A complilation of the posts so far: feel free to respond to these threads on ADA
ANDREA POLLI [...] As an artist working with weather and climate ideas, I've been thrilled by the opportunities presented by the recent explosion of art exhibitions related to climate and sustainability, but it has brought up some larger questions in my mind about the role of art in society. Here are the questions in two groups: 1] Artworks operate within various economies, whether they are gallery works or works of public art. How does this positioning in the marketplace affect the message and effectiveness of the work? In particular, how does the marketplace affect the interpretation of works addressing the urgent issue of climate change? Must artworks always be seen in the context of some market? Is this beneficial to addressing climate change? 2] Currently in the US, science is highly politicized, particularly the science of climate change. How do these politics affect art and science collaborations dealing with climate change? Weather and climate research has a certain amount of unavoidable uncertainty. This uncertainty has been used to discredit science and has been exploited to support various political agendas. Art often presents a personal interpretation of information. How does the personal expression element of art intersect with the uncertainties of weather and climate science? Can this intersection help or hinder public understanding of science? What is the responsibility of the artist to present 'correct' science in art/science collaborations? With an element of uncertainty, how is 'correct' science to be determined? Thanks; Andrea ******************* ROGER MALINA Andrea, You raise some important issues= which I would put in a larger context of climate and culture ( not just art and climate). As pointed out by Julien Climate, like landscape, are cultural constructs not perceptual "truths"= so your question about how to embed current scientific understanding accurately within art works i think needs to be part of a larger question. Among other things artists construct 'grand narratives" ( thus the american landscape painters romanticised the american west as a destination for migration), or Turner in his weatherscapes gave dominion of the weather to human beings. As emphasised by Ramon Guardans one cannot separate 'climate' from other aspects of the 'earth system'= and one concern is that as we work within cultural organisations like galleries we tend to 'simplify' in order to make apprehensible. The art market, like the market of ideas, likes to attach personalities to ideas= to make them negotiable. I am not sure that the art gallery system is any different in this respect from any system where negotiation is taking place. Roger ROGER MALINA You may be interested in a new experiment in on line publishing called THOUGHTMESH http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/ It is being developed by Jon Ippolito, Craig Dietrch, John Bell, Chirag Mehta I have deposited a text that I wrote called LOVELY WEATHER: Asking what the arts can do for the sciences http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/111.php The system creates a "mesh' of citations and semantic connections to the texts. Perhaps other yasminers writing on art and climate would be interested in depositing their texts into THOUGHTMESH here is an excerpt of my text: "If we truly want to understand ecological networks and climate systems, we have to inhabit other 'scales' and develop new kinds of senses. We have to become aware of invisible dynamics at work to which our unaided senses are oblivious. Some artists choose to work through the various kinds of sensors and other interfaces to make explicit these new landscapes; others choose to access the large, and growing databases about the world around us, but to make the content of these databases apprehensible and sensible. We forget that the way we structure thought, language and metaphors themselves, spring from our sensory experienscales, inevitably our way of thinking, our languages and metaphors will change. Both artists and scientists are needed to explore these new territories and make them apprehendable." ********************** IAN CLOTHIER Roger’s message and text has many points worthwhile but I thought I would add to some particular aspects of what he had to say. Understanding integrated systems is extremely important. The weather of course is an outstanding example of systems in integration. Take for example a recent news item distributed by the Telegraph Group, which discussed seeding storms with dust in order to change the direction of cyclones and tornadoes, moving them away from large cities. The very end of the article referred to a possible conundrum: in the US there could be lawsuits over damages caused to properties the storm is diverted over. Leaving aside the question of what actually doing this might be like and whether it is actually possible, what is clear is that the weather does not stand beyond us, but we exist in an integrated system with it. This is true from storms to fires, to swimming at the beach in summertime. So the question really is not what can we do to the weather, but rather what is the weather trying to tell us? As a paradigm of a chaotic situation, one aspect of chaos theory related to nonlinearity in weather is the breakdown of simple cause and effect – one cause could at a later time have a different consequence. And as it happens, we need to look beyond Western European thought, for a heritage of models of integrated systems. As Malina says, it is time for an evolution in awareness in the West. Another consequence of the engagement with nonlinearity is the fact that nonlinearity is cited in engineering and physics, and in post-structural notions such as the rhizome. We need to abandon the notion that one person or thought is always correct, and look to the ways a perspective is both right and wrong. Dissolving academic boundaries and adopting multicultural viewpoints might appear to be idealistic, but the work has already begun. The invitation said we should introduce ourselves, so I am an artist writer with an interest in cultural hybridity and nonlinearity. Some of my projects are themed on hybridity, such as the district of Leistavia, which has an audience initiated constitution and includes substantial and detailed measures in regard to wood conservation and recycling. Leistavia is a meritocracy with ecologically sustainable values driving the economy. Other projects are themed on nonlinearity, which has involved the use of sensors, augmented reality and currently robotics. However while these two themes appear to be of a different order or type, actually they intersect in some unexpected places. Url: intercreate.org/ian. ********************************* NORIE AND MARIA (OUT-OF-SYNC) Thanks, Janine, for moderating this discussion and we look forward to taking part in it. In relation to our own work, Talking about the Weather, and an exhibition we co-curated at UTS Gallery, Sydney (with Jacqueline Bosscher), The Trouble with the Weather -- here are some initial thoughts on your opening questions. 1.Is an emergent mode of relational art developing that is more receptive to public anxieties and concerns about climate and atmospheric pollution? Our project description for Talking about the Weather, which involves social encounters in public places, directly addresses this, so hope you dont mind if we just repeat it here: Talking About the Weather is an ongoing cross media project sparked by our response to the terrifying spectre of global climate change. Sheer terror at the possibilities that are being talked about led us to talking about the weather. In this project weathertalk is no longer a banal exchange of local weather conditions, but instead we ask people to donate their breath - the breath, which they would normally use to talk about the weather and the same breath that is spread far and wide as described bemphasises the dynamic nature of the atmosphere and our part in its creation and destruction. As Tim Flannery says, every breath you take makes you part of a dynamic system called the atmosphere, or the aerial ocean. 2.Does climate science need art? Is the collaboration between artists and scientists useful for both parties and for society-at-large? There are various ways this collaboration takes place. In our exhibition, "The Trouble with the Weather" we sought the collaboration of University of Technology, Sydney scientists in the exhibition catalogue where Stuart White and Jade Herriman, from the Institute for Sustainable Futures and Tally Palmer from the Institute for Water and Environmental Resource Management. They wrote catalogue essays and, among other things, suggested the importance of art in bringing issues of climate science to society-at-large. As Tally wrote: �This exhibition challenges us. The images and sounds break into our senses, perhaps more clearly than other, more linear ways of understanding. These luminous works call out for adventure, courage and a willingness to learn new ways of thinking. New ways of tackling this trouble with the weather�. 3.Does the ambidextrous figure of the artist-scientist or scientist-artist become more relevant at a point of crisis like climate change? This does not relate to our own work nor particularly to our exhibition. Our focus was more on artists engaging with the issue and on opening new ways for the public to engage. What made it all the trickier was that one minute climate change was not on the agenda and then suddenly it was so ubiquitous in the media that people were talking about climate change fatigue. In both instances, there was also a fear factor that we saw art as enabling people to bypass. 4.What expectations do curators and artist-participants have for the audiences of current group exhibitions such as Eco-Media, (Madrid, 2007) Weather Report (Boulder, 2007), and The Trouble with the Weather (Sydney, 2007) Are new audiences expected? Here's what we said in our curatorial statement: The Trouble with the Weather: a southern response brings together artists from the South Pacific, Australia and South America, working across media, to respond to global warming. Using humour and the absurd, displays of excess, sensual environments, intense imagination, and personal and emotional responses, the artists offer us new ways to engage with this politically overloaded and emotionally charged subject.� Its not so much that we wanted new audiences, though we did actually get some, but to offer new ways in to the concerns at a time of overload and fear. 5.How do art projects and exhibitions function in relation to climate activism? Are aesthetic experience and political consciousness diametrically opposed? Not at all, we see aesthetic experience as opening up to political consciousness �in an open ended and non-didactic way. Re this, we agree with Roger Malina's recent post about art's developing new senses. 6.Can art influence public policy on climate change? Is there a social imperative for artists to act politically? Talking about imperatives seems somewhat tricky� And it�s hard to know these days what influences public policy, living in Australia where massive public mobilisations, eg, against the war in Iraq went nowhere. We see it as important to keep a place alive where art can also disturb social rules and regulations � so there can be an artistic climate of diversity and multiplicity. 7.Roger Malina proposes in the introduction to the Eco-media catalogue (2007), The arts, as all other forms of human activity, must be contributors to the new cultural vision of a different kind of techno-scientific society. Currently artistic interactions with science and technology are homeopathic; they need to become systemic. How can this call for a systemic reconfiguration of science-technology-art interactions be actioned? Your question here seems to raise a wider quscience, about new media art and its relation to technology. Steve Dietz has argued that we�re now at a point where 'new media art' needs no longer to focus on technology per se. This seems important to us, to be able to move beyond a formalist attention to technology (which sometimes fell into beta testing for industry) to explorations where as artists we can explore what's happening in techno-scientific society with any technology or media. Best Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda http://www.out-of-sync.com **************************** JANINE RANDERSON thank you to all the respondents to the Lovely Weather thread so far, I posed a few questions at the beginning of this thread, and already several more critical issues have emerged through posts from Roger, Andrea, Ian and Norie. I think now is a good point to probe some responses from other artists about some of the following issues: 1) Andrea Polli raised the complex issue of the affect that economic demands of the gallery system may have on the production of art/climate-science projects. She also asked whether the subjective/interpretive position that artists often occupy, could work against the need for correct science in a field which has an unavoidable uncertainty factor. 2) Roger Malina replied by emphasising that the art gallery system is not necessarily different from any other human system where negotiation is taking place between climate science and culture at large. He makes the point that an artists’ response is just as valid as a scientists’, if we consider that “climate” itself is a cultural construct. (: my art practice moves between the discourses of media hyperbole and scientific data. For example I have displaced media images of floods/storms that have not been proven to be directly caused by climate change, but they are often read in this way. I don’t think it is damaging to the science if art practices occupy a broad spectrum of positions from scientifically observed fact to the sensational (if it is read in context) – but what do scientists think about artists ‘misreadings?’ ) 3) Ian Clothier responds to Roger’s text “What can art do for the sciences” by urging that we look beyond Western modes of thought to respond to the nonlinear integrated system of climate: he suggests that dissolving the boundaries of knowledge areas and adopting multicultural viewpoints is no longer just an ideal: this work has already begun in practice. (:indigenous knowledge seems to be crucial to the discourse around climate change. Is art an area where indigenous voices can be heard more clearly than other discourses?) 4) Maria and Norie from Out-of-Sync responded to the initial questions with a description of their own artwork “Talking about the Weather”. They have also recently curated the exhibition “The Trouble with the Weather: A Southern response” at UTS gallery in Sydney and they provide an insight into some curatorial decisions. Norie raises the issue of “climate change fatigue” through over exposure of the “crisis” in the media. (:this resonates with me as well – is art a small voice that gets lost among the clamour? Or does “keeping a place alive” for art, a different mode/space of thought, have a separate function to activism and of course media which try to mobilise a mass audience. Does it matter if the audiences for art projects are limited?) _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
