This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

The post 50 Shades of Green Conference Tickets Now Available! 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

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Will Gompertz, former director of Tate Media and current Arts Editor at the BBC, this week gave a highly entertaining and engaging talk at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Having spent his career working with artists he has come to appreciate not just the quality of the work they produce, but the value of the underlying creative process itself. In fact, the embracing of this process, he argued, will be a defining feature of the 21^st century.

In the 20^th century we saw machines take over from brawn. The amount of manual labour required, at least in the developed world, dropped as more and more jobs were mechanised. In the 21^st century, they’re likely to take over from brain. Jobs that we previously thought were safe will no longer be so. This is already happening. For example, much of the stock market is now bought and sold by computers instead of human stockbrokers. The Digital Revolution is upon us, whether we like it or not, and we are going to have to adapt.

Life in the digital age is going to be defined by creativity. As the Industrial Revolution led to the development of the middle classes, the Digital Revolution is going to produce a creative class. This is because computers, for all their many merits, are not capable of doing everything that humanity can. Most notably, they do not have imagination, nor the ability to realise the ideas therein. That is our domain.

Do not despair if you are reading this and thinking ‘But I’m not creative’. Two audience members who were having this thought were pulled on stage by Gompertz who demonstrated, through a little story-telling exercise, that that’s simply not true. The human brain is incredibly creative. The psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg, who has spent his life studying the creative process in literature, art, and science, argues that creativity lies simply in cramming two ideas together and discovering where they join. Hence a new idea is born.

Nobody is saying, I hasten to add, that the creative process is an easy one or indeed a pleasant one. Most writers fear the blank page; most painters despair at the blank canvas. Being creative is hard, and yet it is something that we are all capable of doing. There was a shift in the 20^th century such that anything could be art (e.g. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain on the right). In the 21^st century, anyone can be an artist.

What does Gompertz mean by this? He avoided the sticky quagmire of attempting to define art or artists. Rather, he used his vast experience of working with creatives to identify those characteristics that they share, by virtue of which they are able to produce art. It these characteristics that will define the creative class; it the embracing of these characteristics that could improve your life.

First, artists are curious. They ask questions, explore the periphery of our knowledge and push the limits of what we perceive. This curiosity, this eagerness to learn more, leads them to become experts in their fields. This, in turn, enables them to be creative within these fields. Knowledge fuels the creative process.

Second, artists are sincere; they are serious about the work they produce. For it is their sincerity that makes their work authentic. Take, for example, the work of performance artist Marina Abramović. In 2010, Abramović performed a piece called ‘The Artist is Present’ at New York’s MoMA (see left), in which she sat on one side of a table opposite anyone who wished to engage in silent eye contact with her, for as long as they desired.

This piece only worked – it was only art – because she was sincere about it.

Next, artists break the rules. It’s only natural that their curiosity will extend to why the rules are the way they are; it’s almost impossible to push limits without ever crossing the line. We live in a society where rule-breaking is frowned upon to say the least, but we should be encouraging it. Especially in the arts. Take Shakespeare, for example. Shakespeare was the rule-breaker in chief, inventing over 3000 words that are now in common parlance. His willingness to play with the English language, to break the rules, has left it far richer as a result.

Artists don’t fail. Indeed, there is no such thing as failure. Failure is a temporal and subjective concept. Gompertz used Bridget Riley to illustrate this point. Having showed a huge amount of artistic promise as a teenager, Riley found herself in her early thirties not producing art of note. Her work was not the ground-breaking art that people had expected from her and she was considered a failure by most, including herself. That is until she was dumped. Furious at her former-lover, Riley painted a canvas black intending to send it to him. However, seeing that it still lacked something, she added a thin white line across the middle (creating two forms where before there was one) and a curved line to boot. The Kiss was born (see right) – a career launching piece.

Finally, artists solve problems. Their curiosity, sincerity, rebellion and inability to fail are all key to finding and developing solutions to some of the world’s most critical issues. Gompertz gave the examples of terrorism, migration, and climate change to name but a few. It is the belief that artists will be pivotal in solving these problems that lies at the heart of Creative Carbon Scotland. Our focus is mainly on climate change, where we are working directly on the link between art and sustainability and trying to encourage artists to engage with these issues, both in the content of their work and the nature of their practice.

To this end, we run the Green Arts Initiative, a community of practice which supports Scottish arts organisations to be at the forefront of growing an environmentally sustainable Scotland, and run monthly Green Tease events in Edinburgh and Glasgow to provide a forum for artists and sustainability folk. We are also running a project this November called ArtCOP where we are encouraging artists across Scotland to produce work in response to the critical climate change negotiations that will be happening in Paris at the time (see here to learn more about the significance of these talks). This is because we, like Will Gompertz, believe that creativity will be essential when solving modern problems and in changing the way that we live; that by embracing our creativity we truly can improve our lives.

To find out more about Will Gompertz’s arguments check out his new book ‘Thinking Like an Artist’.

Top image courtesy of the Evening Standard. 

The post #GreenFests: Embrace your creativity and improve your life? 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

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Reviewing has ended and we now have a chance to reflect on the 21 shows we have seen over the past 3 weeks. This week our reviewers caught the final 6 shortlisted shows.

For more information on all of the 21 shortlisted Fringe shows, click here.

For details on the upcoming Fringe Sustainable Practice Awards Ceremony, check out our event page here. Come along and help us celebrate sustainability in the arts at its best, in the 2015 Edinburgh Festival Fringe!

Friday 21^st 7.35pm: Maiden: A Recycled Fairy Tail

Maiden: A Recycled Fairytale is not, as some might expect, about recycling. Rather it takes various tropes of fairytales and arranges them into a new tale – literary recycling tales. A natural theme flows throughout, from the beautiful garden to commemorate a lost mother, to the Maiden with the rose on her forehead, to the delicious cherries in the orchard on the top of the hill. In a set constructed entirely of found, second-hand and recycled materials, 3 Bugs Theatre conjure an environment far from their central Edinburgh location. Like all good fairytales however, there is a great deal of darkness and despair to remind us that, despite mark upon the Maiden’s face, life isn’t all rosy.

Saturday 22^nd 12.30pm: Current Location

Current Location is an adaptation of an original Japanese text by Toshiki Okada which responds to the Fukushima nuclear disaster to a piece about climate change. The story is told through an all female cast and while some of the girls challenge climate change, others refuse to even acknowledge it—brushing it off as just a rumour.

Current Location uses minimal production aspects and responds to their venue space. Instead of altering Summerhall’s dissection room to fit their piece, they have adjusted their piece for the room and have taken advantage of the natural light from the large windows to reduce their energy consumption.

 

Sunday 23^rd 2.30pm: The Assembly of Animals

This surrealist piece of performance art manages to keep its young audience entertained despite the performers never uttering a word. Rather, they let the visual and sound effects do the talking as we watched a creature being developed in a darkened laboratory setting – strange machines whirring and emitting puffs of smoke, neon tubes giving the stage an eerie glow. One minute we’re focusing on how a tiny version of the creature’s skeleton move, before being startled by a looming giant creature that had slowly inflated, exploiting our distraction. The Assembly of Animals is a delightful and surreal show about the creation of a creature, full of technical and creepy wizardry.

 

Monday 24^th 11.15am: Green Poems for a Blue Planet 

Martin Kiszko addresses an array of sustainability issues in his entertaining stand-up performance poetry. Green Poems for a Blue Planet ranges from how to travel round the world sustainably to poo-powered busses, and from a lost hedgehog to solar di da neighbours. In addition to the amusing content of the poems the stand-up performance is supported by an array of comical illustrations, drawn by Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park.

The show will made you chuckle, explore your geographic knowledge, test your rhyming skills and make you rethink about your own actions and involvement in sustainability.

 

9.00pm: AtomKraft 

AtomKraft directly proposes to its audience the following question, “would you accept a nuclear power station in the centre of your city in return for free electricity for 50     years?” The show encourages its audience to question this proposition and then subsequently utilises audience participation to set the tone of the piece, creating a conference like style environment.

This show highlights the dichotomy that underpins nuclear power and the current debates that exists around it. Ultimately the show address power relationships, the responsibility we feel for the world around us, and what happens when society does not ask enough questions. AtomKraft, though bizarre at points, is definitely what you would call a thought provoking performance incorporating song, discussion and theatre.

Thursday 27^th 2.00pm: Celebrating Edinburgh’s Traditional Buildings: Calton Hill Geology Walk

Emily Tracey, of the British Geological Survey, guides this lovely tour through both the natural and built heritage of the city. Though situated on Calton Hill the tour does not limit itself to this exact location, rather this vantage point is used to transport attendees around Edinburgh from 300 million years ago back to the present day.

The tour was an insight into the natural building materials used in our city, the craftsman ship that is required to work and restore these materials, and both the social and industrial issues that arise out of the closures of local quarries. Ultimately, the tour emphasized the importance of a sense of place and how this comes down to the surrounding geology of an area, such that the Edinburgh sense of place can be put down to the local sandstones.

Remember, tomorrow is the day we announce the 2015 Fringe Sustainable Practice Award winner! If you cannot make the awards ceremony in Fringe Central 1 from 4 – 5pm then be sure to follow us on Twitter and check our Facebook page for live updates from the event.

Image, Brown Linen Lace Coptic Journal, courticy of Samandra Vieira

The post #GreenFests: FSPA Shortlist Diary No.3 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

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

CCS Carbon Reduction Project Manager Fiona MacLennan recently attended a training session on BAFTA’s Albert carbon calculator. Fiona shares thoughts and skills learned from her experiences on this course–

I was recently invited to attend a training session held in the home of BAFTA in London on the BAFTA Albert consortium’s Albert carbon calculator. Albert was developed by a consortium of companies including BAFTA and 9 others in the industry to help TV productions become less carbon intensive. The Albert system allows production teams to make an early assessment, at the pre-production phase, of the probable carbon footprint of the whole lifecycle of a production. The objective is to highlight any areas which are particularly carbon intensive at a stage when changes to production methods are still possible.

We first examined the reasons why it’s important to train the industry in calculating and reducing emissions:

• Screen is a voice for everyone
• Screen productions are very energy intensive
• The screen industry is staffed by freelancers so there is a need to find a common way of working sustainably in the industry which will be adopted by all production companies

We discussed the indicators for climate change and the need to reduce current trends of increasing emissions:

• The worldwide IT industry has to play its part as it is similar in size to the aviation industry, producing around 2% of global emissions.
• On average, producing one hour of television produces about 11 tonnes CO2e compared with emissions of about 4.5 tonnes for an average UK home for a year.
• Making informed choices on major emissions contributors, like generators for external filming/broadcast or travel for artists and production crews, can significantly reduce the overall footprint of a production.

The Albert system provides simple checklists tailored for the most common genres of production. Filling in the checklist allows the production team to create an emissions estimate for the planned production. Questions require information that is easily accessible, such as the number of presenters working on the production and what equipment will be used.

A footprint based on the genre average is calculated by the Albert program and the format is designed to make emissions more understandable to the team.

When all aspects of the production process are taken into account, programmes which combine filming on location with a studio based element are the most carbon intensive genre (12.4 tonnes CO2e per programme hour) with purely studio based programmes having the lowest average footprint (5 tonnes CO2e per programme hour).

The preproduction estimate of emissions can be used to focus the team on finding ways to reduce emissions for the most carbon intensive activities and equipment.

More efficient lighting, the use of smaller generators and better travel choices have all contributed to typical overall reductions in emissions of 20%.

Changes towards more sustainable practices are likely to result from a number of areas:

• action by communities and individuals
• businesses improving processes
• introduction of new technologies and legislation

One of the major drivers for improvement among companies and business in general is the risk to their reputation if they do nothing to reduce emissions. Audiences expect them to show leadership.

To promote this, the Albert team have produced an accreditation questionnaire (Albert+) which is a means of allowing production companies and suppliers within the screen industry to demonstrate that they are working sustainably.

Questionnaire responses are audited by the Albert team and accreditation is only granted if minimum standards are achieved. The accreditation allows production companies to display the Albert+ logo as part of their credits and this certification is very much valued.

Albert has been endorsed by a number of commissioning companies including Sky and the BBC. Production companies working with Sky have been required to complete the preproduction footprinting process for some years now. Over the last 4 years, 1000 documented footprints have been recorded for a wide variety of production types which have allowed the Albert team to recognise the most carbon intensive activities within broadcasting.

A database of useful case studies is available on Media Greenhouse which describes some of the ways companies have been able to reduce the carbon footprint of their productions.

For further information on our future plans for promoting and supporting sustainability for the screen industries in Scotland please contact Fiona MacLennan (Carbon Reduction Project Manager) by email or give us a call at 0131 529 7909.

The post Reducing emissions in the screen industry 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

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

The Improbable City is the theme for commissions at this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. It’s based on the poetic novella Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, in which the great merchant traveller Marco Polo describes to the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan the wondrous cities he has encountered. The emperor slowly realises that the cities Polo describes are probably fictional, while Polo himself comes to realise that in his descriptions he must balance “exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions” with the probable, to avoid achieving “cities too probable to be real”.

Seven works have been commissioned for the 2015 festival:

• Holoturian – Ariel Guzick
• Tree no.5 (from the Jadindagadendar) – Charles Avery
• Double Mountain – Emma Finn
• SING SIGN: a close duet – Hanna Tuulikki
• She century – Julie Favreau
• Join the Dots – Kemang Wa Lehulere
• The King Must Die – Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

These visual artists have used their work to conjure alternative imaginary worlds, improbable cities that require our imaginations in order to exist.

This is not a one-way street, however. Whilst we determine how we see these fictional worlds, they in turn affect the way in which we perceive reality. They can be very different to our world or very similar, but by highlighting these similarities and differences they draw attention to them. Through juxtaposing an imaginary world with our own, we become aware of things in the real world that we may never before have considered, and about which we must now come to understand.

Comparing and contrasting imaginary worlds with our own also raises questions of how we want our world to be. Which aspects of the imaginary worlds do we desire, and which do we wish to avoid? Is it possible to bring those aspects we want to life? Sometimes an imaginary world can inspire direct and deliberate action to ensure that it becomes a reality. Take, for example, the recent campaign to build a to-scale version of Minas Tirith, the capital city of Gondor in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, in southern England. Other times the effect can be more subtle: think, for example, about how books such as Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 still shape modern discourse on human embryo manipulation and mass-surveillance.

The apparent dichotomy between fiction and fact is a state of the present (and perhaps the past) but it is blurred when considering the future. The future does not yet exist for there to be facts about it: the future must be created. What then, we must decide, do we want from our future cities?

While we may quibble about the specifics, there are some fundamental qualities that are generally taken to be universally desired. For example, we want our cities to be sustainable: they must satisfy the social, economic and environmental needs of their citizens, both in the present and the future. In order to do this, certain challenges must be overcome, challenges that will change over time. This means that the cities of the future will have to anticipate these changes and be sufficiently flexible to accommodate them.

Developing such flexibility is a cornerstone of the 100 Resilient Cities project (100RC), of which Glasgow is one. This project, pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to sustainability challenges – physical, social and economic – of the 21^st century. Such challenges include extreme weather events resulting from climate change, chronic food and water shortages, high unemployment, and inadequate infrastructure to name but a few.

Glasgow, for example, is having to move on from its post-industrial past and reinvent itself for the 21^st century. Careful town planning is creating a healthier environment for Glaswegians, while a vibrant arts community and a diversifying economy are serving only to increase Glasgow’s resilience to various shocks and stresses.

Another example of a project that is trying to build cities today to cope with the problems of tomorrow is the Carbon Trust’s Low Carbon Cities Programme, which works closely with cities to develop and implement carbon reduction strategies. So far this is proving very successful, with emissions reducing by 25% on average over 5 years. By engaging businesses, governments and the public sector, the Low Carbon Cities programme is helping more and more cities move to a sustainable, low-carbon economy.

Such visions of future cities may not be the most exciting – they don’t feature the flying cars and hover boards that Back to the Future had promised us by now for example (Back to the Future II is set in 2015). But there is something great in the idea of a city that allows its citizens to live healthy, happy and fulfilling lives in such a way that their actions are not detrimental to the environment or to each other. A truly sustainable city is itself a wonderful dream, though it is full of challenges that must be overcome – challenges which ensure that such cities are not too probable to be real.

The post #GreenFests: The Improbable City 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