Artful Ecologies 2 Art, Nature & Environment Conference |
The second Art, Nature & Environment conference organized and hosted by the RANE research group at University College Falmouth, took place over four days in July. The conference aimed to bring together leading members of the artistic community and the growing community of artists and researchers already engaging with RANE, to consider and discuss how artists might best address current ecological concerns.
Since the successful inaugural Artful Ecologies conference in 2006, any doubts that our planet’s ecology is now in real danger have been left far behind. Many now argue that we are on the verge of a crisis that could very soon turn to catastrophe. The number of different scenarios we now face, largely of our own making, all present harsh realities and paint bleak pictures of our future. These problems include the creation of a climate that will make large regions of the earth uninhabitable and force an unprecedented loss of species to rival the planet’s previous mass extinctions. Within a generation, toxic levels of pollution and the predicted population explosion will begin to place huge demands on limited resources, with potential shortages of food and water making survival for many an impossibility. The magnitude of the task ahead is almost impossible to imagine, harder still to tackle.
The focus of this conference was to ask whether there is a role for art to play in facing this impending ecological crisis. If, among other things, art is to be seen as a method for making sense of the world; as a means of interpretation and communication; as a way of exploring and proposing alternatives, then is there more for art to do than simply foreground the problems? What can artists do to provide solutions and address practical concerns? With our environment in crisis, what role for art?
In addition to the formal presentations and debates at the college’s Woodlane campus, delegates were also able to explore and enjoy the local surroundings such as the sub-tropical gardens at Trebah, Trelissick Gardens via the River Fal and The National Maritime Museum at specially organised evening events. These settings provided an ideal backdrop to informal discussion and networking.
A full programme of events was enjoyed by over 50 delegates from across the UK and beyond, which included fourteen international speakers. The conference closed on the Saturday with an open session and discussion in which delegates were able to respond to the previous three days of presentations. Papers from the conference are planned to be published by RANE later this year.
Reviews of the conference are now appearing on various blogs, websites and publications. A review of the published papers from the first Artful Ecologies conference which was launched in July has now appeared in the Landscape & Arts Network online magazine, and a PDF of the publication is available here.
The Speakers
These projects have appeared internationally on ABC’s World News Tonight, BBC’s Today Show and in Audubon Magazine, GENEWATCH, ESPACE Sculpture The Guardian, MIT’s LEONARDO Journal, The Journal of Experimental Zoology, The New York Times, Newsday, The New Yorker, Orion, Sculpture Magazine, The Sciences, The Village Voice, and others. His work has been included in several books including the new Art in Action: Nature, Creativity and our Collective Future, published by Earth Aware Editions supported by the United Nations. His Artworks have been exhibited in Australia, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Recent solo exhibitions of his work were held at The Arsenal Gallery in Central Park (NYC), The Peabody Museum of Natural History (Yale University), Archibald Arts (NYC), and Kunstverein Ingolstadt in Ingolstadt, Germany. An upcoming solo exhibition is planned for Yorkshire Sculpture Park (Wakefield, England). He participated in the 2004 Geumgang Nature Art Biennale in Kung Ju, South Korea the Waterways Project, which was installed at the 2005 Venice Biennale and Biennale for Electronic Arts Perth 07 in Australia. Ballengée has been awarded several artist grants including funding from the Puffin Foundation, Maxwell Landau Foundation, Nature Conservancy, New York State Council on the Arts, and others. He also has attended several artist/ researcher in residency programs. In 2003, he was an artist in residence at the Natural History Museum in London, Gunpowder Park and [space] in London in 2007, and the Société des arts technologiques [SAT] in Montreal, Canada in 2008. For over a decade, Ballengée has collected specimens for several scientific organizations, including the Peabody Museum at Yale University, The American Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at U.C. Berkeley and others. In 2001, He was nominated for membership into Sigma XI, the Scientific Research Society. His theoretical article, ‘The Origins and Application of Artificial Selection’ is included in the 2004 anthology Biomedialepublished by the National Center for Contemporary Art in Kaliningrad, Russia. In January of 2002 and 2006, he co-taught an ecology art and neotropical evolution courses in Costa Rica for Hartwick College. In addition, he regularly conducts ecology/field biology/genetics and digital imaging workshops open to the general public at urban parks, zoos, petstores and fish markets. He serves on the board of directors for the Peoples Museum of New York. He currently is a Candidate for a Ph.D. at the University of Applied Sciences and Art, Hochschule für Gestaltung in Zürich, Switzerland. www.greenmuseum.org/ballengee |
He is working with Arnolfini on ideas for a research base concerned with interdisciplinary approaches to complex relational systems. One of his main interests is in processes of consulting with places on what they want and need. |
Clive will present a paper on Aesthetics as ecology. This paper is offered more as an occasion for debate rather than as a fully formed thesis. It responds to the conference theme of art’s capacity to address climate change by focusing on the ways in which art might challenge the boundaries between self and world, and self and others. Fundamental to the promotion of ecological thought and action, Clive will argue, is the need to address the ontological distinction active in the way people conceive of what belongs to themselves and what does not belong to themselves. People disregard or do not value that which they perceive as being beyond or external to themselves. Clive will turn to recent accounts of aesthetic experience from continental thought which present our encounter with the work of art as an occasion in which the subject–other or subject–world opposition is transformed into a relational and, arguably, ecological exchange; ‘ecological’ in the sense that the subject becomes aware of their participation in and contribution to a world which, in some sense, is or belongs to them. The paper will seek to offer support for Whitehead’s model of process thinking (the model which RANE declares as its philosophical framework). However, rather than taking his lead from Whitehead’s notion of moments of experience, Clive will draw on Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. The paper is in two parts. (1) The first part will set out the background to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of aesthetic experience, and argue that the ecological impact of his aesthetic theory is that we are asked to ‘re-inhabit’ the senses. (2) In the second part, Clive will invite contributions from the audience to consider how they approach works of art, especially the works of art being presented or discussed at the conference, and to consider how the notion of ‘re-inhabiting’ the senses might assist us in creating an ecological encounter with art. |
Max Eastley is an innovative figure in the field of sound art, exhibiting at the Sonic Boom show at the Hayward Gallery in 2000. He has exhibited his sound installations internationally, and worked closely with a wide range of interdisciplinary artists, musicians and filmmakers, including Brian Eno, Peter Greenaway, Evan Parker, Thomas Köner, Eddie Prevost and The Spaceheads. In 2006 he produced ‘Ice Field’ a sound sculpture installed at the Natural History Museum in London, which incorporated found recordings from the Cape Farewell’s expedition to the Arctic. In response to this journey, he also collaborated with sound designer Dave Hunt and artist David Buckland on exhibitions including ‘Burning Ice’ at the Metropole Galleries (in Oct/Nov/Dec 2007) and ‘Arctic’, an audio/visual installation as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Max Eastley is currently working on ‘Blossom’ with artist Clare Twomey at the Eden Project in Cornwall. Cape Farewell are currently artists in residence at the South Bank Centre. |
These he currently pursues through arts projects, academic pursuits, education and various advisory positions. As a Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University David directs the A&E [art&ecology] research unit and leads the award winning MA Art As Environment programme. Recent projects in the UK, China, Taiwan, Germany and the USA include The Writing On The Wall, performed poetic interventions; River Life 3000: Like There’s No Tomorrow, sculptural installation; A Walk On The Wild Side, eco-urban art-walks and films; and Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground Gaining Wisdom, with Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. |
Previously he has worked in the visual arts, architecture and interdisciplinary arts teams of the Arts Council’s National Office developing, among other things, ‘Art in Industry Placements’, through action research with industrial partners across the UK, India, the Americas and Asia. He is also a practising artist, directs a collaborative experimental music group and has co-written a book published by Transworld. |
In 2003 he co-edited the Verso book We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism. He was senior lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University for 8 years until he gave up the relative safety of academia to go to Argentina during the popular uprising, to work on the documentary film The Take with Naomi Klein. Obsessed with developing new methodologies of direct action and civil disobedience that bring pleasure, the Carnivalesque, fantasy and the body into radical politics, he set up the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army which went on a national tour, with the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, leading up to the G8 mobilisations in 2005. Recent work includes an operatic downloadable guided walk And While London Burns that explores London’s Square Mile and its role in climate change. Whilst searching for ways to build lifeboats that will take us out of the ecological collapse of civilisation, he is working on a book and film Paths Through Utopias (to be published by La Decouverte) that explores anticapitalist and ecological living experiments in Europe. |
At present Hildegard Kurt is working on a research project entitled ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Sustainability’. The outcome will be a monograph, to be published in German and English. |
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In relation to cultural issues, Dave acts as an independent consultant, and persistently champions the building of stronger links between the worlds of environmental policy, cultural heritage and the creative arts. He is a practising artist, writer, researcher, member of several arts-sector working groups and Boards, and project adviser/collaborator in a number of pioneering environmental arts initiatives. |
Sonfist engages the urban in a dialogue by using structures already present within it. In 1965, he created the Time Landscape, in which he reconstructed a 16th century primeval forest in Manhattan. The Time Landscape has been recognized as a land marked park, and has spawned related projects in Denmark, France, Germany, Japan and Italy. A book about his work has recently been published, entitled Nature: The End of Art; Environ-mental Landscapes Alan Sonfist. |
Since 2001, Andy has worked extensively with artificial life researcher Jon Bird from the University of Sussex. They have collaborated on numerous projects and are the co-authors of several published research papers which include; Experiments in Open-Ended Curation, Hothaus papers: Perspective and Paradigms in Media Arts, Eds. Winwood, K. and Gibbons, J. Vivid/Article Press, 2006, and Better Living through Electrochemistry, Artful Ecologies:Conference Papers – Pub: University College Falmouth, 2008. Andy is currently senior lecturer on MA Fine Art Contemporary Practice at UCF. Prior to this he was course leader of BA (Hons) Fine Art, and BA (Hons) Photomedia at Croydon Higher Education College. His current research project explores the potential of arts practice to act as a catalyst to provoke thinking which can give insights to contemporary ecological concerns. |
The intersection between ecology and art entered Weintraub’s professional activities when she curated an exhibition entitled In Search of the Picturesque: Nineteenth Century Images of Industry Along the Hudson (1983), and Land-Marks: New Site Proposals by 22 Pioneers of Environmental Art (1984), and Buckminster Fuller: Harmonizing Nature, Humanity, and Technology (1990). Current curatorial projects include Thirty Below: Sustainable Cold-Weather Fashions, and Green Up Your Act. Weintraub wrote In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art (2003) and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society (1995). She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Rutgers University. |
Andrej made his first film in 1973, inspired by music and nature, and has since created over 30 independent films mostly focusing on the energies and spiritual aspects of natural phenomena. He has also been commissioned to make numerous educational and scientific films. His work has been screened in over 200 one-man shows, retrospectives, festivals and seminars, across the US and Europe, and broadcast on ARTE, ZDF, RAI, KCET Los Angeles, and elsewhere. His original video installation concept the Time Horizon, is now a permanent exhibit in several science and art museums in the USA, Taiwan and Slovenia, and featured at the World Expo ’98 and Venice Biennale ’99. Andrej has received numerous grants and awards from, among others, the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and CAPS New York, and the Preseren Fund National Art Award, Slovenia. Since 1997, Andrej has been based in Slovenia and worked across Europe. |
