Storms

Turkey limerick: melting glaciers

December 6, 2012Ashden DirectoryAmerican Citizens, Associate Editor, Climate Change, Coastline, Duke University, Eastern Standard Time, Epidemic, Features Interviews, Global Temperature, Gutman, Himalayas, Interviews News, Limerick, Melting Glaciers, Metaphors, Nicholas School, Robert Butler, Six Ways, Storms, Twitter

Melting Glaciers in the Himalayas (Credit: top-10-list.org)

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Kellie Gutman writes:Â Unable to pass up the opportunity to submit an “Environmental Turkey of 2012” in the form of a limerick, to the Nicholas School of Environment contest at Duke University, I have chosen the epidemic of melting glaciers worldwide as my subject. Â The contest, open to American citizens, ends at midnight Eastern Standard Time tonight.

My offering:

As the global temperature warms

Our planet reacts with fierce storms.

The impact is felt

When our glaciers melt

And the coastline around us re-forms.

See: There once was a turkey

â€œashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UKâ€ (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

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Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson

February 4, 2010news, RSA Arts & EcologyArt News, Awe, Ecology, Everyday Technology, Fad, Flickers, Light Storm, Lightening Strikes, Lightning Rod, Magical Experience, Majesty, Meteorological Events, Natural Phenomena, North Africa, North Pole, Spectators, Statistics, Storms, Streetlight, Subtlety, Translating, Vastness, Weekdays

â€œAt any one time there are around 6,000 lightening storms happening across the world amounting to some 16 million storms each year.â€

â€¦ a delicious fact is culled from Pippa Irvineâ€™s review of Patersonâ€™s Street Light Storm installation on Deal Pier onÂ 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.

Itâ€™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 itâ€™ll remain there until February 28, weekdays 5-10pm, weekends 5pm-8am.

www.katiepaterson.org/streetlightstorm/

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Una Chaudhuri’s Keynote at Earth Matters on Stage

May 26, 2009newsChaudhuri, Co Editor, Collegiate Professor, Contemporary Media, Current Research, Earth Matters, Ecology, Elinor Fuchs, Geography, Jean Genet, Keynote, Media Culture, Modern Drama, New York University, Performance Studies, Rachel Rosenthal, Rosenthal And Co, Semiotic Study, Storms, Yale

Una Chaudhuri is Collegiate Professor and Professor of English and Drama at New York University. She is the author of No Man’s Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet’s Plays, and Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, editor of Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms: The Performance Scripts of Rachel Rosenthal, and co-editor, with Elinor Fuchs, of Land/Scape/Theater. She is Guest Editor of a special issue of Yale’s Theater journal on “Ecology and Performance,” and of TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies on “Animals and Performance.” Her current research and publications explore “zooÃ«sis,” the representation of animals in contemporary media, culture and performance.

When artists fail to read the small print

April 7, 2009news, RSA Arts & EcologyArtists, Caleb, Do The Right Thing, Droughts, Ecology Website, Factories, Few Degrees, Furnaces, Incorporate, Makepeace, Marcel Theroux, New Novel, Opts, Parents, RSA Arts & Ecology, Storms, Sunshade

Caleb Klaces makes a point in his review of Marcel Therouxâ€™s new novel, Far North, on the main RSA Arts & Ecology website: the moment when Theroux starts to try and create a plausible scientific scenario for the catastrophic future in which his novel is set is the point where you start going, â€œUmm. Really?â€

It takes a great writer to be able to incorporate research into a novel. Theroux opts to include a character explaining how we got into this mess:

The planet had heated up. They turned off smokestacks and stopped flying. Some, like my [Makepeaceâ€™s] parents, altered the way they lived. Factories were shut down [â€¦] As it turned out, the smoke from all the furnaces had been working like a sunshade, keeping the world a few degrees cooler than it would have been otherwise. He said that in trying to do the right thing, we had sawed off the branch we were sitting on. The droughts and storms that came in the years after put in motion all the things that followed.

See? Itâ€™s not really quite like that, is it?

Read the review here.

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