Curators

Extreme Weather

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Six years ago Professor John Schellnhuber (who had recently been appointed as Chief Government Adviser on Climate and Related Issues by the German Chancellor) talked at the RSA Art and Ecology Conference (2006) about the challenges in modelling the interactions between different critical points in global environmental systems – gulf streams, sea ice, glaciers and snow on mountains, desertification, etc.  He was addressing complexity, not looking at one thing in isolation.

The recent article, Extreme Weather, in the National Geographic explores the increasing extreme weather – flooding, storms, tornadoes, drought and fire.  The article offers an interesting analogy: climate change has a similar effect to steriods – you don’t know whether the steriods enable the batter to score this home run in particular, but you do know that they increase the overall likelihood of scoring more home runs than someone not on steriods.  So the point is not to ask whether climate change caused this storm or that heatwave, but rather to recognise that it is affecting frequency and intensity.

All analogies (and metaphors) have to be used carefully - steriods as a metaphor for ’enhancing’ and making more powerful is probably not the worst, but the other medicalised metaphor is ‘cancer’ which engenders a particular sort of fear – see Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor.

We are still learning about complex adaptive systems.  Understanding that things are connected and that there are unintended consquences is only a small step along the road.

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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CultureLab: Bio-artists who tinker with tools of science

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The New Scientist’s CultureLab blog ran a story, Bio-artists who tinker with tools of science, in early August on artists working with “the tools of science.”  The article draws in particular on the work of SymbioticA.  It doesn’t talk about Critical Art Ensemble or Eduardo Kac, but it does acknowledge the multiple possible outcomes of art working with science (and those tools).

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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PLATFORM is hiring

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From the PLATFORM newsletter:

We’re looking to hire not one, but two positions. Please share this info with anyone who you think might be interested and help us find some really great people!

The deadline for both sets of applicants is 6.00pm Friday the 14th September.

Coordinator for ‘Shake! Young Voices in Arts, Media, Race & Power’ Driving our three-year cultural activism programme with young people (16-25 years old) tackling social and environmental injustice from a race perspective. Shake! will develop a new generation of cultural activists. The new post will co-ordinate with a team of artist-facilitators, campaigners, young people and partner organisations, and oversee dissemination of Shake’s work to a wider public. More info here.

Oil & Human Rights Campaigner Investigating and challenging the environmental and human rights abuses carried out by oil companies in the Niger Delta. Supporting social movements and activists in Nigeria in exposing and holding those responsible to account. Challenging British military and diplomatic support for oil-driven militarisation. More info here.

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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Funding Natural Heritage Projects

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Scottish Natural Heritage publishes a guide to various funding sources for natural heritage projects – included are schemes that support on the ground action as well as communication and education.  This guide covers EU, Public Sector, Lottery as well as Trusts and Foundations and can be found here.

Also worth checking out is the website of the Environmental Funders Network, and in particular their publication, ‘Where the green grants went.’

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

AppleThink – Call for Participants

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Creative Camp in Aizpute, Latvia. September 13-15, 2012

AppleThink is a collaboration between The Center for New Media CultureRIXC, Latvian Contemporary Arts Center and Serde from Latvia, as well as Pixelache Helsinki from Finland.

Apples are one of the most harvest-rich, yet under-exploited resources available in Latvia and other post-kolkhoz (collective Soviet farms) countries. The AppleThink event aims to re-approach the ‘habitual’ apples from a variety of different perspectives. The event will bring together an international trans-disciplinary group of participants, who will be sharing their knowledge and experience by approaching apples as a ‘real’ resource of food and energy, as well as as a cultural metaphor for fecundity and wealth.

The AppleThink event will also include presentations and discussions by artists, curators, science researchers, and community activists who will be discussing different survival strategies ranging from the concepts of ‘downshifting’ and ‘withdrawal’, to the approach of ‘resilience’ and a ‘techno-ecologies’ perspective. The camp will end with a local outdoor market together with local farmers, where the artefacts created during the creative camp will be put out for symbolic sale-exhibition.

  • Call for participation: They are inviting participants who are interested in transdisciplinary collaborations, but they also welcome proposals for AppleThink workshops and presentations. Please send your proposals or letter of intent to participate to rixc [at] rixc [dot] lv, and/or rasa [at] rixc [dot] lv (Rasa Smite).  DEADLINE: August 20, 2012

For more information, please visit http://renewable.rixc.lv

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

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Video Vortex #9 – Re:assemblies of Video

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Video Vortex #9, Re:assemblies of Video, is conceived and hosted by the Moving Image Lab and Post-Media Lab of the Innovation Incubator at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. The conference will be held from February 28 until March 2, 2013. The call for contribution is open until 31 August 2012.

Online video vortices such as Youtube, are assemblages of assemblages: its infrastructure and spheres of use and production again consist of assemblages. The video sphere today is a mesh of different types of elements; we have databases, screens, interfaces, protocols and server farms. Comments, tags, lists and channels, cameras, producers, frames, users and audiences. Last, but not least, money flows, broadcasters, advertisers, property rights, eyeballs and statistics, all add to, and operate in multiple assemblages.

Currently there are new configurations of components in video culture, interacting in new ways and with loose forms of influence. VideoVortex #9 proposes that now is a time to re-engage with a structural and contextual analysis of online video culture.

The Video Vortex encourage critics, theorists, artists, programmers and video makers to look at:

  • 1.)… assemblages of different videos, graphics and texts, be it in material or with a view to new environments of authoring or curation. Such an approach re-poses the question of interactive multi- and hypermedia in the age of html-5, Popcorn, Apps and the likes.
  • 2.)… assemblages of content, interfaces and infrastructures, as found in platforms, with their changing forms and logics of circulation, and to scrutinize media-‘flows’, ‘liveness’, ‘channels’, ‘archives’, ‘lists’, and producing ‘dissolving originals’ and new forms of mash-ups.
  • 3.)… socio-cultural assemblages of producers, owners, curators and perceptive ‘audiences’. The conditions and social realities of video- and TV-production, issues of copyright and re-organization of ‘imaginary’ capital evoke questions as to what extent technology, standards and protocols – and their symbolisms – are taking over the role of what before has been ascribed to ‘culture’.
  • 4.)… assemblages contributing to ruptures and revolts: Indeed „the whole world is watching“ different real or so-called ‘revolutions’: social upheavals are transmitted via video. What does it mean to be an ‘observer’ (individually, socially or scientifically), a ‘participant’ or a ‘witness’? Questions of relevance, media positioning and ‘real virtuality’ are are gaining new urgency.

If you want to know more about it, you can read the Video Vortex_Call_flyer here.

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

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2° Celsius = 565 gigatons but 2,795 gigatons = $27 trillion

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I normally criticise environmentalists using financial numbers, but Bill McKibben’s argument in August’s Rolling Stone is based on really interesting numbers:

167 countries are signed up to the 2° target (keep the impact of climate change within this range).

565 gigatons is the amount of carbon we can release into the atmosphere (roughly speaking) before we cross the 2° threshold (maybe).  That’s just 16 years on current projections.

2,795 gigatons is what the current reserves of coal and oil based on fossil fuel industry reporting.

$27 trillion is what this represents on the balance sheets of the fossil fuel companies.

Read on here.

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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The Reverend Billy says OCCUPY and 350.ORG—You Come Down Here and Embrace!

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This is the cover story in Brooklyn Rail…

On Henry Street just uptown from Foley Square in Manhattan, there is a church called Mariners’ Temple. One Sunday we were among hundreds of folks listening while Mother Henrietta Carter preached. She stood up there, white-robed, and gestured out across the assembled faithful. “We need to see some embracing today,” Mother Carter said, and then she explained that two families were blessed just recently with newborn babies, in the same week.

She boomed out: “I want you two families—come down here and embrace each other! We’ll wait! Oh, you come down here! I know you two families been quarreling about something, you don’t speak much anymore. Oh we all know about it. Now—You come down here and you embrace each other. You bring those babies with you!”

The two families slowly came to Mother Carter and embraced. They were in tears. People called out “Praise!”

Embrace

As you see from the title of my little sermon, I am asking the people from two movements, 350.org and Occupy Wall Street, to do the same.  Read on…

Also of interest a review of Nature, the new volume in The Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series.

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

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Liberate Tate action

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A group of artists and activists donate a symbol of alternative energy to the BP sponsored Tate Modern

The Turbine Hall – image from Liberate Tate blog – image by Ian Buswell

Watch the Vice News video.

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

Creating climate change parks – greenspace scotland

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A new e-resource launched today by greenspace scotland, in partnership with Scottish Natural Heritage, will help park and greenspace managers respond to the challenges of climate change by creating ‘climate change parks’.  Full story at creating climate change parks – greenspace scotland. 

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