Arts and Ecology

Art, Ecology and Citizen Power

Tomorrow, the Dutch artist Marjolijn Dijkman arrives in the UK to begin her residency at Clare Cottage in Helpston, near Peterborough. Her stay marks a shift in focus for Arts & Ecology, towards exploring how the arts may engage people locally with environmental change and sustainability. As part of this, Marjolijn has been invited to [...]

The thing we shouldn’t be asking artists to do

Heart of Darkness by Cornelia Parker, 2004 from Earth: art of a changing world, London 2009 This is Climate Action on Cultural Hertitage week – it’s an initiative championed by Bridget McKenzie as a response to the growing number of individuals and organisations calling for a more clearly defined sense of purpose from the arts [...]

Another kind of model village…

This also from Bruce Sterling: As Sterling’s blog Beyond the Beyond points out, artist Sergio Cezar makes huge models of the Brazilian favelas out of cardboard. There is something disturbing about scale. The 200 dolls houses of Rachel Whiteread’s Place (2008) – part of Psycho Buildings at the Hayward – were downright creepy. Maybe it’s [...]

Furtherfield.org: The Zero Dollar Laptop

Nice to see Bruce Sterling picking up on the excellent media arts collective furtherfield.org’s Zero Dollar Laptop project. Working with clients from St Mungo’s homeless charity, they’re helping people break up old laptops and build new ones, adding free opensource software to help them build new computers for themselves entirely free of charge. It’s a [...]

On houses that fall into the sea

Earlier this week the papers were full of stories of Ridgemont House in Devon – a house bought for £150,000 by auction, only to see its garden plummet down towards Oddicombe Beach. The story brought together the national obsession with house prices with the fact of increasing coastal erosion due to climate change. Artist Kane Cunningham is [...]

Pothole gardens; opportunity from decay

This via Thriving Too: “An ongoing series of public installations highlighting the problem of surface imperfections on Britain’s roads by Pete Dungey, a Graphic Design student at the University of Brighton.” On Dungey’s web page the photos are accompanied by the quote: ”If we planted one of those in every hole, it would be like a forest [...]

Land Art and changing perspectives

Filming Jan Dibbet’s 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, 1969 Jan Dibbets 6 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, Maasvlakte beach, 8 February 2009 A year ago this week as part of the Portscapes project, the artist Jan Dibbets had what he called a “second attempt” at his 1969 piece 12 Hours [...]

Coalition of the Willing: film-making, collaboration, activism

This is a brilliant initiative: a growing online activist movie created by an army of collaborators, who are animating a script by philosopher/activist Tim Rayner: Still from Coalition of the Willing: Back to the 60s by World Leaders The film is appearing online at coalitionofthewilling.org.uk. Rayner’s collaborator is the film maker Simon Robson aka Knife [...]

Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson

“At any one time there are around 6,000 lightening storms happening across the world amounting to some 16 million storms each year.” … a delicious fact is culled from Pippa Irvine’s review of Paterson’s Street Light Storm installation on Deal Pier on FAD Fast Art News: Inspired by such dizzying statistics Paterson set about translating [...]

The impossible hamster & RSAnimate: thoughts on “nubs”

Yesterday, the New Economics Foundation released this video to support their report about the irreconcilability of the idea of sustained economic growth with the idea of sustainability itself, Growth Isn’t Possible. It’s made by Leo Murray, one of the makers of The Age of Stupid and the short film Wake Up Freak Out. The Impossible [...]