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Book Review – Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism

Regine Debatty — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:27:18 +0000

Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism, by Nato Thompson, a curator and producer at Creative Time, and Independent Curators International. With essays by Trevor Paglen and Jeffrey Kastner (available on Amazon USA.)

Publisher Melville House Publishing says: A photo of a secret CIA prison. A map designed to help visitors reach Malibu's notoriously inaccessible public beaches. Guidebooks to factories, prisons, and power plants in upstate New York. These are some of the more than one hundred projects represented in Experimental Geography, a groundbreaking collection of visual research and mapmaking from the past ten years.

Experimental Geography explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether). This lavishly illustrated book features more than a dozen maps; artwork by Francis Alÿs, Alex Villar, and Yin Xiuzhen; and recent projects by The Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Raqs Media Collective, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Cuauhtemoc Medina and Rafael Ortega, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2000-2002 (check out the video)

The book accompanies the traveling exhibition of the same name. You can catch it until September 20 at The Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico. A quick look at the calendar of the exhibition tells me that, alas, they have no plan to come to Europe. I'm usually weary of reviewing the catalog of an exhibition i've never visited. Just like i tend not to blog about artworks and events i've never experienced. This time however, i feel that the book stands on its own legs. Mostly because the field of experimental geography has not been overwhelmingly explored in publications. So i take what i can get get my hands on and didn't find any reason to regret it.

Artist and geographer Trevor Paglen coined the term 'experimental geography' back in 2002 and given his experience in the field who better than him could define this emerging genre?

Experimental geography means practices that take on the production of space in a self-reflexive way, practices that recognize that cultural production and the production of space cannot be separated from each another, and that cultural and intellectual production is a spatial practice. Moreover, experimental geography means not only seeing the production of space as an ontological condition, but actively experimenting with the production of space as an integral part of one's own practice. (More in his essay Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space.)

Alex Villar, Upward Mobility, 2002. Video Still

The fact that Paglen's work has inspired the exhibition and the book, doesn't prevent him nor the other authors of the volume to pay tribute to Walter Benjamin, Robert Smithson, Henri Lefebvre, Vito Acconci, Michel de Certeau and Guy Debord and of course the work and thoughts of the Situationists. However, many of the artists featured in the book do not stick strictly to the ideas and methods of the European artistic avant-garde. They are somehow much more pragmatic and show a greater commitment to engaging "everyday" people into the discussion.

Multiplicity, The Road Map, 2003. Video Still

Among the projects i found most interesting is The Road Map by Multiplicity. In 2003 the Italian collective tried to measure, with their EU passport, the density of border devices in the area surrounding Jerusalem. They first traveled on the highway 60 along with a person with an Israeli passport from the colony of Kiriat Arba to the colony of Kudmin. The following day, they traveled along with a person with a Palestinian passport from Hebron to Nablus. Both routes start and end in the same latitude. Their traveling times, however, are different. The Israeli traveler took around one hour, while the Palestinian took five and a half hours.

Bill Rankin, The United States? 2003-07. A map of self-identified Indians overlaid with the locations of U.S. Indian reservations

Another striking map is the one that Bill Rankin made to document the locations of U.S. Indian reservations. The kind of questions triggered by the map is particularly interesting: can a traditional map accurately represent the sovereignty rights (or claims) of indigenous peoples?

Experimental geography reflects the width of geography's interdisciplinary approach. It is made of loads of maps (there's a wonderful archive of artists, designers and activists maps online) but it also involves interventions in public space, bus tour, performances in urban areas and nature, etc.

It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston by kanarinka (Catherine D'lgnazio) is a thought-provoking and probably quite exhausting performance. In 2007, kanarinka run the entire emergency evacuation system installed in the city to demonstrate the city's preparedness for evacuating people in snowstorms, hurricanes, infrastructure failures, fires and/or terrorist attacks. By attempting to measure the distance in human breath, the artist also aimed to measure our post-9/11 collective fear.

Experimental Geography is currently on view at The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico until September, 20, 2009.

Previously: Book Review - An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Trevor Paglen's talk at Transmediale and Conflux 2008: notes from the panel Cartography of Protest and Social Changes.
Image on the homepage from the project You Are Probably Not Here by Nikolas R. Schiller.

This piece originally appeared on Regine Debatty's blog, We Make Money, Not Art

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 2:27 PM)

Book Review – Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism

Regine Debatty — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:27:18 +0000

Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Cuauhtemoc Medina and Rafael Ortega, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2000-2002 (check out the video)

Artist and geographer Trevor Paglen coined the term 'experimental geography' back in 2002 and given his experience in the field who better than him could define this emerging genre?

Alex Villar, Upward Mobility, 2002. Video Still

Multiplicity, The Road Map, 2003. Video Still

Bill Rankin, The United States? 2003-07. A map of self-identified Indians overlaid with the locations of U.S. Indian reservations

Experimental Geography is currently on view at The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico until September, 20, 2009.

This piece originally appeared on Regine Debatty's blog, We Make Money, Not Art

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 2:27 PM)

The Golden Institute for Energy in Colorado

Regine Debatty — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:58:26 +0000

Another project from the Royal College of Art Show which closed on July 5 (sluggishness has come to characterize my work these days!) This one comes from the department of Design Interactions.

The Golden Institute, by Sascha Pohflepp, not only explores the energy issue through the lens of an alternate history of the USA, but also attempts to examine how visions of the future are being created and how they can make us reflect on contemporary issues. What would the world be like today if we could go back to the decade that followed the 1973 oil crisis? To paraphrase a title of an article published on Worldchanging over a year ago: Where would the U.S. (and thus the rest of the world) be now on climate if Carter had won the election of 1980?

The Golden Institute installation view at the RCA Summer show last June

As Pohflepp explained in an essay he shared with me, technological progress is often the outcome of very specific interests and decisions, mostly economical or strategic. Networked computers are a perfect example for that, not only because of their obvious history in military use but also the much more subtle opportunities that libertarian free-market advocates saw in the emerging Internet which lead to gigantic investments in these technologies (see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture and Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor). Other examples are the Manhattan project which lead to the development of the atomic bomb, or NASA's Apollo program.

Pohflepp's alternate history scenario zooms in a moment in the United States history when the fate of energy technologies could have taken a radically different turn. The neuralgic point in time is the US Presidential election of 1980 in which Jimmy Carter lost against his republican opponent Ronald Reagan. While he was governing the country, Carter implemented policies that focused on the quest for clean energy. He established generous tax incentives for solar energy and gasohol. He turned down the heating system in his office and wore sweaters. He even installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. On the day he presented the 32 panels to the press, the President declared: "A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people."

After he won the election, Reagan almost immediately changed the nation's course on clean energy matters. The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in Golden, Colorado lost about 95% of its funding and the solar panels got dismantled soon after.

Former President Jimmy Carter and the White House solar panels

What if the road heralded by the solar panels had been taken?
In Pohflepp's alternate history, Carter won a second term and took an even keener interest on the conservation of energy and the development of new forms of energy. NREL was developed to be an earthbound space program called "The Golden Institute for Energy", a powerful think tank comparable to the RAND Corporation. Equipped with virtually unlimited funding to make the United States the most energy-rich nation on the planet, its scientific and technical advancements were rapid and often groundbreaking.

A composited landscape painting depicting the illuminated city of Golden, artificially engineered clouds and the means of weather modification and lightning harvesting.

The Golden Institute for Energy plans to manipulate Earth's climate, generating clouds or violent storms that can be harnessed for the production of electricity through wind energy and/or lightning

Its scope ranged from planetary engineering to the enabling of individual participation and profit from the creation of electricity. Notable projects include the development of the state of Nevada into a weather experimentation zone and the new gold rush in the form of lightning-harvesters that followed, or major modifications made to the national infrastructure in an attempt to use freeways as a power plants.

Model of the Golden Institute in 1985. Its architecture echoes both Californian corporate architecture and the original RAND Corporation in Santa Monica

The project asks how visions like these are being created in the public imagination but also how they are being reflected by the economy and by individuals. In the case of weather modification, people are modifying their cars into lightning harvesters to participate in the experiments, both scientifically and commercially. The car presented in the model below is a modified Chevrolet El Camino that has been fitted with a lightning rod and various electrical equipment like variable resistors and capacitor banks to store the electricity from a lightning strike. Drivers are then able to sell the stored electricity at any one of the drive-through energy exchanges, which have opened around the zone.

Model of a Nevada desert Lightning Harvester based on a Chevrolet El Camino

The Golden Institute found a way to modify freeways and harness the energy which would otherwise be lost through braking when a vehicle exits the freeway at a velocity of about 55 miles per hour. Now, vehicles are equipped with magnets. As they exit the freeway at high-speed, the cars are gradually slowed down employing the Lorentz force as they pass through a series of induction-coils. The coils are typically operated by a franchise like Chuck's Café and if used effectively can get the driver a discount on a cup of coffee.

Model (1:500) of an induction loop-equipped Chuck's Cafe, Interstate 5 near Bakersfield, CA

The projects presented in this rewriting of history offers an exaggerated yet serious view on current challenges which in scale may be considerably greater than the mega-scale projects of the past (see Saul Griffith, "Climate Change Recalculated": book and video).

What logic lies behind major technological pushes of the past and how could it apply to future projects and what could we learn from the visions of an American past that never happened?

The Golden Institute for Energy is a vehicle for further investigation and new material will constantly be added. For example a running collaboration with Rick Guidice who was responsible for painting NASA's space settlements or interviews with various thinkers about the promise of unlimited power.

Check out this six-minute corporate-style video in which senior strategist Douglas Arnd (played by Stuart Packer) explains the mission and the ambition of the Institute:

More image.

This piece originally appeared on Regine Debatty's blog, We Make Money, Not Art

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 1:58 PM)

No Impact Man (the movie): A Sneak Peek

Sean Conroe — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:22:32 +0000

Worldchanging ally Colin Beavan -- aka No Impact Man -- has been up to some cool, ambitious and thoughtful projects.

As many of you know, Colin and his family took on one bold challenge a few years ago: attempting to live a no-impact lifestyle in the middle of Manhattan. Embedded in so many destructive systems, they had to change their lives dramatically to reduce their ecological footprints.

Their experiment has gone from blog to book, and now to film. Colin's a witty guy, and from the trailer (below), the upcoming documentary looks like a deft blend of personal charm and real, big-picture, difficult questions for those of us living in the world's most wasteful societies to confront -- particularly the vast gap between individual responsibility and systemic change.

You can catch their story, No Impact Man: The Documentary, in theaters September 11.

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(Posted by Sean Conroe in Arts at 10:22 AM)

No Impact Man (the movie): A Sneak Peek

Sean Conroe — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:22:32 +0000

Worldchanging ally Colin Beavan -- aka No Impact Man -- has been up to some cool, ambitious and thoughtful projects.

You can catch their story, No Impact Man: The Documentary, in theaters September 11.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Sean Conroe in Arts at 10:22 AM)

Sorry, Out Of Gas: Architecture’s Response To The 1973 Oil Crisis

Regine Debatty — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:58:26 +0000

Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture's Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis, by Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi. With essays by Adam Bobbette, Daria Der Kaloustian, Pierre-Édouard Latouche, Caroline Maniaque, Harriet Russell (Amazon USA and UK.)

Publishers Edizioni Corraini and Canadian Centre for Architecture describe the book as follows:From November 7th, 2007 to April 20th, 2008 the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal hosts the exhibition "1973: Sorry, Out of Gas", curated by CCA Director Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi. The exhibition examines the oil crisis of 1973 as a major precedent of contemporary concerns about energy resources and fossil fuel dependency. In fact, the 1973 shortage triggered research and development of renewable energy sources, improved technologies, and social experiments that were to have an enduring impact on the architectural and political fields both in America and Europe. The catalogue of the exhibition is co-published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Corraini Edizioni. Book design by Massimo Pitis.

An illustrated tale by Harriet Russell, specially conceived on this occasion, introduces the book from a child's point of view. Her amusing drawings create ironic and funny situations in order to make children familiar with energy saving and oil dependency concerns.

Line-up at a Los Angeles gas station in anticipation of rationing, 11 May, 1979, Photograph © KPA

I would have miss this brilliant and superbly documented book had i not received it as a present from the lovely people at For your Art during the Postopolis blogathon in Los Angeles last April.

Sorry, Out of Gas is the catalog of an exhibition of the same title that ended in April 2008 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. I wish i'll get to visit CCA one day as they seem to regularly set up truly innovative exhibitions.

Sorry, Out of Gas explored the architectural innovation spurred by the 1973 oil crisis, when Middle East producers declared a boycott and the value of oil increased exponentially and triggered economic, political, and social upheaval across the world.

June 1, 1973, Leon Mill spray paints a sign outside his Phillips 66 station in Perkasie, Pa. to let his customers know he is out of gas (image)

Thirty years ago already, industrialized economies realized they might be relying too heavily on crude oil. Researchers, inventors, engineers, activist groups and architects came up with innovations and experiments aimed at preserving, renewing or creating new forms of energy. Today, it seems that much of their work (at the notable exception of Buckminster Fuller) and ideas have sunk into oblivion.

Gas stations abandoned during the fuel crisis were sometimes used for other purposes. This station at Potlatch, Washington, was turned into a religious meeting hall Photo by David Falconer, April 1974

The book and exhibition attempt to remind us that the architects, designers and other 'luminaries' who are currently brandishing the magic word sustainability might want to acknowledge the pioneering work carried out more than 3 decades ago. As CCA Director and exhibition curator Mirko Zardini explained, "By providing insight on the forerunners of many contemporary approaches to sustainable living, the exhibition aims to increase public awareness and encourage contemporary research in the field."

The book starts with "An Endangered Species", a lovely illustrated tale that explains to children our dependence on oil, the existence of alternative sources of energy and the little steps families can take to cut back on consumption.

Illustration by Harriet Russell (image)

Then comes an essay by Mirko Zardini and a chapter dedicated to oil, from the embargo to the games that were created at the time to educate or even sometimes dedramatize the issue. I was particularly fascinated by a series of discourses pronounced in the 70s by world leaders. They were much bolder and more undisguised than the ones voiced by today's politicians. It feels like our leaders prefer to tread much more carefully and are afraid of causing us any discomfort.

The rest of the book is divided in chapters that correspond to alternative sources of energy and their use in architecture: Sun, Earth, Wind and Integrated Systems.

The houses constructed at the time were far less pretty than the ones that are built today with the same attention for saving and generating energy. Not that the times could not do stylish. Matti Suuronen had just created Futuro House after all. It was the first plastic house designed to be delivered in one piece anywhere the world by helicopter. As alluring as it might be, the project failed. Partly because of the swelling of oil prices and the consequent tripling of the cost of plastics.

Times called for a new austerity, for a more sensible and DIY aesthetics. A few examples worth mentioning:

Image: Wide World Photo, the MIT News Office, and the MIT Museum

The Dover Sun House was the first solar home that was actually inhabited. Entirely heated by solar energy, it had been deliberately designed without back-up heating system. It was made by three women: sculptor Amelia Peabody commissioned its construction, Dr. Maria Telkes, an assistant in MIT's Department of Metallurgy, designed the house heating unit and architect Eleanor Raymond drew up the plans and supervised the construction.

John Barnard's Ecology House is the outcome of the architect asking himself the question "How to make a house that resembles a park?" The answer came into the form of a construction sunk underground, with 25 to 40 cm of soil on the roof. Rooms receive natural light through the central open-air atrium shown below:

John E. Barnard Jr., architect. Ecology House, Osterville, Massachusetts, 1973. View into courtyard with solar panel

In 1976, a tenant-owner cooperative installed on the roof of their building at 519 East 11th Street in Manhattan solar collectors and a wind generator with the aim of using the energy for the public space inside the building. The system was connected to the Con Edison network, the company that had the monopoly for supplying power in the area. The energy generated was used in parallel with the supply from Con Ed. Over the first 5 months, the system met 110% of the overall demand.

Solar collectors installed on rooftop at 519 East 11th Street, NYC, ca. 1976, Photograph © Jon Naar, 1976/ 2007

Images from inside the book:

More photos from the exhibition on arttattler and designboom.

This piece originally appeared on we-make-money-not-art.com

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 11:58 AM)

Island of Future Airships

Geoff Manaugh — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:55:40 +0000

As the previous post suggested, a number of great projects came out of this year's Urban Islands.

[Image: The front and back of an architectural trading card, designed by Mitchell Bonus for Urban Islands 2009].

I've mentioned it before, of course, but Urban Islands is a biannual architecture studio hosted out on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbor. For two weeks, students and their visiting international instructors – I had the huge pleasure of serving as an instructor this year – explore the spatial possibilities of Cockatoo's abandoned landscapes.
For now, focusing solely on the work of my own students, I want to highlight five or six particularly interesting responses to the design brief (a brief I'll describe in a later post).
The previous post was one project; the following project is by Mitchell Bonus.
Tongue firmly in cheek, Mitchell has called for Sydney's apparently much-needed second airport to be built out on Cockatoo in the form of a solar-powered zeppelin field.
The style of his pitch, however, was strategically ingenious, well worth both study and emulation elsewhere.
Acting on the assumption that, if you want to see a new building or project take shape, then you have to stop relying on design competitions, architecture blogs, or industry publications to get the word out – that is, you need to find another way to convince the public that your design should exist, making its material realization seem more like an afterthought – Mitchell created a series of trading cards, modeled after sports cards.
He then sealed, laminated, and stuck the cards inside bags of potato chips, cigarette packs, and boxes of morning cereal.
The idea was thus that people would open up a bag of smoky bacon-flavored chips and find an architectural proposal awaiting them.
Inside their morning oat bran would be a trading card-sized vision of the future. Falling out of the cigarette box as they light up on the sidewalk would be a portrayal of some strange island future yet to come.

[Image: The fronts and backs of four architectural trading cards, designed by Mitchell Bonus].

After all, why not skip Archinect,ArchDaily, Inhabitat, and Dezeen altogether and simply mass-produce trading cards of your own speculative building plans?
Then just hide those cards inside cereal boxes and wait till the ideas trickle out, burning into the collective cultural consciousness.
Gradually, it will dawn on people that, of course, there should be a new airport for zeppelins out on Cockatoo Island – or of course there should be aerial gondolas traversing Manhattan, or of course there should be a vast wheel of glass rooms, fourteen hectares in diameter, rotating over the rain forests of Papua New Guinea.
It's like subliminal advertising for a parallel future.
Why not slip these architectural speculations into pop culture at large? Why not bypass clients and experts and just bring your vision to everyone?
Isn't that what Hollywood set designers and concept artists have been doing all along?

[Image: Four more architectural futures cards, designed by Mitchell Bonus].

Mitchell's project – executed in less than one week (as with all the projects that came out of my studio) – was thus presented simply as a bunch of sealed chip packets, cigarette boxes, and so on. Viewers of his presentation were handed a bag, some cigarettes, or a cereal box and, as they opened up their personal booty, they found not just an edible lunchtime snack but a well-produced act of architectural speculation.
How incredibly interesting would it be to find that, in every box of Total or, hiding at the bottom of every canister of oatmeal you open, new visions of the cities around us are patiently hiding...?
A whole new urban redesign of Tokyo awaits anyone who buys a bucket of popcorn at the start of 2012.

[Image: The front and back of one card by Mitchell Bonus, from Urban Islands 2009].

It's a genuine challenge: publish your next architectural project not as a short article in Log, or as a press release on Dezeen, but as a series of trading cards hidden inside popular consumer goods all over the world.
Slip your vision of the future into mass consciousness both slowly and subliminally.
See what happens.

This piece originally appeared in BLDG BLOG.

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(Posted by Geoff Manaugh in Arts at 3:55 PM)

Island of Future Airships

Geoff Manaugh — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:55:40 +0000

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(Posted by Geoff Manaugh in Arts at 3:55 PM)

Biorama 2: Inside The Hollow Earth

Regine Debatty — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:25:00 +0000

Image by Iman Moradi

More notes from the second edition of Biorama, a symposium and workshop that invited artists and experts to share their views, works and discoveries about the biology of the underground. Andy Gracie kicked off the artists presentations with a compelling introduction to the mythological theories about the structure of the Earth and the civilization, often called the Agharta, that live inside it.

Let's get this straight first: the Earth is hollow and other societies live in there. Andy brought us to the cave in order to be closer to them. Modern science doesn't pay much attention to the theory of the Hollow Earth, or Agharta, but this has not always been the case:

Astronomer Edmund Halley (he of the comet) was fascinated by the earth's magnetic field. He noticed the direction of the field varied slightly over time and his theory was that there existed not one, but several, magnetic fields. In 1692, he put forth the idea of a hollow Earth with inner concentric spheres nested into each other and rotating at different speeds. According to Halley, the spheres were separated by different atmospheres separated these spheres, and each had its own magnetic poles. These inner regions were luminous and probably hosted other civilizations. He speculated that escaping gas caused the Aurora Borealis.

Mathematician and physicist Leonhard Paul Euler believed that there were two entrances to the Hollow Earth. One was in the North Pole, the other in the South Pole.

Polar entrance to Inner Earth

In 1947 Admiral Byrd would have given the first scientific evidence of a Hollow Earth. A "lost" diary reports that the explorer went on a mission to fly over the North Pole. It was not his first trip there. Actually, Byrd was the first person to fly over the North Pole in 1926. This second time, however, he discovered the entrance at the north poles and flew through the hollow earth where he observed other civilizations and enormous herds of giant mammoths.

Another expedition in 1956 would have located the second entrance in the South Pole. The U.S. government kept the discovery secret and didn't allow anyone to cross the pole anymore which, obviously increased rumors of a conspiracy.

Back in 1942, the Nazi sent their own expedition to find these openings that, according to them, would have lead to the land of the original Aryans and make alliance with them.

A photo from the NASA would be proof:

Satellite images do not display any existence of a hole in the Earth. What you get sometimes however is a black dot over the pole that only reveal an absence of information.

On November 25, 1912, the United States granted the patent number 1096102 to Marshall B. Gardner for "The Hollow Earth Theory".

Others "proofs" that this hollow Earth life exist have been put forward: certain birds migrate to the North, aurora borealis, anomalous compass readings in high latitudes, north and south, etc.

Andy invited us to participate to the symposium inside a cave so that we would be closer to the only creatures we know of that live below the earth's surface and are so completely independently from the sun that they die when exposed to light. These organisms are called troglobites. There are fish, shrimp, crayfish, bacteria, molluscs and insects.

Olm

The most intriguing of the troglobitesis is perhaps the proteus anguinus, or the olm. In Slovenia, a tourism industry exists for those who want to cathc a glimpse of the cave-dwelling creature. The olms are blind, yet have barely visible, regressed eyes covered by skin. Their body is covered by a translucent skin with two pink gills at the back of the head. Unlike other amphibians that metamorphose into an adult form, the olm retains its larval features, a phenomenon known as neotony (via).

Andy then explained us briefly Jakob von Uexküll's theory of 'umwelt', an organism's self-centered perception of the environment. Uexküll theorised that organisms can have different umwelten, even though they share the same environment. In order to be able to make sense of the world around, a creature would look in other organisms for a series of elements that carry some significance.

For example the tick's umwelt is reduced to only three (biosemiotic) carriers of significance: The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals + The temperature of 37 degrees celsius (corresponding to the blood of all mammals) + The hairy typology of mammals. That's how they recognize if they are in front of a mammal they can parasite.

Some parasites even hack the nervous systems of their host in order to control their behaviour and establish better conditions for their own survival.

While looking for online information about the phenomenon, i stumbled upon this hair-raising video that explains how spores from a parasitic fungus come to infect the brain and changes in behaviour of a jungle ant.

Carpenter ant infected by Cordyceps unilateralis

This is going to put me off mushrooms for some time. But back to the Umwelt. Jakob von Uexküll's theory of the Umwelt made him a pioneer of semiotic biology, or biosemiotics, a field that addresses the complexities of biological processes by studying the production, action and interpretation of signs in the biological realm. Some researchers have put forward the question "Do Does a robot have an Umwelt?" There doesn't seem to be any agreement on the answer.

Giambattista della Porta was an Italian polymath who lived in Naples at the time of the Scientific Revolution. In 1560, Della Porta founded a scientific society called the Academia Secretorum Naturae, one of the first scientific societies in Europe and their aim was to study natural sciences. The Academia Secretorum Naturae was compelled to disband when its members were suspected of dealing with the Occult as, at the time, it was regarded as blasphemous to reveal the secrets of nature. Della Porta was summoned to Rome by Pope Paul V.

Andy Gracie drew a parallel between the Academia Secretorum Naturae and bioartists today who start their research in a DIY fashion. People like Garnet Hertz and Anthony Hall are amateur scientists who like to learn for themselves and uncover nature. Is it art? Is it science? Does it really matter?

Image on the homepage PBS.

This piece originally appeared in We Make Money Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 1:25 PM)

Biorama 2: Inside The Hollow Earth

Regine Debatty — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:25:00 +0000

Image by Iman Moradi

Mathematician and physicist Leonhard Paul Euler believed that there were two entrances to the Hollow Earth. One was in the North Pole, the other in the South Pole.

Polar entrance to Inner Earth

Back in 1942, the Nazi sent their own expedition to find these openings that, according to them, would have lead to the land of the original Aryans and make alliance with them.

A photo from the NASA would be proof:

Satellite images do not display any existence of a hole in the Earth. What you get sometimes however is a black dot over the pole that only reveal an absence of information.

On November 25, 1912, the United States granted the patent number 1096102 to Marshall B. Gardner for "The Hollow Earth Theory".

Others "proofs" that this hollow Earth life exist have been put forward: certain birds migrate to the North, aurora borealis, anomalous compass readings in high latitudes, north and south, etc.

Olm

Some parasites even hack the nervous systems of their host in order to control their behaviour and establish better conditions for their own survival.

Carpenter ant infected by Cordyceps unilateralis

Image on the homepage PBS.

This piece originally appeared in We Make Money Not Art.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 1:25 PM)

Chapter 1, The Discovery

Regine Debatty — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:40:04 +0000

Anyone visiting LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre before September 7 will get face to face with a mysterious installation by young artist Félix Luque Sánchez. Chapter I: The Discovery is an impenetrable, geometric object and a series of videos restaging the moment of its discovery, as if it were a scene from a sci-fi movie, where the hero is suddenly confronted with an alien, slightly chilling figure.

Credit photo Marcos Morilla

The videos are broadcast in the first room. Images show the dodecahedron in places which are fictitious and devoid of any human trace. No matter the context, the alien entity reproduces the same light and sound animation, expressing a state of waiting by emitting a signal of presence. The sculpture itself waits for visitors in the second room. As the viewer gets closer, the machine detects the movement and "tries" to engage in communication made entirely of light and sound code. If the sculpture is surrounded on all its vertical faces, it will respond by releasing its maximum energy.

Chapter I: The Discovery questions the viewer's perception about the truthfulness of what is shown, right from the visioning of videos with synthetic images and ending up in an encounter with an interactive object which co-opts information flows, sound and light transmission.

Rather than answering questions--such as, How can technological advances be controlled? On what ethical bases can its purposes be chosen? Who is entitled to decide on the ultimate mission of machines? Can machines destroy us?--this installation, on the contrary, is about reformulating those modern philosophical questions through the use of images associated with the popular culture of science fiction.

Wow! That's quite a programme!

Credit photo Marcos Morilla

I had to ask Félix for more information about the installation:

Your essay about Chapter 1, the Discovery draws parallels with science-fiction. You mention authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick. who are the scifi writers today who, in your opinion, do a similar job of "opening up unforeseen possibilities that are sure to become realities in a very short time"? Don't you feel sometimes that technological progress is going faster than science-fiction anyway?

First, I have to say that I'm not a SF expert. I am interested in SF because I like the freedom and potential it has to explore its central subject: the relationship between humans and machines, society and technology. A subject that is central for me in digital art. Science fiction is for me a perfect framework for artistic expression with technologies, given that it questions the role of science and technology in the definition of the human.

I think that you could find examples that go both ways. For me Science Fiction mirrors reality in the same way as reality mirrors science fiction. As such, the relationship is confusing, with one continually projecting onto the other.

So what I find very interesting is the fact that being a cultural production, the visions of the present, near or faraway future it makes, are in fact reflections of the society we are living in and its relationship to machines and technologies. We can then use SF to reinvent trajectories crossing the past, present and future of the relationships between man and technologies.

These crossovers are at play in contemporary works. I can think of several examples for now, but there are certainly not the only ones. If you take William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), it exalts the now prestigious figure of the hacker and the deep impact of the informatics sciences in our society. Or if you take Crash (1973) by J.G Ballard, there is a hyperrealist approach of the present, without futuristic elements. Existenz (1999) by D.Cronenberg is also a good example presenting an amazing digital art piece about virtual reality and gaming, two subjects very recurrent in the digital art production of the last years. Andrew Niccol's film Gattaca (1997) constitutes another good example, with an interesting approach about a contemporary social debate: the ethical implications of genetic modifications. Another present question, the effects of climate changes, appears with an apocalyptical vision in the novel The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy.

For me, the most interesting things about these works are what they tell us about our present culture, more than what they predict about our future.

Photo credit: Enrique G Cardenas

The description of the work says: "As the viewer gets closer, the machine detects the movement and tries to engage in communication by generating a light and sound code." Can you give us more details and explain which kind of 'interaction' (if that's indeed an interaction) takes place between the piece and the viewer?

The interaction is very simple : it is one to one. If someone approaches the dodecahedron, the zone facing the visitor detects his presence and reacts to it with a series of lights animations. These series of lights animations change depending on the distance of the visitor from the zone of the dodecahedron.

The object's code is made by these changes, which generate different light animations resulting in a light-sound code (in the piece sound is made out of the electronic circuits dimming the light tubes).

The importance of the interaction resides in its meanings, which try to convey the idea of artificial intelligence. The interaction is meant to simulate this very complex concept through a language of very simple behaviours.

In order to fully engage with "Chapter 1, the Discover", how much does the public need to know about the work and the way it functions? Is it necessary to keep some mystery and guessing? Or would you rather communicate as much information about it beforehand?

I think that there is no need to know anything before experiencing the piece. In fact the narration through the whole installation is quite simple. You first enter a room where you watch several videos with different versions of the same moment: the discovery of a strange object in the form of a dodecahedron. Once you move to the second part of the installation, you physically encounter the object, and it reacts to your presence. It tries to communicate.

It's not important for me if the visitors can read the interaction clearly; I only want them to feel a certain reaction from the object to their presence. By this simple process I hope that people will ask themselves about the meaning and the reality of this experience.

Finally, can you tell us a few words about the aesthetics of the machine? It seems to be quite unfriendly (as opposed to the openly fun, entertaining, playful installations one can see in many media art festivals and exhibitions today), at the point of being slightly alienating?

The object is a representation of a technological alter. The piece explores the concept of alterity from an anthropological point of view: The fear of the other, the exotic, the "primitive" or as in this case the technological other.

The choice of the dodecahedron as a sculptural form is grounded in its symbolism in science fiction and in popular culture in general. My goal is to use the symbolic potential of this figure to favor its conscious or unconscious mental association with images from that popular "subculture".

The aesthetics of the object resides then in its capacity to become unfamiliar, to make it appear as a machine more than a sculpture. To attend this goal we had to express the apparent simplicity of the form, make disappear the technology, create an indistinct surface, texture, and matter.

Thanks Félix!

Chapter 1, the Discovery is on view at LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre in Gijon, Spain, until September 7 , 2009.

All images courtesy LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre.

This piece originally appeared in We Make Money Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 11:40 AM)

Magazine Review: Future Exhibitions

Regine Debatty — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:55:48 +0000

A couple of months ago, the postgirl brought me a magazine i had contributed to. I'm absurdly reluctant to open any publication i've contributed to. Poor mag laid on the kitchen table for weeks. Last week, however, i grabbed it on my way to the airport and realized that the magazine, the very first issue of Future Exhibitions, was awesome. The publication is concerned with searching the world for signs of what is to come. Given the visitor's experiences, life choices and dreams, what is the probable future of the exhibition as a medium, a voice, experience and contemporary fountain of knowledge? And what future do we who are working in the field hope to see? I don't know if they manage to answer the questions they assigned themselves but they certainly asked the right questions, explored every possible angle they could think of, knocked on the door of some of the most fascinating and mind-boggling experts and wrapped it up in fantastic graphics and (albeit these were sometimes OTT) fonts.

Content include:
Ruth Catlow and Marc Garret propose a new way to organize and manage art events in the near future, using examples of projects they've supported and shown at Furtherfield over the past couple of years. Björn Norberg visits an exhibition of the future while, in other pages, several experts discuss the impact of and possibilities offered by technology inside cultural institutions. Katherine Watson gives an encompassing overview of the new paradigms brought about by digital culture. Jonas Runberger and Mats Brodén look at animals and plants to design intelligent buildings. Sharon Schaffer explains why museum can provide young children with a precious learning environment. Ken Arnold, head of exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, my new favourite exhibition space in London, illustrates how he turns shows into social events where visitors get to take first stage. There's also a spotlight on innovative cultural spaces such as MU in Eindhoven (one of the very few whose programme blows me away) or the Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth (South Africa) and initiatives such as Fab Lab.

Heinrich Wolff, Red Location Museum of Struggle, Port Elizabeth 2005 (image Daimler Contemporary)

Johan Nylander shared his perspective on the role of the exhibition medium in countering greenhouse gases, an article particularly precious at a time when cultural institutions multiply exhibitions about sustainability without (most of the time) reflecting on the fact that exhibitions hardly ever come without damages to the environment.

As Therese Larsson wrote in one of the articles of the magazine "So much has happened in contemporary art over such a long period while art institutions have hardly changed at all. In order to realize really interesting ideas it is important to move outside the walls of the white room". So she interviewed the directors of Public Art Lab in Berlin, Creative Time in New York and Mobile Art Productions in Stockholm. Each of them gave their point of view about contemporary art moving away from traditional venues.

Annika Eriksson, Mannen i parken (The Man in the Park), produced by Mobile Art Productions)

Future Exhibitions is much more than what i've just enumerated. Its 142 pages will send your grey cells spinning in all sorts of directions. Icing on the cake for people like me who keep complaining that one cannot 'click' on a piece of paper, each article comes with a set of weblinks enabling readers to get further information about the issue at stake. Future Exhibitions is bilingual (English & Swedish) and will be published annually with the first number released in April 2009.

Views from inside the magazine:

To order Future Exhibitions. Copies can also be purchased at Konst-ig, an art book store in Stockholm + the book store at Malmö art gallery, in Malmö, Sweden, no international stores so far.

This piece originally appeared in We Make Money Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 3:55 PM)

The Dalston Mill & Wheatfield

Regine Debatty — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:43:34 +0000

The Radical Nature - Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009 exhibition, which is currently on at the Barbican Gallery (previously covered by Régine) also consists of several off-sites. They aim to engage with the city of London and make some of the themes of the show more palpable and real, if you want.

Rendering of the Mill, view from Dalston Lane (from EXYZT's Flickr)

I went to visit the double piece which is located in London's North-East district of Dalston where both a re-staging of a work from the exhibition, Agnes Denes' Wheatfield, A Confrontation and a new commission, The Dalston Mill by Paris-based experimental architects EXYZT. The site itself is part of an abandoned railway line (the Dalston Junction Eastern Curve) and had recently been filled in with gravel to be used as a car park. Both pieces in fact form a temporary functional ensemble and eventually the mill will be processing grains from the field when the wheat is ready to be harvested.

The Wheatfield and the Dalston Mill, two days after opening

The field is basically a re-creation of the Manhattan field from 1982, but it's much smaller and the backdrop is quite different, in that case an abandoned house and the Kingsland Shopping Centre, which is so absolutely puzzling in terms of style that it actually makes an intriguing and very London-like backdrop for the piece. The stark contrast between local production of food and the front-end of its industrialized production also makes for a nice update to the 'confrontation' side of the original piece. One could even say that it is being inverted in an interesting way as the 1982 version was partly about exporting the harvested grains to 28 cities worldwide and planting them there. Visitors are invited to sit by the field and, considering that it is jammed in between extremely busy streets and several construction sites, it feels like an island of peace in one of the madder areas of London.

The mill itself was designed by EXYZT, a collective that many Londoners are familiar with through their Southwark Lido, a temporary structure they created in 2008 together with Sara Muzio for the Architecture Foundation and which was based around the idea of "a community of users actively creating and inhabiting their urban environment [as] key to generating a vibrant city". Sara is part of this project as well, creating a documentary about it and was working in the Mill's bakery when I got there. She explained that this project, although consisting of a very different setup, is built around the same ideas of the 'functional city'. Here, structures, apart from providing shelter, can also take on tasks like generating electricity or grinding wheat and provide a shared platform for the local residents.

The servo pole, gears and modified wheat grinder

The mill itself is 16 meters high and the main structure is built from a scaffolding typically used in construction. The six hemispherical sweeps at the top have been made from resin and are arranged in a hexagon. From there, a servo pole leads down to the bar area where it meets a small customized grain grinder which, whenever the wind moves the big structure above is making a few turns. Interestingly, there is also a series of gears which drives a small generator that is charging a battery which at night powers bars of LEDs in different corners to light up the building.

It all moves very slowly and does neither generate a lot of flour nor energy, but it's fascinating to see how the attempt on creating a somewhat autonomous structure in the middle of a highly developed cityscape actually works and above all creates a very pleasant space around itself. However, to drive things like fridges and music, the mill has to have a secondary circuit which actually hooks into the mains because the wind does not generate enough power. It would be interesting to further look at how something like the Kingsland Shopping Centre and an ensemble of Mill and Wheatfield actually compare, as functional spaces and in relation to the absolute space they occupy in a city.

Architect Sara Muzio making focaccia using flour from the Mill

The Dalston Mill and the Wheatfield is unfortunately only up for three weeks in total and will close on August 6th, so make sure you go check it out if you are in London. It is open daily from 2-10pm, and there is a program of events scheduled (including a conversation with EXYZT about 'pirate architecture' on August 2nd) which mainly focuses on notions around community and sustainability.

Entrance by the Peace Mural on Dalston Lane, between Ashwin Street and Hartwell Street, London E8.

This piece originally appeared on Regine Debatty's blog, We Make Money Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 2:43 PM)

The Dalston Mill & Wheatfield

Regine Debatty — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:43:34 +0000

Rendering of the Mill, view from Dalston Lane (from EXYZT's Flickr)

The Wheatfield and the Dalston Mill, two days after opening

The servo pole, gears and modified wheat grinder

Architect Sara Muzio making focaccia using flour from the Mill

Entrance by the Peace Mural on Dalston Lane, between Ashwin Street and Hartwell Street, London E8.

This piece originally appeared on Regine Debatty's blog, We Make Money Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 2:43 PM)

Using LEGO to Envision a Better Society

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:13:08 +0000

By Hesseltje S. van Goor

Last monday, July 6th, the UK-based National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) organised RebootBritain, a public event where social entrepreneurs, activists, policy-makers and social thinkers had a chance to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing Britain today. As part of this discussion, organisers invited participants to make their own idea of what would help to reboot Britain ... in Lego blocks.

Why? The idea is that building with the hands prompts different ways of thinking ... ideas emerge ... the process gives a voice to the regular delegates at this grand event with big-name speakers ... and everyone is drawn to view each others' interesting, clever, pretty models.

The exercise produced a collection of fun images for sparking dialogue and action:

Create digital knitting for others to unravel

Push the balance towards community and collaboration,
not personal leadership

Creative minimalism

Don't be scared to take a risk and take your idea on a journey

Looking at problems and solutions from new angles

Building bridges across social divides

Shout about it!

Looking back and moving forward (how to learn from the past to make the future we need)

Additional resources, if you're interested:

* The original flickr photo set for this collection of Lego images

* A resource website for those who want to learn more about David Gauntlett's premise that "making is connecting"

* Resources and articles directly from this year's RebootBritain conference, available on the NESTA website.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Arts at 12:13 PM)

Green Platform at Strozzina in Florence

Regine Debatty — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:07:09 +0000

I've spent the past few days highlighting some of the works exhibited but i still had to write a proper review of Green Platform. The exhibition, dedicated to art, ecology and sustainability, closes on July 19 at Strozzina (aka CCCS) in Florence.

It is a good show. Definitely less spectacular but gutsier than Radical Nature which i had visited a few days before. It's also much darker. Although there are projects that lead the way to sustainable and achievable strategies, many others leave you with a guilty (but better informed) "What have we done to this planet?" feeling.

About two third of the pieces exhibited have been produced by the Strozzina. A few of them by the usual suspects but there's also a fair amount of talented Italian artists i had never heard of.

As curator Valentina Gensini explains in the essay she wrote for the catalogue:

Traditional indicators of human well-being (life expectancy, literacy, access to sanitation, grain yield, spread of information technology, etc.) do not take escalating environmental and humanitarian catastrophes into account, nor do they include important data regarding both the reduction of biodiversity - viewed also in cultural terms - and damage to the environment, some of which stems from technological innovations and scientific experimentation whose long-term effects are still unknown. GDP (gross domestic product) does not describe the general quality of life in any way, nor does it indicate the environmental sustainability of the paths that have been undertaken.

Accordingly, the exhibition attempts to address ecological issues not only in environmental terms but also with respect to its philosophical, psychological, economic and social implications. As you can guess, Green Platform provides visitors with an intense experience. One which comes with much more questions to ponder on once you've left the gallery than answers.

Requiem, 2007

The work i found most subtle and powerful was Julian Rosefeldt 's magnificent Requiem, a four screen video installation arranged in a square. Visitors find themselves surrounded by 4 films shot in the Brazilian rainforest, home of one third of the primary forests in the world. Precious and fragile as it is, the area is nevertheless relentlessly threatened by logging multinationals.

In the beginning of the video, visitors can revel in the contemplation of lush vegetation, bright colours, the hum of insects, birdsong and the sound of raindrops falling from the trees. After a few minutes, the peacefulness is interrupted by a disturbing sound which signals that a tree is falling nearby. The crashing of the tree is quickly echoes by another one. Then another one. Although, no human figure appears on the screen, it is impossible not to feel guilty and ashamed at man's lack of consideration and long-term intelligence regarding the health of this unique ecosystem. The fact that the sound of the chainsaw is absent, makes the crash of falling trees all the more resonant and distressing.

Medusa Swarm, 2009. Photo Credit: CCCS, Firenze; Valentina Muscedra

Tue Greenfort is the darling of exhibitions about ecology and sustainability. The work he created especially for Green Platform is a direct reference to the rise in temperature observed in the Mediterranean Sea. A combination of climate change, water pollution and lack of natural enemies like turtles and tuna decimated by overfishing have enabled the mauve stinger, a jellyfish with a very painful sting, to proliferate in the Mediterranean and threaten its biodiversity. Greenfort asked artisanal glassworkers on the island of Murano in Venice (an area which is more aware than most of the consequences that the rising level of the sea can have on urban life) to produce glass models of the pink jellyfish. The battle against the invasive jellyfish is absurd and tragic as the damage they are causing is the result of human foolishness. They are a part of nature but are deemed not 'natural' enough for European waters. The battle against the proliferation of the mauve stinger constitutes the umpteenth attempt by man to combat the consequences of his bad behaviour without attacking the root of the problem.

MARCH.16, 2008 (Pharomachurus mocinno), 2008. Photo Credit: CCCS, Firenze; Valentina Muscedra

Henrik Håkansson (who also has another work in the exhibition Radical Nature in London) had a long stay in the Mexican reserve of Montes Azules, in the Selva Lacadona (Chiapas.) The area is gradually shrinking as a result of human activities, leaving animals to constantly struggle for survival against the progressive reduction of their living space.

The audio works featured in Green Platform reproduces the song of the quetzal. Once venerated by the Maya and the Aztecs as Quetzacoatl, the feather-serpent, the "king" of birds is now an endangered species. Visitors can only hear the bird for a few seconds every 12 minutes, a rhythm that reflects the rareness of the bird. To hear the bird, you either have to be patient and stay there until it sings again or you must be lucky and stumble upon it. In Håkansson's work the song of the quetzal is reproduced by an amplifier, a Fender Reverb 65, which is itself considered a legend and defined, on the rock scene, as the "king" of its kind. The work thus takes the form of a sculpture/sanctuary, a tribute to the living legend of the quetzal, whose song might one day be heard and remembered only by artificial means.

Inlandsis 09, 2009. Photo Credit: CCCS, Firenze; Valentina Muscedra

Dacia Manto's Inlandsis 09 layers several sheets of delicate eco-plastic, derived from maize, to reproduce the area of the South Pole, which is gradually shrinking due to global warming. It has been estimated that over 13,000 square kilometres of marine ice have been lost over the past 50 years. Internally, the huge shelf loses between 90 and 150 square kilometres of ice each year. Manto invites us to consider the geography of the South Pole as a living and fragile organism whose protection is vital for the future of our planet. It can be disturbed the softest blow and even visitors passing near the sculpture seem to cast a menacing shadow upon it.

Invisible 5 (The Grapevine, Buttonwillow; San Fernando Valley Map), 2006. Images credit: Kim Stringfellow, Amy Balkin

Developed in conjunction with artists Kim Stringfellow and Tim Halbur, together with the Pond: Art, Activism, and Ideas and Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice organisations, Amy Balkin 's Invisible-5 has a more journalistic approach. The project examines the social, economic and environmental context of the San Joaquin Valley along whose length runs Interstate 5 connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. A strategic axis for the transport of goods and people, the corridor is also key in the development of livestock farming and intensive agriculture, waste disposal, oil and gas industries and the construction industry. Interstate 5 is one of the most toxic areas on Earth.

Invisible-5 is an audio tour starring the people and local communities who fight for environmental justice. The sound archive, shared over the Internet, gathers the testimonies of the inhabitants along with typical local sounds and music.

Green Platform, an exhibition curated by Lorenzo Giusti and Valentina Gensini, is on view until July 19 in Florence.

All my pictures. Image on the homepage: Julian Rosefeldt, Requiem 4, 2007, Lightjet print.

P.s. The catalogue of the exhibition is to die for. Strozzina has generously uploaded the essays online and the object itself is a superb large format Moleskine.

This piece originally appeared on Regine Debatty's blog, We Make Money Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 3:07 PM)

Green Platform – The World Bank

Regine Debatty — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:34:21 +0000

As i wrote yesterday, i've just spent a day in Florence to see Green Platform - Art, Ecology, Sustainability at the Strozzina center. It is a good show, more coherent than Greenwashing and much darker than Radical Nature. Proper review should land on your screen shortly but i felt compelled to dedicate a post to a project i found particularly striking.

Michele Dantini, The World Bank, 2009. Courtesy the artist

In the Winter of 2001/02, Michele Dantini traveled to Cameroon to photograph and document what is still the biggest private sector investment in sub-Sahara Africa: the construction of the controversial Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline.

The World Bank takes the name of the international financial institution that made the construction possible. It's indeed the World Bank that teamed up with ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and Petronas of Malaysia and allocated 4.2 billion dollars to the ambitious project. Concerned by the potential risks to human rights and the environment, international NGOs and local communities voiced their opposition right from the start. The consortium attempted to calm down the accusations by forcing the governments of Chad and Cameroon to sign a strict guarantee protocol destining oil revenue for health, education and agriculture.

Michele Dantini, The World Bank, 2009. Courtesy the artist

It soon became clear that the petroleum exploitation did not manage to balance juicy profits with ecological and social principles. The pipeline required the cutting through the primary forest of south-eastern Cameroon for some 1000 kilometres in order to reach the export-loading terminal on the Atlantic coast and the drilling of 300 oil wells in Doba, south of Chad. The region affected by the project is a richly biodiverse area and home to the forest-dependent Bakola and Bagyeli people. 150 families were singled out for resettlement, many village lands were expropriated, crops and plants destroyed and water sources polluted. The upgrading of existing seasonal roads has facilitated logging and illegal poaching in otherwise inaccessible areas. Besides, the arrival of largely male job seekers in the area has led to serious social disruption of the communities, with prostitution, alcohol abuse, and STD all on the rise. The compensation plan crafted by the World Bank was very limited in scope and inadequate to restore or improve on broken livelihoods.

Michele Dantini, The World Bank, 2009. Courtesy the artist

The pipeline commenced operation in autumn 2003. Less than five years later a statement from the World Bank announced that it was ceasing to support the project because Chad's government had repeatedly violated the terms of the agreement by using oil revenue to purchase arms and recruit French troops.

In retrospect, Dantini considers his project a sort of "test" that verifies the skills and socio-environmental responsibility of the managers of the largest Western financial institution, the ideologists of a single model of "development" that has all too often shown itself to be inadequate, unsustainable and even harmful.

The World Bank, 2009. Photo Credit: CCCS, Firenze; Valentina Muscedra

The artist created a magazine (bilingual: italian and english) distributed in the gallery and entirely dedicated to the pipeline and its developments. If you can't go to the Strozzina befor ehte show closes, you can download the PDF of the mag online.

Green Platform runs until July 19, 2009 at Strozzina in Florence.

This piece originally appeared on Regine Debatty's blog, We Make Money Not Art

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 10:34 AM)

Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009

Regine Debatty — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:23:08 +0000

From the photo archive of the Centre for Land Use Interpretation, 1977. Photograph: CLUI archive

Radical Nature - Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009, an exhibition that opened a few days ago at the Barbican in London, brings together Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism.

Artists and architects have always been moved and inspired by the beauty and mysteries of nature. Since the 1960s and even more unreservedly over the last five years, the increasingly evident degradation of the natural world and the effects of climate change have brought a new urgency to their responses.

Mark Dion Mobile Wilderness Unit, Wolf, 2006. Courtesy Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna. Photo: Lisa Rastl

There is sincere commitment in artists' efforts to raises consciences about the eco-drama our planet is going through... even if sometimes, while visiting artshows on a similar topic, i've found myself in front of art works or events that smelled a bit too pungently of opportunism. But if those artworks help us change the world that's a good thing, right? My answer is "yes of course but how can i avoid being cynical?" As long as these artworks do not step out of museums and galleries most people hardly ever visit (i'm not talking about you and me but about my old friends, most of whom have no time nor inclination to follow the visual art scene), i fear that the impact of their work might be somewhat limited. Besides, setting up a contemporary art exhibition, whether its theme is eco-awareness or Bronze Age jewellery, is everything but a 'sustainable' activity. Laudable exceptions, however, are slowly emerging.

Lothar Baumgarten. Albatross,1968. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris

Right! That didn't prevent me from enjoying Radical Nature. Unlike the many shows i've seen over the past 2 years on the exact same topic, this one is more than the sum of its parts. The pieces found on the first floor are mostly flashy, easy to love artworks. The most thought-provoking pieces occupy the gallery upstairs. Many of them are remnants of performances, photos and videos of actions, models of projects and other paraphernalia.

Simon Starling. Island for Weeds, 2003. Courtesy the artist and the Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow. Photo: Jeremy Hardman-Jones, c/o Scottish Arts Council

Back in 1999, Simon Starling was working on an artwork in Scotland when he learnt that rhododendrons were to be uprooted and destroyed in the country. Considered weeds in the UK, the plants were due to be removed by government agencies from an environmentally "pure" zone of native vegetation and destroyed. Starling took seven rhododendrons and drove all the way from Northern Scotland to southern Spain, reversing the introduction of these plants to England in 1763 by a Swedish botanist. The work, called Rescued Rhododendrons highlights all the subtleties, complexities and paradoxes of nature, or rather what we regard as 'nature.' It is also a political piece, one that echoes the sometimes openly xenophobic ideas of ethnic purity found in many parts of Europe.

The work included in the Barbican exhibition builds upon Rescued Rhododendron. Starling's Island for Weeds is a floating island that hosts the plant that Scotland is adamant it should be eradicated. Starling had first hoped to install the floating structure on the famous Loch Lomond but his idea was rejected. Island for Weeds astutely questions the ability (of nature, of a nation or any system) to absorb new organisms and ideas.

Henrik Håkansson, Fallen Forest, 2006. Courtesy the artist, Galleria Franco Noero, Turin and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow. Photo: Yann Revol

Henrik Hakansson displaced nature too but in a much more shocking way. His Fallen Forest is a 16-metre-square segment of rainforest re-planted in black plastic pots and flipped on its side as a comment on the unbalanced relationship between man and nature. Powerful lights pointed towards this portion of nature enable the plants to grow horizontally, though some of them didn't seem to be in excellent shape when i visited the show.

In 1982, Agnes Denes planted a two-acre field of wheat in a vacant lot in downtown Manhattan. Wheatfield -- A Confrontation yielded 1,000 lbs. of wheat on a ground worth fortunes to comment on "human values and misplaced priorities".

It took her about a year to prepare the site, removing junk and debris from the construction of the nearby World Trade Center. She even installed an irrigation system. After that, trucks after trucks brought in organic matter to make the topsoil. The harvested grain then traveled to 28 cities worldwide and was symbolically planted around the globe.

As part of Radical Nature the work is restaged at an abandoned railway line in Dalston, East London (opens on July 15.)

Joseph Beuys's Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz (Honey Pump at the Workplace), 1977
Photograph: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

One cannot dream of a more suitable guest at the exhibition than the co-founder of Germany's Green Party. Barbican is indeed showing the remains of Honeypump in the Workplace, a performance that saw Joseph Beuys pumping two tons of honey through 17 meters of plastic tubing, using motors lubricated with over 200 pounds of margarine. The action lasted for the 100 days of Documenta 6 and was accompanied by talks and debates that all together highlighted his expanded notion of art.

Joseph Beuys, Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz. First presented at documenta 6, 1977

Honey takes an important place in Beuys' work, it is the product of bees who, for him, represented as ideal society of warmth and collaboration.

Ant Farm, Oceania, Dolphin Embassy Sea Craft, 1976. Photo: Doug Michels

The Dolphin Embassy was an unrealized sea station that American architects Ant Farm had imagined to build in Australia. The project aimed at researching the possibility of establishing non-verbal communication between dolphins and humans using the new video technologies. Interspecies communication was for them a means to reach a shared vision for a harmonious co-evolution.

As usual, Ant Farm's practice made an innovative use of technology, this time by making video equipment the intermediary that would enable humans to connect with dolphins. (more info at this video of a press conference where Doug Michels and Doug Hurr are presenting the Dolfin Embassy to the media.)

Ant Farm, Doug Michels with video and dolphins in Australia, 1977. Courtesy Ant Farm. Photo: Alex Morphett

In the '70s, Wolf Hilbertz developed the mineral accretion process which consists in the electrolytic deposition of sea-shell-like minerals from seawater that creates a construction material. Sunlight would then turn the minerals in seawater into limestone for underwater and dryland constructions.

Hilbertz's Autopia Ampere project was an island that would grow in the Mediterranean Sea. It would house, feed, and employ 50,000 inhabitants.

No one does Philippe Rahm like Philippe Rahm. His Pulmonary Space is a form made to inflate when 5 musicians blow into their wind instrument. In his statement about Pulmonary Space, Rahm refers to Hegel who considered music the most beautiful art form and architecture the lowest art form. According to the philosopher, the more an art form goes beyond its materiality, the less it is constrained by the natural world and the closest it is to pure spirit, the more elevated and transcendent it became.

Today we know that sound or voice are not abstract nor dematerialized. They possess a physical, biological and chemical dimension. Pulmonary Space gives a visible, physical presence to music.

Video of a Pulmonary Space performance:
Pulmonary space

More images: Barbican, flickr and The Guardian.

Radical Nature - Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009 runs until 18 October 2009 at the Barbican Art Gallery.

Events focusing on a similar topic: Day 1 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics: Seed broadcasting workshop, Open Sailing, drifting lifestyle to cope with looming disasters, How to Save the World in 10 Days at Vooruit in Ghent, Transmediale 09 - Survival and Utopia, Interview with Ulla Taipale from Capsula, Greenwashing. Environment, Perils, Promises and Perplexities , Ecological Strategies in Today's Art (part 1) and (part 2).

This piece originally appeared on Regine Debatty's blog, We Make Money Not Art

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 10:23 AM)

Urban Echo: Art Project Displays Thoughts and Imaginings

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:15:00 +0000

Nominated by Sarah Kuck

As night falls, illuminated letters crawl up the broadside of a public building. From across the way, the artists behind Urban Echo choose a question, like "what is your greatest hope for America?", or "what am I?", and beam it and a phone number upon the structure. Viewers respond by sending in messages via SMS or voicemail, and the Urban Echo crew projects the thoughts and imaginings of the city-dwellers on the wall. This art project has been carried out on buildings and museums around the world.

Urban Echo @ Kitchen Budapest from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

This piece is part of Worldchanging's Attention Philanthropy campaign. All week long, the Worldchanging Network will be delivering "attention grants" to worthy projects, individuals, resources and more. You can learn more about these gifts of notice and find other entries by clicking by clicking here.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Arts at 8:15 AM)

Self-Portrait Machine

Regine Debatty — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:27:07 +0000

More nuggets from the RCA show. This time from Design Products' edgy and inspiring Platform 13, headed by the very talented Onkar Kular and Sebastien Noel.

Images courtesy Jen Hui Liao

Jen Hui Liao's Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model's help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait.

The project started with the observation that nearly everything that surrounds us has been created by machines. Our personal identities are represented by the products of the man-machine relationship. The Self-Portrait Machine encapsulates this man-machine relationship. By co-operating with the machine, a self-portrait is generated. It is self-drawn but from an external viewpoint through controlled movement and limited possibility. Our choice of how we are represented is limited to what the machine will allow.

Images courtesy Jen Hui Liao

The project aims to explore the cooperation process of human & machine. The designer explains: I found some the relationship between human and machine are amazing and could be horrible (like this one that shows how we human invent machines then put human inside to it to manufacture goods), The final object - A machine is a miniature of what I understand through the process of research, and the aim of the machine is to let people have a chance to feel the condensed process of how we generate our self identity from external point of view as from the society, which is a big machine we all in.

P.S. the website of Self-Portrait Machine will be on line soon, it will show more about the background research and the building process of it. I'll update this post as soon as the website is up.

Videos of the machine in action.

Exhibition view. The designer had aligned portraits made by the machines along with portraits made by painters

The Royal College of Art Show is open every day from 11amd to 8pm until July 5, 2009.

This piece originally appeared in We Make Money Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 4:27 PM)