Arts And Humanities

Information sessions | Imagining Natural Scotland

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This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

Imagining Natural Scotland, aiming to thoroughly think through the relationship between the arts and the natural environment, is holding a series of sessions which promise to be more interesting than the title suggests. Sessions are to encourage collaborations applying for the awards.

Each session will feature,

  • Detailed information on how to apply to the Imagining Natural Scotland fund.
  • A presentation, open discussion and Q&A on a particular aspect of Natural Scotland’s representation in the arts and popular culture; featuring guest speakers from both the environmental and creative sectors.
  • Time for networking and meeting potential collaborators.

For example Dundee feature presentations on cross-disciplinary collaboration from Tentsmuir Artist in Residence, Derek Robertson and Sophie Eastwood the Red Squirrel Project Officer for Fife Coast and Countryside Trust; Inverness will feature Professor Paul M Thompson and artist and composer, Mark Lyken, and curiously Oban will feature Professor Laurence Mee director of Scottish Marine Institute (SAMS) and the designer Daniel Mee.

Dumfries will feature artist, author and planner, Timothy Collins and Reader in the Institute of Geography, Emily Brady on why arts and humanities informed by science are uniquely situated to explore future imaginaries and potential virtues where nature is concerned.

From what we understand one of the key issues for the Imagining Natural Scotland team is that the visual arts (and applied arts?) are perceived to be very engaged with the environment compared to music, dance and poetry, though we’re certain that there are those that would dispute this perception.  The point is that visual and applied artists interested in this programme might want to partner up with other art forms.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.
It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
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Time of the Clock, Time of Encounter

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This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

If practitioners of environmental and ecological arts have become expert in the critique of spatial politics and practices, should they also be able to develop and use critiques of time?

ecoartscotland is a partner in an AHRC funded workshop programme entitled Time of the Clock, Time of Encounter. This forms part of a cluster of research projects focused on the theme ‘Connected Communities’.

The ‘Time of the Clock, Time of Encounter’ project has been put together by:

ecoartscotland, Woodend Barn, Encounter Arts and Holmewood School are community partners.

The aim of the project is to destabilise assumptions about temporality and to activate alternatives. The group believe that the arts and humanities have particular forms of knowledge around temporality that are of potential use to communities (e.g. those directly involved as well as in the wider sense).

There are some key experiences related particularly to the arts which are known, but perhaps not activated as tools of critique, such as ‘nunc stans’ (the experience of time standing still), ‘flow’ time when the process takes over all sense of time. But we should also note Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’s use of ‘the urgency of the moment’, that sense of a particular time when culture is maleable, when new stories of futures can be imagined. In contrast Elaine Scarry’s discussion of pain and the loss of any sense of time is also relevant.

Perhaps one of the key cultural projects which focused on temporality was Futurism, and we now have its corollary, the Slow movement.

Amy Lipton recently posted a question to the ecoartnetwork asking artists to highlight projects which are open to the public during June 2012. Her intention was to make this information available to the Outreach Officer at the Environmental Protection Agency for inclusion in a calendar associated with the White House Initiative ‘Great Outdoors Month’.

The question is of course driven by ‘The Time of the Clock’ (or at least the calendar), but the example provokes reflection on temporality in relation to ecoart projects.

We might offer a number of other questions which might relate to clock/calendar as well as encounter:

How long did the project take?

What experience of time does the work encourage in the minds of those involved?

Ecoart projects tend to assume the wider agency of other species and systems – what is their relationship with temporality?

Did any of the artists in any way attempt to use creative strategies to affect community sense of temporality?

Are these projects ever ‘closed’ in other than a practical sense of visiting them?

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

Plasticities Sciences Arts

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This post comes to you from Cultura21

“Plasticities Sciences Arts” is an association based in France, operating at the transdisciplinary crossroads of art and science. As expressed by its president, Marc-Williams Debono, “the PSA research group aims at opening new fields of interaction between sciences, arts and humanities. The group has its origins in 1994 when it established a Transdisciplinary network of researchers focusing on the nature of evolutionary processes. The identity of the group is founded on both knowledge and human experience as on the suggestion of the concept of plasticity. The latter is considered to be the basic principle underlying the organization of any life form, art or idea.”

The group’s website contains valuable online resources including news items, activities and publications, and the online Journal  Plastir, which is on open access (i.e. freely accessible). The latest issue of Plastir (25) was released in December 2011.

The website (in English and in French) of “Plasticities Sciences Arts” and Plastir is accessible at: http://plasticites-sciences-arts.org/

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

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EMOS Call for Papers & Proposals | Earth Matters on Stage

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Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA - May 31-June 3, 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PROPOSALS

Ecology is at the heart of burgeoning creativity and interdisciplinary scholarship across the arts and humanities. This Symposium, together with the concurrent EMOS Playwrights’ Festival, invites artists, scholars and activists to share their work, ideas, and passions with one another and with the larger community who attend the Festival.

We welcome 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 relationships in general. We encourage proposals that go beyond a recitation of ideas or positions, and instead bring presenters and participants together as they engage the driving question of how theatre has or might function as part of our reciprocal relationship with ecological communities.

Possible topics for exploration include: land and body in performance; representations of bioregionalism; eco-literacy; representation of/and environmental justice; green theatre production; old cultural narratives/new stories; indigenous performance; community-based performance/ecological communities; sensing place/staging place; the ecologies of theatrical form and/or space; animal representation; and application of ecocriticism to plays, performance and culture.

Please email a one-page (250 word max.) proposal and/or abstract by November 1, 2011 to:

Prof. Wendy Arons
School of Drama ~ Carnegie Mellon University
warons@andrew.cmu.edu

Please include:

  • Type of session & title;
  • Your preferred type of space (classroom, theatre, studio, or outdoors);
  • Time-length (60 min; 90 min; half-day);
  • Ideal or maximum number of participants;
  • Short bios of presenter(s).

For more information about the EMOS Festival and Symposium at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012, see http://pages.uoregon.edu/ecodrama/.

AHM’s State of Play, Dundee

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This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

AHM‘s final State of Play event takes place in Dundee on Saturday 1 October.

As with previous events it will include a number of ‘One Minute Manifestos’.  One of these has emerged through a collective process of writing initiated by Tim Collins and contributed to by a number of participants in the Values of Environmental Writing programme at Glasgow University.

Tim has asked me to post the manifesto and authorship, and to encourage anyone who broadly supports the manifesto, and is at the State of Play symposium, to come forward and share in the speaking of the manifesto.

“Who are we? Though the origins of this manifesto are the Values of Environmental Research Network conversations, this document is inclusive of all those who feel that the arts and humanities have a vital role in the effort to mitigate and prevent environmental damage.”

The Anthropo-scene Evolution

2011 saw the culmination of avarice that necessitates naming the human impact on all earthly things. In response we wish to reject humanity’s supposed dominion over nature and to take responsibility for wilful and excessive impact. Our intention is to constitute greater empathy between the world’s free-living things. As creative pragmatists committed to producing practical wisdom, we recognise a loss of humility and seek to reengage the aesthetic and the sublime, which provide interface and witness to spirit on earth. Cultural responses to the anthropo-scene realize that there are opportunities embedded in new constraints; but more importantly there is generative force amongst living things that must be engaged anew. We experiment with a new materialism and aim for new metaphysical purpose for the arts and humanities within the public domain.

Background

Draft1 scribed by Tim Collins (TC) with Reiko Goto, 18 June 2011, subsequently edited by Tom Bristow and Chris Maughan, with comments and encouragement from Aaron Franks and Chris Fremantle (CF). The AHM ‘State of Play in Scotland’ submission was initiated by CF. TC offered the first rough draft with proper word editing by Aaron Franks and Rachel Harkness, followed by strategic refinement by Rhian Williams, Kate Foster, Alistair McIntosh and Owain Jones. The full manifesto is a result of discussion that occurred on 17 June, 2011 with Aaron Franks, Owain Jones, Chris Maughan, Mike Robinson and Karen Syse. Tom Bristow and the ‘frog team’ were present in spirit if not in material form. The work was inspired and energized by presentations and dialogue with Alistair McIntosh and Gareth Evans all set within the wider context of the AHRC supported Values of Environmental Writing Network, organized by Hayden Lorimer, Alex Benchimol and Rhian Williams (2011).

 

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

Funded PhD opportunity

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This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

On The Edge Research and Woodend Barn Banchory have created a wonderful opportunity to undertake a funded PhD.

Woodend Barn is a multi-arts centre outside Aberdeen with a strong environmental programme including an organic cafe, allotments, etc.  On The Edge Research is a practice-led programme focused on artists working in public.

Supported through the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Awards Scheme, they are looking for someone interested in understanding how

“creativity is channeled and provoked by the presence of an artist and in what ways this presence stimulates critical, socially and aesthetic understanding and action. It draws on a recent history of artists’ constructs and protocols for critiquing the institutional and organizational. It also draws in entrepreneurship studies, in particular approaches to understanding community as a dynamic.”

This could be undertaken by an artist as a practice-led, self-reflective, programme, or through other approaches.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland