Art: absolutely. The only way to inspire folks to imagine and create a world where we’ve cut back on our carbon footprint 80% is through art. Hitting each other over the head with dueling statistics about what’s going to happen or might happen only goes so far. We need a radical but engaging and somehow attractive vision of a simplified future with a really robust quality of life…and that’s not the realm of science or policy…or even science fiction. Obviously, we’re not going to reduce consumption of carbon by 80% any time real soon, if current trends are any indicator, but if we approach it (through art) as a generational challenge with the goal of healthy, sustainable communities, then maybe we can muddle our way to frugality, as someone once suggested.

I think with climate change issues, we need to use many different formats to discuss it and to look for solutions. art is an important form. It is more universal then science and numbers. It is also a great form of inspiration and hope.

Art, Design, and the End??
A delegation of clichés prescribing the end is already here, the ecological society, which has formed around the possibility of the end, through pollution, through various floods, the greenhouse effect, etc. Hence, alarming criteria makes up the roots of an environmentalist debate. Now, the gravity of industrial accidents renders the appearance of an eschatological society possible, a society of the end. Paul Virilio believes this raises primary philosophical questions; Nazism was an eschatological party, which brought about absolute war. Virilio’s raison d’être is; “to invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck; to invent the airplane is to invent the crash”. Any valuation of scientific progress implies reciprocal accident progress. Designers converse about inventing airplanes with a thousand seats, which then imply a possible thousand deaths. Aristotle said, “The accident reveals the substance,” which is to say that one cannot separate the innovation of an object, technique, or place from its devalued negative side. Therefore in the bona fide values of a flourishing city, what then constitutes the magnitudes of its failure?

Art as form of infomatic: telling us about the global ecology—-
Thoreau in Walden also hinted at form following function and architecture without decoration;
“True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him.”
“,..the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin merely, — that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shell-fish its mother-o’-pearl tints…”

The nature of its continuous process of rebirth.

A couple of quotes from Tom Wessels:

“Reflective practice is essential to convert Knowledge into understanding and, eventually, wisdom”

“Reflective practice is not soley based on contemplation; it is also fostered throught the arts.”

these are great responses, and give me a lot to think about. i particularly am interested in thinking about art as information. is aesthetic response a kind of information? and if so, then when that information is coupled with other kinds of information, a strengthening happens.

“The worlds about us would be desolate, except for the worlds within us”
- Wallace Stevens