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 24^th 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.

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.

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.

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.

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This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

by Guest Blogger Dr Carol Birrell

She was a tiny clot of earth, a nano particle of something finer than clay, finer than silt, but soil nonetheless. She was ancient with memory rushing though gills, feather, bone and gullet. She rubbed against scales, swallowed spore of dinosaur plants, arctic tundra and Devonian rocks. The ingestion of millions of earth years all held in one big watery sponge of memory. It adhered to her, refused to let go, to be absorbed by some other fleeting jolt of reality. It would not dissolve in those acidic depths, nor would it break up or break down. It just remained. It was the taste of infinity that knew no definitions between plant or animal, organic and inorganic, human or non-human. Her hair turned copper red, her skin became dark brown leather, creased at the edges of dreams, slipping in and out of viruses, bacteria and the DNA of a million frozen glaciers. She had become that, and all, a cosmic conflagration.

I am an artist, writer, and researcher who has always held a deep fascination with bogs: peat bogs. In Alaska in 2015, on a Writers Fellowship through the Island Institute, I was in a thick boreal forest late afternoon when the sun’s rays hit spots on stumps, branches, trunks, and leaves. The light was riveting as it seemed to illuminate those spaces from within. That moment encapsulated for me the moment of carbon capture and I was hooked into something.

Since then, I have pursued my interest and lack of knowledge about the carbon cycle. I want to understand how/why carbon is captured, stored, and released in a story of transformation from organic matter to inorganic mineral (peat, lignite, coal, graphite, diamond, and many in-between). In these Anthropocene times where concrete evidence of indelible human impact on the planet’s life systems has been acknowledged, carbon, the element, has become demonised. It is one of the major greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. I am keen to develop my own relationship and insight into this crucial life force. I look to the intersection of the arts and ecology as a way of deepening into my embeddedness with the earth, and as a means to make sense of these times. I trust the arts and creativity as a way of knowing, and I wanted to work with a group of artists to open new possibilities.

The project began with an invite for a gathering of an open group of artists, working across various arts modalities, such as writers, visual artists, poets, printers, photographers, story tellers, dancers, musicians, performance artists, all interested in the story of carbon, and working on one particular place: a peat bog on mainland Australia. This peat bog, a glacial relic, is estimated to be at least 20,000 years old and has been strongly disrupted from its trajectory by humans and domesticated animals, yet still survives, albeit in tattered form.

The type of questions I was hoping to explore were: What can this peat bog teach us? How can our own arts practice speak of the bog? What are the stories that emerge from this place? What might it mean to share the stories of this place and our art work in a series of conversations both private and public? How does our relationship with and our understanding of carbon and the earth itself develop through this process? Is it possible for humans to develop an understanding of Deep Time through the process of engaging with an ancient bog?

The idea was for people to go to the bog independently and develop their own arts response to it, then come together on a regular basis to share those responses, tease out ideas, see the art work in progress, and create a dialogue between artists, known collectively and fondly, as Bog Rats. A Secret Facebook page was established as a platform for people to share their work and ideas. ‘Secret’ because the bog is not legally accessible, hence this artistic work requires boldness and risk, just as we humans living in the Anthropocene need to think and act in a disruptive fashion in order to forge new relationship with the earth. The possibility has been raised of a podcast, or documentary and presentations at conferences, or an art exhibition. We were also hoping to grow the project so people living in other countries could be part of their own carbon lab and share ideas across the globe.

So far, we have had 30 or so artists express interest and embark on their own art work, as well as a public performance story telling group offering to be part of this work in re-telling and re-enacting our stories. We have had several meetings full of showing, sharing and asking questions. The dialogue is always rich and alive. When an artist speaks from her/his voice, I am exposed to a different way of knowing expressed through their particular arts modality, and it makes me see and understand things differently. Like the bog, I ingest new layers of sediment, swirl them around together, then something settles in me for a time of waiting, to emerge, who knows when, as a new articulation.

I want to speak to some of the work that has emerged so far through my art: I have written four short pieces, a few poems, taken photos of the bog in golden light, of human presence insinuating itself into bog life, played with bog art using bog mud on paper, and tasted bog mud, bog plants. Finally, I have smeared my body with bog mud in an echo of ‘Bog Man’ stories of preservation. I have dreamt about the bog…

The ideas that are coming to me for further work concern the seeming surface stillness versus the seething mass of movement of sediment in water throughout the under layers of the bog; how my concept of time alters in dialogue with bog time/carbon time; the notion of a state of equipoise or suspended animation as regards the ‘hold’ on life the bog has – it reminds me of hibernation – when the normal process of life has been intercepted, so that decay, the natural process we associate with death, is held at bay or deferred; and the curious transition from organic to inorganic states.

What I thought to be a relatively short-term project (six months) is now looking like a few years. If you would like to be part of this project, begin your own or converse with other ‘Bog Rats’, contact me via email:carolleebirrell@gmail.com.

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Dr Carol Birrell is an artist, researcher, and writer. She has taught in universities and schools, is passionate about the intersection between ecology and the arts, and Indigenous knowledge systems. Her land-based art practice, developed over 20 years, called Touching the Earth, is a dialogue with the earth. Carol knows, as part of her Climate Change work, she needs to urgently spend time in Greenland listening to glaciers melt, and in the Arctic Circle responding to permafrost thawing. You can FB Friend her at Carol Birrell where she may allow you to join the Secret Group of Carbon Laboratory.

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Follow on Facebook and Twitter.

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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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Featured Image: Members of the Tidelines Ferry Tour from left to right: Hoonah high schoolers Cecilia George and Mary Jack, artists Heather Powell, Michelle Kuen Suet Fung, Chantal Bilodeau, and Allison Warden at the ferry terminal in Ketchikan. Photo by Peter Bradley.

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

by Guest Blogger Peter Bradley

This article originally appeared in the Capital City Weekly, June 22, 2016.

We were at the Fish House in Ketchikan early in April, talking about climate; the room was full and the conversation was lively. Outside, the berries were blooming and the snow was gone. Ketchikan was the third stop of the Tidelines Journey, a nine-town ferry tour organized through my work at the Island Institute, a Sitka based nonprofit dedicated to fostering resilience by promoting creative, collaborative explorations of the connections between place and community. I was traveling for the month with a group of storytellers, artists, and culture bearers, all of us working in our own ways to better understand the relationship between the changing climate and our changing cultures. A week into the tour it was becoming clear that other people in Southeast Alaska are as preoccupied with climate change as I am.

For my entire adult life there’s been an environmental alarm in the background of my consciousness, sometimes faint, sometimes loud, but always buzzing away. I’ve come of age alongside our society’s growing recognition of climate change, and I think about it every day. I’ve heard people compare that feeling to what they experienced during the Cold War — a looming threat of global proportions far beyond their control or even the daily experience of any individual. The ferry tour was a way to step back from the distancing global perspective of climate change — the unprecedented environmental disasters, the ugly politics, the terrifying forecasts — to try to capture the Alaskan perspective on the ground.

Toward that end, we hosted conversations in nine coastal communities on the ferry network. We asked people to share observations about changes they’ve seen in the land, what they expect to see in the future, and what climate change means to them. We were excited to have these conversations because of the incredible eloquence of Alaskans when it comes to describing the natural world. As much of the country and world has gone through rapid urbanization and domestication, many Alaskans remain attached to seasonal rhythms, taking direction from seasonal cues and activities, engaging with wildness as a daily practice.

Allison Warden speak with three classrooms of students at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School in Juneau as her rap persona, Aku-Matu. Photo by Simone Machamer.

We believe that the world needs to hear those sorts of perspectives, and all of that knowledge and experience made for expansive conversations on our ferry tour. What we learned is that when Alaskans talk about climate change, there isn’t much that we don’t talk about. We talk about migration and exodus, blueberries and cedar, carbon and nitrogen. We talk about the snow-melt and the spawning salmon. We talk about higher tides, glacial rebound, and green mountaintops. We talk about forest fires and algal blooms and seabird starvation. We talk about steamer clams and the red tide and the forced decline of longstanding subsistence practices. We talk about jobs and lifestyles, about dependence and independence, about war and collapse and expansion and contraction and carrying capacity and our capacity for caring, about unpredictability and the difficulty of adaptation. We talk about winning and losing. We talk about grandparents and grandchildren. We talk about language and the words we won’t need or will need more than ever.

As the tour continued, we came to realize that most of us don’t have the scientific tools to differentiate between climate-related changes and the other forms of environmental imbalance that we’re witnessing. That’s why when we talk about climate change, we can’t help but talk about seals loaded with lead, about wastewater from cruise ships, tailings from mines, and coastlines riddled with trash from around the world. We talk about how mountain lions have arrived on Kupreanof Island as a result of moose arriving as a result of willow growing as a result of humans logging. We talk about science, but we also talk about storytelling, about tradition and about technology, about responsibility, and about regret.

As the tour unfolded, the conversations about climate change started to feel more and more like conversations about the values of Alaskans. We learned that the forces that have defined Alaska’s financial growth and expansion in recent decades are not the forces that define Alaskans as people.

At the Public Library in Petersburg, at the Salvation Army in Kake, at the Elks Lodge in Wrangell, and at the Center For Coastal Studies in Homer, we heard a great yearning to maintain the connection to the land that defines us as Alaskans. We heard people express that disconnection from nature and the unwilding of humanity have sparked climate change among a suite of other social ills. We heard people talk about finding hope in the idea of committing to ancient strategies and technique in the modern world. We heard the idea that culture and language grow out of place, and that within a language are keys to long-studied ways of living rightly in a place. We heard that intergenerational knowledge, communal wisdom, and hard-earned intuition capture more of the spirit of a place than technology can, and we heard that respecting the land as a vast, uncontrollable, and powerful entity is an essential part of moving forward.

Weaver Teri Rofkar and her husband Denny on the ferry between Juneau and Kodiak.

As a state, Alaska is reeling from the collapse of oil and coming to terms with the precariousness of our financially dependent relationship on this extractive industry. As people, however, Alaskans are reeling from the idea of collapse of the ecosystems on which our well-being and chosen lifestyles depend, coming to terms with the precariousness of our reciprocal relationships with the rich web of life.

As people the world over try to understand the implications of a warming world, Alaskans have an opportunity to share our knowledge about the wealth of the world around us, and the importance of establishing and maintaining sustainable practices that honor the earth. The world needs to hear the voices of people whose daily practice includes measured, close observation of the patterns and movements of the vast ecosystems they are part of.

Often, people feel small, insubstantial, and vulnerable in the context of climate change.

We’re used to that combination here, though it comes in a different form: awe. It’s a breathless feeling of tininess that we can experience standing atop a mountain, or rocking in heavy swell, or interacting with a bear. At our final event of the tour, at the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies in Homer, we asked people to share their stories of awe. Those stories of humble respect for the whims of the wild seem essential as we come to terms with climate change and talk about the damage that humanity has wrought by trying to tame and control the planet.

A beautiful scenery seen from the ferry during the Tour. Photo by Chantal Bilodeau.

At the Island Institute, we’re working to find more ways to gather the knowledge that Alaskans have about climate change, and share it among Alaskan communities and with the wider world. Our next step is to create a radio and podcast series. Through these stories, we hope to inspire our listeners with the lives of the adaptive people and species that will continue to have a close relationship to the land in the midst of change. We also hope to catalyze a larger commitment toward becoming more engaged participants in, and observers of, the broader natural world around us.

We’d like to hear from you. If you’re interested in sharing your perspective, observations, or ideas about what climate change means for you or for Alaska, please emailradio@iialaska.org or write to Island Institute / PO Box 2420 / Sitka, AK 99835.

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Peter Bradley is the Executive Director of the Island Institute, a Sitka based non-profit which runs a variety of artist residency programs, community conversations, and storytelling events, along with the Sitka Story Lab, a creative writing and storytelling program for youth. You can reach the Island Institute by emailing peter@iialaska.org, writing to PO Box 2420 / Sitka, AK 99835, or calling 907-747-3794.

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Filed under: Editorial, Guest Blog Series

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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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This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

by Guest Blogger Simon Kerr

Can music help make a safer climate?

As a musician I should say yes. Folk music has always engaged in social issues, Rap is a language of self-empowerment for marginalized youth, and Reggae speaks of freedom …

Except there isn’t much music speaking to climate change.

While other art forms address climate change, music is conspicuous by its relative silence. But I think it ought to. As Joan Sullivan writes on this blog, “protest music is the missing ingredient to breathe new life and a sense of urgency into the global climate change conversation.”

In the beginning of 2016, we developed Music for a Warming World  –a 75-minute concert using music and projected visuals and video, telling the story of our warming planet.

Over the years I’ve recorded a few “environmental” songs and they were often a part of our gigs, but I always felt that this wonderful creative medium could do much more to address climate change. But how could we do it without being trite or preachy? Here is what we did.

First, we figured we needed to tell a story. We knew it couldn’t be just a scary story. That doesn’t work, as lots of recent research has shown. So we thought long and hard and came up with this structure: starting with the coming Storm (sobering news from science), experiencing Loss (eco-mourning), focusing on positive Change (technology & politics) and finally celebrating Hope (living well in a challenging world). It sounds straightforward now, but it took several months and a couple of trial runs before we found something we were happy with.

We decided not to try to “convert” climate change deniers and sceptics. Music is not really the appropriate medium for presenting carefully constructed rational arguments. Music is good at telling stories and is wonderful for allowing people to feel the impacts of those stories. We would just tell an honest story and let people engage with it in their own way; art creates space for reflection! Using original music and imagery (including minimal text), we speak honestly about the perilous state of planetary warming without trying to prove anything (though all our key facts are from peer reviewed sources).  That’s the rather challenging “state of the planet” bit of the story. But what does it mean for us?

It means loss. We have and will continue to lose much that we value to climate changes; coastlines, species, home and ways of life, mighty glaciers, probably the Great Barrier Reef. This is where we must acknowledge a role for mourning, for processing the many rapid changes happening before our eyes.

That, by no means, is the end of the story. Maybe we can change things? There is in fact a hell of a lot of positive change happening that we all need to see, to feel, to experience. One significant story is the need to leave coal (and other fossil fuels) in the ground. We need to stop digging it up because if we do, we will burn it, and if we burn all current known reserves, the planet will warm 3-4^oC. No climate scientist I know (and I do know a number) wants to live in that world. So I wrote a song called “Leave them in the Ground.” It is not yet a global hit, but hey, there is still time! Though releasing it first might help!

What about the revolution in renewable energy that no one predicted? We thought we should tell that story as well. It seems to cheer people up a fair bit.

Then there was the troublesome issue of politics. Now, I understand the frustration of politics (having taught it at a university for a number of years), but we needed to include it in our story. Then along came Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything, and her linking of the unfinished business of social justice, climate change and capitalism. So to cut a long story short, I wrote a new song called … “This Changes Everything; It’s Changing our World.” It seemed to catch the mood I was in. And it is a reggae type thing, so you can dance to it, if you want to.

But how should this story finish? That got us pondering deeply about our beautiful and troubled world. We realised how simple it really is. Wellbeing depends on where our emotional attention is. We think we can be encouraged by an underestimated fact about the future; it is not here yet.

The interesting thing about the future is that it rarely turns out as we expected. Predictions are difficult. Climate modelling is pretty accurate these days, but what is far less certain is how we, the human community, will respond to climate change. I wasn’t expecting the Paris Agreement to be signed. But it was. Who knows what could happen if there is a democratic majority in the US Senate, under a Clinton presidency? There is as much opportunity for optimism as there is for pessimism. We have a choice in how we want to live. That led to a new song called “Imagine the World,” not an excuse for pollyanish visions, but for much more grounded and positive understanding of social change.

And what about simply living well? In the midst of trying to save the world, we reminded ourselves that we also want to have a good time. We decided that Music for a Warming World would be a great gig, regardless of the topic, and that we would have fun playing and sharing our music and interacting with the audience (good art is participatory, I think).

In the twenty or so shows we have performed this year, people have told us that they feel much more positive and committed to change by the end of the show. We think that comes from the process we go through, a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, and combining music and powerful imagery to allow emotional reflection and engagement. The result is more than the sum of its parts. The band, the music, the rich and evocative visuals and the audience create a temporary community, one focused on music, our climate challenge and collective hope.

Maybe music can help make a safer climate.

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Simon Kerr is a New Zealand songwriter, guitarist and thinker based in Melbourne, Australia. In 2016, he and his partner Christine Parker, developed a unique multimedia concert telling the story of climate change. A prolific songwriter, Simon has released three studio albums and performed around New Zealand and Australia. A former academic, he has worked professionally in Research Management at the University of Melbourne for some years and is now a climate activist and musician.

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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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This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Featured Image: Ceaseless no. 1, 24×24 inches

by Guest Blogger Doug Fogelson

Surrounded by ghosts spinning and whirling
we gyre
the emulsion bath of flavors and cloud degrees
lift and bob

Excited like a proton in a microwave
sizzling hot from the inside out
the seed that was engineered to sprout
percolates under steroid soil

Cooled in the Freon
Covered by the rayon
Colored like a crayon
Culvert in a canyon

A synthetic erection
floating puff of Styrofoam on a bauble of warm air
like a brain tazed under Ketamine
We Plastic.

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The industrial building in downtown Chicago that houses my studio is sandwiched between a catering company and a garbage sorting facility, however my work takes me far outside urban confines. Both allow me to pass between and through landscapes that are familiar, unfamiliar, and almost alien. Experiencing these discrete spaces, with the interplay of varying sensory inputs they offer, juggling thoughts and camera controls, engages something within me. This is the first stage in the art making process.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a synthesis of the “artificial” with what we normally consider natural. In the grandest sense this is called Anthropocene, the impact of the totality of human inputs on the planetary system, and in the smallest it is drinking a glass of water from a warm plastic bottle. Every day, my mental list, forever running in the background like a data algorithm monitoring internet searches, pulls in more and more examples: biologic medicines, surgical implants, facial recognition software, Siri, genomics, Wi-Fi radiation, and on and on.

Ceaseless no. 2, 24×24 inches

Stage two is returning to my room, and the processed latent images. The camera machine and the plastic film base support the cache of colors suspended in layered emulsion I see glowing on the milky surface of a light box. Time is relative and the memories of travel fades so quickly, some of which are now jogged back into view from photographic neural stimulation. Time can be layered over multiple exposures I shoot along the filmstrip so that spaces overlap and become somewhat abstracted under bands of framed edges. Film material is the embodiment of another synthesis, one of natural and artificial elements combined in just the right way to perform magic, the collaboration of humans with physics and chemistry. Even the black leader of unexposed film contains the potential for recording and this excites me to the point of a fetish.

We don’t consciously choose to be in the alive in a specific era. This writing finds me at mid life and this shifting world is something I have to accept somehow, endeavor to change, or worry over. I was born in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day. In that time the situation has gone from bad to worse. So much could have been accomplished to help future generations that it boggles the mind. My son is 10 years old now, what will he face by mid century?

Creative Destruction no. 2, 30×34-5 inches

Phase three of the art making process begins when I put on a respirator, safety glasses, and latex gloves. My full color film is at hand along with a collection of spray bottles and bowls containing chemicals purchased at the local hardware or grocery. I spray, soak, dip my precious memory stimulating material in this toxic bath to abstract the image surface— echoing the large-scale impact of waste and pollution in our land, air, and sea. Eroding the surface of the signifier my film’s emulsion begins to melt in a succession of acrid dyes; first the yellow, then the magenta, finally the cyan layer in light and dark until only the clear plastic base is left. Emulsions break apart, waving in the liquid chemicals like ribbons or tattered flags.

What if we could accept that we are hybrids, that a future of beauty and balance will invariably involve stripping something away, adding something not yet imagined? To what end will we see ourselves go in climate engineering? Will we add to the growing list of feedback loops already in play? I never thought I would entertain geoengineering, but I suspect once the melted permafrost and resulting methane release is uncorked I will give it serious consideration.

Creative Destruction no. 6, 30×42-5 inches

The fourth stage of production comes when the soupy film dries down, fixing its abstraction into place. Residue from the silver halide and chemistry form small crystals in some areas and in others leave a patina of shapes resembling snowflakes or veins. Bubbles can dry and be captured flat. The layered film at times doubles the remaining imagery and often looks like the red/blue of a vintage 3-D image (seen from goofy glasses). Collaborating with invisible forces of change and chance the final image is one of arrested slippage. To my mind these can hint at the struggle for sunlight and the phases of earthly circulation.

What I do, where I go, flying high above earth’s surface, bumping along with ozone in the stratosphere, I help push our event horizon ever closer even as I fear it’s approach. The blue veil breaks apart the cocoon contrails continuously wrapping it up. Here, each of us is offered an incredible vantage point, an opportunity to gain perspective and yet, so many of us choose to distract ourselves with screen upon screen, updating an invisible taskmaster even thinner than air itself, high on our sugar/insulin spikes. We are simple creatures only requiring food and drink, elimination, rest, and breathing. To accept the time we inhabit and the state of the world right now is to know we are not only our body, the planet is not only our host.

Return to Oblivion no. 8, 30×40

The final stage of my art making process is the high-resolution scan of the altered film. Once it has been digitized I can zoom in and out on my computer screen to see the details. The scanner is like a microscope, I feel like an adventurer and fledgling scientist as well as an artist/photographer. At times I am repulsed by the remaining hues of the film, missing the color range of the original or disliking the acid tones laid bare in the process. The tension of interplay between representation and abstraction, or simply the abstraction alone, is ultimately the reward. I print the images via thermal pigment dropped onto ink jet paper to exhibit as editions. And I accept what may have been lost, to processes and decisions made along the way, along with that which is left in its place.

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Doug Fogelson studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. His photographic works are included in collections at The J. Paul Getty Center, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Cleveland Clinic, and have been exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, Walker Art Center, Sasha Wolf Gallery, Linda Warren Projects, Marlborough Chelsea, and Museum Belvedere, Netherlands. Fogelson founded Front Forty Press and has taught photography at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Doug Fogelson is represented by Sasha Wolf Gallery in NYC.

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Filed under: Guest Blog Series, Photography

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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.

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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.

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This is an update of an article that originally appeared in the Hong Kong-based magazine, Ecozine in the spring of 2015.

Filed under: Music, Photography

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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.

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by Guest Blogger Emeric Jacob

The edges of the earth must be explored by bike… I jump on my bicycle fitted with a trailer and head towards the beach of Terre Neuve in Camargue in order to recharge my batteries, read, and unearth creatures hidden in the deposits from the sea.

Like the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, unending beaches, dunes, meandering canals, and ponds come together in the first light of dawn to reveal the preserved and wild Camargue. With the sun’s first rays, the quietness of the night is disturbed by the mistral wind which whips sand on bare legs and face. Blown by the wind, the crop is ready to be harvested from the wide flat expanse. Plastic rubbish, half buried bottles, and polystyrene fragments entwined with marran grass both occupy and are hidden in that place. The landscape is striking, buried under great waves of sand where the water rushes during storms. Everything the sea has been carrying in its bowels for days seems to be stored there. An eclectic collection of objects weathered by wind and sun: reeds, roots, branches, boat pieces, fence poles, pens, corks, bottles, games, boxes, cans, green-orange-and-black ropes…

Sailing on this sea of sand, I fill bag after bag, weighing down the trailer. It’s time to find a place where I can allow the composition of the objects to emerge and retranscribe the omens they convey.

Terre Neuve Beach in Camargue [43°28’1.98″N; 4°11’17.83″E]-2016

Whether in January 2015 on Aresquiers Beach, in April 2015 on the the banks of Méjean Pond, in October 2015 in Cevennes Canyon and in December 2015 among the rocks of the Riviera, the result is the same. Our delirious surplus of consumption is brought by water during floods and storms. These piles of objects coming from the floating world are links between the sea and the earth, a form of communication between these two great elements. Swallowed up, crushed, rolled over and digested by the sea, these objects are a testimony of human activity. Buried memories are recalled by a plastic bottle sandblasted by the wind, a plastic ball hardened by salt and time, the former wooden planks of a mariner, a plastic figurine or even a broken sole.  The past interlocks with these sand blasted old pieces of wood, buried in the sand but in spite of it all still present, reemerging from the depths of the sea in the form of monsters and strange creatures. From the waters, a new way of life emerges…

“Grosse moustaches d’Obelix” special edition Aresquiers-2015.

These fragments are collected from different preserved and wild sites because of their volume, color, texture and aesthetic value. The fragments are then sorted out, washed and classified. Chance, opportunity, and choice determine the contents of this eclectic collection.

Stainless steel rods going straight through the different objects create complex spatial correlations. A new entity is born from the many connections between elements. An ecosystem forms. These organic and non-organic objects are organized in a unique and non-reproducible way for each sculpture, and are different at every site.

Installation of the creatures.

The tripod creatures are set up on the site where they have been harvested in the silence of dawn. Waiting beside the sculptures in the  fresh air of the early morning is a surreal experience. The first rays of sun reveal the creatures’ strange shapes. Waves break on the beach and caress their feet. A full family of creatures, all of different sizes, emerges from the quiet morning waters. The scene is immortalized in a picture as a testimony.

Aresquiers Beach [43°29’52.41″N/ 3°52’8.52″E]- 2015.

A little like a report, linking sculpture and photography, the creatures show what seashore they come from. Exhibited in multimedia libraries, festivals, universities or museums, they encounter large audiences, bearing witness to and questioning our society as well as the impact of our production on the environment and the climate. In light of Prometheus or Victor Frankenstein, have we gone beyond our responsibilities, our knowledge? Are we conscious of the consequences of our creations?

Detail of “le tamiseur parfumé” special edition Aresquiers-2015.

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Passionate about sculpture, nature and travel since my childhood, I have been carving and sculpting whatever I come across. From troglodyte rocks to various materials brought by the sea, I have been inspired by it all. Then at one point, I became eager to understand and make my own “systems” and chose to study at an engineering and research graduate school. I was an engineer for twelve years, funneling my urge to create into the construction sector. Because I have always been a builder with a passion for technique and nature, I naturally gravitated towards working on renewable energy building sites. However, I now choose to express this commitment through artistic creation. Eager to share my concerns about environmental change and travel all over the world, I make my creations come to life thanks to artistic exhibitions and collaboration.

You can find me at www.emericjacob.com and https://www.facebook.com/emericsculptures/.

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Filed under: Guest Blog Series, Sculpture

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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.

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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.

The 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:

• improved energy efficiency
• sustainable building materials
• transitional architecture
• carless city centres
• urban farming
• #netzero building certification
• mind-bendingly tiny micro-apartments
• there’s even zero energy furniture !

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

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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