Environment 2.0: Through Cracks in the Pavement
Leonardo Guest Editor: Drew Hemment
The second call for papers of the Leonardo special project Lovely Weather: Artists and Scientists on the Cultural Context of Climate Change seeks new cross-disciplinary thinking on sustainability in urban environments, with a focus on creative intervention, social change and non-Western perspectives.
In urban environments we are separated from the consequences of our actions as surely as the tarmac of the road cuts us off from the earth beneath. This physical boundary encourages a phenomenological separation. It is also a symptom and a driver of a global reliance on the private car and fossil fuel. But between the cracks in the pavement, another world flourishes—local activism, recycling, environmental collectives, permaculture, urban gardening.
Artistic and social projects can widen the cracks in the pavements. Such creative innovations might be artworks, social entrepreneurship, scientific intervention or innovations that harness everyday creativity. They might seek to decode the complex relationships between people, nature and technology in urban settings. Or they might be conceived as interventions that can help contribute to profound social change, or suggest alternative possibilities for or critical perspectives on sustainability.
A new relationship is emerging as computing migrates into the environment. When the Earth is mapped, tagged and digitized, it ceases to be inert raw material and becomes instead navigable, computable and manipulable. How will this affect the way that industrial societies have viewed the environment as a resource to be exploited and tamed?
Leonardo is soliciting texts that document the works of artists, researchers, and scholars involved in the exploration of sustainability in urban environments. Themes and issues may include:
* Sustainability in urban environments
* Ubiquitous, pervasive, locative and mobile communication technology
* Growing community
* Sowing seeds of social change.
Linked activity includes an Urban Climate Camp forum at ISEA2008 in Singapore in August 2008, and an exhibition and workshop at Futuresonic 2009 in Manchester, U.K., during May 2009, . Submissions are welcome in all linked strands of activity.
Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts or proposals to leonardomanuscripts@gmail.com. Leonardo submission guidelines can be found of Leonardo On-Line. Please indicate your proposal is for Environment 2.0.
For more information on Leonardo special project: Lovely Weather: Artists and Scientists on the Cultural Context of Climate Change
Fonte: [olats.org]
Leonardo Lovely Weather: Art & Climate
Leonardo Publications are inviting paper, special issue and book proposals that deal with artistic approaches to weather, climate and their modifications.
Western societies have progressively dissolved their ancestral link to climate, a link that was critical: the question for food. This is largely a result of massive urbanization and the development of the modern lifestyle. It has been possible to observe a deterioration of sensitivity to meteorology and climate.
Today, very few professions still reveal a direct relationship to climate; our intuitive understanding of it is thus weakened. Artificial indoor climates have given us a sort of second skin but also leveled our general experience of climate. Until recently, in consumer societies, the weather forecast has mainly been used for the organization of one’s leisure, and “talking about the weather” has a social function. It is no surprise, then, that the science of meteorology is still believed to be one of the last “objective” sciences.
From a scientific point of view, climate (as well as weather) can be divided into series of meteorological parameters such as temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind force, etc. However, it seems impossible to conceive it as a totality except in subjectives terms. Weather and climate exist as such only for corporal and sensitive being and can be regarded phenomenologically speaking, as a landscape 1.
Landscape does not exist in nature without the eye, which grasps an expanse of land as a landscape. Weather’s and climate’s existence are similar. The perception of weather and climate is the perception of an arrangement, a configuration of the real. Weather and climate are thus a multidimensional phenomenon in which are combined the contributions of nature, culture, history and geography, but also the imaginary and the symbolic.
Art could help us to question our perceptions and relationships to weather, climate and their changes. Artistic explorations should not be restricted to illustrating our scientific discoveries, as is done in contemporary climate-change showcases. Art could instead help us to experience and reveal our inner participation with weather and climate, the rupture of their balance and its meaning for our inner world, in the same way that landscape artists reframed the relationship of humans to their environment.
Leonardo seeks to document the works of artists, researchers, and scholars involved in the exploration of weather and climate (change), and is soliciting texts for Leonardo Journal and Leonardo Transactions, special issue proposals for the Leonardo Electronic Almanac and book proposals for Leonardo Book Series.
References:
1 – Böhme, Gernot, « Das Wetter und die Gefühle. Für eine Phänomenologie des Wetters“, in Bernd Busch (Hg.), Luft, Köln, Kunst- und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 2003, pp. 184-161.
Sub-themes :
We are interested in a very broad array of artworks that encompass visual arts, sound art and music, performance and performing arts, etc, as well as in climate sciences, meterology and social sciences.
Following thematic sub-themes have been defined (but the call is not limited to them):
* Environments: weather and climate works enabling new experiences of environments ;
* Meteorological and climate sciences: artworks questioning and linking to these sciences. What dialogue with air pollution meteorology, weather modification, climate sciences and climate history ;
* Weather and climate technologies: artworks questioning and linking to these technologies as space based global monitoring satellites and their databases, as well as remote sensing technologies ;
* Sustainability: artworks engaged in alternative energy ressources or climate memories for example ;
* Social and political action: weather and climate works which may spur new thinking for action on environments ;
* Weather and climate perceptions and/or narratives: poetical perceptions/ narratives of weather and climate phenomena. What for ontological issues about transience and mutability may be engaged in such artworks ? Artworks engaged in weather and climate fiction (real or imaginary weather/climate phenomena, climates and weather phenomena on other planets).
The « Lovely Weather » Editorial Group on Art & Climate (John Cunningham, Annick Bureaud, Ramon Guardans, Drew Hemment, Julien Knebusch, Roger Malina, Jacques Mandelbrojt, Andrea Polli and Janine Randerson).
A moderated discussion on the topic, moderated by Janine Randerson, will begin this fall on the YASMIN network
Further information:
Art & Climate Leonardo project
General Inquiries should be sent to leonardolovelyweather@gmail.com
Fonte: [olats.org]
