All these conversations, heading...

I just returned from a conversation around collaborative research at RISD, which was sponsored by the Landscape Architecture Department in honor of the 10th anniversary of Innovation Studio. These past few weeks have seen a congregation of thoughts and actions around the ways in which RISD as a community is stepping up to the social, political and design challenges of our times. Some of these other events and occasions include the panels around David Orr's visit, Marjetica Potrc's talk to the Sculpture Department on interdisciplary practice around issues of self-articulated communities, and our own office's Student Visioning Gathering this upcoming weekend.

In all of these gatherings, there exist a number of emergent themes that belie the imagined divide between the fine arts and design disciplines and offer up a compelling vision for really "what we do" here at RISD.

Just briefly, themes I took away include:

1) While innovative, integrated learning and research is happening at RISD, people are operating in discrete pods, which decreases the impact of the work. How do we create nodes of knowledge gathering and dispersal for students and caulty to know how to approach cr0ss-departmental collaboration and resource sharing?
2) As an institution RISD needs to shift gears to recognize the rapid speed at which financial, ecological, social, and political reorganization is progressing, lest we be left out of the conversation.
3) Research at RISD is classroom & studio-based, ultimately tied to the interests and passions of the student body. Therefore the school has an obligation to students to find ways of accumulating and dispersing information about what research they are doing and support faculty who are formulating new seminars and studios to push this learning.
4) The ways that we work with communities, whether local collaborations or in system analysis of developing countries, there needs to be an acknowledgement of the informal strategies (informal cities, design solutions, high-low technology interfaces, etc) that are also impacting these investigations.

With all of the incredible creativity here at RISD, there are no shortage of ideas of how to best address these issues. However, I keep returning to a place of caution - that we don't need to wait for leadership (and its subsequent financial resources) to come from above. We can do more by learning to want less, to make concrete steps forward that fit current financial realities. As an institution of creative learning, I am confident RISD can put forth innovative strategies for moving the agenda of ethical and sustainable education into the new paradigm that lies ahead.

Public art under review in Rhode Island

Yesterday the Providence Journal ran an article about the Senate Review of the state's current 1% for Art policy.

You can read the full article here. The likelihood of this review is a revision to the policy but hopefully in the favor of making a shift towards directing some portion of those funds to more community-based temporary public art projects. At the recent hearing, senators frequently mentioned RISD, along with other higher-ed institutions, as incubators for up-and-coming public artists.

For people who are interested in learning more or voicing their opinion on the issue, there will be a session for public testimony on Tuesday April 28th at the State House.

Contact RISCA at (401) 222-3882 for more details on the hearing.

David Orr @ RISD

The next two days are going to be jam-packed with events surrounding David Orr's visit to RISD.

Once again, Respond|Design has pulled together a timely and compelling series of conversations about the intersection between art/design and sustainability both globally as well as here on the RISD campus!

David Orr is Professor and Chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on environmental literacy in higher education and his recent work in ecological design. Orr is the author of four books: The Last Refuge: The Corruption of Patriotism in the Age of Terror (Island Press, 2004); The Nature of Design (Oxford, 2002); Earth in Mind (Island, 1994); and Ecological Literacy (SUNY, 1992). For a full bio, you can check him out here: http://www.davidworr.com/


This week's events include:
Thursday, April 23

11:30am - 1:00pm BEB* room 106
Urban Eden Conversation:
Professor Anne Tate will present her sabbatical work. Come join in the speculation on the future of our sustainable city.
Panelists include:
DAVID ORR +
Damien White, sociologist
Charlie Cannon, landscape architecture
Lili Herman, landscape architecture
+ more...

6:30pm - 8:00pm Metcalf Audiotrium**
David Orr: Down to the Wire:
The activist-educator joins RISD to discuss how sustainability intersects art and design in an age of climate change.

Friday, April 24

11:30am - 1:00pm BEB* room 106
Curricular Change: A Dialogue on Sustainability at RISD:
Panelist will include:
DAVID ORR +
Liz Collins, Textiles
Dennis Congdon, Painting
Peter Hocking, Public Engagement
William Miller, Painting
Robert O'Neal, Industrial Design
Colgate Searle, Landscape Architecture
Damian White, Sociology

Imagination and Wonder in the Face of Climate Change

After viewing Jane D. Marsching's video/sound installation, NOAA Webcam 2005, RISD students in Christopher Ho's Competition, Collaboration, and Collective class discussed the desire to communicate social, environmental concerns with the quest for aesthetically compelling imagery. How, they wondered, do artists walk the line between creative ambiguity and wanting their art to be a call to action?

This essay by Marsching gets to the heart of these questions while also pointing to the ways in which our collective relationship to the reality of climate change has radically shifted over the past five years. Today we are living in a post- Inconvenient Truth age when much of what scientists and artists and activists were struggling to vocalize five years ago is now readily accepted. There is less a need for convincing, or pointing to the problem.

We know the problems - the question as Marsching puts it, is now "how can we put everything we have in service to the act of inspiring individuals, communities, and countries to work for our future?"

+++++

Imagination and Wonder in the Face of Climate Change

Bleak news about climate change barrages us relentlessly. Stories of future disasters, of ineffectual changes, of ever more catastrophic climate models create a picture that many find daunting and off-putting. We have gotten better at recycling, using fluorescent light bulbs, etc., but still, the problem seems so huge, so out of our hands, and getting every more complex, that its easier to turn away or indulge in cynical dystopic visions.

The North Pole is the epicenter of the climate crisis news cycle and data glut. It is our canary in a cold mine (literally), as the effects of forced anthropogenic warming affect the delicate ecosystem more extremely than climates closer to the equator. Melting faster than scientist's predictions can keep up with, the possible effects of the rapidly transforming boreal climate keep us hooked up to the morphine drip of cataclysmic prophecies.

As a result, we are paying attention to the North Pole in ways we have never done before. New technologies have allowed for nearly real time experience of the landscape through webcams and other networked technologies. Advances in engineering have allowed for penetration of otherwise truly remote wilderness as never before: witness the invaluable data found in mile long ice cores carefully screwed out from deep within ancient ice sheets and glaciers. Developments in energy production and travel allow for tourists and scientists both to cheaply (relatively, at a cost of often $25,000 per ticket), quickly, and comfortably sail up to the pole in nuclear icebreakers or subs. This mythical place, which was once our most remote, our most inaccessible landscape, is now almost on our doorstep and irrevocably connected to very real, even quantifiable, daily human life.

And yet, the long rich history of Western exploration of the far north is still a part of our anxiety over the disappearance of its age old climate. The images, lectures, lantern slides, poetry, and journal entries picturing the far off lands fueled deep desires to experience and conquer. To the culture that produced so many people willing to throw themselves at this harshest of terrains at ever greater expense and national pride, the north pole was our farthest north, spiritual summit, heroic destination, most extreme landscape on the farthest edge of the world. Its vast tracts of land and sea and ice existed beyond our borders of representation and understanding, yet were pictured as sublime frontier, filled with the supernatural or paranormal, a place outside of the normal vagaries of life, where even our shadows, footprints, and breath act alien to us.

"What may not be expected in this country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities forever." — Mary Shelly, Frankenstein, letter from Walton, explorer to North Pole

But, Shelly's Frankenstein lecturing about the quest for glory on the way to the North Pole is now Al Gore on an elevating platform gesturing towards complex graphs of temperature fluctuations. The technologies of communication deployed by science, industrialization, and geopolitical concerns picture this territory now. What was once considered a wilderness foreign to our Western culture is now a harbinger of our future and so has become part of us. The natural, the technological, and the production of data are no longer in conflict, but exist in reciprocal need.

The north pole, once a mythical land of unreachable sublime wilderness, is now at the heart of scientific data predicting calamity. How do these disparate pictures resolve or oppose one another? Can we turn our doom-filled prophecies into catalytic responses? Can the power of imagination and wonder provoke us out of exhausted cynicism toward visionary engagement?

What is the opposite of despair, of disaster, of death? Elaine Scarry, in her groundbreaking book The Body in Pain, makes a claim for the power of imagination to push the world towards creation, while pain (or the fear of pain?) leads towards destruction. In the nineteenth century, Western explorers of the Arctic took with them on their ships as much of Western culture as they could, including sets of silver, libraries of great literature, and smoking jackets. They also brought trunks of costumes with which they performed the popular theater of the time upon the ice during the long winters of darkness when they were trapped in the ice in subzero temperatures with little hope of survival. These extravaganzas were a necessary focal point for a crew deeply suffering and filled with doubt. Harnessing the power of wonder allowed them to take a journey out of the dark cold and into other fantastical worlds with humor and spectacle.

This story became the basis for Arctic Then, a series of images of vaudevillian performers enacting uncertain tableaux with detritus of our urban communities and set upon 3D visualizations of digital elevation models of ice caps and glaciers from around the world. The images put the glaciers in the place of the explorers of yesterday: starving, endangered, with little hope. There is so little that we feel we can do to save them. Perhaps yoking the power of imagination on their behalf can create a rift in the immense sea of complex uncertainties of responses to the climate crisis.

Arctic Listening Post

I have researched, mapped, and explored the North Pole for the last five years through Arctic Listening Post, a collaborative, interdisciplinary digital media project. Through this project, I created a pair of video installations that imagine the future of the North Pole over the next hundred years: Rising North and Future North Ecotarium.

Rising North, a nine-minute large scale video projection pairs a very economical and meditative color field visualization of the change in temperature at the North Pole over the next century with a larger than life operatic voice singing in aria form the prosaic news headlines from Google news on the vernal equinox of March 21, 2007: reports of kiteboarders surfing over the pole to watercolor classes offered in North Pole, Alaska to endless accounts of changing climate data. How can we make sense of the climate change predictions in the news? How do we absorb scientific information into our everyday lives?

Future North Ecotarium imagines our future in the next hundred years after irreversible climate change. Created in collaboration with visionary architects Mitchell Joachim and Terreform Studio, the three-minute stop motion animation images our response to a three meter sea level rise over the next century. Massive migrations of urban populations will move north to escape severe flooding and increasing temperatures. Many areas inside the Artic regions will warm up significantly, making their occupation newly desirable. Real estate values will shift to privilege far northern climates formerly imagined as the edge of the earth. The reality of hundreds of millions of people relocating their respective centers of culture, business, and life is almost incomprehensible. In this animation, entire cities float away from their flooded moorings and meet in a new North, re-imagining the entire surface of our planet in the future.

I am often asked, what is the point? Or, more directly, can aesthetic experience or art make any real difference in the face of such a huge crisis? What does looking at (and listening to) art do to effect change? Beyond pointing to the long history of art used to revision crisis in the service of change, I call upon the power of our imagination in partnership with our intellect and our activism as the key trio in a global consciousness shift that is necessary to slow and ameliorate the human causes of climate change. Instead of prioritizing one approach over the other, the question should be: how can we put everything we have in service to the act of inspiring individuals, communities, and countries to work for our future?

The Nature of Teaching Exhibitions

The Tricks of the Eye exhibition evolved out of a number of conversations between our office and other departments & offices on campus on how best to foster discussions around publicly engaged art practices at RISD. Given the intense project-driven nature of studio practice and students' busy schedules, I proposed that we create an exhibit that would connect classroom learning to examples of contemporary creative practice. By working with faculty whose courses explore similar themes, students would be offered the opportunity to engage in the work on many different levels, from the intellectual to the conceptual to the aesthetic.

ceramic bowls and poster prototype for Blue Hammer, Leon Johnson

Coming from a background in dialogue-based and performative public art, I was curious about how documentation of these kinds of practices would go over with RISD students. When introducing under-explored forms of art making, there needs to be some level of education around the practices - we chose to take a multi-faceted approach using descriptive wall text, visiting artists talks and classroom visits, and guided-tours with me as curator. Given that we were highlighting documentation of past projects, rather than original work, I was concerned with how to balance the need to contextualize the documentation without having the show become overly dependent on text. I tried to address this issue by including a number of different mediums - from textile to ceramic objects to vibrant poster art, and video to audio.

Meyers-Bitter Survey and Knitting Nation installation views

Does this kind of presentation of multi-faceted art practices work as an exhibition strategy? Even though we recognized the importance of combining object-based work that taps into our desire for craft and concreteness with more conceptual and relational practices. It was also important to, as much as possible, to create opportunities for the students to meet with the artists (or me as the curator) so their critiques and questions could be addressed in real, face-to-face, time.

These conversations - with Peter Hocking and Charlie Cannon's Use of Space:Place of Campus and From Studio to Situation seminars, Marie Cieri's Social Geographies class and Christopher Ho's Competition, Collaboration and Collective seminar - proved to be rich moments of contextualized learning. Sitting in on these classes and walking classes through the exhibit, I have found myself being asked to defend a number of the projects. It was important for me to articulate that I chose to include much of the work due to its compelling problematic nature. Rather than offering answers, the projects included in the show grapple with the complexities of representation and dissemination of socially charged information. The curator's role is one of navigating and interpreting for audiences that may be unfamiliar with the ways in which the highlighted projects fit within the artists' investigative trajectories or larger social practices.

To that end, I will be hosting weekly curator tours of the exhibit on Thursday afternoons from 12:00 - 12:30 starting March 19th and continuing through April 2nd. Please feel free to RSVP to me at ssakash@risd.edu. I also welcome comments to this post or via email.

5 Questions

Organized by AREA Chicago and Creative Time, Inc. this online interview project features the responses of Chicago artists and art administrators to questions related to connecting art to social justice movements, building local audiences and social networks, and sharing economic resources. Many of the people interviewed for this project were part of the Art & Activism retreat that I attended back in January - it is interesting to hear their thoughts about art and social change in this place-specific context.

http://5questions.areachicago.org

Though some of the concerns are specific to the city of Chicago, there is also a lot to ideas that are pertinent to the conversations around the Creative Providence Cultural Plan, as well as the growing sense of the need for artists and designers to take a relational approach to their creative practice which recognizes their role as citizens and change makers.

The questions:

1. Who is your audience, and how does your work mobilize it towards strategic local concerns?

2. Given that the ways we make money impacts the type of culture we produce, how does the local economy effect your art practice? How do you work to obtain and share resources?

3. Describe a local cultural event that productively expanded the social networks that your practice operates in. That is to say, the event produced a new sense of community that had political potential.

4. As a politically engaged artist or organization, how do you and/or your practice relate to existing social movements?

5. These conversations come out of a nation-wide concern about the fate of democracy. How do you see your projects tying into a larger national structure? Is organizing nationally productive? What are its limitations?

Leon Johnson Artist Talk

2009 Public Engagement Associate, Leon Johnson, will be giving a talk on the intersection of his creative and pedagogical practices on Tuesday March 10th at 6:30pm at the Office of Public Engagement (CIT Building, 2nd Floor).

For more information, please visit Leon's page on our website. You can also check out documentation from two of his recent projects in the Tricks of the Eye exhibition.