Monthly Archives: April 2016

Data and the Future City: a dramatic exploration

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

We often think of art and science as being almost opposing disciplines. Yet at Creative Carbon Scotland we find ourselves benefiting from opportunities presented by bringing artists together with scientists, engineers and technicians to explore approaches to dealing with climate change. Artists can often respond with enthusiasm and a novel viewpoint to problems which seem intractable to the problem solvers while scientist can bolster authenticity in a work of art. Our own recent project ArtCOP Scotland, during which artists responded to the December Paris Climate Summit, revealed the myriad of ways in which artistic practices could help to discuss and explore our relationship with the social-political issues surrounding climate change.

The Traverse recently hosted an interesting example of this approach with a joint production from the Traverse Theatre and the University of Edinburgh Schools of Engineering and Informatics of Data and the Future City.

A group of research staff at the department of Informatics at Edinburgh University were approaching the task of gathering research proposals. Faced with the prospect of organising yet another workshop along the usual lines which would come up with the usual ideas, a chance suggestion that they ‘talk to someone at the Traverse’ culminated in a dramatized presentation of 11 possible scenarios.

Each of the scenarios dealt with a different possible aspect of living in a future version of Edinburgh where personal data was being used to provide services for (and control of) the population. The academics involved each wrote a short dialog which explored possible uses of ‘Big data’ ranging from medical services (e-doctor) to punishments for minor offending (off-points) with benefits and disadvantages explored and discussed.

The dialogs, voiced by 6 actors, reading direct from the scripts, were thought provoking and ranged from tragic to comic and engaged the audience in a way that a list of workshop inspired research ideas never could.

The process of writing, dramatizing and presenting the scenarios took place over 3 half days and was both inspiring and difficult for both the scientists and the artists but illustrated how the arts can provide a voice for a wide range of communities who struggle to communicate and audiences who would otherwise have limited opportunities to hear diverse messages.

Creative Carbon Scotland runs a range of projects to bring together the arts and environmental sustainability. Find out more about our work here.

 

The post Data and the Future City: a dramatic exploration 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

Powered by WPeMatico

Architects and climate change

Artists and Climate Change

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Daughter of an architect, I’ve noticed an uptick of articles over the past two years speculating that #architects will increasingly find themselves – wittingly or not – at the center of global climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts.

As architect Alice Guess has written:

“Architects are, by the very nature of what we do, best positioned to lead the response to [sea level rise and climate change] in a way that not only insures we can persist but that persisting can be beautiful and comfortable and safe and functional. So architects need to step up and take our seat at the table and start leading the way (emphasis added). We need to reclaim the conversation from the insurance industry and statisticians who focus on “hazard” and “risk”. Let’s start talking about possibilities and opportunities, to start designing our future.”

Based on a quick* Internet search, the majority of recent articles linking architects and climate change have focused on urban architecture and/or urban planning. This is justified, given that 54% of humanity currently lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to two-thirds by mid-century.

Not to be overlooked, however, are hundreds of beautiful and innovative projects designed primarily for rural areas. For two stunning examples, look no further than Arturo Vittori’s architectural firm which designed the WarkaWater Tower project in Ethiopia and Bee’ah’s environmental waste management project in the Emirati desert (see image below) designed by visionary architect Zaha Hadid, who passed away suddenly last month.

Screen Shot 2016-04-07 at 8.28.47 PMThe following set of links provides a few examples of the myriad strategies currently available to architects, designers, engineers and urban planners to reduce emissions, conserve energy, build resilience, and prepare for inevitable sea-level rise in coastal urban centres:

But of all the projects I’ve seen on the Internet recently, my absolute favorite is Strawscraper, an urban wind farm proposed by the Swedish architectural firm Belatchew Arkitekter. As a renewable energy photographer, I’m clearly a sucker for anything and everything wind. But after watching the video below, I seriously wondered if I have made a mistake by not following in my father’s footsteps:

* N.b. This short post was only meant to be a quick introduction to what I hope will become, over time and with your input, a more substantial essay on the important role that architects must play as we adapt to and mitigate climate change, especially in large coastal urban centres. Neither architect nor architectural historian, I surely have overlooked important contributions from the architectural community that deserve to be highlighted here.  I welcome your feedback, criticism and collaboration to jointly enlarge this post over the coming months before sharing it more widely in print.  Joan Sullivan, Photographer

Follow Joan Sullivan on Twitter @CleanNergyPhoto

 

———-

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

Powered by WPeMatico

Ben’s Blog: Disinvestment

Creative Carbon Scotland

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Over three years ago now, I wrote a blog about why anyone investing in a pension – and that means most of us, with auto-enrolment meaning that all employers will soon have to provide a workplace pension – should consider a fund that avoids investing in fossil fuels. A recent report brings this up to date and makes even more stark predictions.

The report, published in the highly respected academic journal Nature Climate Change, spells out the risks. When I was writing back in 2013, my point was that as climate change became more urgent, companies whose worth was based on their fossil fuel assets would lose value as people realised that the oil and gas wells, coal mines and tar sands they owned would never be exploited as fossil fuels would become too expensive or illegal to use. This is still the case, and a speaker at a discussion after the Paris Climate Change talks suggested that one reason why Saudi Arabia is not curtailing its oil production to raise the price, as it would have in the past, is because it knows that in future its oil will be harder to sell, so it might as well pump as much as it can now.

The risk today is wider. The report argues that the impact on global financial assets of 21st century climate change is equal to 1.8% of the total, or $2.5trillion, assuming that we take a ‘business as usual’ approach to climate change – ie we don’t make any changes to the way in which we run the world. However, this is just the lower end of the estimate and in the worst scenarios it rises to nearly 17% of the global financial assets or $24trillion. These are substantial sums.

13635340783_b4f475f9d7_kThe losses would be caused by severe weather events, and the damage done to buildings, infrastructure and land used for agriculture; and by the reduction in earnings and presumably productivity for people affected by higher temperatures, drought and other climate impacts. In recent decades, there has been a great deal of high value building on relatively low lying land – areas like Florida for example, or the bank of the Thames. Flooding caused by sea level rise and storm surges; therefore, now has much greater financial impact than would have been the case in the past when land at risk of flooding was routinely less developed.

The report argues that taking action to contain climate change to below 2°C will reduce the potential losses significantly:

‘Including mitigation costs, the present value of global financial assets is an expected 0.2% higher when warming is limited to no more than 2◦C, compared with business as usual. The 99th percentile [ie the worst case scenario] is 9.1% higher. Limiting warming to no more than 2◦C makes financial sense to risk-neutral investors—and even more so to the risk averse.’ (Nature Climate Change 4 April 2016. DOI: 10.10138)

So what should the pension investor, or perhaps more importantly the arts manager who is setting up an auto enrolment scheme for their company’s employees, do? The answer must be to avoid investments in companies with interests in fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal. Not only will their assets become less valuable, as Carbon Tracker continues to demonstrate, but their continued development of the fossil fuel reserves that they own will also affect the wider portfolio of shares and assets that pension funds invest in. There are numerous pension funds that avoid environmentally problematic investments – Aviva’s Sustainable Futures funds are just some of the best known (and this isn’t a recommendation – I’m not qualified for that!).

There’s another angle to this. I signed a letter that was published in the Guardian on Monday urging Hartwig Fischer, the new Director of the British Museum, to drop sponsorship by BP. Liberate Tate, Platform and Art Not Oil have been very successful at raising this issue and apparently having some success: BP will no longer be sponsoring the Tate. Their approach has been political, artistic and fun, demonstrating that art and politics can happily go to bed together. Similarly the divestment campaign at Edinburgh University continues to make waves – and to be fair, seems to have had an effect. And Glasgow University was the first in Europe to disinvest. Things are happening.

Many years ago, Scotland faced the poll tax before England and our protests were a bit too restrained – nothing happened. Shortly after there was more… robust protest in England, Thatcher and the poll tax were chucked out. Is it time we in the arts became a bit less restrained here about fossil fuel?

The post Ben’s Blog: Disinvestment 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

Powered by WPeMatico

Rhyming Science Over a Street Beat

Artists and Climate Change

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

A rapper is perhaps the last person I would expect to tell me about our global environmental issues. Yet rap can be a powerful tool for communicating  the politics, economics, and science of climate change. That’s what I learned after seeing Baba Brinkman‘s latest show The Rap Guide to Climate Chaos in New York City a few weeks ago. There is something exhilarating about rhyming such a dry subject over a street beat and delivering it with the high energy usually reserved for lowbrow topics.

Baba graciously accepted to answer a few questions for Artists And Climate Change:

How did you get into rap?

I was into writing poetry as a teenager, and rap was the music we all listened to, but for some reason I saw rap and poetry as separate things. I was already a pretty good writer when I started college, but I couldn’t see how poetry would ever support me or help me connect with a significant audience of my peers. Then around age nineteen I tried writing some poetry based on the rhyme and rhythm patterns of rap, and before I knew it I was writing rap lyrics. That’s eighteen years ago now and I’m still hooked.

What can rap accomplish in terms of communicating climate change that other art forms can’t do as well?

Rap songs are packed with mnemonic devices, rhymes, hooks, melodies, rhythms, all designed to get the song stuck in your head, so they are naturally a great way to distill complex ideas into a memorable form. Also, rap as a genre is infused with confidence and swagger, and climate science needs a shot of adrenaline to drive home its core messages, which are actually pretty astonishing when you confront them head-on. As I say in one of the songs: “You want a new definition of ‘hard core’? Check out the intergovernmental climate report”

You presented Rap Guide to Climate Chaos at COP21. How was that experience? What was the reception?

It was amazing to be there in the midst of the negotiations and see the wheels turning and the process of international climate diplomacy at work, although of course much of the time observing negotiations is like watching paint dry. The result was exciting and the sense of being part of history was exciting, but the nitty gritty was a mix of fascinating and tedious. That’s probably part of why the response to my performances was so enthusiastic, because I was kind of a “pop up rapper” at the conference, there to inject some levity into an otherwise heavy atmosphere. Rather than a single scheduled show, I was invited to perform at multiple events, usually for audiences who didn’t expect me to be there, which definitely raised some eyebrows and snapped a few people out of their torpor. Here’s a blog written by some German students who randomly caught one of my shows, which gives a good sense of how most people responded.

Baba Brinkman 2

What is the single most important thing artists can do to address the problem of climate change?

The problem has historically been stalled by a lack of political will, so artists, especially famous artists, can play a major role in signalling to their fans and supporters that this is a major issue and it needs to be confronted. Not everyone will apply their creativity directly to climate issues as I have done, but wherever possible it’s important to bring the issue to the forefront and be provocative about it, forcing people to face the facts honestly instead of resting on false consolations and complicity.

What gives you hope?

The people I meet at my shows who share my desire to raise the alarm, and the sense that the tide is turning and denial of climate change is an increasingly fringe position.

 

———-

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

Powered by WPeMatico

Opportunity: Project Artist Hawick Flood Protection Scheme

Creative Carbon Scotland, Open Calls

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

May 2016 – October 2016

Deadline for applications:  Monday 25th April 2016

Fee:  £4000

A unique opportunity has arisen for a Project Artist to work closely with the engineering and project team around the Hawick Flood Protection Scheme (HFPS) and engage communities in the development and design of proposals which can be taken forward within the scheme.   The key priority of the HFPS works is to protect the town from the effects of a ‘1 in 75’ year flood event on the River Teviot, but the works also offer opportunities to incorporate imaginative place-making proposals, including for permanent public artworks, which can be taken forward into the second phase of the HFPS.

This opportunity has been enabled through a partnership between Scottish Borders Council, CH2M (scheme engineers) and the Creative Arts Business Network (CABN), and has already involved initial engagement with community groups around potential proposals.

More information is available on the CABN website – http://www.cabn.info/opportunities/project-artist-hawick-flood-protection-scheme.html

Image: http://www.oldemaps.co.uk/Hawick-map.htm

The post Opportunity: Project Artist Hawick Flood Protection Scheme 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

Powered by WPeMatico

Job: Sustainability Coordinator at the School of Art Institute of Chicago

Open Calls

Duties

1. Competition Coordination – Develop, plan, coordinate and implement activities including, but not limited to, Recyclemania, other competitions and programs related to sustainability at SAIC. Both the manner in which these activities are organized and the nature of their content should be geared towards achieving buy-in and habit transformation from student, faculty and staff community members.

2. Project Management and Policy Development – Encourage and facilitate sustainability programs initiated by student, faculty and staff community members. Foster and coordinate new ideas and concepts for sustainability programming themes and identify materials and resources to supplement, expand or replace existing sustainability programming.

3. Committee Development – Assist Sustainable SAIC (Committee) in defining goals, performance metrics and a long range plan for sustainability at SAIC. Monitor and evaluate program effectiveness, document performance trends, and recommend and implement modifications to improve program effectiveness.

4. Department Liaison – Represent SAIC’s sustainability programs to the University; maintain liaison with groups, programs, offices and departments at SAIC to achieve sustainability objectives; serve on Sustainable SAIC committee.

5. Reporting and Planning – Work with community stakeholders to submit SAIC’s annual Greenhouse Gas Emissions Report, as part of the schools Carbon Commitment, as well as compiling information for Chicago’s Energy Benchmarking Ordinance. Collect and track energy data for such reports. Lead the SAIC community in developing a Climate Action Plan as well as AASHE STARS. Coordinate efforts to establish and report on a Resilience Commitment. Create process for updating plans and reports on annual basis.

6. Department Programs – Work with Facilities Services to maximize potential of waste diversion programs – recycling and composting.  Expand services where necessary. Initiate campaign to rework signage for programs.

7. Accounting and Budget Tracking – Assist in the preparation of budgets and grants; monitor, verify and reconcile expenditure of budgeted funds as appropriate.

Perform other related duties incidental to the work described herein.

  • Experience working in higher education
  • Bachelor degree in art or sustainability related field preferred.
  • Experience in program administration and knowledge of the SAIC community necessary to plan, coordinate and implement a variety of program activities and events across schools and departments.
  • Excellent analytical, communication and organization skills; an ability to self-motivate, multi-task and to work in a fast-paced environment; to work under deadlines; and the ability to work closely with students, faculty and administrators from various schools and central administration.

The position is full time M-F. Located in SAIC.

Application Time Out Warning

The Art Institute of Chicago requires all applicants to complete an online application to be considered for employment. 60 minutes are allotted for applicants to complete the employment application. The application will automatically time out after 60 minutes. If you are unable to submit the completed application at this time, please choose the “Save for Later” option to avoid losing the information you have entered so far.

Closing Statement

The Art Institute of Chicago is an equal opportunity, equal access employer fully committed to achieving a diverse and inclusive workplace.

You can find the original post by CLICKING HERE

Support Blued Trees New Legal Initiatives!

news

From Friend of the CSPA Aviva Rahmani:

We are pleased to announce that on Earth Day, April 22, 2016, a series of new 1/3 mile measures of the Blued Trees Symphony will be created in Virginia and New Hampshire. We invite you to participate in the Blued Trees Symphony. Download the Blued Trees manual.

We are also thrilled to report that the Blued Trees Symphony has received a generous grant from the Ethelwyn Doolittle Justice and Outreach Fund from the Community Church of New York Unitarian Universalist. The $2,500 grant will be used to help support the legal work to protect the Blued Trees Symphony under threat of demolition, where people’s private land is being seized under eminent domain by fossil fuel corporations. Please make a contribution here that would go towards matching this grant, covering our legal costs.

The Blued Trees Symphony could help protect the planet from dangerous methane emissions by setting legal precedents with a network of connected art! Proliferating natural gas infrastructures across the United States (and globally) significantly contributes to climate change.

The Blued Trees Symphony is a new kind of art. It establishes a permanent
relationship between people, art and habitat. You can make a donationto support lead artist Aviva Rahmani and help cover the Blued Trees Symphony administration costs here: Support the Blued Trees Symphony!

The overture copyright was registered, but Spectra Energy destroyed it anyway. Now we want to hold them accountable with a new legal strategy. Your support for that legal framework would protect the Blued Trees Symphony from further destruction and hold Spectra Energy responsible for the damage they have already done.

Please give as generously as you can to win this fight. We believe that with your help, our creative approach, a celebration of beauty, trees and natural lands, we can prevail against toxic fossil fuel expansion and establish a new paradigm for our times.

Open Call: Feeding the Insatiable – a creative summit

Open Calls

November 9-11, 2016
Venue: Schumacher College, Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EA, UK

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS 22.00 GMT May 8, 2016

Schumacher College, RegenSW and the art.earth network invite you to submit a proposal for participation to the forthcoming summit Feeding the Insatiable to be held November 9-11, 2016 at Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EL, UK.  This event is part of Schumacher College’s Arts & Ecology programme and is produced by art.earth. More detailed information can be found at feedingtheinsatiable.info.

Frame

COP21, the climate talks held in Paris in December 2015 produced a breakthrough agreement after twenty years of frustrations, meanderings, compromises, and political squeamishness. The commitment to limit temperature rise to 2°C (whilst aiming for 1.5°C) represents a global commitment to wean the world from dirty energy to cleaner forms in which renewables must inevitably play a significant part: the only way the commitment can be met. This, we were told, ‘was the last chance… and we took it’; not all voices purred so positively but the outcome was broadly embraced.

The politicians and diplomats, it seems, have finally been moved to action. Moving the general populace has proved more difficult. Twenty years of increasingly immoderate language bordering at times on the hysterical, broadly-aligned and finely-honed but progressively panicky science from some of the world’s brightest minds, and even a grudging political consensus has made virtually no impact on how people live and how they consume: energy, food, the planet. In the meantime our government here in the UK sends out the most mixed of messages, lauding the outcome of COP21 whilst legislating to undermine renewable and clean energy and many other initiatives aimed at mitigating harmto the planet. Clean energy becomes a discussion about money, not about our world.

Art can change the world.  Artists have played an important part in every major social change in our society and have an indispensable role today in helping us deal with complex existential challenges.  But issues-laden art can be bombastic, unsubtle and lacking in spirit, particularly when artists insist they have a message to send. Renewable energy can change the world, too. But we don’t have to accept that only industrial scale installations are the answer.

This creative summit encourages through creative intervention and invention and new approaches to scientific enquiry all manner of energy generation including the quirky, the impossible, the micro and the personal. It encourages debate – practical, philosophical, metaphysical, and theoretical – about how creative minds and creative spirit can be broughtto bear on these issues.

We explore ways in which creative makers and enquirers (artists and scientists), philosophers, theorists and others can increasingly play a part in moving rather than cajoling, inspiring rather than scaring, succouring rather than scourging. The impassioned voice has an essential role to play in shifting the inert and entrenched thinking about how we live in the world, how we consume its resources and how we subvert and circumvent monolithic thinking. The danger lies not in those with abrasively negative views (as panic leads to stridency bordering on the absurd and numbers inevitably dwindle to irrelevancy under the growing weight of evidence), but those who have no views at all. Flicking the switch is so utterly fundamental to our daily lives that we gasp with horror and puzzlement if it produces no effect.
How can the lights not come on?

Keynote speakers

Robert Ferry and Elizabeth Monoian of Land Art Generator Initiative
Laura Watts (IT University of Copenhagen): writer, poet and ethnographer of futures

Topics of interest

Not intended to proscriptive or prescriptive, this list of topics suggests the areas we are likely to explore. However we are open to all relevant ideas, from the philosophical to the most practical and pragmatic

  • visioning change
  • imaginative and invented narratives and technologies
  • micro-generation and body-derived energy
  • plant and other organic power generators
  • transformational potential of art
  • beyond communication
  • energy and metaphor
  • message and instrumentalisation
  • slow art, process
  • non-literal big data visualisation
  • the artist and the engineer
  • envisioning the profound
  • aesthetics of art/science
  • using imagination for social change
  • emotion / science
  • sensible / actual
  • new ways of seeing
  • new ways of knowing
  • evolving meaning
  • celebrating authenticity and ethos
  • energy in the animal world
  • exploring chasms between artists and industry
  • energy futures and questions of design
  • ethnographics, big data, climate change, understanding

Types of submission

Submit any ideas that inspire you and which you think may have a place during this event. Given its deliberately constrained scope and size, there will be limited slots available, so please inspire us.

We are interested in submissions that embrace the following formats. Note that in each case we will add time for Q&A, but please think about how interaction with the audience can be built into your offer. Formats might be:

  • academic paper presentations lasting no more than 20 minutes (with 10 minutes for Q&A)
  • panel discussions, live interviews, and other discursive formats, lasting between 30-50 minutes. There is potential to broadcast these live.
  • presentation of artwork, indoor or outdoor walking and other outdoor activities, particularly ones that engage with theoretical or philosophical thought in addition to their creative content
  • workshops, lasting 90 minutes (please indicate how many participants you can support)
  • if you are geographically distant, you can send papers for inclusion in the publication only. These submissions will be considered along with all others, on the understanding that you are unable to attend the event itself. There will be a nominal registration fee to help cover publication costs.

The deadline for submission is 22.00 GMT on Sunday May 8, 2016. We are requesting 250-word abstracts or outlines, which must be submitted through the event website at http://feedingtheinsatiable.info/take-part/. We are unable to accept any submissions after the deadline.

For more detailed information please visit www.feedingtheinsatiable.info

CLIMARTE SPECIAL EVENT (VIC): POSTER PROJECT

Open Calls

CLIMARTE has commissioned eleven Australian artiststo design posters that engage the community on climate change action, and convey the strength, optimism, and urgency we need to move to a clean, renewable energy future.

Artists Angela Brennan, Chris Bond, Jon Campbell, Kate Daw, Katherine Hattam, Siri Hayes, Martin King, Gabrielle de Vietri & Will Foster, Thornton Walker, Miles Howard-Wilks have created posters that speak from the heart.

Posters will be displayed in an exhibition at the LAB-14 Gallery at the Carlton Connect Initiative University of Melbourne, as well as on poster sites throughout Melbourne.

CLIMARTE would like to thank the City of Melbourne, Purves Environmental Fund, the Connect Initiative, and Plakkit for their generous support of the CLIMARTE Poster Project 2016.

          

Event
Poster Project Exhibition

Exhibition Dates
5th – 28th May 2016

Opening Night
Thursday 5th May 2016
6:00pm

Venue
The University of Melbourne
LAB-14 Gallery at
the Carlton Connect Initiative
700 Swanston Street, Carlton

Stay tuned for more!

Call for Papers: Art and Political Ecology

Open Calls

The upcoming issue of Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics will discuss art’s relationship with political ecology: What role does art have to play – if any – under the precariously situated human and environmental consequences of neoliberalism and its political geography? Which potentials can be found in locally situated artistic discourses and re-imaginations of political ecology, for influencing global discourses on climate change? How can the dialogue between culturally and historically different ecological imaginaries and eco-philosophical traditions be significant in an era marked by unprecedented threats to the environment?

Contributors from diverse disciplines are invited to submit essays, reviews or interviews that address the theme ‘Art and Political Ecology’, through a high variety of possible angles.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

  • Artistic strategies as forms of eco-activism.
  • Eco-activist, artistic platforms for cooperation.
  • Experimental formats of political ecology: artist/ research residencies, cross-disciplinary fieldwork.
  • Cooperative projects in political ecology between artists and researchers from diverse scientific fields.
  • Eco-poetics and eco-aesthetics, across all art forms.
  • Artistic eco-activism in response to restrictions to the freedom of expression.
  • Indigenous ecological imaginaries in art.
  • Ecopoetics and the political ecology of ‘space’ and ‘place’ in art.
  • Ecological imaginaries and eco-philosophical traditions in a cross-cultural and historical perspective.
  • Potentials and disadvantages related to the integration of eco-activism in the global contemporary art scene.
  • Critical artistic thinking on eco-aesthetics/ eco-activism in relation to neoliberal geopolitics.

Please send your proposal (abstract or draft), a brief bio and samples of earlier work to submissions@seismopolite.com  within April 8, 2016. Submission deadline, final text: April 29, 2016.

www.seismopolite.com

Back issues: http://seismopolite.com/artandpolitics

Thank you very much, and all the best,
Paal Andreas Bøe
Editor-in-Chief

www.seismopolite.com
paal.andreas.boe@seismopolite.com