Annotated Bibliography

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, 2016, Welcome to the Anthropocene, Big Small Planet, http://www.anthropocene.info/index.php, viewed 8/10/16

Welcome to the Anthropocene is the world’s first educational web portal on the Anthropocene. It aims to inspire, educate and engage people about the interactions between humans and the planet. The web portal was first developed in 2012 by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Globaïa, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDB), Stockholm Resilience Centre and Stockholm Environment Institute.

This site has been the basis of my video essay; obtaining statistics, information on the anthropocene, facts & helping me understand the critical aspects of the anthropocene. The site simplifies each aspect which makes it easily accessible and easy to understand. This site would be my go to if someone asked me about the Anthropocene & I wanted to explain it to them. 

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Steffen, w Royal Society, 2011,”The anthropocene; historical and philosophical perspectives,”  http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1938/842#sec-6

Scranton, 2 2015, ‘Learning to Die in the Anthropocene; Reflections on the End of Civilization, City Lights press 

See Week 1 Posts – Both of these texts are useful in my initial understanding of the Anthropocene & Learning to Die in the Anthropocene helped part of my argument. Stating that we have both natural disasters as a result of human impact & also the direct  human impact such as war on the environment. The concept of the loss of natural order & also that civil disobedience & law & order would be challenged. This intrigued me because they are obvsiously important foundations of a civilisation. As far back in recorded history their has been rules & regulations followed(or not followed); even in Ancient Egyptian religious rituals.
It begs me to ask the question; (and hopefully not know the answer) what will the world be like once all order is disestablished?  Especially since our current lifestyles based on an industrial and technological industry are integral with this concept of order.
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Waters, C.N, Zalasiewicz, J, 2016, The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically different from the Holocene, Sciene Mag, Vol. 351, Issue 6269,  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6269/aad2622 

Recent issue (Jan 2016) of Science Mag, an article within which talks about the Anthropocene. The magazine is issued by the American Association of Science and has multiple authors; so i think it is very reliable. I found the more information I was able to gather on the Anthropocene allowed me to begin my video essay. So as much information as I could gather was useful & beneficial. Although this article was written when they were discussing wether the term was to be used, it is still helpful. 

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Razian, N, 2016, Art in the time of the Anthropocene, http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/196/, viewed 8/10/2016

Initiated by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation in 2011, Ibraaz is the leading critical forum on visual culture in North Africa and the Middle East. We publish an annual online platform – consisting of essays, interviews, artists’ projects, and platform responses – that focuses on research questions conceived through a network of editorial contributors based in the Middle East and beyond

‘Art in the Time of the Anthropocene’ This concept really intrigued me in Week 9  watching the youtube video. 

Quote from video ; “In the event of Fukushima a lot of artists expressed how powerless is in the face of disaster, We felt the same way, but wed only confirm that if we didn’t do anything. And i felt it necessary to record what we can do as an artist at that moment. When everything stopped functioning properly what artists created at times like that would mean a lot, when looking back from 50 years,  100 years, 200 years in the future it will seem non-sensical not to have created something in response.”

I decided to base my video essay off this concept that as Visual Artists it is necessary for us to document the world around us now; and not just for documentation purpose but also as a way to have a voice for change. As an artist, studying visual arts at university I feel like I always have to defend my life choices & career choices to the outside world and I think this is a way to not only cement our importance in the scheme of the world now, but also be a catalyst for change. We have the knowledge & the tools to connect with society & all walks of life. 

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https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100013745740677

I created a Facebook called “Carlotta Change” She is the symbol & voice of every person who is willing to do something to help our environment, but she also provides a voice for those who do not yet have one. As a Gen Y, Facebook is the platform where I receive all my information, from friends & family and also big world wide news & issues. So I thought it was fitting to use this platform in my video to showcase my point, Which is that artists have a responsibility to create art & make voice to the Anthropocene and climate change.  The mission of Facebook states that it gives people the power to share & make the world more open and connected. This is exactly what we need to start making changes and is the perfect platform to share Carlotta’s event ” Art for change” which calls the world to start making a difference.
There is some issues with accessing your information through facebook as it is filtered through your friends likes; and you can also become disensitised to the content you are viewing as it is abit of an information overload at times. But overall I think it is the platform of our future & is amazing to see humans get behind.
All my video is based in a contemporary culture as Facebook is a platform for current issues and news. I also think that we have already made our damage, so it is important that we look to our future now & figure out how to prevent any more damage.

The mission of facebook;

Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.

Culture of facebook; 

Facebook is defined by our hacker culture – an environment that rewards creative problem solving and rapid decision making. We encourage people to be bold. Our open culture keeps everyone informed and allows people to move around and solve the problems they care about most. We work in small teams and move fast to develop new products, constantly iterating and improving. The phrase “this journey is 1% finished” is posted on our walls, reminding us that we’ve only begun to fulfill our mission to make the world more open and connected.

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Click to access PULL%20PDF11.pdf

Artist information on Mary Mattingly’s artwork “Pull” (Description below)
“A proposal for a place without a door and without walls, Pull is a sculpture in two parts. Pull is a negotiation, like two bodies, pushing and pulling, forming new histories. Elemental life-support systems cycle through the spaces. Pull is a performance. In a process of compromise, balance, and care it is pulled across the city. Temporarily inhabiting spaces outside at Parque Central and inside the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, it will be dragged to its next location in a long-term procession across the city, its route growing. Made through meeting, co-learning, compromising, and materials with past lives, Pull is brought together from all over Havana and New York City. Pull understands that interdependency with each other, with urban and rural environments is necessary now more than ever. When activated, it is a stage for storytelling about our shared future, and the ability each person has to narrate. A porous kind of island, ecosystem, and organism in formation, Pull is a poem and a tool.”

This was a helpful source as it showed me the ins and outs of her work & provided a description for part of my video. 

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http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/stunning-contemporary-art-captures-terror-wonder-wit-anthropocene-180956742/#CKPlXueT2MeLBKyO.99

Provided information on other artists used in Video. It was a starting point of my research into each artist. It was really interesting to delve deeper into each artist. Each one has a unique take on the events of contemporary events which is where Facebook lies, with recent events & contemporary attitudes towards certain things.  Artists include; Mary Mattingly, Joann Brennan, Laurel Roth Hope, Edward Burtynsky, & Ken & Julia Yonetani.

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https://www.facebook.com/DavidAvocadoWolfe/videos/10153625047761512/?pnref=story
Video of Aleppo War torn Syria Before and After Images; Taken from David Wolfes personal page; David Wolfe is one of the world’s leading orators. His passion is health and well-being.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNJQ8hvXKXc
Hurricane Matthew; Death toll soars in Haiti. Taken from Euronews youtube page, originally found on Facebook under the search #hurricanematthew.

 

Week 5

Excerpts from Jane Bennett, 2010, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.

We value things against how we can use or exploit them. This exploitation was how we began the Anthropocene through our use of natural resources & our impact on the environment. Bennets text talks about how we can reconnect the individual and make them aware of the vitality of “things”.

When people distribute themselves into racially and economically segregated neighborhoods, even if, in doing so, they are following a cultural trend and do not explicitly intend, endorse, or even consider the impact of their movements on, say, municipal finances, crime rates, or transportation policy. There are many afIinities between the act of persons dragging their belongings to their new homes in the suburbs and the acts of worms dragging leaves \ to their burrows or migrating to a savanna-forest border.

A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously  composed materialities that form confederations. In revealing similarities across categorical divides and lighting up structural parallels between material forms in “nature” and those in “culture,”

he focuses on a potentially disruptive human force that exists within (though is not recognized by) the public. He calls this the force of the people or of the “demos.” The democratic act par excellence occurs when the demos does something that exposes the arbitrariness of the dominant “par, tition of the sensible.”24 This is the partition that had been rendering some people visible as political actors while pushing others below the threshold of not

Such scenes, however different in their cast of characters, always tell the same story: the story the equality of speaking beings.” The “mise­ en-scenes that reconfigure the relations of the visible and the sayable” expose “the ultimate secret of any social order,” that is,’ that “there is no natural principle of domination by one person over another.”

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Louise Boscacci, 2016, ‘On Affect: Bodies in Movement and Rest’ [unpublished notes] – a summary document on affect theory in contemporary arts practice and scholarship

 

 

 

 

 

Week 4; Data of the Athropocene

Hawkins, Harriet, 2014. “Questioning Environmental Encounter.” [Catalogue essay] Christina Della Giustina http://www.dg-c.org/youarevariations/Questioning%20environmental%20encounter_HH.pdf

• Realizing, in the process, forms of encounter – of embrace – of both scientists, and of trees, that was undoubtedly challenging, but also brimming with possibility.
• You are variations took place not only in the context of such situated scientific production – the localised social context of the lab – but also against the backdrop of global concerns with the observable trends in climate change, and the related known and unknown modifications in the water cycle both globally and in a micro-climatic context
• transpose into visual and sound-scapes, thus rendering the differences in water availability and plant responses to climatic change into a very different register
• field and laboratory explorations of these environmental data sets, collating and analyzing information on soil moisture, sap-flow, leaf gas exchange and meteorological conditions.
• Working in conjunction with not only the art profression, but along side scientists to help inquire information to inform her art practice. I think its really important that we work along side other profressions to become a connected world.
• In the course of these studies it was not just the tree species she was getting to know, but also the species “scientist.” For as the project evolved, her investigation of the trees, become an exploration of the ways of knowing, and the form of environmental encounter that shaped the scientific knowledge she was working with. This started out as a form of epistemological clash, as her own skills and sensibilities as an artist and a philosopher often met head-on with those of the environmental scientists. These often uncomfortable social negotiations become however, something productive with the formation of a collaborative think-tank. This collective effort, while far from easy going, represents the commitment of both Della Giustina and the scientists involved to work together to explore the different ways of thinking about, and knowing these trees

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Morton, Timothy, 2013. “What Are Hyperobjects?,” in Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World ed. Cary Wolfe, Posthumanities Minneapolis and London University of Minneapolis Press

• Hyperobjects are here, right here in my social and experiential space
• “From the center of the galaxy, a supermassive black hole impinges on my awareness, as if it were sitting in the car next to me at the traffic lights. Every day, global warming burns the skin on the back of my neck, making me itch with physical discomfort and inner anxiety. Evolution unfolds in my genome as my cells divide and mutate, as my body clones itself, as one of my sperm cells mixes it up with an egg. As I reach for the iPhone charger plugged into the dashboard, I reach into evolution, into the extended phenotype that doesn’t stop at the edge of my skin but continues into all the spaces my humanness has colonized.”
• . I am not sure where I am anymore. I am at home in feeling not at home.
• Along with this vivid intimacy goes a sense of unreality. Thus, there emerges the fully demonic quality of contemporary ecological experience, mimed in post-1945 art. The intensity of the hyperobject’s aesthetic trace seems unreal in its very luminosity. The vastness of the hyperobject’s scale makes smaller beings—people, countries, even continents—seem like an illusion, or a small colored patch on a large dark surface. How can we know it is real? What does real mean? The threat of global warming is not only political, but also ontological. The threat of unreality is the very sign of reality itself. Like a nightmare that brings news of some real psychic intensity, the shadow of the hyperobject announces the existence of the hyperobject. We find ourselves caught in them. The name of this trap is viscosity
• The mirror becomes a substance, an object. Hyperobjects push the reset button on sincerity

 

Week 10 –

http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/196/

See it to believe it – This notion of seeing it to believe it is what a lot of people go by in society.

It’s about the regimes of the visible and the invisible. Aesthetics in a global sense belongs to affecting the regimes of what should be shared, seen, and heard in order for things to change. Museums and art institutions today, in both the Global South and the Global North, feel a stronger urge to connect to what is happening in their immediate environments – they try to see what their constituencies are and what groups they are exchanging with.

http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/196/

The discourses of the Anthropocene attribute the destruction of the planet and its ecosystem to humanity as such. These discourses assume that humans have gradually embarked upon their own destruction once they discovered fire, the very precondition of human life and labour. This de-historicizes the problem and de-couples it from late capitalism. One of the criticisms of the Anthropocene claims that attributing the disintegration of the planet’s ecology to ‘humanity’ is ideology at its purest in a sense that it attributes the responsibility of such destruction to everyone on the planet when responsibility only lies within a small elitist fraction of humans who own the means of production. This ideology relegates to us, as conscientious individuals, to save the planet by taking individual responsibility for it – by recycling, consuming conscientiously and so on. You also seem to attribute agency and responsibility to the individuals in the curatorial proposition of the exhibition project. What would be your response to this critique?

 

My understanding of the Anthropocene is not that it is a product of late capitalism but rather the human greed for colonialist expansionism that created the problem. There is a part of our human civilization that always needs to go beyond one’s own frontiers in order to capture and extract, taking nature – as well as the Other – as an immense provider for one’s own well-being. If you look at some of the oldest indigenous cultures of the planet you can see that they have survived on almost a zero waste economy and yet are being exterminated as we speak by the current capitalist societies. The critique of anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene should be there in order for us to learn as much and as quickly as possible about how to prevent this from happening again and again. The solutions that are being offered – by the Global North mostly – are geo-engineering and creating more technology in order to clean the atmosphere and get rid of waste. I do not think that there is actually a solution. This is where I think the field of arts has a double-sidedness: it can be considered a safe space where activist artists retreat in order to produce ‘improvements of evolutionary code’, as Marko Peljhan calls it. It is possible for two enemies to meet in the space of art without war breaking out. They can negotiate. It is a kind of space that still claims to be neutral even though we know that a neutral space cannot exist. The field of artistic production has the privilege to be simultaneously attached and detached.

I think the exhibition is a space of negotiation. It cannot produce massive changes in the world but maybe it mobilizes on a local, national, or perhaps even on a global level. It builds relationships and affinities and produces knowledges that can then filter into other spaces. It opens up a public conversation with a different exchange of knowledge. It is not about grand gestures but rather what’s being mobilized.

Week 9- Nuclear & other Disasters

“In the event of Fukushima a lot of artists expressed how powerless is in the face of disaster, We felt the same way, but wed only confirm that if we didn’t do anything. And i felt it necessary to record what we can do as an artist at that moment. When everything stopped functioning properly what artists created at times like that would mean a lot, when looking back from 50 years,  100 years, 200 years in the future it will seem non-sensical not to have created something in response.”

This section of the video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWN7d4pBqTs
I think this had the greatest impact on my realisation of the importance of Art. I studied Ancient History in high school and a lot of the knowledge we gained about the societies at that time was through Art. So listening to this, I originally felt that Art had no place in the event of a natural/man made disaster, however it occurred to me that through a documentary and historical perspective, it is really important that we do document these events. But also from a current perspective, it allows people to convey their feelings & also for people to understand what is happening from an understandable medium not just what is portrayed in the media. Also the media covers it usually for a couple of weeks before the next big thing, but the effect of the event does not just last that time period, people are affected by it for years and years after & this allows a medium for them to present this perspective to the world, to tell their story. To also use it as a platform to make sense of the events that have occurred.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVWSuFY6O-M – Change should start with society. with the individual)

Coralie Wynn and Ryan Reynolds from Gap Filler discussing how they began to make projects in response to the Christchurch earthquake:

Bring the community together & having a platform for conversation. Projects with a sense of community that in an event of a disaster make people feel connected & useful.

Ken and Julia Yonetani Crystal Palace & Ant made with nuclear beads led me to their other work Sweet Barrier Reef, also making a point about human impact.

Sweet Barrier Reef (2009) Ken + Julia Yonetani

Materials: Sugar, vegetable gum, polystyrene foam

Dimenions: variable

Sweet Barrier Reef focuses on the event of bleaching coral. Coral bleaching refers to the process leading to coral death. River waters containing high levels of suspended sediment (nitrogen, phosphorus and herbicides) cause coral death and bleaching. This sediment often comes from harvesting sugarcane, and is known to be one factor leading to bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef. In fact, many large sugarcane fields are located beside coral reefs, leading to coral damage in places across the globe. In this project, Yonetani focuses on this impact by creating a reef of sugar. Yet here, sugar is used as a much larger metaphor, questioning the environmental impact of our desire to consume.

More broadly, this work seeks to focus on all causes of human impact that lead to coral death. Presently the most significant factor of coral bleaching and danger to coral is posed by global warming. Abnormal rises in sea temperatures lead to massive coral damage in vast areas. Coral is a very sensitive animal and cannot tolerate a rise of even one or two degrees in sea temperature. It can be classified into one of the animals that are easily damaged with human impact, such as a result of climate change, over-fishing and water pollution.

Like Yonetani’s other works, Sweet Barrier Reef investigates the relationship between human desires and environmental issues. Sugar becomes a metaphor of human desire. Sugar is also a symbol of colonization, modernisation and consumerism. This may be related to the intimate relation between colonial history and sugar plantations. Sweet Barrier Reef is inspired by the vision of the massive coral colonies within the Great Barrier Reef.

 

Week 8 – The Post Human Metamorphis

http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway/

“It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with) – British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

Gives me “speculative thinking” in spades. Isabelle Stengers insists we cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world.

She maintains that decisions must take place somehow in the presence of those who will bear their consequences.

In the Navajo language, string figure games are called na’atl’o’. They are one form of “continuous weaving,” practices for telling the stories of the constellations, of the emergence of the People, of the Diné. These string figures are thinking as well as making practices, pedagogical practices and cosmological performances. Some Navajo thinkers describe string figures as one kind of patterning for restoring hózhó, a term imperfectly translated into English as harmony, beauty, and right relations of the world, including right relations of humans and nonhumans. Not in the world, but of the world; that is what leads me to include Navajo string figures, na’atl’o’, in the web of SF worlding. The worlds of SF are not containers; they are patternings, risky co-makings, speculative fabulations. It matters which ideas we think other ideas with; thinking or making cat’s cradle with string figures with na’atl’o’ is not an innocent universal gesture, but a risky proposition in relentless historical relational contingency.

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cc.aspx

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came. These responses from aesthetes told a disturbing tale.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

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The Posthuman Metamorphosis

Week 8

• speculative thinking
• thinking the posthuman in the anthropocene
• the anthropocene is time of human impact on the environment
• speculatuve thinking on the construction of stories.
• about how creative practice thinks and responds to the anthropocene
• IF the anthropocene is about the geological marker left by the human, what then is the human?
• HARAWAY – “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with. It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with” The language, the ideas, the objects we use all matter, because they help us to think where we are and what we are doing
• What is the human? Human = Individual
  Rene Descartes – I think therefore I am – cogito ergo sum
  (Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum) -> i doubt therefore it think, i think therefore i am. 
• his ideas where that you cannot believer everything you see or hear, but because we doubt, means that we think
• What is the opposite of human (thinking things)?  = Technology, machine, animal, women? = work like clockwork
• What about nature and technology? Are they opposites? Human nature and technology (haraway) are not opposites at all

• Natural Nature – normal, the way it has always been, not touched or contaminated by humans, separate to and distinct from culture/control, free/left to its own to devices.
• Great barrier reef – natural should we conserve it, should we let nature take (her) course? Great barrier reef is an anthropocene artefect
• Fredwrick Edwin church The icebergs
• Olafur eliasson ‘The weather project” 2003 – people start behaving like their directly with nature. they treated the sun like it was the sun in the gallery space, lying down and sitting and having picnics, wouldn’t usually happen. how do we work through these interactiosn?

• What does it mean to be human?
• Why in this age of overwhelming desire and perhaps, pressure to escape the human/ the planet, do we silty ant to stay and work with the human/ planet?
  Maybe these days its not to be a thinking thing to be human but to be a caring thing, something that is in relationship with other things.
• what are the implications of the networking of other types of bodies with our own, through technologies such as genetic engineering?
• If the human is not a discretely confined entity, how might we articulate its relationships with other bodies and objects.
• Post human – the boundary between the human and the non human, human and technology and human & nature.
• Donna Hardaway – began her relationship as a primatologist

Week 6;Extinction & Non human ecologies

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/25/the-sixth-extinction

 

Kolbert looks at species and the ecologies in order to lay fact that we are in the “sixth extinction.” The knowledge & scientific facts back her claims that we are currently undergoing mass extinction.
The many species that have existed on earth—estimates run as high as fifty billion—more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared.

In Darwins theory of natural selection, Darwin embraced extinction; it was, he realized, essential that some species should die out as new ones were created. But he believed that this happened only slowly. Indeed, he claimed that it took place more gradually even than speciation: “The complete extinction of the species of a group is generally a slower process than their production.

Kolbert talks about the 5 Big stages of mass extinction; this allowed me to understand the significance of extinctions & the differing between the one we are living in now.

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• “Signal Eight times”
• Nature, Catastrophic Extinction Events and Contemporary Art
• In History of Western thought nature remains continuous and at a safe distance from the impacts of humanity and technology.
• Amidst the escalating crisis known as the anthropogenic climate change nature is understood as a human construction that more then ever needs our protection.
• It relies on the fact that humans think that they are at the apex of a great chain of being (At the top of the ladder)
• Contemporary Artists challenging this oder of things by addressing nature as a complex of environmental and interspecies relationships.
• Anne Salmond – Key reassessment of the defence of nature.
  Cartesian “Order of things: and her description of Vitalist “Order of Relations.””Order of Things”
• Conservation concepts
• “resource management”
• “Environmental services” ideas that assume people control the planet via economic tools they themselves have invented
• Humans control and defend nature (It is something they can manipulate, decontruct and construct?)
• Desire for classification and measurement of nature
• “Distressed conservation ethics, where powerlessness and grief are countered by a determination to do something.”VS. “Order of Relations”
• Recognition in the knowledge of indigenous peoples well versed in integrated and dynamic ecosystems (respect for the land)
• Understand the implications of the human animal in the complexes of capital that have been labeled “nature”
• A vitalist approach investigates the environment as a system that includes the organism both human/nonhuman as a whole.

Approach to species extinction is found within the eco-sanctuary movement. However, its aim to “restore our sanctuary valley to its pre human state” suggest a desire to return to the order of things. (The removal of the human organism.)

A vitalist understanding of ecologies does not separate the human organism from the environmental; instead the environmental is part and parcel of any organism that may occupy it.

• Signal 8 times – Painting – Bill Hammond
• Living in the 6th Great Extinction – the 5th was the end of all the dinosaurs
• How we act and understand the Anthropocene being in the 6th extinction
• Given scientific fact that their dinosaurs, Up until 1659 fossils where thought to be growing in the rocks (Nicola Steno)
• It proves that their was actually something before us, something before humans
• If we have this fossil record of animals before us then it points to the fact that something catastrophic must have happened. 1796 – George Cuvier
• As they discover/understand species is equated in its absence if its studied through fossil record.
• Begin to ; Classify and quantify records (fossils/animals)
• an attempt to understand and map species is essentially colonising the world
• NZ has been inhabited by humans for 800 years (versus australia 16000) and in that time they have managed to kill 50% of the native animals since inhabited.
• Sirocco The Rockstar Kakapo
• Became ambassador for conservation and humans – Unusual to have one of the ambassadors as the animal itself
• Flies in its own private jet and tickets sell out to meet Sirocco
• 74 kakapo left in the world, all have been listed and named
• Argument is spending personal time with Sirocco you will understand the specials and change your behaviour towards them. To know a bird is to love him.
• Huia Bird Extinction (Bird Beak Broach) – few bird species to have different beaks for gathering food and they mate for life.
• J.G. Kuelomans from W.L. Bullers – a history of the Birds of New Zealand
• Buller – Amateur Naturalist, Capturing, killing & eating thousands of native birds
• the only reason we have records of certain birds is because of Buller
• Bill Hammond “Bullers Table cloth” 1944 (Taxidermy)  Hammond trying to show how buller’s “scientific” study of birds was a domestic one.
• Bill H The Fall of Icarus 1995.

 

 

 

 

Week 3; Humans, Machines, Nature & Networks – Notes

Uta Meta Bauer The Kula Project

• Kula Ring – experience of exchange
• Experiences – how self sustainable communities are, they do not contribute to the climate change on a large scale. (they are also suffering as a result from it)
• we are so dependent that we don’t even understand anymore it could be possible to reduce consumption.
• important we do this as a group. This whole constellation of going somwhere together in a place we haven’t been is an interesting part.
• 70% of global trade is done on the ocean, not by land or air
• Artists are in a  unique position to give another opinion on what this is
• Art is reflecting on those emotions and the environment
• This whole chain of impact that is so important & difficult to recognise, everything we do has a consequence.
• Through our industrialisation, consumption and desires we are causing the biggest impact & how do we change that
• It is our responsibility.
• Can we get out of our comfort zone, and share what they see & produce as a follow on to the experience.
• Social relations that are occurring with the artists & then each artist is taking it in their own way. Some think about globalisation, the people or the environment.

ENVIRONMENTAL ART

• Rachel Carson “Silent Spring” 1962
• “fable for tomorrow” a true story using a composite of examples drawn from many real communities where the use of DDT had caused damage to wildlife, birds, bees, agricultural animals, domestic pets and even humans.
• Inspired by Carson’s work;
• Newton & Helen Mayer Harrison – Art park spoils pile reclamation site, the Harrison Project – Work in collaboration with scientists and ecologists. If you can get the soil right other things will grow. (Making Earth 1970.) After understanding that topsoil was endangered world wide we made earth. Work to make soil healthy. 
• Not aestheticising work or constructing it, or making something from the earth like Andy Goldsworthy. Literally making earth.
• Land art/ Earth Art
• Robert Smithson used the land itself as his medium and the landscape as his gallery.
• Entropy made visible. “Everything is wearing down, human beings might be different to dinosaurs… it might be a different situation.”
• Asphalt Rundown 1969 – Pours truck loads of asphalt already down a worn down cliff face. Collar with scientists & builders
  Entropy (anti-mechanistic world view) irreversible condition.

Systems Ecology – Jack Burnham

Mel Chin – Revival field 1991

Unexpected interactions

Impact on relational thinking/practices
– earth art

-Systems

-environments

Week 2; Living as Social Form

http://www.spikeartmagazine.com/en/articles/interview-rirkrit-tiravanija

• Rirkrit Tiravanija his subject and the way that he has read Western culture against the cultural attitudes of his homeland, Thailand.
• Far Eastern thought is not concerned with substance, but with relationships,
• I decided to make something that was very close to me and that was part of my everyday experience. When I made the first cooking piece, it was not about cooking at all (I suppose it has never been about cooking!), but was rather a (kind of) museological critique – about cultural fragmentation (the removal or displacement of cultural artefacts from one (original) context to another, i.e. from the East to the West (from my perspective))
• It was about reanimating certain structures in order to address the shifting of context, to bring back the everyday to objects which had been catalogued into a certain sphere of cultural value
• I felt that this distance represented the gap in Western thought between »subject« and »object,« which I needed to attack and dismantle – the »doubt« about the author, or the »doubt« about the subject’s position or positioning. So, in order to confuse the positions, I implicated the viewer.
• have always been ideological in my approach to art making and the potential of art making, and I have always been sceptical about institutional structures or institutional boundaries. This doesn’t mean that I have worked or lived outside the bounds of such structures, but certainly, instinctively, I have always been doubtful
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  What is relational aesthetics and how is it related to the Anthropocene?

Nicholas Bourriaud 1988
to descirbe a new way of working
Relational aesthetics; “aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relational which they represent, produce or prompt.”

“He saw artists as facilitators rather than makers and regarded art as information exchanged between the artist and the viewers. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world.”
http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/r/relational-aesthetics

http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/15/art-of-interaction-a-theoretical-examination-of-carsten-holler-test-site

CARSTON HOLLER TEST SITE INFORMATION

RELATIONAL AESTHETICS

“Together, alone in our own homes” the moment relational art speaks to.

Social media etc.

Rirkrit Tiravanija – Untitled (1271) 1993.
1271 is the year the italian explorer set sail through asia, returned to native venice from china the recipe of noodles. This piece is about the circulation of ideas & relational aesthetic art. Originally paddled work through canals of venice & then the art was situated in a gallery where, the viewers can interact with the art & pour hot water into noodles and the viewer can eat their noodles, join together & chat. Showing connection of joining cultures.

Generosity in work – generous work.

 

• Artistic activity strives to open up obstructed passages of human communication and connected levels of reality keep apart from one another.
• The superhighway may well actually help us to travel faster and more efficiently, yet it has the drawback of turning its users into consumers.
• We feel meagre and helpless when faced with electronic media, theme parks, user friendly places and the spread of compatible forms of sociability, like the laboratory rat doomed to an inexorable itinerary in it its cage, littered with chunks of cheese.Although surrounded by a large amount of information connecting us between other humans we also feel helplesss with a path of constant information we have no control over. Also surrounded by everything we want but may not necessarily be what we need?
• The ideal subject of the society is extras is thus reduced to the condition of a consumer of time and space. For Anythingg that cannot be marketed will inevitably vanish. Before long it will not be possible to maintain relationships outside these areas.

As we have become a consumer to technology & information, however it runs the risk that we will no longer be able to communicate to people outside of these technologies.

So we are summoned to talk about things around a drink, as a symbolic form of contemporary human relations.
The relationship between people as symbolised by goods or replaced by them and signposted by logos. This is a society where human relations are no longer directly experienced but become blurred in their spectacular representation

Here lies the biggest issue to do with art?

IS IT POSSIBLE to generate relationships with the world, in a practical field art history traditionally earmarked for their representation?

in the art world, the artistic practice, as distinguished from theory appears to be rich for social experienments, like a space protected from the norm. (the uniformity of behaviour patterns)

Relational Form; Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts, it is not an immutable essence.

Antagonism & Relational Aesthetics
Claire Bishop ‘The Palais de Tokyo”

 

Week 1

http://plasticparadisemovie.com/

This is the link to the Movie I have watched.