SAVE THE DATE
December 5, 2015 at 6 p.m. (CET)

Climate change is not a purely political issue; nor is it limited to the COP21 conference in Paris. It is above all a human issue, one that connects us all, everywhere in the world.

At ikonoTV — the only broadcaster in the world to showcase art and only art 24/7 — we believe that art can give a new and powerful voice to the pressing concerns of global warming and man-made natural disaster, and that we can use art’s emotional appeal intelligently to convey the urgency of these issues in a deeper, more immediate way.

Our proposal is to invite artists to join forces and to put together a 24-hour playlist of contemporary video works based on environmental themes, free of any additional commentary. Because these concerns affect us all, and because art’s language is universal, artists are probably best equipped to enlighten and to touch us. This is why we present these issues from an artist’s point of view — to implement art’s power to speak out on this serious matter and appeal directly to human feeling.

“Art Speaks Out” will be a global event, broadcast exclusively on ikonoTV. It will run uninterruptedly from:

6 p.m. on Saturday, December 5
to 6 p.m. on Sunday, December 6 (CET).

ikonoTV’s global reach includes satellite transmission, SmartTV applications with access to over 200 million households worldwide;
a 24/7 stream for all online and mobile devices;
and over 135,000 Amazon downloads in only five months, making us the number one app in our category in the US, the UK, and Germany.

“Art Speaks Out” is a worldwide forum — an invitation to open our eyes to climate change, our responsibility to the planet, and the necessity of adopting measures of sustainability.

SNEAK PREVIEW

ikonoTV’s upcoming 24-hour digital event ART SPEAKS OUT, which will be broadcast globally in conjunction with the COP21 Climate Conference in Paris as an official part of ArtCOP21.

Our ART SPEAKS OUT program features Swiss artist Ursula Biemann’s stunning and disturbing video Deep Weather.

The work is comprised of two parts: Carbon Geologies, set in the tar sands of the boreal forests of Northern Canada, and Hydro Geographies, set in flood-threatened Bangladesh. The connection between a tar sands project in northern Canada the size of England and dangerous weather patterns and rising sea levels in Bangladesh sheds light on the global effects of man-made natural disaster. The video, narrated in an eerie whisper, begins with aerial views of the inconceivably toxic tar sands wasteland, entirely devoid of wildlife and birds,  and progresses to footage of Bangladeshis collecting clay in plastic sacks to reinforce the embankments in lower-lying areas—“collective social actions to protect villages on the outer rim of these amphibian territories.”

“Climate change, exasperated by projects such as the Canadian tar sands, puts the life of large world populations in danger. (…) Hands-on, machine-less work by thousands is what climate change will mean for most people in the deltas of the global south.”

As part of the ART SPEAKS OUT playlist, Canadian artist Isabelle Hayeur’s large digital montages, videos, and site-specific installations delve into precarious ecosystems and the collision between natural and artificial environments. Her work takes a critical approach to the environment, urban development, and social conditions, exploring feelings of alienation, uprooting, and disenchantment. Her works are to be found in some twenty collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Fonds national d’art contemporain in Paris, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

Using copyright law as an artistic strategy:

Aviva Rahmani’s Blued Trees

Preview of the environmental art featured at the upcoming ArtCOP21 as an official part the 2015 Paris Climate Conference

Blued Trees consists of a musical score painted with nontoxic slurry onto a series of trees growing on private land that lies in the path of the planned Spectra Energy Algonquin Incremental Market pipeline. The course of the pipeline runs within 115 feet of the Indian Point nuclear facility, and a Fukushima-scale event could annihilate the entire East coast of North America. This ambitious project seeks to halt the expansion of the pipeline by implementing an unexpected legal tool: artistic copyright. If the government grants Rahmani her copyright, Spectra would have to destroy the artwork to complete the pipeline expansion, thus infringing on its moral rights. It’s a brilliant strategy—if it works.