Hi
Tim Collins and Reiko Goto have been working with Creative Carbon
Scotland on a project called /CO2 Edenburgh: Can art change the climate?
Spirit in the Air/. There's a project website which will give you a
detailed description of what's been put together
http://www.co2edenburgh.wordpress.com). They have been using some
innovative CO2 monitoring technology (innovative in its scale and
portability) to raise the issue of CO2 in the context of the Edinburgh
Festivals. I was asked as ecoartscotland (http://ecoartscotland.net) to
'curate' a series of four discussions which have taken place over the
past three weeks. I've pasted the three short pieces I've published as
we've been going along on ecoartscotland, but for your interest they are
pasted in below. They speak very specifically to the issues raised in
this discussion.
Pt. 1
In amongst the people handing out leaflets for shows and holding up
placards for restaurants, there are a couple of people wearing white
coats walking around bearing standards reminiscent of Roman Legions,
though these are not surmounted by eagles but rather by LED displays
reporting CO2 levels.
They are working out of the Tent Space at Edinburgh College of Art where
the data that they are collecting plus the data from a number of
Festival venues (theatres, galleries and public spaces) is all feeding
into a wall of information. Creative Carbon Scotland have relocated
their office to the space so they are living with the blinking red LED's
as well as a background pattern of noise generated from the data and
emitted into the space.
Yesterday, at the first of a series of discussions (see below for
details), Tim Barker, a media theorist from Glasgow University,
_http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/cca/staff/timothybarker/_ talked about the
history of interference -- the point at which we became aware of the
invisible. So in 1886 there was unexpected interference on the new
Austrian telephone system. This was electromagnetic radiation from the
sun picked up by the copper wires. (According to Tim, Alexander Graham
Bell's assistant used to just sit and listen to the noise on the wires
just because he was fascinated.) So there's something about noise
overpowering signals that's pretty important in the history of science.
Or maybe its the converse -- as someone said yesterday afternoon, what's
important is, "...the desire to uncover the new by a disruption and
treatment of the real."
Why does this matter? Because our relationship to CO2 is pretty much at
a similar stage -- scientists are monitoring it (and it was a research
station in Hawaii which first recorded passing 400ppm earlier this
year). But we only think we understand what all this means. Actually the
sensors that form part of this project are taking readings ranging from
320ppm to over 1000ppm. Walking around the City Centre yesterday with
one of the team of 'Carbon Catchers' taking readings, we were getting
different levels along the Cowgate. Someone commented during the
discussion in the afternoon that they were surprised that the CO2 level
in the room was going down because there were 10 people talking and no
obvious carbon sink.
Harry Giles, the other invited speaker, challenged us to set aside the
two cultures argument and pay more attention to the militaristic nature
of the territory we are in (and he wasn't talking about the Edinburgh
Tattoo). The maps and sensors being used enable the surveillance of the
environment in ways that has both tactical and strategic purposes. Art
has often been allied with power
We might argue that the arts are engaged in both tactical and strategic
purposes. There is an avowed intention on the part of Collins and Goto
to challenge assumptions about aesthetics. There is not a lot of
'sublime' or 'picturesque' in this environmental art work. We might well
ask where is the aesthetic? Surely this is just public engagement in
science -- how is it different from something that the Science Festival
might put on? And if it's public engagement with science, is it
effective? Is this a Kaprowesque blurring of art and life? Is this like
Burrough's cut-ups, something as normal as a book cut up to offer new
meaning, and at once so strange that it appears as just noise without
meaning? If we are dealing with things that we can't perceive with our
senses, and which have timescales that we find difficult to comprehend,
then should the aesthetic be that of a horror movie?
On the strategic level Creative Carbon Scotland aims to green the
cultural sector supporting organisations and institutions to reduce
their carbon footprints. This is of course part of a pattern of
attention on environmental issues which means that climate change comes
up in pretty much every conversation, every organisation has a climate
change policy (and it would be fun to make a collection of these), and
the sustainability question in grant applications may in the future
include environmental alongside economic criteria. But usually these
programmes are 'business to business' rather than 'business to consumer'
(if we accept that an exhibition in the Edinburgh Art Festival is by and
large a 'consumer' facing affair).
So the events programme, a series of four conversations which
ecoartscotland has helped to put together, is perhaps the point where we
break out of these sorts of dichotomies.
On Saturday (10^th August) the conversation will track across art,
technology, activism and knowledge with the help of Dr Wallace Heim (of
the Ashden Directory) and Joel Chaney (from the Energy Research Group at
Heriott Watt).
The following Wednesday (14^th August) focusing on "Environmental
Monitoring" we will be joined by Andrew Patrizio (art historian and head
of research at Edinburgh College of Art) and Jan Hogarth, (Director of
Wide Open and one of the key people behind the imminent Environmental
Art Festival Scotland).
An for the last event "Going beyond the material" (21^st August) we'll
be joined by Sam Clark, artist, and Lucy Mui, student, activist and
Theatre Manager for Bedlam.
Pt. 2
Sat. 10^th August. We dug back into the question of the role of the
artist, in particular working with other disciplines such as scientists
and public engagement professionals.
The discussion highlighted a couple of slippages: one towards science
and another towards public engagement. These are points of blurring --
things that the artist might be doing. For example, CO2 Edenburgh
involves environmental monitoring and this has been developed between
the artists, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, and Creative Carbon Scotland,
Ben Twist and Gemma Lawrence). Both teams have specific skills in this
area. CO2 Edenburgh also involves public engagement and both teams have
specific skills in that area. So the Carbon Catchers walking the streets
of Edinburgh and stop to take readings and talk to people. The install
in the Tent Space at Edinburgh College of Art is like a lab studio
combination with data and readouts on maps on walls. Both of these
tactics are designed to make the monitoring very visible and engaging.
Both are also elements that we might find in other activist art projects
such as Tushar Joag's Unicell.
But this needs to be set against claims for art. If we want to make
claims for the role of art in relation to the social and environmental,
and in particular to make a case for high level involvement, then we
need to be able to articulate the distinctive contribution, otherwise
the role of the artist could be replaced by the environmental scientist
or the public engagement professional.
So let's just note that one of the things Tim Collins and Reiko Goto
highlighted is that it feels like CO2 is a talked about as a bad thing
in public discourse at the moment. It's also talked about as a very
abstract thing. One of the messages that has been used in campaigns to
influence the public in the UK as been "Act on CO2". There's a danger
that CO2 becomes like smoking or drink driving. There's another
connected issue with CO2: the climate change discourse focuses on
specific thresholds 350 parts per million, 400 parts per million. The
environmental science that monitors climate change 'flattens' and
abstracts CO2. The importance of this point came home when Joel Chaney,
one of the panellists, mentioned in passing that the national grid, the
infrastructure by which we move electricity from the point of production
to the point of consumption, requires 'grid stability', again 'evenness'.
So two points in relation to these issues: firstly CO2 isn't in itself
'bad'. In fact it's only the release of currently fossilised carbon into
the atmosphere as CO2 that is a problem. Carbon and CO2 is what we and
all of the living world is made out of. Secondly, What is coming out of
the monitoring that CO2 Edenburgh is that CO2 is anything but flat or
evenly distributed. The monitoring is beginning to enable us to perceive
the complexity of the pattern of CO2 in central Edinburgh. As Tim
Collins said, this project tries to "...calibrate an experience of CO2."
Tim Collins and Reiko Goto's central focus in recent work is empathy.
The work /Plein Air/ that they installed in the Tent space in the spring
(and /Plein Air/ is an ongoing project) seeks to enable us to experience
trees breathing as a means to engage us empathetically with trees. Of
course trees are other living things which we know, experience, and
understand (reasonably well). Some people have planted and nurtured
trees. Some people have pruned or cut down trees. CO2 on the other hand
is a molecule, something which we, particularly if we focus on the
science, can't experience. On the other hand if we begin to pay
attention to the locally specific then perhaps we can experience -- the
stuffy room, the fresh air, etc. And as Simon Beeson noted that
experience of CO2 should inform architecture -- thinking about CO2 in
the environment of buildings.
Perhaps, as Tim Collins pointed us to, we need to deeply engage with the
shift from Subject Object (me and CO2), to Subject Object Environment
(me, CO2 and the interrelations embedded in the environment). One of
Scotland's great scientists, Someone reminded us that James Clerk
Maxwell was at the forefront of a shift from looking for 'evidence' to
looking for 'interactions'.
But we need to go back to the top -- trying to understand what it is
that the artist 'does'. Another trope is to talk about the artist as a
storyteller. This is in danger of being a slippage towards the public
engagement we mentioned above. Wallace Heim, another panellist, started
us off with Alan Badiou and the importance of events. For Badiou there
are four critical forms of event -- love, politics, art and science. For
Badiou these forms of event change our perception of reality in a way
that require us in the future to act in ways that are true to that event
(so we are not talking about everyday politics, science or art, but
those moments when something is revealed and understood). Badiou is of
course not writing about art, not trying to tell us what art does
distinctively. Rather he's attempting to describe something about life,
something fundamental about being human. And art is part of that, for
Badiou, enscribed at the heart of it, but not exclusively.
So we believe that artists can change things (Tim Collins and Reiko Goto
talk about three aspects to art, the lyrical, the critical and the
transformative). But the difficulty is that science, public engagement,
politics (and love) also change things, transform them. What we want to
be able to do is to understand and share the ways that artists such as
Collins and Goto, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Amy Balkin,
Hans Haacke, Suzanne Lacy operate because they can make a significant
contribution to deep social and environmental issues. We also don't want
to let that potential contribution be reduced to a description of
storytelling, or public engagement, or public science, or creating
spectacular events. But we also don't want to set it on a pedestal as magic.
Pt. 3
Wednesday afternoon 14^th August, third discussion around the issues of
art, science, environment, monitoring, CO2.
Andrew Patrizio started us off by taking us back to Renaissance
Florence. His summer reading had been Michael Baxandall's /Painting and
Experience in 15/^/th/ /Century Italy/. In that he found a description
of the particular characteristics of the mercantile mind, the ability to
gauge quantity, weight, volume and space accurately. According to
Andrew, Baxandall argues that the circumstances in which Florence was a
nexus for trade meant that a significant proportion of the population
were involved in activities requiring gauging. By gauging I imagine we
mean forming accurate judgements about things which can be weight and
measured, but where some of the technologies for doing that which we
take for granted didn't exist or were relatively unsophisticated. We can
perhaps imagine parallels with the emergence of monitoring in the 21^st
Century. Can we imagine the flows of energy through the grid when we are
told about the impact of everyone turning on their kettle in the break
for advertisements during a major sporting event? Or that animation
_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99nmJ3mqXXg_ of aircraft moving across
the Atlantic and then moving back? As we have previously discussed, the
calibration of our experience of CO2 through art is a particular challenge.
Renaissance Italy was at a critical point of social, economic and
cultural development and the arts were deeply enmeshed in that. Trade
was central, but the ramifications are much wider. The emergence of the
new painting characterised by the use of perspective, but equally
importantly including specific identifiable individuals such as patrons
in real space with divine figures also treated as if they were human, is
well known. We can imagine the pleasure that a painting which expressed
space through perspective, and depicted fabric realistically, would
bring to a person who could fully appreciate the space, volumes and
sumptuousness -- the play between the aesthetic and the mercantile mind.
The late 20^th and early part of the 21^st Centuries has as Andrew drew
our attention to, been characterised by conceptual, performative and
participatory practices, sculpture in the expanded field, systems
theory, data visualisation and new media.
In Renaissance Italy we know the practices of art and science were not
separated out in the way that they are now. The enquiry into what can be
understood about the world, whether through philosophy, science or art,
was a process that individuals participated in as what we might now call
public intellectuals, rather than as distinct disciplines. The
methodologies were broadly similar and compatible if the manifestations
were different. We know of Leonardo's sketchbooks but we are less
familiar with Piero della Francesca several treatise on mathematics of
which the most well-known are those on perspective. The emergence of the
artist researcher who plays across these two fields is a relatively
recent not always welcomed development. It is criticised on the one hand
as institutionally driven, and on the other perhaps because it seems to
'explain' the work, which by rights should stand on its own. The 20^th
Century in particular has been dominated by a resistance to the
instrumentalisation of art, a resistance to a 'unified reading' of the
work of art. The artist researcher, write of papers as well as maker of
art seeks to understand the world and share that understanding. The
artist researcher might seek to intentionally change the world (though
probably not through simplistic cause and effect processes).
Setting aside the question of who writes papers and who makes artworks,
Andrew was asking us to think about the comparison between then and now,
the extent to which we are living through a period of more than just
social, cultural and economic change. The shift taking place in
Renaissance Italy might be characterised as the emergence of the idea of
the human as being at the centre of everything, able to shape the world
according to our desires and for our convenience. The word 'environment'
means the circumstances or conditions that surround one, or that
surround and organism or a group of organisms. It is predicated on an
assumption of a 'thing' which has 'an environment'. Without a 'thing'
there is no 'environment' because the word is describing that
relationship. Perhaps the Renaissance is the point in modern history
where the human moves to be the de facto 'thing' -- where the human
environment division is crystallised. If we look at the paintings we see
the human at the centre of the environment, the focal point.
We feel that we are living through another key paradigm shift, or rather
that we need to be living through a paradigm shift, because the current
paradigm, that we can use the planet and everything on it for our own
convenience and comfort and it will just carry on, isn't working
anymore. If 500 years ago it seemed that we needed to learn how the
world worked so that we could control it to make it safer (and make no
mistake life was short and painful 500 years ago), at that point it
seemed that nothing we could do would impact on 'nature'. Science and
technology offered ways to protect ourselves, live longer, avoid
illness, be warm and comfortable.
If we accept that our world view is changing again, that the
Anthroposcene is the result of a trajectory that has social, economic
and cultural roots in the deep past, it is interesting to imagine the
arts' involvement in the process 500 years ago. Did artists sit around
and worry about being instrumentalised? How would they have felt about
Samuel Beckett's statement, "Art has nothing to do with clarity, does
not dabble in the clear and does not make clear." Of course that
resistance of Beckett's is precisely because art has been implicated in
the paradigm that created the problem. And Beckett has contributed to
our understanding of the world. But Ian Garrett, one of the founders of
the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, led us into another
possible construction of the avoidance of 'making clear' in a simplistic
sense (where frankly Design Communication has the task of 'making
clear'). He talked about the project Fallen Fruit
_http://www.sustainablepractice.org/2009/02/21/finding-unforbidden-fruit-in-los-angeles/_
which used maps in a way which is reminiscent of the work of Helen Mayer
Harrison and Newton Harrison, where the layering of information creates
a density that requires thought and interpretation. CO2 Edenburgh layers
information on carbon dioxide monitored in the City over greenspace and
urban fabric, it performs the movement through the landscape of CO2, and
overlays the social cultural activity associated with the Edinburgh
Festivals. It could add economic layers or regular traffic movement
layers, or any number of other factors. The point is to create questions
in the mind of the person engaged with the work of art.
Chris Fremantle
chris@fremantle.org
+44 (0) 7714 203016
On 23/08/2013 03:07, roger malina wrote:
> Brian
>
> your email triggered a nerve-
>
> when we surveyed the STEAM field in
> US high schools for the SEAD white papers we found dozens
> of STEAM programs- including STEAM with the A for Agriculture-
> so yes all for Activism !!
>
> my colleague tom linehan has been asking provocatively whether
> the very concept of STEM is a concept that is now no longer useful
>
> ie the very ontology of STEM forces you into a way of thinking
> that blocks the most interesting ideas and projects
>
> Johnathan Zillberg in his SEAD white paper meta analysis
> started a frontal attack on the very concept of the two cultures
> as one that is no longer useful and critiques how in spite of
> ourselves we draw on the two culture mythology even though
> C P snow himself disagreed with the way his ideas had been
> distorted
>
> how would the art science community begin to think if we
> banished the two cultures and CP Snow (yeah aristotle is fun
> to read too) and the very concept of dividing knowledge and
> education into STEM fields and non STEM Fields= so maybe
> this STEM to STEAM discussion is fundamentally misguided
>
> i remember 20 years ago roy ascott when we were working
> on the Leonardo Special Issue on Art and Interactive Telecommunications
> (with the late and regretted Carl Loeffler) agitating to find a way
> to replace the work Art because it carried too much unuseful baggage
>
>
> so no for STEAM STEAAM SHTEAM yes for ?
>
> roger
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Brian Degger <brian.degger@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 7:24 AM
> Subject: Re: [Yasmin: Fwd: What about that ?
> To: YASMIN ANNOUNCEMENTS <yasmin_announcements@estia.media.uoa.gr>
>
>
> I thought we were all about STEAM now ;)
> Can't wait until Science, techology,engineering, arts, maths becomes STEAAM
> Science, technology,engineering, arts, activism, math.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 4:28 PM, rbuiani <rbuiani@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> yup, thanks Annick for bringing this up....except that this STEM obsession
>> has brought some admins to believe that we no longer need the arts and
>> humanities.
>>
>> http://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/university-of-alberta-moves-to-cut-20-arts-programs-1.1416250
>>
>> rb
>>
>> On Aug 19, 2013, at 9:01 PM, roger malina wrote:
>>
>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>> From: Annick Bureaud <abureaud@gmail.com>
>>> Date: Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 3:53 PM
>>> Subject: What about that ?
>>> To: malina <rmalina@alum.mit.edu>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57598551/living-breathing-glowing-rabbits-successfully-born/
>>> I don't exactly know how it fits into your art-science discussion but
>>> after the "first" steack grown by a scientist, may be it would be nice
>>> to have an "art and humanities" curiculum for scientists ;-)))
>>>
>>> Can't send it to Yasmin, as I can't use my registered email address
>>> where I currently am.
>>>
>>> Annick
>>> --
>>>
>>> ------------------------
>>> Annick Bureaud (abureaud@gmail.com)
>>> Leonardo/Olats : http://www.olats.org
>>> Web : http://www.annickbureaud.net
>>> Collectif Nunc : http://www.nunc.com
>>> -------------------------
>>>
>>> e.com
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>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> roberta buiani
>> PhD communication and culture, York University
>> programmer ArtSci Salon http://artscisalon.wordpress.com/
>> program advisor Subtle Technologies Festival http://subtletechnologies.com
>> http://atomarborea.net
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
> --
> ----------------------------------------
> Brian Degger
> twitter: @drbrian
>
> http://makerspace.org.uk
> http://transitlab.org
> ----------------------------------------
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