Ian Garrett

Graphic Design and Printing Resources

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We recently found Renourish (http://www.re-nourish.com). From their site: “Renourish is a resource for the graphic design industry. When green design is usually discussed, most people think of buildings, products or even cars, but what about packaging? Shouldn’t magazines, business cards, brochures and websites be green? At renourish, we’re helping to start the conversation on green graphic design by providing defintions, tips, and links to sustainable resources designers can use to make their work a little greener.”

While Renourish is an excellent resource for graphic designers, it is also a resource for those of us that require graphic design. I’m a big advocate of graphic design and using graphic designers. They are experts in clear and inventive communication from way-finding (signage) to brochures and on and on, visual coding is an important part of an effective communication strategy. Reframe that as a marketing strategy and you’ve got why we think this is going to be a great resource for you an your practices. If you’re looking for sustainable choices for printers, papers, inks and so on, please check them out. We’ll put a link up and you’ll always have a way to find them.

At Fermyn Woods and Sudborough Green Lodge

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William Shaw over at Arts & Ecology just posted that Richard Woods’ installation Stone Clad Cottages opened this past Saturday at Fermynwoods, near Kettering, Northamptonshire, Uk. The project is quite interesting as it re-engages people in their relationship to their surroundings, which fits nicely in Fernynwoods goal to give people a place enjoy contemporary art in tranquil indoor and garden settings. Give it a look…

 

“The Sudborough Green Lodge cottages are currently been renovated by the Forestry Commission for our partnership projects with them. Based at these cottages will be an exciting programme bringing professional artists to Fermyn Woods to create new works, undertake research, explore new ideas, and lead on education projects. The cottages will create accommodation and working space once they have been restored by this summer.

Fermynwoods Contemporary Art’s interest in the environment (both rural and urban), engagement with the community and contemporary practice will develop in our new venue.

To date an inspiring schedule of artists has been drawn up, including Richard Woods who covers buildings in daring retro designs, and who will be wrapping the cottages and Jacques Nimki, who researches plant life and will be investigating the most wonderful array of weeds currently inhabiting the cottage gardens and the SSI wild flower meadow. He will also be working with children from Woodnewton School in Corby.”

As someone who’s artistic practice is heavily invested in lighting phenomenology, I’m interested to see what comes of Kurt Laurenz Theinert’s residency in the spring. 

The Ecological Sustainability of Theatrical Lighting

Announcements, Research

This Article was originally presented at the St. Louis University “Constructed Light, Constructed Meaning” Conference April 12th, 2008. To see this article with notations, please visit our Wiki by clicking here.

Theatrical production is an inherently unsustainable process. Stage shows can live long lives: The Phantom of the Opera became the longest running Broadway musical on January 8, 2006 when it had its 7,486th performance (McElroy 1), but the vast majority of theatrical productions have much shorter runs. Of the 14,000 non-profit productions in the US, in 2006 there were 172,000 performances (“Theater Facts” 2). This works out to an average run of less than 13 performances. While Phantom has enjoyed a sustainable success, the vast majority of professional theater in the United States is created in the non-profit realm. There are 14,000 non-profit productions, but there are only 39 Broadway theaters. This does not reflect the entirety of commercial production, nor does it include community or academic theater, or theater that is produced on a small professional scale without hopes of commercial success and created without non-profit status. But, it does offer a glance at the divide between two distinct modes of production. (more…)

Please Welcome Green Museum

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Green Museum’s blog is now being syndicated here with the CSPA. You can now see the info coming from the bay area organizations feed, edited by Moe Beitiks. 

The online museum emerged from the creators experiences making environmental art and from seeing firsthand some of the challenges facing artists, community groups, nonprofit organizations and arts institutions when it came to presenting and discussing environmental art.

More than a museum, greenmuseum.org is a giant collaborative art-making tool. We hope you find it useful, friendly and easy to navigate. If you have any information you’d like us to know about or publish please let us know. Thank you!

CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS

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The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CPSA) in partnership with EARTH MATTERS ON STAGE: Ecodrama Playwrights Festival and Symposium on Ecology & Theatre at the University of Oregon, Eugene is asking for presentations from the national arts community focused on building ecologically and economically sustainable models in the arts.   The EMOS Festival and Symposium takes place May 21-31, 2009.

The CSPA is a start-up arts-service organization focused on researching, developing and implementing change to increase the ecological and economic sustainability of the arts in the United States. The CSPA will be hosting a series of focused sessions within the larger symposium to deal with practical change and repeatable models.

While the content and format of the presentations is open to the creativity of presenters, preference will be given to presentations that focus on critical analysis, scientific data and documentation as the basis for support of a project’s relationship to issues of sustainability. We seek shareable and repeatable models for active change in arts practice.

Based on the proposals received, presenters may be grouped into topical sessions and may also be asked to participate in roundtable and/or panel discussions to be able to best compare and contrast existing and proposed models of sustainable change, especially as it may highlight the balance of the ecology and economy in contemporary arts practice.

Possible topics include presentations on the impact or future impact of LEED certified arts facilities, company greening initiatives, the creation of efficiency standards for the arts, government initiatives, production methodology, education of theater artists, individual projects created with ecology in mind, re-use programs and any practical documentation of positive ecological sustainable change.

While the CSPA’s session at the symposium will focus on practice and the practical application of change, we encourage all presenters to also submit to the general call from The Ecodrama Playwrights Festival and Symposium on Ecology and Performance. They seek “creative and innovative proposals for workshops, round-tables, panels, working sessions, installations, or participatory community gatherings that explore, examine, challenge, articulate, or nourish the possibilities of theatrical and performative responses to the environmental crisis in particular, and our ecological situatedness in general.”   See the EMOS Call for Proposals at: www.uoregon.edu/~ecodrama or email ecodrama@uoregon.edu.

Please send a one-page proposal and/or abstract by January 1, 2009 to:

Earth Matters Symposium 2009
The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts

(attention Ian Garrett)

c/o LA Stage Alliance

644 S. Figueroa St.

Los Angeles, CA 90017

Or you may email your materials to conferences@sustainablepractice.org

Please feel free to direct any questions to the CSPA via email at conferences@sustainablepractice.org

Please Welcome EcoTheater

Announcements

Along with the syndicated new from the Green Theater Initiative in New York City, we are adding the syndication of MIke Lawler’s EcoTheater blog. I consider this blog to be one of the most central and important tools as the sustainability movement has come to the theater industries, and Mike is an all around swell guy to begin with. 

On a sad note, Mike is again deep in the trenches of his fight with cancer. If you have a momenet I ask that you also visit his blog about his fight called the “C” word. 

Because of Mike’s health, there will understandably be little activity from EcoTheater right now, but we will be posting some of his earlier posts periodically in the coming weeks.

USGBC-LA November Newsletter

Announcements, Research

My paper on the ecological sustainability of theatrical lighting, originally presented at the St. Louis Univeristy “Constructed Light, Constructed Meaning” conference, has been included in the USGBC-LA chapter’s November 2008 newsletter. 

You can sign-up for the newsletter by clicking here

You can link directly to the paper by clicking here

Please Welcome The Green Theater Initiative

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Today we have started to syndicate the news coming from the Green Theater Initiative. The Initiative was founded in early 2008 by Gideon Banner, a professional actor living in New York City who was instrumental in the founding of Blue Man Group’s environmental committee. He has performed with Blue Man Group internationally and across the United States, and has also appeared on such stages as Lincoln Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, the Old Globe, and the Williamstown Theater Festival. You can go directly to see what is up with GTI at their site here:

http://greentheaters.org

You can also find them linked through our partners on the right side of the CSPA’s site.

Tip #1: Print on Both Sides

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SAVE PAPER IN YOUR OFFICE

Near each printer, create a stack of scrap paper that has only been printed on one side, and use that paper to print nonessential documents.

Estimates show that the American paper industry is the 4th largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions among U.S. manufacturing industries,   Moreover, the creation of the paper produces a large amount of dioxins and other cancer-causing chemicals that are released into our air and water.  (A recent study showed that nearly 40% of American streams and rivers are too polluted for fishing and swimming.)  Much of that paper comes from forests that are not sustainably managed — that is to say, they aren’t cared for in such a way that the local ecosystem will survive over time.  And even though paper recycling rates are increasingly slowly, recycling is not a perfectly benign process: the paper still has to be shipped first to you and then to the recycling plant (possibly to China, where much of America’s recycling material gets reprocessed), and that recycling still consumes a fair amount of energy.  (For more on paper’s effects on the environment, see articles here and here

One of the best ways to save paper is to use sheets that have already been printed on one side and print on their blank sides.  Some people don’t like this — they feel that the sheet is cluttered, or feel that it’s too difficult to do.  But frankly, once you start, you’ll quickly find that it becomes easy and simple, and it’ll become a habit you’ll wonder why you never developed before.

And you’ll save money.  Artistic Director PJ Paparelli of Chicago’s American Theater Company estimates that his organization has cut paper purchasing costs nearly in half by using this technique.

Other ideas for saving paper:

  • Print two pages per sheet
  • When possible, read scripts online rather than printing them
  • Adjust your margins so that more text is printed per sheet
  • Ensure that nonessential pages, such as cover sheets and web page extras, aren’t printed  (Greenprint)
  • Don’t throw paper away: make sure it goes into a recycling bin

Want to share what your organization is doing to save paper?  Let us know in the comments section below.


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