Ecology

Another kind of model village…

As Sterling’s blog Beyond the Beyond points out, artist Sergio Cezar makes huge models of the Brazilian favelas out of cardboard.

There is something disturbing about scale. The 200 dolls houses of Rachel Whiteread’s Place(2008) – part of Psycho Buildings at the Hayward – were downright creepy. Maybe it’s because there’s something unsettling about the way we loom over things when they’re unsettlingly small. You can’t help feeling a little like Adolf Hitler looming over Albert Speer’s models for a new Berlin.

It’s also something to do with the fact that we aim for a kind of perfection when making models. I once met a criminologist who made model villages. True story. I wondered if he would put the odd burglar breaking into a model house into his creations but it turned out his model villages were entirely crime free. He preferred it that way. We Brits tend to make villages set in some imaginary idyllic past.

And so when you look at them there’s a dissonance between their vision of miniature perfection and the imperfection of what they represent. Which is why I kind of like this vision of a slum; it makes it look cute for a second until you start thinking of what it must be like to live in it and what that person in the black limousine is doing there.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Furtherfield.org: The Zero Dollar Laptop

Nice to see Bruce Sterling picking up on the excellent media arts collective furtherfield.org’s Zero Dollar Laptop project.

Working with clients from St Mungo’s homeless charity, they’re helping people break up old laptops and build new ones, adding free opensource software to help them build new computers for themselves entirely free of charge.

It’s a great project. To paraphrase the fishing rod homily, teach a man to use Microsoft Word and they’ll be able to write their own CV. Teach him tobuild his own laptop from scratch and, who knows, I’ll probably be sending him my CV in years to come.

Donate your own laptop to the project

Find out more about The Zero Dollar Laptop project

Furtherfield and Feral Trade Cafe on Arts & Ecology

Furtherield on not flying for art

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

On houses that fall into the sea

Earlier this week the papers were full of stories of Ridgemont House in Devon – a house bought for £150,000 by auction, only to see its garden plummet down towards Oddicombe Beach.

The story brought together the national obsession with house prices with the fact of increasing coastal erosion due to climate change. Artist Kane Cunningham is jealous of the Devon housebuyer. He is actually waiting for his house to fall into the sea:

Landscape artist Kane Cunningham has used his credit card to buy a house that is about to fall into the sea. A bungalow at Knipe Point in Scarborough, North Yorkshire – near the scene of the infamous Holbeck Hotel cliff collapse 16 years ago has been condemned after a fresh landslip. Cunningham states:

‘I’ve bought a house that will be the next one to fall over the cliff. It feels like I have no choice. I’m going to rig the house with cameras and film the last sunrise before nature claims its bounty’.

‘It’s the perfect site-specific installation – a stark reminder of lost dreams, financial disaster and threatening sea levels. It’s global recession and global warming encapsulated. This little house is feet away from the edge of the cliff – it can go at any moment. The idea is to create an artwork on a scale never been seen before in North Yorkshire and to stimulate within the imagination of the public the idea that this house falling into the sea can become a work of art. If the aim of art is to stimulate discussion and debate on issues, then surely this will get people talking.’

His idea’s a little like Bettinna Furnee’s Lines of Defence, except this time with a real house involved. It’s an interesting thought; if you’re trying to make people act on climate, maybe you need to make the message as domestic as possible, like an English bungalow falling into the sea…

Maybe

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Pothole gardens; opportunity from decay

This via Thriving Too:

“An ongoing series of public installations highlighting the problem of surface imperfections on Britain’s roads by Pete Dungey, a Graphic Design student at the University of Brighton.”

On Dungey’s web page the photos are accompanied by the quote:  ”If we planted one of those in every hole, it would be like a forest in the road.”

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Land Art and changing perspectives


Filming Jan Dibbet’s 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, 1969


Jan Dibbets 6 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, Maasvlakte beach, 8 February 2009

A year ago this week as part of the Portscapes project, the artist Jan Dibbets had what he called a “second attempt” at his 1969 piece 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective; the artist and curators rejected the idea of the event being a recreation. The apparently parallel lines are drawn on the beach and disappear again within the space between two high tides.

The original work became part of the canon of Land Art when it was included in Gerry Schum’s 1969  Land Art TV broadcast, alongside pieces by Robert Smithson and Richard Long. For Schum the attraction of Land Art was its liberation of art from the gallery. He was trying to make a TV-based form of art that suited the more democratic half of the 20th century.

In the second attempt the work becomes more obviously about man’s relationship to the natural world, partly because Portscapes, which we list as one of the 21 highlights of 2009, was a series of commissions by Latitudes on a piece of land that will disappear as part of the new Dutch industrial port complex Maasvlakte 2. And the piece now seems to emphasise the tidal inequalities of that relationship. Just as Dibbett’s illusory parallel lines are seen being washed away by the rising tide, so this beach will soon be gone. That is another perspective shift, of a kind.

Read more about 6 Hours Tide Object… here

Photos: Latitudes, Paloma Polo/SKOR and Freek van Arkel

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Coalition of the Willing: film-making, collaboration, activism

This is a brilliant initiative: a growing online activist movie created by an army of collaborators, who are animating a script by philosopher/activist Tim Rayner:


Still from Coalition of the Willing: Back to the 60s by World Leaders

The film is appearing online at coalitionofthewilling.org.uk. Rayner’s collaborator is the film maker Simon Robson aka Knife Party, who has pulled in a glorious range of film makers and animators to bring Rayner’s script – on how activists can come together to combat climate change.

The first clips went up at the start of this week. More will be appearing in waves in the coming weeks.

it’s a really exciting way of bringing creative people together on a project like this. The medium is wonderful. I’m not entirely sure I’m convinced of the message – though I would like to be. The Coalition of the Willing’s theme is that that the net allows “swarm politics” to flourish, giving activists a unique chance to mobilise against global warming.

While the net does have that effect, there are two other effects which seem to be just as strong:

1) It gives exactly the same power to those who think the very opposite of what you do – witness the swarm  of warming scepticism online.

2) Though it creates lots of networks there is no real incentive for those networks to link up. They are often reproducing exactly the same message, deploying the same tactics, in isolation from each other. At the same time as it pulls people together it also keeps them in separate silos.

Knife Party, Tim Rayner

FILMMAKERS: Adam Gault & Stefanie Augustine, Bran Dougherty-Johnson, Cassiano Prado, Mario Sader & Ralph Pinel, Clapham Road Studios, Dave Baum, Decoy, Dom Del Torto, Dylan White & Andy Hague, Echolab, Foreign Office, Andreas Gebhardt, James Wignall,BBWD (Loyalkaspar), Sehsucht – Directed by Mate Steinforth, Mighty Nice, Parasol Island, Thiago Maia, World Leaders, Yum Yum London

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson


“At any one time there are around 6,000 lightening storms happening across the world amounting to some 16 million storms each year.”

… a delicious fact is culled from Pippa Irvine’s review of Paterson’s Street Light Storm installation on Deal Pier on FAD Fast Art News:

Inspired by such dizzying statistics Paterson set about translating this natural phenomena into a poetic and beautiful artwork on Deal Pier in Kent. Harnessing everyday technology, lightening signals from as far away as the North Pole or North Africa are received by an antenna on the pier and projected as short bursts of light. As the pattern of lightening strikes changes, so the pier lights oscillate correspondingly, with a subtlety that contrasts with the power and drama of the storms they reflect.

To watch the pier by night is a genuinely magical experience with each flash anticipated with mounting tension. Every sporadic burst is accompanied by an appreciative emotional thrill and a sense of awe at the fact that somewhere out there the ominous rumbles of thunder and lightening are mounting. The work connects spectators to the vastness of the world beyond, collapsing the distance between the individual and remote meteorological events.

It’s an interesting way of making art that represents scientific data in an open-ended way. Paterson turns Deal Pier a kind of lightning rod for the world; the romantic-era majesty of a lightening storm is reduced to data, but then remade as flickers of light.

The artwork was originally intended to run throughout January but has apparently gone down so well that it’ll remain there until February 28, weekdays 5-10pm, weekends 5pm-8am.

www.katiepaterson.org/streetlightstorm/

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

The new bucolics: Caught by the River


Illustration by Jonathan Newdick from Caught by The River

In our industrial societies,  nature comes to represent the escape from the business of our lives. Caught by the River (“the antidote to indifference”) has been around a while; it’s an interesting collective of people who have come together to reflect on the luxury of taking time out in by a riverbank.

It’s a website less inspired by environmentalism than a kind of gentle refusenik-ism – something more to do with Tom Hogkinson’s and Gavin Praetor-Pinney’s The Idler than anything more strident – but it’s growing into a great online repository for new ways of looking at the British countryside.

Co-founded music entrepreneur Jeff Barrett and including a contributor list of artists, writers, photographers and songsmiths it claims the late Roger Deakin as its patron saint. Deakin’s brilliant Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain is becoming a handbook for a kind of half-mystical, half-historic neo-Romantic approach to the world.

The site is full of gems. Last week they featured a timely reappraisal of the work of Richard Brautigan; today they start to feature a series of pieces of music influenced by birds. They begin with a song from British Sea Power called “The Great Skua (Plover demo”) which you can listen to here.

Last year they published an anthology:  Caught by the River: A Collection of Words on Water.
Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

The impossible hamster & RSAnimate: thoughts on “nubs”

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqwd_u6HkMo

Yesterday, the New Economics Foundation released this video to support their report about the irreconcilability of the idea of sustained economic growth with the idea of sustainability itself,  Growth Isn’t Possible. It’s made by Leo Murray, one of the makers of The Age of Stupid and the short film  Wake Up Freak Out.

The Impossible Hamster is a clever way of drawing attention to an idea, using a short viral video. In some circles this would be called an agit-nub, nubs being “short videos that explain or bring an idea to life“.

In the last couple of years, nubs have increasingly become the means by which new ideas are spread around the web. They encapsulate how the web works; by making them embeddable, they become a freebie for other content producers. Spreading ideas and messages on the web is about reciprocity; you have to give in order to receive attention.

Nubs raise a few questions. Firstly, at the moment wit is still prized as much as quality, but will the increasing standards of advertising viral videos begin to crowd out the more low-fi productions like Leo Murray’s? Take a look at this ad about the persuasive technology of a musical staircase which turns out to be an advertisement by Volksvagen. Made to look low-fi by the adevertising agency DDB Stockholm, it became one of the most successful virals of last year. Advertisers are spending increasingly large sums producing these virals.

Secondly, if nubs are the repository for political messages, will we soon have “nub wars”? As somebody in the office pointed out the moment they saw The Impossible Hamster, a climate sceptic might have made a video of a hamster growing not only fat but clever enough to start building new worlds.

Thirdly, do they respresent a kind of Darwinism of ideas; if an idea is not reducible to a three minute nub will it become worthles?

Myself, I don’t think so. I think their mix of expression and intellect makes them an incredibly powerful new genre.

On the last point, the RSA’s own RSAnimate series shows that nubs don’t need to be reductionist. Take a look at Matthew Taylor’s Left Brain Right Brain which is just out this week:

Look out for new videos coming up on the new RSA Comment pages:http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Update on State of the Arts

A week ago the RSA and Arts Council England held the substantial State of the Artsconference, which we hope will become an annual event. The conference tweeters continue to sing with the compelling ideas and discussions that the event prompted. And now content from the London event is becoming available from the RSAs main website and there will be more online soon. Enjoy.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology