Monthly Archives: October 2020

Virtual Conference: Institutional Approaches to Sustainability

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INSTITUTIONAL APPROACHES TO SUSTAINABILITY â€” A virtual conference series by Art/Switch


October 31, 2020 from 4-7 pm CET on zoom. 

This conference is part of our virtual trilogy [re]Framing the Arts: A Sustainable Shift, organized in collaboration with the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Nyenrode Business University.

This first edition, Institutional Approaches to Sustainability, is dedicated to the structural and institutional shifts towards a carbon zero arts sector. We will discuss the options for an environmentally sustainable building, investigate the organizational choices behind sustainable storage facilities, and learn about sustainable climate control systems.

The speakers will also discuss how we might engage both individual operations and those on an international scale in adopting practices in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. If sustainability is an organizational priority, how can we adopt a holistic approach within our institutions and take responsibility for our actions?


We are very excited to start the fall with this first edition of [re]Framing the Arts and are looking forward to rethinking, renewing, and connecting towards a climate-conscious future.


Tickets are donation-based: https://www.artswitch.org/ticketing-1

SPEAKERS

Sarah Sutton & Stephanie Shapiro — Sustainable Museums
A Post-”Plus/Minus Dilemma” Reboot: Where are we Now, Where are we going?

Samantha Owens — Glenstone Museum
Glenstone: A Case Study in Sustainable Measures for a Contemporary Museum

Foekje Boersma — National Library of the Netherlands
High-tech and Low-key Storage Solution for the National Library Collections

Sofie Öberg Magnusson — National Museums of World Culture
Sustainable Organization of Art Institutions – Experiences and Reflections Underway

Discussion lead and moderated by: Paula Toppila, Executive Director of Pro Arte Foundation Finland and IHME Helsinki and Saara Korpela, Eco-Coordinator for IHME Helsinki; Frame Contemporary Art Finland; HIAP, and Mustarinda.

The conference will take place on October 31, 2020 from 4-7pm CET on zoom. 

For questions, contact us at info@artswitch.org

Opportunity: Creative Green Awards 2020 – Public nominations open

Creative Carbon Scotland

Creative Green Awards for Campaigns and Creative Programming in 2019/2020 are open for applications.

Julie’s Bicycle is a London-based charity that supports environmental action in the creative community. We’re excited to announce the Creative Green Awards 2020, which will be presented during a virtual ceremony on November 13th.

We inaugurated the first Creative Green Awards in 2017 to recognise and honour the achievements of the creative community taking action on climate change. Four years later, still the only environmental awards designed specifically for the creative and cultural sector, we are excited to launch two new awards that will be open for public nominations – Best Campaign and Best Creative Programming.

The two new categories are open to international applicants or programmes, and free to enter. Winners of the two public awards will receive the value of a day’s personalised programme of support, negotiated according to needs, and delivered from across JB’s expert team of consultants.

Best Creative Programming Award
This award recognises the Best Creative Programming that has inspired people to think about climate and environmental issues in a new and creative way.

Best Campaign Award
This award recognises the Best Campaign that successfully inspired and galvanised people to take creative climate action.

Deadline for submissions: Friday 9th October, 2020 at 5pm BST

Visit the submission page on the Julie’s Bicycle website for more information, eligibility criteria and FAQ.

At Julie’s Bicycle we recognise that the imbalances existing within the climate movement mirror environmental inequalities overall. Therefore, we particularly welcome submissions from individuals or organisations from one or more of the following groups: Black, Asian or minority ethnic, refugee, D/deaf, disabled, neurodivergent, working class and LGBTQI+. If you have any questions regarding access requirements, please contact info@juliesbicycle.com or 0208 746 0400.

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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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Call for Chapter Contributions: Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities

Open Calls

Type: Call for Papers
Texas,
Date: January 1, 2021

Subject Fields: Cultural History / Studies, Digital Humanities, Educational Technology, Environmental History / Studies, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Call for Chapter Contributions
Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities

Editors:
Luke Bergmann, Arlene Crampsie, Deborah Dixon, Steven Hartman, Robert Legg, Francis Ludlow, Charles Travis

Abstract Submission / Expression of Interests Deadline:  1 January 2021

Precis

Scholars in the emerging field of digital environmental humanities (DEH) observe that  “the idea of nature is becoming very hard to separate from the digital tools and media we use to observe, interpret, and manage it.”[1] The ‘digital turn’ of the last quarter century, and the existential threat of climate change are converging and forcing our species to “reorient  . . . profoundly in relation to the world, to one another, and to ourselves.”[2]Whilst external environments are roiling due to global warming and socio-political conflict, the inner “saturation of our intimate and physical lives by digital, wireless, and virtual technologies,”[3] are causing adaptations on personal, regional, social, theoretical, technological, and ideological scales. 

Our ideas, our standards, for what is natural are distributed and maintained in digital tools and media like databases, computer models, geographical information systems and so on.”[4]  Though an automation predicated on algorithms has become the touchstone for thinking about the future of privacy and consent, issues around data colonialism, data hacking and Lo-TEK point to complicated, ongoing social inequalities in terms of access and inclusion, as well as the resilience and future-facing nature of a range of environmental aesthetics. 

Employing historical, philosophical, linguistic, arts practice-based, literary and cultural lenses, DEH has/have confluences with fields that foreground earthly processes and forms (environmental humanities), interrogate technological apparatus, techniques and framings (digital humanities) and draw out shifting biological, neurological and psychological strata that subtend a ‘human’ being (medical humanities).  Ontologically and epistemologically, the concept of the DEH raises a few pertinent questions:

  • What new objects, relations, capacities and affects are being located and marked for analysis? 
  • What kinds of data are being foregrounded as objects of analysis and as the bases of  empirical findings? 
  • What techniques are being brought to bear, for what purpose and with what import? 
  • And what kinds and forms of story-telling are being undertaken, by what kinds of actors, with what agencies, and for what audiences, users, and communities of interest and practice?

In addition,  humanities, scientific, artistic, geographical, cartographical, informatic and computing disciplines are finding a common space in DEH, and are bringing the use of digital applications, coding and software into league with literary and cultural studies, feminist, queer and critical race studies, and the visual, filmic and performing arts.  As such, DEH is empirically, critically and ethically engaged in exploring digitally mediated, visualized, and parsed framings of past, present and future environments, landscapes and cultures, as well as the ways in which these operate to produce scale, from the intimate and personal to the global and planetary.  Conceptualizations such as Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Anthropo-scene, Anthropobscene, and so on provide alternate framings of ecological and social collapse, loss and extinction, that emphasize the specific time-space emergence of crises, a diversity of lived experiences across the globe, and the work of words (images and graphs) as analytic formulations as well as descriptors. 

Call for Chapters

This volume, edited by human, physical,  and critical geographers, geomaticians, GIScientists, and literary, digital and environmental humanities scholars, aims to help produce a capacious, eclectic space of knowledge on DEH.

We are calling for chapter contributions from researchers in the arts, humanities and sciences, scholars in commensurate fields,  practitioners and professionals, artists, activists, poets, filmmakers and storytellers who engage the environment and the digital and are situated or situate their work in the Global South and Global North (terrestrially and subterraneous) the Oceans, the Arctic, Antarctica (surface and benthic), the Atmosphere and its layers, the Moon, Solar System, Interstellar space and Galaxies beyond. 

We seek chapters on the DEH engagements, practices, pedagogies and applied cases that facilitate trans-disciplinary encounters between fields as diverse as human cognition, and gaming, bioinformatics and linguistics, social media, literature and history, music, geography, geosciences, anthropology, archaeology, painting, philology, philosophy and the earth and environmental sciences.  Potential themes: mediations/ remediations, reflections, experiences, delvings, contestations, challenges, praxes,  and pedagogies. Potential subjects (contributors may suggest their own as well): 

  • Applied DEH studies.
  • Art-historical questions, geographic concepts, and digital methods.
  • Aural and visual exhibits, performances.
  • Atmosphere.
  • Big data, longue durée, geographical history. 
  • Climate histories-historiographies.
  • Cyborgs, biologies, environments.
  • Cities, sub-urbs.
  • COVID-19 Pandemic Digital Ecologies
  • DEH activisms.
  • DEH critiques / critiques of DEH.
  • DEH colonizations / decolonizations.
  • DEH facilitating knowledge production in novel transdisciplinary constellations.
  • DEH guides, tools / theories / techniques.
  • DEH hacking.
  • DEH identities, genders, sexualities, networks.
  • DEH pedagogies.
  • DEH and the earth and environmental sciences.
  • DEH storytelling.
  • Digital food production, transportation, consumption geographies.
  • Digital performances, remediations of place.
  • Digital recovery of texts, objects, and traces of human experience thought long since lost to time. 
  • Digital watersheds, riverines, oceanic and benthic systems.
  • Dynamic digital platforms for integrated environmental humanities data management, analysis, synthesis and knowledge dissemination.
  • E-Epidemiology.
  • Film and cinematic approaches.
  • GIS, Geoinformatics, R, Neogeography.
  • Graphesis / counter-visualizations.
  • Open-Source DEH.
  • Indigenous Studies (Indigital).
  • Posthuman landscapes, environments, atmospheres, waters, extra-terrestrial spaces.
  • Resource extraction.
  • Small data and capta.
  • Your own idea here:______________.

Publication Schedule:

1 January 2021, Submission of Abstracts

15 February 2021, Response of Editors to Authors

1 May 2021, Submission of Draft Chapters by Authors

1 June 2021, Editorial Comments / Revision Suggestions Returned to Authors

1 August 2021, Final Submission of Chapters by Authors

1 September 2021, Submission of  DEH Handbook to Routledge

Submission Instructions: 

Listed below are the names and emails of the editors of the Routledge Handbook of the DEH. You may submit your abstract / expression of interest to any one of the editors based upon mutual interests or preference.  Please submit an abstract, or expression of interest, describing the subject of your chapter contribution by 1 January 2021.

Editors:

Sources

[1] Finn Arne Jørgensen. 2014. “The Armchair Traveler’s Guide to Digital Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Humanities 4: 95-112.

[2] Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. 2010.  “Introducing the new materialisms.” New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics: 1-43. 

[3] Ibid.

[4] Jørgensen, The Armchair Traveler’s Guide to Digital Environmental Humanities. 109.Contact Info: 

Contact Email: ctravis@tcd.ie

Seas of the Outer Hebrides

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We believe that collaborative, creative approaches can support knowledge-gathering and problem-solving processes, particularly, but not necessarily, where participants have different backgrounds, interests, expectations or hopes. They can work particularly well in community consultations to bring together community members and local government or organisational teams wanting to create a shared vision.  

In 2019, Creative Carbon Scotland partnered with the Marine Protected Area Management and Monitoring (MarPAMM) project to bring inclusive, creative approaches to the Seas of the Outer Hebrides (SEASOH) project. Our involvement arose from the project team’s desire for an inspiring, different and accessible way to work with the Outer Hebrides communities. We are proud to be supporting their key aim â€“ to build a shared vision for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in the region â€“ by involving artists and creative practices to help explore the cultural dimension of residents’ relationship to their seas.

stunning aqua-green sea, white sandy beach with mountains in background; Isle of Lewis

MarPAMM is a cross-border environment project, funded by the EU’s INTERREG VA programme, to develop tools for monitoring and managing a number of protected coastal marine environments in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Western Scotland.

The SEASOH project will deliver a regional management plan for the Outer Hebrides Marine Region, putting communities and people at the heart of the process and building consensus on the future management of MPAs in the islands. Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, Marine Scotland, NatureScot and the University of the Highlands and Islands are supporting the delivery of effective MPA management.

Project activities

July 2019
We attended a series of events held by the SEASOH team during July 2019 aimed at creating an inclusive environment for listening to any views or concerns, and providing information about the SEASOH project and its aims. During this time we also met with local artists and cultural organisations to build our understanding of existing arts activities and inform our ideas for hosting creative workshops across the Outer Hebrides.

September 2019
Our first series of events were co-organised with the Hebridean International Film Festival, where we held conversations alongside film screenings, connecting the film festival themes, â€˜Islands, environments and remote communities’, to community members’ perceptions and experience of the marine environment. Participants also contributed drawings to a short animation produced following the festival themed around the local marine environment.

February 2020

Seas of the Outer Hebrides 2

In February 2020, we co-ordinated a series of family friendly, creative workshops on Lewis, Harris, North and South Uist with local artists Kirsty O’Connor (North Uist) and Sandra Kennedy (Lewis), alongside the Seas of the Outer Hebrides team. These workshops interwove creative activities, including mono-printing using found objects from the shoreline and origami paper boat making with conversations about marine protection, what benefits communities derived from the sea, and their hopes and fears for the future.

Next steps
mono-printing using found objects from the shoreline; abstract shapes in greys, greens and reds, reminiscent of the sea

Through these events and an online community survey the SEASOH project was able to gain a deeper understanding of communities’ priorities for the marine environment as well as the less tangible aspects of peoples’ lived experience and relationship to the sea, which will inform the development of marine management plans that reflect the interests and concerns of communities living and working in the Outer Hebrides.

We are continuing our discussions with the SEASOH team, despite a pause in progress due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will update this page to coincide with the project’s progress as it occurs.

SEASOH is part of our culture/SHIFT programme. 

The SEASOH logo was created by Loom Graphics, an independent graphic design studio based in the Outer Hebrides.

Image credits: Seilebost beach, Isle of Lewis – Paolo Chiabrando on Unsplash; workshop images – Creative Carbon Scotland

Marpamm and interreg logos for Seas of the Outer Hebrides project