Experimental Arts

‘Eco-sustainable public art’ mapped in new database

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This post comes to you from Culture|Futures

curating-cities_entri590With searchable artwork themes such as ‘Atmosphere’, ‘Energy’, ‘Renewal & Regeneration’, and ‘Waste, Recycling, Consumption’, a new ‘Curating Cities’ database was launched on 30 August 2013. It maps “the increasingly important and emerging field of eco-sustainable public art.”

The ‘Curating Cities’ database is developed as a resource for researchers, academics, artists, curators, educators, commissioning agencies and sponsors working in the field as well as those interested in promoting sustainability via public art.

In addition to descriptive information, the database evaluates the aims and outcomes of each project as well as the external constraints (and subsequent negotiations) that influence the production of public artworks.

Curating Cities is an Australian Research Council funded Linkage project led by Professors Jill Bennett and Richard Goodwin, and Chief Curator Felicity Fenner of the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA) at the University of New South Wales’ College of Fine Arts.

Linkage Partners: City of Sydney, Object: Australian Centre for Design, Carbon Arts, University of Cincinnati.

Research Team: Jill Bennett, Felicity Fenner, Richard Goodwin, Jodi Newcombe, Adrian Parr, Margaret Farmer and Kerry Thomas.

curating-cities_scrdmp

curatingcities.org

Culture|Futures is an international collaboration of organizations and individuals who are concerned with shaping and delivering a proactive cultural agenda to support the necessary transition towards an Ecological Age by 2050.

The Cultural sector that we refer to is an interdisciplinary, inter-sectoral, inter-genre collaboration, which encompasses policy-making, intercultural dialogue/cultural relations, creative cities/cultural planning, creative industries and research and development. It is those decision-makers and practitioners who can reach people in a direct way, through diverse messages and mediums.

Affecting the thinking and behaviour of people and communities is about the dissemination of stories which will profoundly impact cultural values, beliefs and thereby actions. The stories can open people’s eyes to a way of thinking that has not been considered before, challenge a preconceived notion of the past, or a vision of the future that had not been envisioned as possible. As a sector which is viewed as imbued with creativity and cultural values, rather than purely financial motivations, the cultural sector’s stories maintain the trust of people and society.
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The Art of Improvisation – Call for Papers ASA 2012

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Calendar Variations - Experiment at Woodend Barn, 2010, Photo: Chris Fremantle

This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

The call for papers for the ASA Conference 2012, which will be held in Delhi on 3-6th April, is now open.

The deadline is the 6th of December, 2012.

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract for our panel ‘The Art of Improvisation’.

We are interested in securing contributions from a broad range of perspectives, e.g. anthropology, the visual arts, music and performance. We are hoping to develop a dedicated journal issue as a result.

Full details can be found here.  Queries should be directed to Amanda Ravetz.

Convenors:

  • Amanda Ravetz (Manchester Metropolitan University);
  • Kathleen Coessens (Vrije Universiteit, Brussel);
  • Anne Douglas (Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen).

The panel is driven by an interest in understanding embodied, experiential knowledge through the lens of experimental arts practice. Taking an expanded notion of improvisation as a state of ‘being alive’ (Ingold 2011), the panel will explore trajectories between improvisation in life and improvisation in art as follows:

In life, asserts Tim Ingold, there exists no script. The primacy of experience is a form of ‘trying out’. We might think of this then as a movement from an indefinable and undifferentiated state to one of feeling our way through creating direction.

In art we cast a critical eye on the ‘givens’, the predetermined structures of social, cultural, material experience while recognising that freedom and constraint are profoundly interrelated. Improvisation in art across cultures is a specific approach to form making that centres the imagination (of the creator/ performer/spectator) precisely on managing the interplay between freedom and constraint.

In artistic research, the artist/researcher places him/herself at the sharp point of the inquiry, re-imagining, re-configuring, intensifying and scrutinising practice to create insights within and beyond the arts.

  • How might a revisiting of improvisation as a condition of life open up approaches to improvisation in art, challenging its current formulation as a specific formal approach?
  • In what ways might such an inquiry inform new understandings of embodied knowledge within and beyond artistic practice?
  • How might such knowledge sit beside anthropological formulations of improvisation and creativity?

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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CURATING CITIES: SYDNEY TO COPENHAGEN CONFERENCE

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Drawing on case studies from around the world, the Curating Cities project assesses the ongoing and potential contribution of public art to eco-sustainable development and the benefits to Sydney and cities in general.  The project provides a rubric for public art in relation to the fundamental domains of sustainable planning: energy, water, food and waste.

A vital part of the project, the Curating Cities: Sydney to Copenhagen Conference will address the demands on the cultural sector in the face of climate change; namely the need to develop sustainable cities and raise questions about the role of public art in urban ecology. Bringing together artists, designers, curators, educators and creative thinkers the conference will propose new strategies of change toward the fundamentals of urban sustainability.

The conference organized by the National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW in association with the City of Sydney, the Danish Arts Agency and the Visual Arts and Design Educators Association. The conference will be opened by Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and Lord Mayor of Copenhagen Frank Jensen. For more details and full list of speakers please visit http://curatingcities.org/conferences/curating-cities-sydney-copenhagen

CURATING CITIES: SYDNEY TO COPENHAGEN EXHIBITION

The Curating Cities: Sydney to Copenhagen Conference is held in conjunction with a keynote exhibition that highlights the fundamentals of sustainability: carbon reduction, consumption, and food production. The exhibition (17 Nov – 18 Dec 2011) will be a showcase five influential projects that evoke the city as part of an ecology affected by human action. For more info please visit http://curatingcities.org/exhibitions/curating-cities-sydney-copenhagen

Our project website is: www.curatingcities.org.

National Institute for Experimental Arts presents HotHouse

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National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA)

Cultural ecology and sustainable urban environments

Symposium
27-28 July 2010

Sydney Opera House
Utzon Room
http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au

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Symposium 27-28 July 2010, Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House (with drinks and project launch: 27 July, 6pm, Opera House Marquee)

Bookings through Sydney Opera House http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com.

Updates and blogs: http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au. Pre and post HotHouse events can be followed on a dedicated HotHouse website to be launched in July 2010.

HotHouse brings together a diverse group of creative thinkers, each with visionary ideas for transforming urban environments. It seeks to cultivate a new cultural ecology in which the arts play a key role, working with the planners and users of city spaces to address urgent environmental problems.

HotHouse advances the proposal that we no longer curate art but curate space. Taking the city as a venue it replaces the traditional idea of ‘exhibiting’ art with a practical vision of art as a catalyst for social and environmental change.

The guiding principle of HotHouse is that of micro-change and universal, networked participation. Micro-change does not mean small change but networked or interconnected change with vast potential for expansion. The HotHousing process is designed to stimulate new projects, connections and local/transnational community collaboration.

Participants in HotHouse include design thinkers such as Bruce Mau who has spearheaded community-driven projects for large-scale sustainable change in both North and South America, Tony Fry, Director of Team D/E/S and founder of the EcoDesign Foundation, and Adrian Parr (University of Cincinnati); artists/designers Janet Laurence, Dan Hill, Allan Giddy, Mathieu Gallois, David Trubridge, Carbon Arts, Makeshift and Digital Eskimo; new media writers such as Mark Pesce, one of the early pioneers in Virtual Reality and co-inventor of VRML; and international curators such as Hou Hanru (San Francisco Art Institute), pioneer of exhibitions that operate in everyday city spaces, and Michaela Crimmin (former director of the UK RSA, Art & Ecology Centre) leading international environmental art curator.

HotHouse is an initiative of the National Institute for Experimental Arts [NIEA] at UNSW (Director, Jill Bennett; Chief Curator, Felicity Fenner) in association with Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design and the City of Sydney.