Sensing machines mapping the Arctic, hormone-altering vapour, sweating bacteria, songs from the swamps…. This year’s Open Fields Conference was packed with mind-blowing discoveries
Category Archive: green
Inspired by the Dieselgate scandal, the work recontextualizes the industry’s own visual marketing tools to reveal the stark contrast between its professed environmental narrative and actual practices
PL’AI is a process lasting several months in which plants grown from seed and an AI-robot whose perceptual world is limited to them, interact with each other
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Across twelve case studies, this book charts the emergence of diverse forms of artistic practice and brings together accounts of how artists, scholars and activists are creatively responding to environmental destruction
Jumana Manna’s film exposes how Israel is weaponising conservation laws to alienate Palestinians from their histories, land and traditions
Ressler takes a stand on the problem of increasing carbon emissions and accompanies civil disobedience activities that illuminate the inseparability of environmental issues and sociopolitical as well as economic conditions
social
The film explores the boom in data centre construction near the Arctic Circle through the fictional story of a surveyor who has travelled north to survey a site for the building of a server farm…
Whether they make the sky cry or celebrate the Constellation of Taurus, Nadal’s performances and sculptures play with atmospheric events and everything that is elusive and ethereal
The book considers such topics as the presence of plants in the history of philosophy, the shifting status of plants in various traditions, what it means to make art with growing life-forms and whether or not plants have moral standing
How the pervasively used notion “green” is used to symbolically mask the increasing technical manipulations of nature and the environment
Artists and curators on the human and nonhuman agencies that affect and are affected by the sea within contemporary art and visual culture
An interview with Laura Cinti from C-Lab about a project that uses a drone to survey unexplored part of a forest where a female specimen of one of the rarest plants in the world might be growing
The massive efforts of deforestation around the world are the symptoms of colonial and capitalist extractivism often connected with suppression of Indigenous political struggle or mere existence in their sylvan environment
How the Pentagon became the world’s largest single greenhouse gas emitter and why it’s not too late to break the link between national security and fossil fuel consumption
One would expect artists, designers, activists and thinkers who engage with issues related to pollution, global heating and loss of biodiversity to live a life that reflects their values. Few do. Hence my desire to exchange with Aljaž
A sharp overview of artworks that respond to the Anthropocene and its detrimental impact on our world, from scenes of nature decimated by ongoing extinction events and landscapes turned to waste by extraction, to art from marginalised communities most affected by the injustice of climate change
The methodology adopted leaves space for risk-taking, error-making and deeper connections with science institutions while opening up the development process to other disciplines and, as the festival demonstrated, to the public
The works explore the urgency of decolonising nature, of developing a deeper connection with non-human species and the emergence of new ecosystems where the artificial and the natural contaminate each other.
The exhibition illustrates the history of colonial and ecological exploitation hidden behind the beauty of tropical plants
The book takes our planetary state of emergency as an opportunity to imagine constructive change and new ideas. How can we survive in an age of constant environmental crises?
“With so many tears I started to wonder whether it is possible to cultivate some marine life in them,” the designer writes.
“If you care about the future of life on the planet, you have several possibilities to continue working as an artist, doing work in relation to and in collaboration with protagonists of progressive social movements. And I’m afraid a classical studio practice is becoming more and more cynical and irrelevant…”
A collection of credible, collaborative tools that attempt to recalibrate the relationship between plants, fungi, microbes, humans and other animals
Joan Fontcuberta and Pilar Rosado give politicians an orgasm while Zane Cerpina and Stahl Stenslie expose their research on Ecopornography in Digital Arts
In 1970, a group of Buddhist monks protested against industrial pollution by traveling to factories with the objective of cursing factory owners to death
What is that nature we so desperately worship, seek to love, protect and save? Does it even exist?
While weather patterns have been disrupted -sometimes irreversibly- by technologies reliant on extractivism, these same technologies are now hailed as saviours that can protect the planet through weather manipulation
What would happen if the development, running and all the activities associated with a major art center were guided by an energy budget and not just by a financial one? If, in accordance with the Paris Agreement, that cultural space were to cut its energy use by 50%?
There are great ways to adapt to the climate crisis that confronts us, but there are disastrous ways too. In this book, Morgan Phillips takes us from the air-conditioned pavements of Doha and the ‘cool rooms’ of Paris, to the fog catchers of Morocco and the agro-foresters of Nepal
An event in Marseille offered some thoughts on ideas of sustainability, resilience and the effects of the capitalocene on non-human life
“The recreational and tourist industry is constantly producing new sports models and trends which show a kind of detachment from the landscape context. Events that take place in a landscape that is in itself fragile due to its topographical configuration, such as glaciers, are only related to the place through the type of sporting activity practicised there”
Maxime Berthou’s cloud-seeding performance meant that he basically attempted to “steal” clouds heading to the US and make them rain over Canada. This artistic gesture hinted at the possibility of geopolitical disputes arising between neighbour countries over the ownership of water contained in clouds
A panel that looked at how activists, thinkers, researchers and creative minds are trying to make digital technology more “frugal” or sustainable
Interview with a multimedia artist, engineer, educator and designer whose practice focuses on the practical and experimental applications of sustainable energy technologies, particularly photovoltaic solar power
In this manifesto, climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tyres and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse
Next month, I’ll be giving online classes titled “Art & Politics for Plants. On plant geopolitics, phytoengineering and uncanny crops” with the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe
In her keynote, Manuela de Barros explored the limits of Earth resources, the responses to climate change, the sharing of a limited territory with non-human beings, the energy and ecology transition and other environmental issues through the lens of artistic proposals
My notes from a round table with curator and COAL co-founder Loïc Fel, artist Claire Bardainne as well as artist and activist Joanie Lemercier
In her talk, art historian and curator Bénédicte Ramade explored the differences between ecological art, environmental art, green art, ecologist art, Anthropocene art, etc.
Examining the potential benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence to advance global sustainability