Hi, in thinking about the conversations of the last month I’ve been struck by the many interesting ways of connecting and seeing science and art together. In windows around the world one thing I’m always struck with is light and in one of Jane’s last posting she had a number of photos of light on winter days. light is a powerful part of the arctic as at certain times of the year the sun is not up and othertimes it’s always up. light is also a powerful aspect of art.

A local network of home gardens = A community of food producers!
Victory Gardens 2007+ calls for a more active role for cities in shaping agricultural and food policy. It is a concept we are trying to get adopted by the city of San Francisco that would provide a subsidized home gardening program for individuals and neighborhoods.

This program offers tools, training & materials for urban dwellers to participate in a city-wide transformation of underutilized backyards into productive growing spaces.

The project draws from the historical model of the 1940’s American Victory garden program to provide a basis for developing urban agriculture as a viable form of sustainable food practice in the city.

See the Video

We would like to tell you about a project we completed last year.
27 kilos is the amount of CO2 emitted by each person in the UK ever day.

“We wanted to make a personal connection between global warming and our daily lives.”

The installation consists of 27 columns formed from blankets, placed in the gallery space. Each column represents the volume of 1 kg CO2, the gas responsible for global warming. 20% of each column is in a slightly darker colour. This area represents the sustainable level of CO2 emissions averaged out worldwide. The disparity between current emissions and the sustainable level reinforces the urgency to reduce individual emissions.

Artists-Birgit Muller and Mike Moran

More information can be found at www.27kilos.com

27kilos is currently on show at Hotbath gallery, in Bath, UK.

My name is Deb Todd Wheeler, and I am an artist living and working in the Boston area. I would like to introduce my most recent project, Live Experiments in human Energy Exchange, which was an installation of kinetic experiments fueled entirely by bicycle power, installed Oct-Dec,2006 at the Green Street Gallery in Jamaica Plain, MA.

Central to the installation was a modified bicycle, which was hooked up to a generator and various rigs, gears and pulleys. By pedaling the bike, the rider (a gallery volunteer) activated the installation, generating light, wind, sound, and motion to fuel a series of kinetic studies on the fraught relationships between nature and technology. In one piece the bike powered a DC generator that in turn powered fluorescent lights embedded in hacked ant farms, in which worker-ant tunnels were dug beneath looming silhouettes of 1964 World’s Fair pavillions. In another work, the same bike turned gears that transfer energy to wind power by turning a windmill-like form with sails made of recycled plastic grocery bags.

This is a collaborative project between Zach Smith, Program Coordinator of the Wright Center for Innovative science education at Tufts University, Medford, MA, and Scott Battaion, Media Coordinator of the Wright Center for science Education
( www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/), and myself, Nathalie Miebach, as the artist. Together we are building data collecting devices that are being used to collect science data from a coastal environment on Cape Cod (Provincetown, MA), which are then used to examine larger environmental changes. These data is being collected using 3-D quadrats, which are essentially 1 m3 cubes, made of PVC pipes, containing scientific instruments for data collection. Functioning as mini-environments, these 3-D quadrats collect real life science data, from which certain variables are selected and examined in the context of larger environmental changes (e.g.: ice on/off dates, faunal migration patterns, floral changes, temperature anomalies, CO2 concentration, and others). These data are then translated into woven sculptures that examine linkages between these locally recorded environmental changes and broader regional and global climate change.

many people have asked me what art and science have in common? I am more interested in what they don’t have in common I think. Of course there are shared subjects (climate change, the Arctic, glaciers, etc.) and shared investment in a process of inquiry, research, and analysis. But even each of those things can be broken down and found to share only the most gross of efforts. But that seems less useful than contemplating where their differences lie, or more aptly, how they might come together to create a greater whole? I am interested in focusing on the role of research that both artists and scientists share an active engagement with.

Hi All,

I’ve been working on various projects about weather and climate change; there seem to be a number of sub-plots, sub-projects, off-shoots, tangents, etc. etc. First, there’s a weblog which I hope will eventually provide a useful research archive of relevant contemporary artists’ projects. The blog lives at http://StrangeWeather.info.

Another recent project (2006) took the form of a group exhibition and was fairly whimsical: out of the blue.

I’ve been interested in the conflicted relationship between art and the documentary. At times they seem to be pitted against each other…

Currently I am working on a series of paintings. In brief, I pull images — news documentation of climate events and disasters — and re-enact them as paintings.

Here’s an introduction to a subset of these that focus on post-Katrina New Orleans, by way of an announcement and a few links :

Hello All,
I’m happy to announce after several months in the lab, we will be launching the eSAT campaign in March 2007.
eSAT (which stands for Environmental Standardized art Techniques) provides free environmental signage to schools around the world.

Teachers and students will be able to pick their favorite cause, favorite artist, and favorite language. Artists designing eSAT signage includes an all-star roster of artists, designers and celebrities. I currently have a recycling bin that Hunter S Thompson designed for us in the Global Inheritance. The artists designing for eSAT are in the same neighborhood (but probably not as rad as Hunter). All eSAT signage will be logo free.

Back when I was going to school, any cause based signage you’d find in the classroom or in the halls was usually super corny, horribly designed and communicated the message as if you were a total moron. kids today have been marketed to since Day 1, so the artwork, message and messenger is paramount.

Hi,

The last couple of weeks have really been interesting and provided me with alot to think about. As a scientist and educator it is wonderful to see and hear so many people talking about climate change. For so long it seemed like we (scientists) were working in a vacuum without the message getting out. The more conversations I hear and the different approaches to the conversation are great. I think art and shows like “A Friend Acting Strangely” and Jane’s show here at ICA are wonderful and reach alot of people.

I gave five talks about my exhibit up at the ICA in Boston last night–8 minutes five times in a row.  After the blinding headache that ensued no doubt from the effects of my own droning repetition, I started thinking about the most significant part of what I was saying about the project.  Basically the images I was talking about, as you see here, take DEMs from glaciologists studying the dynamic response of the mass balance of glaciers around the world to environmental factors and I render them in a 3D program with temperature, light, cloud, snow covers that are relatively accurate to the sites (the picture you see here is the edge of the Austfonna glacier in the northernmost tip of Norway, an area known to be a common jumping off point for early north pole expeditions).  I then insert these tableaux of vaudevillian performers (here Mike Waters, the project manager for the ICA building construction supervises Naomi Greenfield, a local balloon artist, making an umiak, a common boat form in the arctic, out of pin balloons).

Happy new year everyone! Lets change the world this year, OK?

I’m still thinking about the questions raised earlier in the comments to various posts on this site, asking what kind of role art can play in climate change issues. As I plan out my year, I am trying to keep my feet to the fire of my focus this past year or two: thinking about how to continue creating projects that combine visual, technological, interdisciplinary, collaborative, conversational, and site-responsive works about our human impact on climate change in the arctic in the past and future. In a nutshell I think that I will be gathering much more information, perspectives, narratives, images, and collaborators, trying to keep a balance between my studio practice and a practice of aesthetic alliances with so many different people. I want to go to a science research station in the arctic (any ideas anybody?)–Toolik in Alaska has been suggested to me, so that I can do some work there in the actual landscapes and technologies of the site itself. I’m trying to create visualizations of what the deep arctic will look like in 2110? What kind of transportation will we use to get there and travel around while we’re there? Will we live there? And if so in what kind of house? How will we grow food? What kind of phones will we have to communicate with? How will we get pictures/news of the rest of the world? I want to imagine these things with the combined mind of a science fiction illustrator and a sustainable design innovator.
Will these efforts or their resulting art/activist/conversation projects make a difference? Still wondering. Probably its a one person at at time thing.

I am a sculptor who is currently working on a collaborative project on climate change. With the help of Zach Smith and Scott Battaion from the Wright Center for science education at Tufts University, I have been building very low-tech data-collecting devices that extract climate data from a particular coastal environment. This device consists of a simple, 3-D cube made out of PVC pipes that is filled with cheap science instruments through which I record daily changes in the physical environment. I strap this cube onto my back every morning and bike out to the beach, where I measure temperature (air, water, soil), wind speed and direction, wave direction and speed as well as make notes of any flora and fauna changes I may see. I also make note of the daily erosion changes that seem to constantly sculpt the sand into new formations everyday.

Preemptive Media, a new media collaborative art group, have a great project right now called AIR, which distributes small sensor units to calculate the carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide levels in the surrounding air–the data collected from these sensors can be seen on their website, the sensors, and in exhibitions.

Check out a good description of it here.

Katie Kurtz of WorldChanging did a great writeup of this project the other day and I wanted to mention one part of it here because it so interestingly describes what I think this project can do:

“Climate commons has slowly revved up since Marsching’s introductory post November 26th, serving as a collective diary by folks with varying backgrounds who are doing something worldchanging within their sector to address the affects of climate change. Contributors include artists, architects, a climatologist and a glaciologist, activists, even an Episcopalian priest, and others (including Worldchanging’s own Sarah Rich)… Rather than forge ahead alone to understand the intricacies of ice, the problem of soot, the science glacial changes, and other Arctic-specific topics, Marsching assembled a dream team that could offer new and alternative perspectives on the site.
Aside from a collective diary, it can also be seen as a text-based panel discussion. Or a potluck conversation. Or evidence of how people from different backgrounds are exploring ways we are connected to a landscape that may be remote in terms of distance but is around the corner in terms of our impact on it.”

Once the conversation began around arctic Listening Post and Climate Commons, I suddenly found myself having many more interactions and receiving many more emails in my day-to-day about the increasing interest in using art as a vehicle for expressing environmental concerns.

In the last five weeks, our book tour has stopped into eleven cities around North America. In the context of climate change, it’s an interesting time to be traveling around. Everywhere I go, the locals are talking about how “unusual” the weather is for this time of year. At the beginning of December it’s hot in Denver and snowing in Seattle; DC has tornadoes and rain has flooded numerous areas on both coasts.