be recombined and reoriented so that it is a general rather than specific interpretation and viewers can create their own narrative.

Florida Aerial View

Paintings such as Toxic Green and Algae Bloom look at the redirection of natural waterways and polluted aquifers that result in toxic algae blooms. Here, neon green shapes bloom in aqua waters. Sand, Sludge and Sea concern runoffs that contribute to sludge, and sandbars that block natural waterways and reshape land.

The rising sea level and increasing tides that are a result climate change are shown in Florida City Aerial View, where the grid and system of cities face encroaching water and eroding shores. In the pieces Third Wave and After the Storm, man-made islands in vibrant colors of neon pink and day-glow orange project into the ocean, connected by long causeways. They are extremely vulnerable to weather events. Tidal Wave and Tsunami depict strong storms and sea water that inundate the structure of the city. In all these pieces, a systematic structure confronts free flowing organic shapes.

Tidal Wave

Why did I focus on Florida? Florida is literally ground zero for the United States and climate change. Florida’s east coast ranks as the region’s most vulnerable to sea-level rise. Just this week, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore devoted a speech to climate change, which they presented in Miami. They discussed the science behind climate change and concomitant issues such as rising tides and storms.

As the recent hurricane demonstrated, rising sea levels and storm surges inundate cities during major storms. What happens in Florida is just a precursor of what will happen to our coastal areas. Focusing on this issue is particularly important as some politicians even deny the existence of climate change, not to mention its drastic effect on our land.

My intention is not to lecture but to stimulate thought. Artists have a long tradition of exploring the landscape, environment, and planet we live on. We can interpret scientific data and information in ways that are accessible to the public. My hope is to communicate to the audience the urgency of the global climate challenge.

See the article in the October issue of Artscope Magazine for more information.

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Lisa Reindorf is known for her vibrant mixed media works of architecture and landscapes. The color sensibility is influenced by time spent in Mexico in a community of artists. She has a BA in Design of the Environment from the University of Pennsylvania and received her MA from Columbia University. She was also an instructor at RISD. She is represented by Galatea Gallery in Boston, and has exhibited extensively in NY, California, Mexico and Europe.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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Ben’s Strategy Blog: Culture/Shift: Working with the Arts for Mitigation & Adaptation

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

CCS Director Ben Twist invites people working on climate change and sustainability to think about how the arts can help them deliver their aims.

Over the summer Creative Carbon Scotland focused more than we have in the past on talking to people and organisations working on climate change and sustainability about the role of the arts in their field (as opposed talking to people in the arts about climate change).

We’ve been doing a lot of thinking (and I’ve covered some of this in one of my other blogs) about the particular role of the arts in working on carbon reduction and adaptation to a new society. My part of this has been to do a number of talks to various groups, from anevent at the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation during the Edinburgh Festivals to aTEDx talk at Heriot Watt University.

I’ve refined my talk over the summer and the structure now goes something like this:

  1. We’re facing a major social change: either we achieve the carbon reduction targets implicit within the Paris Agreement – in which case our relationship with energy and fossil fuels will have to change radically – or we don’t achieve them – in which case issues such as migration, changing food supplies, resource related conflicts and so on will bring about major social change (as they are already).
  2. The Mexico City Declaration by UNESCO provides a useful definition of culture in a broad sense as effectively the way we live in the world.
  3. Using that definition, climate change is as much a cultural issue as a scientific or technical one: it is a function of our culture, our way of living in the world, which is a culture of consumption. We dig up resources, use them and throw them away, and this latter stage is a major cause of climate change. In order to avert more climate change, we need to shift to a culture of stewardship.
  4. This would have useful implications not only for environmental sustainability and climate change but also social sustainability (climate justice but also equalities more broadly) and economic sustainability (perhaps abandoning the search for endless economic growth and following up some of the principles of Tim Jackson’sProsperity Without Growth, for example).
  5. So how do we achieve this cultural shift?
  6. Culture in a narrower sense – what we generally call the arts, but this includes design, film and media, museums and heritage etc – is the expression of culture in the wider sense used above. Art has often been said to ‘hold a mirror up to society’. But it is also therefore a way of understanding, interrogating and changing the wider culture.
  7. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote, ‘Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it’!
  8. Working with the arts is therefore a useful way to work on achieving the cultural shift.
  9. There is often an assumption that the role of the arts in areas such as these is to communicate complex ideas more effectively and particularly to engage the wider public emotionally rather than factually. This is indeed a useful role of the arts, but they can do much more. I have a slide which provides a (non-exhaustive) list of ways in which the arts work.
  10. What Art Does, Some examples:

I think there are interesting ways in which artists can contribute to addressing climate change through making artistic work – CCS is involved for instance in a project led by the RSPB on developing awareness of the importance of the peat bogs in the Flow country as carbon sinks.

And there are also ways in which artists can use their skills, knowledge and ways of thinking in non-artistic projects and settings. After one talk, someone who has been attending the meetings of the Local Advisory Committee of the European Climate Change Adaptation Conference in 2017 came up to me. ‘I realise that’s what you’ve been doing at the meetings,’ she said. ‘You’ve used your role as an artist to make us think about and discuss things we wouldn’t have discussed otherwise.’

This was encouraging, as that’s what I do, although I hadn’t really thought of it as such in that particular situation. And in a way, that’s the point: I was being a member of a group and using the skills I have as a (former) theatre director, just as others in the group use their skills as academics, project managers etc.

This is all part of a strand of our work at CCS called Culture/SHIFT: the artistic and conceptual work that we do alongside, and inextricably linked to, our more practical and technical work supporting cultural organisations to reduce their carbon emissions. There’s more information about this here.

We’re always interested in more people working on climate change and sustainability attending our Green Teases and other events – following our most recent Arts & Sustainability Residency we’re thinking about reserving places for non-artists next year.

Our message must be getting through: we’ve been asked to run a session on this subject at the SSN Conference on 1 November. We’ll run through some of the ways in which we think the arts can support climate change and sustainability work and help participants to think about how this could be useful in their work. Sign up now!

 

Image: Ed Hawkins:Spiralling global temperatures from 1850-2016 

The post Culture/Shift: Working with the Arts for Mitigation & Adaptation 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: Cultural Innovation International Prize Climate Change 2016-2017

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

How can culture defy climate change? The second edition of the Cultural Innovation International Prize encourages projects that offer imaginative and effective solutions to one of the biggest global problems of the 21st century. The winning proposal will be included in an exhibition on the subject at the CCCB.

Climate change is one of the central themes of the CCCB’s 2016-2017 programme. In the course of the year we’ll be offering activities, talks and a major exhibition with the aim of addressing what we see as one of the biggest challenges facing humankind.

Year two of the International Prize for Cultural Innovation marks the start of this annual interdisciplinary agenda and opens the debate about the role that culture and cultural institutions can play in helping to address the problem.

Can we analyse global warming beyond catastrophist viewpoints or technological solutions? Can we contribute to the need for an ecological ethic and collective environmental responsibility? Can we act as catalysts of change?

Timeline

Entry and submission period
From 11 October 2016 to 31 January 2017 (at 18:00 CET)

Announcement of finalists
25 April 2017

Presentation and award ceremony
June 2017

Find out more and apply here.

The post Opportunity: Cultural Innovation International Prize Climate Change 2016-2017 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

Powered by WPeMatico

Opportunity: Partners Sought for Artists’ International Travel Research

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Puppet Animation Scotland and Creative Carbon Scotland are looking for organisational or individual partners to join them in a research project to understand the realities of travel by artists to and from and Scotland and to explore ways of reducing the associated carbon emissions.

This is a valuable opportunity for those planning to apply for Regular Funding from Creative Scotland, contributing to the Environment Connecting Theme.

The project will consider travel planned for 2017/18:

  • November/December 2016 – gather information about planned international travel (overseas artists coming to Scotland; Scottish artists travelling abroad): journeys, related carbon emissions, reasons for travel
  • December/January 2017 – develop action plans for each company or individual that aim to reduce the total travel, the carbon emissions related to the travel or the carbon intensity of the travel (by increasing the artistic activity related to the travel)
  • February 2017 onwards – companies implement the action plans
  • April 2018 onwards – we review the results and report

Creative Carbon Scotland will lead the project which will involve meeting as a group at the beginning and occasionally during the year, plus individual work for each company supported by CCS. CCS will write and publish interim and final reports.

For more information, please contact Fiona MacLennan onfiona.maclennan@creativecarbonscotland.com

If you’d like to take part please let Fiona know by 31 October 2016. The first meeting will take place on 17 November.

The post Opportunity: Partners Sought for Artists’ International Travel Research 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

Powered by WPeMatico

The Making of “Concert Climat:” A Tale of Words and Music

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

By Guest Blogger Joseph Makholm

Revelations don’t come very often, but when they do your head is never quite the same.

In the fall of 2014, a revelation came to me in the form of Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything. It confirmed what I suspected to be true about climate change, which is that no attempt to deal with it can succeed without challenging the economic system that created the problem and brought us to where we are today. Science, politics, economics, culture all had to be considered at once if there were any hope of confronting this potential apocalyse.

Her thesis is logically and brilliantly argued, and a pleasure to read. It reminded me of two other books, among many I’ve read over the past decade, which are revelations in their own right. Whereas Ms Klein’s book considers climate change through an economic and political lens, Bill McKibben’s Eaarth examines it from a cultural orientation, and Dr James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren from a scientific perspective. Taken together, they’re an impressive trio.

I’m not a scientist, not a journalist. I’m a musician – composer, pianist and trombonist, specializing primarily in jazz. There are lots of trios in music, and, for a composer, just the idea of something in three parts can be an inspiration. I noticed an interesting three-part structure in Eaarth/This Changes Everything/Storms of My Grandchildren, with the middle section a sort of fast movement vis-à-vis the other two. Medium? Symphony, or sonata, or song cycle? That would work itself out. The real dilemma was how to adapt a book on current affairs into a piece of music.

What I did have was a potential deadline. The international climate conference COP21 was taking place here in Paris in November/December 2015. It would be great to premiere a piece during the conference, but by the time I got down to really thinking about it, it was only six months away. With that time frame the simplest option would be my own jazz ensemble, the Paris Jazz Repertory Quintet (PJRQ), whose repertoire is oriented toward classic compositions from the hard bop era.

I made a few phone calls to people whom I thought might have some influence, some useful suggestions. Nothing came of it, and the summer was spent on other projects.

Then, in late September I happened to be at the Sunside, one of Paris’ major jazz clubs – the PJRQ has played there often – and I asked the owner, in an offhand remark, what he thought of a climate concert during COP. His response: “Sound’s great. Send me a proposal by email.”

Oh, shit! Now I’ve got to do it, and I only have two months.

The first thing was I knew we’d have to expand the ensemble. The quintet already had excellent soloists and a fine rhythm section, but this sort of project would need a broader orchestral pallette. Two additional horns would do it, and fortunately my first choices – trombonist and second saxophonist – were both available. We were now the Paris Jazz Repertory Septet.

But I still had to tackle this book adaptation thing. I knew I wouldn’t have to reread the books in full, but I would have to dig in to find ideas, phrases, images that were evocative musically.

First in line was Eaarth, and the book’s central premise – and it’s title – was a workable point of departure. McKibben argues that the planet we now inhabit is not the same as the one we knew during millenia of human development. The stable, welcoming, nurturing world that brought about the flourishing of human culture has already become a harder and less accommodating planet, the result of a relentless exploitation of natural resources, industrialization, and the like. For us as a species, our earth is now a different place, i. e. “Eaarth.”

The dichotomy could become the basis of a balanced musical narrative: the reality of the new planet/memories of our former world. I couldn’t resist the double-A in McKibben’s title. The opening uses those two notes as a bowed ostinato in the contrabass beneath a procession of stark, dense chords in the brass. An anguished melody in the alto saxophone – improvised – emerges from the other horns in response to threatening gestures from the percussion.

The piano, absent in the opening, is the vehicle for an over-the-shoulder glance at what used to be. The dark A-minor harmony suddenly becomes a bright, colorful E-major – again from the title – with a warm, Ellingtonian richness. But it’s only a momentary reverie that can’t reverse the inevitability of the inhospitable new planet Eaarth.

This became the first section of “Eaarth.” I could continue with a detailed account of the words to music process, but there isn’t the space here. Suffice it to say that the full program of “Eaarth” would ultimately follow a three-section narrative:

1.  The New Planet, and Memories of Our Former World

2.  Nature Pushes Back
Melting Ice Caps—Rising Oceans
Drought—Crop Failure
Migration—Resource Wars

3.  Surviving, Not Thriving
Memories of Our Former World (reprise)
A Durable, Stable, Robust Future
The New Planet (reprise).

To give a sense of scale, each of the subsections in the text is a separate jazz theme – six in all – which are connected with transitional passages. The entire suite is 45-55 minutes in length without a break.

The second suite, “This Changes Everything,” came together in much the same way, and was finished only ten days before the premiere. It had become clear a couple of weeks earlier that I’d never get around to composing the third suite, but that was fine. The music had grown into something much bigger than originally planned, and we already had enough material for a full concert.

The unfinished “Concert Climat” was premiered at the Sunside/Sunset on 1 December, shortly after COP21 opened in Paris. The house was full, and the reaction from the audience was, to say the least, positive. Next step was to complete the third suite, “Storms of My Grandchildren,” and arrange for a performance of the full trilogy. That took place in Paris on a rainy Sunday afternoon in late May. The concert lasted four hours, and the room was full from start to finish. (Video clips from the May concert are available via this link.)

The piece is scheduled to be played again by the PJR7 at the Sunside in three separate concerts this season beginning on 13 November, each concert focusing on one of the three suites. Full details are available at the club’s website as well as our own Concert Climat website.

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Jazz pianist/trombonist and composer Joseph Makholm has been active in Paris since 1982.  He currently teaches composition at the Bill Evans Piano Academy. Much of Makholm’s music draws on the rhythmic and harmonic character of modern jazz.  His “Three Impressions for Solo Piano” is listed on the syllabus of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in the United Kingdom. In the spring of 2013 “Five In One (Monk’s Moods),” a symphonic portrait of Thelonious Monk was premiered by the Turning Point Ensemble in Vancouver, Canada. He performs regularly in small groups and with the Paris Jazz Repertory Quintet.

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Filed under: Guest Blog Series, Music

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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Opportunity: 2 Degrees Festival 2017: Open Call

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Artsadmin’s next 2 Degrees Festival will take place in June 2017. As a key part of the festival programme they are opening a call for proposal for a new participatory project.

With the support TippingPoint, ArtsAdmin are offering one commission of £7,500 for an artist to develop and produce a new project for 2 Degrees Festival 2017 that aims to inspire, connect and empower people to create solutions for a sustainable future.

2 Degrees Festival is Artsadmin’s biennial celebration of art, environment and activism. The programme invites artists to present cutting-edge responses to climate change, urging us all to act now to build a more positive future.

Eligibility:

  • Applicants can be individuals or groups/collectives
  • Applicants must be based in the UK
  • Proposed projects must take place during 2 Degrees 2017, the week of 12-18 June 2017
  • Applicants must propose a new project
  • Applicants and proposed projects can use any art form but the audience must have an active or participatory role
  • Artists who are currently produced by Artsadmin may not apply

Download the Open Call PDF here for full information including how to apply.

Application deadline: Midday, Friday 11 November 2016.

The post Opportunity: 2 Degrees Festival 2017: Open Call 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

Powered by WPeMatico

Going Up: Climate Change + Philadelphia

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

By Guest Blogger Christina Catanese

Featured Image: River print (detail) by Kaitlin Pomerantz & John Heron.

In Going Up: Climate Change + Philadelphia, eight artists from around the country – Daniel Crawford, Lorrie Fredette, Jim Frazer, Eve Mosher, Jill Pelto, Kaitlin Pomerantz and John Heron, and Michelle Wilson – explore the future of a hotter, wetter Philadelphia.

Several of the artists use data as a point of departure, and others suggest imaginative ways of thinking about problems and solutions, even considering the responsibility of art to reduce its own carbon footprint. The gallery contains artwork made for indoor display as well as pieces that document social practice or conceptual art that happened outside the gallery or studio, less focused on the product than the process. Many help us to notice our surroundings more closely, observing the small and incremental changes around us that track global change.

Going Up opened on September 24th at the Schuylkill Center, and runs through December 2016.

Artist duo Kaitlin Pomerantz & John Heron explored waste and water pollution, presenting an imaginative way to think about the problem and potential solutions.  They created handmade paper works they call river prints during a residency at Recycled Artists in Residence, a program which gives artists access to the waste stream at a Northeast Philadelphia recycling facility.  The fourteen-foot-long piece in our gallery was made from discarded paper and denim, and then dipped into a polluted estuary in the Delaware watershed, drawing up oils and residues from the water surface to “print” on the surface of the paper.  Pomerantz writes, “Though I wouldn’t venture to say that our river prints did anything real in the way of remediation, for me, they began to suggest new ways of thinking about how to act on the messes we’ve made of our planet’s water…Our river prints project got me thinking about the value in making people actually see pollution, as a way to spur more conversations about new ideas in remediation.”  These artists also raise the question of the responsibility of art to reduce its own carbon footprint – their work is created entirely from found materials with no new art products needed.

Other artists in Going Up are interpreting dimensions of climate change related to health, biodiversity, water, waste, and food – encompassing of a broad range of kinds of climate change impacts.

Daniel Crawford created a string quartet composition from climate change data that uses music to highlight the places where climate is changing most rapidly.  In Planetary Bands, Warming World, each note represents the average temperature of a single year of four regions of the globe, demonstrating change over time and inspiring listeners to use different senses to understand these warmer years.

Lorrie Fredette presents a ceramic installation responding to Lyme disease, which is projected to spread as climate change increases the range of suitable tick habitat. Made up of 685 individual ceramic pieces referencing the form of the Lyme disease bacteria, the shape of the installation responds to the shape of the Schuylkill Center’s zip code, one of the highest incidences of Lyme in Philadelphia.

13x19 – Jim Frazer, Glyph 16

13×19 – Glyph 16 by Jim Frazer

Jim Frazer’s paper works are derived from bark beetle chewing patterns, an issue for forests which is expected to increase with a warming climate.

Jill Pelto uses climate change data as a point of departure for her watercolor works to communicate scientific research visually.  In addition to three works exploring global trends, Pelto created a new work for Going Up interpreting four sea level rise scenarios for Philadelphia.

Eve Mosher’s High Water Line (in Philadelphia and other cities) engaged communities with local issues of sea level rise and flooding. In 2014, Eve Mosher used surveyor’s chalk to mark ten feet of storm surge, the level to which water would rise in particular Philadelphia neighborhoods under certain climate forecasts.

Michelle Wilson’s Carbon Corpus project explores the implications of individual food choices for global climate change. A conceptual project, she shows a video documenting the project along with an 8.5 foot cube, which occupies the space that 35 kilograms of CO2 takes up in the atmosphere, the amount saved by eating a vegan diet for one week.

Landscape of Change by Jill Pelto.

Landscape of Change by Jill Pelto.

Dichotomies of scale pervade the gallery space. The colors and forms of the works, though, have a quietness and subtlety to them. In this way they are analogous to climate change itself: massive in scale but local in effect; happening gradually yet creeping up on us; a dominant presence, yet allowing us to move through and around it without making much of a change to the path we are on, at least for the present.

The show’s title references this trajectory along with scientific trends which often point in a terrifying upward direction. Yet, in invoking rising movement, we also pull hope into the climate change conversation. Climate change doesn’t only present challenges and doom-and-gloom scenarios, but also opportunities for innovative solutions, cooperation on an unprecedented scale, perhaps even a more sustainable and equitable society. These eight artists turn our focus both inward, toward the impacts in our own lives and communities, and upward, toward what we can do about them.

High Water Line

Eve Mosher and assistants draw the High Water Line in Northeast Philadelphia.

In 2014, Zadie Smith wrote on climate change that, “In the end, the only thing that could create the necessary traction in our minds was the intimate loss of the things we loved.” Art can be an anchor for this traction. Though art about climate change often contains elements of loss, the end result somehow feels more optimistic. Smith continues, “I found my mind finally beginning to turn from the elegiac what have we done to the practical what can we do.” Artists today have the unique potential to help more minds make this same, critical turn.

Together, the artists in Going Up have created a new avenue into the tangled knot of climate change. Instead of bombarding us with data, the information is transformed into beauty, into innovative communications and evocative images that stand in their own right as works of art, but which also invite the visitor to understand our warming world in new, personal ways.

Going Up is supported in part by a grant from CUSP – the Climate & Urban Systems Partnership, a group of informal science educators, climate scientists, learning scientists and community partners in four Northeast U.S. cities, funded by the National Science Foundation to explore innovative ways to educate city residents about climate change.

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Christina Catanese is the Director of Environmental Art at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education.  Founded in 1965, the Schuylkill Center is one of the first urban environmental education centers in the country, with 340 acres of fields, forests, ponds, and streams in northwest Philadelphia. We work through four core program areas: environmental education, environmental art, land stewardship, and wildlife rehabilitation. The environmental art program incites curiosity and sparks awareness of the natural environment through presentations of outdoor and indoor art.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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Opportunity: Transformations 2017 Call for Papers

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

The overarching theme of this conference is ‘sustainability transformations in practice’. Important advances about transformation across different disciplines are already emerging, such as from the arts, humanities, social science and different scientific fields, including social-ecological resilience research, social-technological transitions research, development studies, and research focusing on social innovation. However, transformation is an inherently practical endeavour, and many of the most exciting innovations for change are emerging from practice, such as changes in routines, policies, norms and behaviours and wider attempts to encourage change. This can include diverse approaches that aim to enhance adaptation to and mitigation of climate change, address biodiversity, social justice, water, food security challenges and many other aspects relating to sustainability.

In many cases practical and academic knowledge are developing independently, rather than informing each other. Greater cross-fertilisation of transformation research and practice across different communities and across different strands of research is important. Transformations 2017 therefore seeks to bring together different kinds of knowledge to accelerate learning about, and help facilitate, fundamental changes in people-planet relationships.

Transformations 2017 warmly invites submissions for presentations, practice sessions and workshops from any practical sector, organisation or academic discipline interested in being part of the dialogue that encourage significant changes towards enhancing environmental and social sustainability related to one of the broad themes of the conference.

Submission Deadline: 31 October

More information here.

The post Opportunity: Transformations 2017 Call for Papers 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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Press Release: Artists Selected for Residency Connecting Arts & Sustainability

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Eight Scotland-based artists selected for artist residency exploring connections between arts and sustainability.

This Friday, Creative Carbon Scotland (CCS) will welcome eight Scotland-based artists from a variety of disciplines to Cove Park on the Rosneath Peninsula, for a weekend exploring and reflecting upon humanity’s impact on the planet and the role of the arts in transitioning to a more environmentally sustainable society.

Over 100 artists from across Scotland applied to be a part of this residency, which will equip artists with opportunities to think about the role of cultural practices, learn from one another and develop their own work in relation to environmental sustainability. Artists are not expected to produce new work during the short residency, but rather use the experience as a springboard for future development in relation to residency themes and wider social change.

Working in partnership with Cove Park, Creative Carbon Scotland’s third annual artist residency will focus on the Anthropocene, a period of geological time which places humanity at the centre of the recent global environmental changes.

On choosing the topic of the Anthropocene, CCS Director, Ben Twist, said: “The Anthropocene marks a significant shift in how we understand humanity’s role and responsibility in relation to issues such as climate change. Exploring this topic during the residency offers an important opportunity for Scotland’s artists to consider how their practices could contribute to a wider cultural movement towards a low-carbon future.”

Co-facilitating the artist residency will be Jan Bebbington, Professor of Accounting and Sustainable Development, St Andrews Sustainability Institute, and Lex ter Braak, Director, Van Eyck Institute, Maastricht, Netherlands. Joining the facilitation team, Jan Bebbington said: “I am excited to share time and conversations with this talented group of creative people and I am sure my understandings of the Anthropocene will change and deepen from the engagement. Residencies are wonderful settings in which to create shared understanding across disciplines and practice settings.”

Catrin Kemp, Assistant Director of Cove Park, said: “We are hugely excited to be welcoming CCS and those selected for this multidisciplinary Arts & Sustainability residency to Cove Park. This group will be the first to take over the entire 50-acre site since the opening of our brand new £1.4m Artists Centre. Cove Park offers artists from across the world a unique space to develop their ideas, and we hope that this residency will spark fresh creative thinking around how the major themes related to the Anthropocene might be communicated to audiences.”

-Ends-

Notes to editors

For more information please contact Gemma Lawrence at: gemma.lawrence@creativecarbonscotland. com T: 0131 529 7909

This year’s arts and sustainability residency is funded by Creative Scotland and kindly supported by the Dr David Summers Charitable Trust and is run in partnership with Cove Park.

The full list of artists who will be attending Creative Carbon Scotland and Cove Park’s Arts and Sustainability Residency 2016 are as follows:

Reem Alkayyem

  • Reem Alkayyem is a Syrian born and educated architect. She has practiced architecture for 15 years in her home country and has MScs from the University of Edinburgh in Architectural Project Mangagement (2012) and Advanced Sustainable Design (2016). She aims to enhance and disseminate the knowledge of sustainability to include the social and cultural aspects in addition to environmental. She is additionally keen to contribute to the reconstruction of her country and to educate future architects on sound and sustainable bases.

Kathyrn Beckett

  • Kathy describes her creative practice as ‘in exploration of ecocentric approaches’, seeing that her responsibility and passion as an artist is to help serve a more beautiful life sustaining world. She works across a range of mediums, with people and nature at the core of her activity and, public engagement as a vehicle of expression. She has been contracted as a project artist concerned with environmental sustainability for a range of organisations, including the Glasgow School of Art, Creative Carbon Scotland and North Light Arts.

Simon Gall

  • Simon Gall is a musician, composer, educator based in Aberdeenshire. He has toured (and continues to tour) internationally, recording with a number of artists including well-known world music band Salsa Celtica, Cuban band Son al Son and more recently contemporary Scottish folk duo Clype.

Alex Mackay

  • Alex Mackay is a sound artist, composer and performer based in Glasgow, making work across media including sound/music, image and performance for a wide range of contexts, including recorded media, installation, live performance as well as collaborative work in the fields of visual art, dance and film.

Victoria MacKenzie

  • Victoria MacKenzie is a fiction writer working on her first novel, Brantwood, about the life of art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, as well as a short fiction collection, Creaturely, which explores our connections with other species.

Michael Stumpf

  • Michael Stumpf (born in Mannheim/ Germany) is a visual artist that works primarily in sculpture. In addition to his own practice he currently is a member of the artist group Poster Club. Recent exhibitions include: New Wheat New Mud New Machine (with Posterclub) Cooper Gallery, Dundee; Objects Converse on a Matter of Mutual Concern, Art Across the City, Swansea; This Song Belongs to those Who Sing It, Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow School of Art; In Other Words, Lewis Glucksmann Gallery, Cork; New Alchemy /Contemporary Art after Beuys, Landesmuseum, Münster.

Samuel Tongue

  • A hybrid of lyric and language poetry, Samuel’s practice is inter-medial and parasitic, living within, feeding from, and provoking a variety of artistic forms. Poems are search patterns, part of a meshwork of ideas and concepts, rooted in an incorrigibly plural world.

Jenna Watt

  • Jenna Watt is a multi award winning Scottish theatre maker, her latest work; Faslane, written in part at Cove Park, received a 2016 Scotsman Fringe First Award at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

Funded by Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council, Creative Carbon Scotland has been working since 2011 to embed environmental sustainability within the arts and cultural sector in Scotland and connect the arts with the environmental sustainability sector. The arts and sustainability residency has been running since 2014 and has already engaged artists in topics of future climate change scenarios and the post-2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals. The 2014 and 2015residencies were held on the Isle of Mull in partnership with Comar.

Founded in 1999 by Peter and Eileen Jacobs, Cove Park is funded by Creative Scotland, by trusts and foundations and by the generosity of individuals. Their contributions are made on the premise that the vitality of the arts today, and the contribution they make to society, is based on the ability of artists to make new work on an ongoing basis.

Photo credit: Ruth Clark

The post Press Release: Artists Selected for Residency Connecting Arts & Sustainability 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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Ingold’s Sustainability of Everything

This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

Sustainability is an overused word.  It is much diminished by its occurrence in too many documents purporting to suggest that transport, local government or how anything is sustainable following the end of grant funding.  But we know that sustainability matters and thinking out of the current construction doesn’t happen nearly enough.

Tim Ingold’s lecture at the Centre for Human Ecology (Pearce Institute, Govan) on Saturday 10 September was entitled ‘The Sustainability of Everything’.  This provocative phrase came from an invitation to talk at a previous event about sustainability in relation to art and science, citizenship and democracy, love and friendship.

Ingold used ‘everything’ including qualities and processes as a way to open up a trenchant criticism of not merely the usage of sustainability but more widely the turn in science to data and the atomisation of everything.

Tim Ingold is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.  He is known for his distinctive, arts and humanities inflected approach to anthropology.  He is currently leading ‘Knowing from the Inside’, a major European Research Council funded project involving anthropologists, archaeologists, architects and artists.

For Ingold the question of sustainability is not “How can we carry on doing what we are doing but with a bit less waste and impact?” but rather “What kind of world has a place for us and future generations?” “What does carrying on mean?” and more practically speaking “How do we make it happen?”

The key point is that everything in Ingold’s sense is not the collection of all the individual bits, but something different.  His problem with current science and current constructions of sustainability are their reliance on isolating something to analyse it.  Ingold comes at things looking for movement and entanglement rather than boundary.  To make this point he uses examples where either you don’t know where one thing ends and another starts, or examples of things in motion.  So he asks for instance whether the bird’s nest is part of the tree?  Or whether the wind that has made the tree grow bent over is part of the tree?  He asks if you can tell which part of the eddy in the stream is the ‘inside’ and which is the ‘outside’?

The importance of this approach is that it opens up new ways of experiencing and knowing which are more process oriented rather than object oriented.  Artists in particular respond enthusiastically to this way of knowing.

Ingold further developed this through Lucretius’ idea that everything is in motion and when things bump into each other they form knots – clouds are knots of water and temperature and wind.  Trees are complex knots.  Ingold evolves the idea of knots by pointing out that rope stays together through a combination of twist and friction.  He notes that harmony (eg polyphonic music) is exactly the same – a combination of elements that in themselves might initially appear to be in conflict but in relationship with each other are beautiful.  Again he’s nodding to artists ways of knowing.  In his terms everything is a “correspondence of parts” – not a totality but rather a carrying on.

Having set up this alternative way of understanding Ingold highlighted how current formulations of sustainability are underpinned by an assumption that the “entire earth is a standing reserve” and that we need to protect the earth in the way that a company protects its profits.  He drew attention to the underlying corporate or management language implicit in these descriptions of sustainability and how this is true of conservation organisations as much as corporations and governments. Furthermore of course Paulo Friere provided a deep critique of the ‘banking’ model of education which is closely aligned with this accounting version of sustainability.

Having established what he meant by ‘everything’, Ingold went on to construct an idea of ‘carrying on’.  To do this he referred to traditional ways of forestry in Japan where there is a dynamic relationship between the forester, the forest and the building of a house articulated in a 30 year cycle – trees take 30 years to grow and a house needs renewed every 30 years.  Trees are planted, foresters learn to build houses, trees are cut to build houses, trees are planted.  It is very different from the forms of plantation forestry and clear felling we experience across much of Scotland.

In conclusion Ingold came back to the themes of art and science, citizenship and democracy, peace and friendship.  He suggested that science has reneged on its commitment to understanding the world in ways that are useful for life, and that in his view environmental arts do this more effectively now.  He talked about the need for a politics of difference and the importance of embracing tension and agonism.

Reflecting on this talk there are a few key points that are worth teasing out of Ingold’s valuable line of argument.

Firstly, the construction of sustainability currently offered in ‘sustainable development’ and ‘ecosystems services’ is fundamentally human-centric and has lost any connection with the ‘existence value’ of the non-human as constructed by the likes of Arne Naess, Gregory Bateson and many others which were early inspirations of the environmental movement (and remain very influential on environmental arts). Ingold’s focus on entanglement and movement is a useful counter to ‘banking’ approaches. *

Secondly, we need to recognise that our current construction of sustainability is only one possible construction.  It is in terms of conventional ethics basically a form of Utilitarianism – the greatest good for the greatest number.  And in this respect it suffers from all the criticisms of Utilitarianism in being fundamentally subjective and in environmental terms challenging – if more than half the world’s population lives in cities then what is good for cities must be good for humans – that is a bizarre thought (although one often promoted by architects and urban planners)!  But the point is that Ingold is providing an underpinning articulation of ‘being’ that asks for a different ethics – one which accepts the conflicts but accords value to the connectedness of everything and its motion.  So he positively argued against the conservation of trees and in favour of the carrying on of planting and growing, felling and building as a cycle. Perhaps Ingold doesn’t go far enough – Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, eminent ecological artists, argue that we need to ‘put more back into ecological systems than we take out’ in our carrying on. By this they mean that our cycles need to be weighted to greater biodiversity and strengthening ecological cycles.

Finally Ingold’s construction, particularly of ‘knots’ is useful if we recognise that we humans are arch constructors of knots.  Everything we make is some sort of knot whether it’s food or paths or roads or houses or nuclear power stations or mustard gas or satellites.  And if we can imagine a knot then we will make it.  If its been imagined then someone is trying to make it, somewhere.  That’s an interesting problem.  It’s prompted discussions around what ‘responsible innovation’ might be. How can we create knots that make for healthier places for all living things.

* I’m indebted to Dave Pritchard for elucidating this evolution through the sequence of major environmental summits starting in Stockholm in 1972 and progressing in 10 yearly intervals through to Rio+20 in 2012.  He correlated this with the shift from an environmentalism of ‘existence value’ through to ‘ecosystems services’ and ‘sustainable development’.  Each Summit sought to achieve greater policy impact and as a result reframed in terms of acceptable (human-centric) policy.

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.

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