GENERATIVE CONVERSATIONS

ECO-ART - Pori Museum of Art, Finland

2011-02-01T05:40:00.000-08:00

25th January - 4th February: Installation of 3 pieces at the Pori Museum of Art, Finland for the show ECO-ART, curated by John Grande, Peter Selz and Pia Hovi Assad.

The works are:

WIND VORTICES, Sky Blu, Antarctica 2007.
Printed by Elephant graphics in Sussex to a scale of 740 x 270 m.

DUST TO DUST, ASHES TO ASHES -
A mushroom spore print painted directly onto the wall using dust from the ventilation ducts and ashes from birch logs used for heating a sauna. Dimensions - 3 m. diam.

CARBON SINK
Made from birch logs, branches, twigs and charcoal sticks, the work is a vortex of logs laid on the floor 8 m. in diam.

On the first day the temperature outside was - 22 degrees and Errki and I headed out to a forest school 25 K. away to select the logs for Carbon Sink which were delivered later that day. Two of us, Veijo and myself laid the piece in 6 days. The print, in 10 sections, was hung by professionals and two artists painstakingly painted the spore print, which was projected on an overhead projector. It took them 4 days.

Artists in the show are:
Jan-Erik Andersson, Brandon Ballengee, Ciel Bergman, Christo and Jean-Claude, Joyce Cutler- Shaw, Agnes Denes, Chris Drury, Michael Flomen, Andy Goldsworthy, Helen and Newton Harrison, Ichi Ikeda, Richard Misrach, Nils-Udo, Dennis Oppenheim, Alan Sonfist.

It runs from 4th February to 29th May.

INTERVIEW WITH PU HONG - CHINESE SCULPTURE MAGAZINE

2010-05-11T00:22:00.000-07:00

An Interview with British Land Art Artist Chris Drury

Pu Hong

Pu: could you say something about how Land Art has evolved and changed in the last 40 years? In the era of globalization, is there a new face to Land Art which is different from the 1960s’?

Chris: I think land Art has evolved and changed a great deal and most artists I know who have been given this label, do not like it because it does not adequately describe what they do. Narrowly defined as an art made in the landscape, with the landscape as part of the work and the work as part of the landscape, then such an art, no longer exists because it has broken out of those parameters. What it isn’t, is works made elsewhere in a studio and placed in a landscape setting, as in a lot of sculpture parks.

You could say that it has become: Art in Nature, Art and Nature, Art and the Natural Environment, Body and landscape,

private rituals in the landscape, cosmic cycles, Eco Art and there is an element of Land Art in Art and Science. Some artists, particularly in America are focusing on ruined landscapes – industrial wastelands and the spread of the suburbs. Some have become community based and activist, where vegetable gardens are being created on the sterile front yards of suburban wastelands transforming communities as well as landscape. In Europe Joseph Beuys politicized an art connected to nature ( he co founded the Green Party – an anti political party) and this has now been taken forward by artists making work about Climate Change, which is activist as well as aesthetic.

In Britain there is an organization called Cape Farewell which takes art, science and education practitioners to the Arctic and to melting glaciers around the world, to give them first hand experience of the phenomenon. This has resulted in artists such as Rachel Whiteread filling the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with thousands of white plastic boxes, or Alex Hartley, making political claim to a small island emerging from the ice in the Arctic, a comment perhaps on the Russians laying claim to the sea bed beneath the North Pole.

So Land Art now has a very wide sphere of reference. I myself went to Antarctica with The British Antarctic Survey as one of two artists working alongside a scientific organization which is focusing on the effects of Climate Change. I experienced wonder, but tinged with incomprehension, confusion, regret and anger. In the face of this to simply make a sculpture or painting in that place would be wholly to ignore the reality and this attitude must exemplify how things have changed.

Pu: Through creativity and hard work, Land Artists of Britain have earned their worldwide reputation. Do you think there is any national and cultural identity which separates British’s Land Art from that of other countries, such as the Americans Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria? Is there something uniquely British about it? Insert images from Long, Fulton, Nash, Goldsworthy

Chris: Richard Long, whatever he might say, was very influenced by the Americans in the 60’s when he was at college – mostly because they pioneered the idea of using the wild outside spaces of the world as a form of canvas for their work. Linked with the conceptual movement, he and Hamish Fulton developed a language about walking. Fulton was actually very interested in the conceptual language of the musician John Cage and their heroes were the British and European Climbers and Explorers of the early 20th Century. The Himalayan climber/explorer Eric Shipton once said that if you couldn’t organize an expedition on the back of an envelope, then it was too complicated. Fulton’s statement: ‘Take only photographs, leave only footprints’ is a similar statement of intent. Last year at the age of 63 Fulton climbed Mount Everest. In 1975 I went with him to the Canadian Rockies to walk for two weeks in the first snows of October and this one experience changed the direction of my Art. I understand his attitude of not touching, but I would argue however that because we are nature, we are always going to touch and alter it, it is a question of how much and why. Both Long and Fulton are very critical of the heavy hand of American Land Art, and hold a strong, almost Buddhist idea of not altering the landscape in any major way. Move some stones, scrape a line with your foot, take a photo, make an entry in the notebook and walk on.

Although David Nash’s art is based around the philosophies of the German philosopher Rudolf Steiner his work is very English, as it focuses on the tree and plant growth, and although most of his work is carved outside using a chain saw directly into fallen trees, it is mostly then shown inside, but that is no different to Long and Fulton who exhibit documentation of actions and walks made outside, inside the gallery.

The attitude of a light touch was taken further in the 80’s by Andy Goldsworthy, who some criticize as being purely decorative. Such is the hegemony of Conceptual Art in Britain that to my knowledge the Tate Gallery do not own a work by Goldsworthy. British Land Art may have a lightness of touch and a Zen simplicity and from the outside may look like a national attitude, but in reality is full of divisions and disagreements, which is how it should be. Today things are moving on and what is happening is more in line with global movements advocating environmental change.

Pu: Your work seems different to other Land artists, because of your enthusiastic link to Science. This is especially evident in your project in Antarctica, I can see science elements everywhere. And once you said the “theory of everything” has a bearing on your works. Some critics even said you are more of a scientist than an artist. How does science influence your conception of Land Art?

Explorers at the Edge of the Void - Antarctica 2008

Chris: In many ways I am an outsider, I have few works in museums and galleries around the world and I am not represented by

cutting-edge galleries. This has been a source of extreme frustration, because it makes surviving financially very difficult, but

strangely it has put me in a position of great strength, because I can operate at the borders of many disciplines, and so can make unique connections in the world.

The Art world and the Art market is very narrow in its terms of reference, it is rife with positioning and infighting and tends to be self referential. It rarely bursts out of its own bubble. It reminds me of the heating system of a car in cold weather, switched to internal recycled air. The car gets nice and warm but all the windows mist up so you can’t see out. That’s the Art world. I prefer to let the air come in from outside, so I can see the world clearly as it is, or better still, get out of the car altogether.

This attitude, together with the circumstances of my life, means that I must go with whatever is coming towards me. It is in effect a Taoist attitude and it means that I am interested in all ways of looking at our connections to nature and poses the question: How can we live sustainably in the 21st Century? It means that I have collaborated with people from many areas of expertise. Science is one of them and an important one, but I have also worked with small, often marginalised rural communities, farmers, doctors, clinicians, architects, town planners and local authorities, also technicians of many varieties including dry stone wallers, wood craftsmen, basket makers, radiographers, film editors and digital wizards. All of these people see the world in different ways and add to the complexity of how we see nature and how we live on the Earth.

The world of science is much like the world of art – often narrow and compartmentalised. Of course there are people from both fields who make breakthroughs and see the bigger picture. Science is so complex that most scientists only have time to read about their own field and often fail to see the whole. As someone who acts on the edge, I am in the unique position to make connections, which is what my so called Land Art has evolved into doing.

Pu: how do you understand Nature?

Chris: Nature simply is. Nature is also a word, which is language and language is culture. Culture is our conditioning as an individual, through to a society. In the 21st century culture is global. Culture is the veil through which we see nature, so we rarely see it as it is – we see it through the veil of our conditioning.

From the first early farmers we have tried to control nature and right now that is causing immense problems because we are

changing the climate of the earth and heading towards the 6th mass extinction of most of the biosphere. Sixty five Million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, 95% of the biosphere became extinct. We have evolved from the 5% which survived and are in danger of becoming a part of that 95% which will disappear again. Understanding our disconnection to nature, may yet save us.

Pu: in your philosophy on Art, you talk most about the idea of “macrocosm and microcosm”, can you expand on this more for us?

Chris: Like I said, we set up divisions. Nature is not something ‘out there’. We are nature. We are made from the dust of stars, millions of years old. The energy and laws which underlies the creation of the universe, also created us. The underlying energy driving the universe, creates the same patterns of flow in our bodies as it does in weather systems, so everything is linked by this creative force.

Pu: To continue, it seems that in your art you often draw attention to the similarities between two different things. For example, mushrooms and atomic explosions, the radial form of Destroying Angel Trinity to the shape of a Mandala; this is like a mysterious metaphor between different worlds. Is the similarity just the bridge connecting macrocosm and microcosm?

Destroying Angel Trinity and Destroying Angel - 2008

Chris: Similarities and comparisons certainly form a bridge, but perhaps to more than just microcosm and macrocosm. The bridge opens up further possibilities. For instance in Nevada I asked a plant ecologist, working on the desert of the Nevada Test Site (NTS), what was growing in the soils of the area where from 1951 to 1963, 14 atmospheric tests were carried out. Her answer was to produce two images: one a magnified image of a soil sino-bacteria, and the other an image of that area of the Test Site,

(Frenchman’s Flat) taken from space. The dried out river wash of Frenchman’s Flat was remarkably similar in pattern to the string of fibres in the sino-bacteria. These two images became the first work – Life in the Presence of Death 1. I then took this idea for a walk, looked up the gene sequence for the plant – at that time only partially decoded at 559, and stencilled this sequence in groups of 100, onto a 18 m. long wall like rows of grave stones, in soil collected from the NTS.

We then collected 559 stones from the desert and constructed a very primitive and fragile stone fallout shelter, with a floor plan like a splattered explosion. So here there are multiple layers that bring in all sorts of associations. In the final show at the

museum, each work was bridged to the next in a train of thought.

Life in the Field of Death 1 & 11

559 Shelter Stones - 2008

Before I can make a work, I need to make a connection and this is intuitive. I am drawn to something for no particular reason other than that I feel an excitement in the pit of my stomach. This may be a reaction to a particular place, landscape or experience, or it may arise from a conversation or something I have read. In this case language is a guide to memory of the actual physical world.

I feel my way towards finding the best way to explore it and look for a visual form. Usually each new work has to start from zero and it may mean that I end up using a process, medium or material for which I have no prior experience, so I look for experts to help me. My work therefore has no particular style or medium. Its cohesion rests in the connections it makes.

To finally make a work, everything has to be in balance – idea, process, material and form. Because of this, in any one work there are many layers and I may not be consciously aware of them all. Microcosm/macrocosm may well be in there. For the viewer, however there is work for the eye and mind to do to extend those connections and find meaning within the context of their own lives and experience.

In a work outside, this process is condensed into the one piece and because it is a tangible thing – often architectural, like one of the Cloud Chambers, which have an inside as well as an outside, there is an outer form and an inside experience which has an almost bodily way of communicating – beyond language.

Willow Domes on The Este - Hamburg 2003

Star Chamber 2006 - inside and out

Pu: Besides exploring a philosophy, your works are also involved in many social problems, such as in the project Mushroom/Clouds, where there is reference to nuclear issues, but you know, “reflecting the world” and “changing the world” through art are not the same thing. May be we cannot change anything through art. So, besides their great visual strength, what more can we discover from your Art?

Chris: Yes, I agree that Art is not really going to change anything and it does reflect society as it is at that particular moment in time. Mostly change happens very slowly, so slowly we don’t notice it, but the world is a very different place now to what it was when I was a teenager. Sometimes an idea reaches a critical mass and then change happens fast as in a political revolution. The idea of Climate Change, which has been around since the second world war, has now reached a critical mass and politicians are having to take action.

As humans though, we don’t seem to have changed at all. We are still as much driven by greed, anger and violence, as we were thousands of years ago. Greed will in the end destroy us. An art connected to nature can be a superficial thing – a love of mountains, fresh air, fitness etc is a romantic notion – Hitler’s Youth movement extolled all this and look where that led. If we want to move from what you call Land Art, the connections will have to go deeper than mere scratches on the surface.

Of course Land Art can become political and subversive, as it has, but art is a visual, non-verbal language, and any work which is in tune and in balance communicates a kind of harmony without trying to ‘say’ something.

Pu: Concerning Nature and Humanity, you have said, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is not an egocentric imposition on a landscape. But in fact, is a masterpiece of human civilization. It has had a great impact on the surrounding environment; Its iconic nature is areflection of the focus of human attention over the years. In such a context, is there any difference between Spiral Jetty and your works which use similar spiral patterns, such as Ice Print?

Heart of Reeds - 2005

Chris: There is a great deal of hype about Smithson breaking away from the city/gallery based art markets and using the landscapes of the South West as the place of his art – negating the market. This is not really true; Spiral Jetty with its purchase of land, construction and documentation was all financed by the art market and was sold and broadcast by that market. Much of his other work – the site and non-site work was also gallery based. Spiral Jetty, however is iconic because it has a life beyond the market. It exists as a reality in the land. It changes and reacts with the landscape in which it sits very beautifully. Its shape is archaic. It changes colour in reaction to the salts of the lake and it appears and disappears as the water levels change. For this it is truly extraordinary.

Despite the archaic native form of the spiral, in the final sequence of the film of its making, there are elements of transcendence and redemptive Catholicism in the blinding rays of the sun and kaleidoscopic colours surrounding the lone figure of the artist within the work itself. Catholicism was the religion he was brought up in and something that interested him a great deal in earlier works. This in itself would set him apart from my own and other British Land Artists, although in the project Mushrooms|Clouds I am talking about the cycle of life, death and transformation and there may well be cross-over’s there. Smithson did however genuinely try to place his art in other contexts. He tried to interest strip-mining companies in working with him, but he was way ahead of his time and they all turned him down. In he end he was killed in a helicopter accident while researching a work for a site in Texas. It took artists like Herman Prigann in Germany in the 1990’s to finally get strip coal mining to see the worth of working with Land artists to find creative solutions to clean up these devastated landscapes. For myself, having been ostracised by the Art Market I found that other organisations: scientists, architects, clinicians, environmentalists etc came towards me with proposals.

Like most of my British contemporaries however, my work is small scale, hand made and often ephemeral. When I was in Antarctica I wanted to observe and experience, rather than make. The few works I did make on the ground used ice and snow and disappeared in a few hours. Iceprint was a human fingerprint brushed onto a fresh fall of snow on blue ice with a dustpan and brush – the documentation of it highlighting our inappropriate presence in such a place – do not touch!

The only work of mine which approaches the scale and shape of Spiral Jetty and was also constructed using heavy machinery is Heart Of Reeds in my home town of Lewes. This work however, lives, grows and changes, providing habitat for other species. The shape uses a complex chaos pattern from blood flow in the heart to create the conditions to maximise the biodiversity of a small local nature reserve on a piece of land once used as an industrial railway siding on the edge of town. A work made for small creatures as well as people. You can get up close and see the microcosm, or climb a nearby hill and see it from above and at a distance.

In creating the conditions for plant and animal life, these living systems become a part of the work. Unlike Spiral Jetty which is in a sterile saline environment, Heart of Reeds is a living system, in which people have to play a part. The work therefore is managed, not as an artwork, but so that it continues to provide maximum habitat for biodiversity. I explained this work to one of the Paiute tribe I worked with in Nevada, and he was intrigued, because of course a concern for all of life is at the centre of their belief system. This is something which was never a part of the thinking of Heizer or de Maria, but if Smithson had lived I have a hunch that is where he would be at now, Nancy Holt has gone on to make ecological works.

Pu: I really appreciate your art project “the heartbeat of the Earth” in Antarctica. There is a nervous tension when you use radar, a human technology, to represent the natural world. How does this fit within the wider context of your art-making experience?

Chris: the work I made with scientists in Antarctica was in fact an extension of the work I have made in connection to blood flow patterns in the heart, which came about through collaborations with clinicians in hospitals. Antarctica was in many ways a difficult social experience – two artists amongst many scientists and technicians, many of whom thought that we were taking up valuable science resources. We were advised therefore, to connect with people by giving talks about what we do. I gave two slide presentations and as a result of this was approached by a scientist who was anxious to show me the parallels in what he was doing and introduced me to the images of the echograms they were working on.

Later I spent time with him deep in the interior, living in tents on the ice. In a conversation we had he made the statement “Our echograms are like the heartbeat of the Earth”. A great statement and he was right – an echogram is very similar to an echocardiogram of the heart. One is produced by radar fixed to the wings of airplanes, and the other by ultrasound through the body; both show flow patterns. A surgeon can read the medical life history of the patient in an echocardiogram, just as a scientist can read the history of the Biosphere in the echograms of the ice.

One of the works in this series was called Double Echo. I superimposed the echocardiogram taken from the heartbeat of the pilot who flew these echogram flights, onto a fragment of one of his echograms. So the whole project was a continuation and deepening of my research into universal patterns of flow, the underlying energy of the universe made visible.

Pu: The last hypothetical question: supposing I have a ticket for you to attend Shanghai Expo in 2010. You will create an artwork for this city, which is different from the desert in Nevada and the glaciers of Antarctica. In Shanghai, there is a multi-perspective on culture. What should you do to have a dialogue with this charming city and not lose your sense of the natural environment?

Dust to Dust, Ashes to Ashes - 2008

Chris: This is your hardest question yet, because in order to make something I need a context and I have never been to Shanghai. If the brief is to come for a short time, make a temporary work and leave, and if the space is a white wall in a building, then I would use a universal symbol and make it particular to place by the use of a local material or pigment. Or if there was a space outside, I might use a vortex pattern, which spirals downs into the earth, maybe using bamboo or recycled timber from industrial pallets, laid on edge and charred black as they move into the centre.

The thing about cities, however is that they are complex places. Most modern cities look superficially the same – high-rise buildings, transport flow systems etc. However all will have layers of history within them. That history will have been built from culture and language, but still be deeply connected to its particular place in the land. Its customs, language and food will have been shaped by this land.

What would really interest me would be a longer term project which peeled back some of these layers. Perhaps it could be a

collaboration between myself, a neurosurgeon, a botanist and an engineer, which could be open ended in terms of an eventual work, but which might be a garden or small park which reflected our findings. Send me that ticket any time.

Carbon Sink drawing.

Thank you to the students at Penn State

2009-05-11T07:35:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Karen Keifer-Boyd and the students of the spring 2009 Web 2.0 Pedagogy class at Penn State. Their participation in the web exhibition design charrette produced inspirational data for our process. See them in action here.

Student participants:
Elizabeth Andrews
Ashley Carrano
Lindsay Didio
Min Kyung Kim
Hongkyu Koh
Min Jung Lee
Christine Liao
Mary Elizabeth Meier
Jennifer Motter
Rebecca Plummer Rohloff
Myoungsun Sohn

Encounter with Different Concepts of Time

2009-03-27T12:48:00.001-07:00

Encounter with Different Concepts of Time
1. Butterfly Effect
2. input, variability in flow—Chaos Theory
3. History of Particular Moments
4. Riparian Zone

meandering in riparian zone

2009-03-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

an annotated sound sketch

2009-03-27T06:20:00.000-07:00

Lists, Lists and More Lists

2009-03-25T10:52:00.000-07:00

Hi again from UNM... Below is our class response to the original Walker list provocation. The last is our edited and discussed final list.

Walker:
Hybridity
Appropriation
Performance
Space
Time

Felicie:
Respect
Dissolution
Inclusion
Engagement

Jennifer:
Succession
Exploration
Displace
Sensitivity
Process

Gene:
Structure
Function
Process
Driving force
Sustainability

David:
Pasear (walk)
Estampa (to make a mark)
Colonizacion
Poner la bandera (plant flag)
Enmarcar (Frame the landscape)
Recordacion (Memory)

Final List:
Dissolve
Enmarcar (Frame)
Engage
Relolectar (Recollect)
Witness

Greetings from University of New Mexico

2009-03-23T21:41:00.000-07:00

Hi from UNM Art and Ecology 493/593, which includes Bill and Catherine (who have introduced themselves), and Molly the class’ graduate assistant soon to finish a master’s degree in fine arts sculpture. The students include a retired forest service supervisor, a student of photography, a student of sculpture and a student of landscape architecture. I don’t mean to pigeonhole the class by background or area of study, but to demonstrate that this is an interdisciplinary course. We come from different parts of not just UNM’s art department but of Albuquerque and the world, and our ages span sometimes as much as our circumstances. We meet weekly to discuss assigned readings of both art and ecological significance. Weekly topics include water (so imperative, layered, and controversial), history of ecology, cultural ecology, food, eco practice, mapping and walking. We respond, rant, question, contradict, extol and criticize. We can be cynical, direct, simple, childish, confident, obtuse, insecure and insightful when trying to get to the crux of – art and ecology, and ecological art. We review and critique our constructed responses to the readings. We wonder how what we do in this classroom can relate to provocations from somewhere on the web, let alone outside the classroom. Issues addressed provoke and arouse not just questions relating to the readings and of the classroom ebb and flow of discussion, but of concerns connected (and disconnected) to our lives, ourselves, and our creative processes. We meet for two hours a week, oftentimes longer because five minutes before the end of class is when the good conversation starts. Below is a week by week reading list with a sample of some of the art objects and images inspired by the readings.

Week One: Water
Childs Craig, “Phoenix Then and Now”, High Country News, April 16, 2007
Reisner, Marc, Cadillac Desert
Stegner, Wallace, The American West as Living Space, Living Dry.

Week Two: Water
Childs, Craig, The Secret Knowledge of Water
Irland, Basia, Water Library
SIMPARCH with Steve Rowell, Hydromancy www.bustersimpson.net, Cydlifiad (Confluence), Beckoning Cistern, Water Glass & Water Table, King Street Garden, Exchanger Fountain, Hudson River Purge

Week Three: History of Ecology
Kastner Jeffrey & Wallis, Brian, Land and Environmental Art
Smithson, Robert “Frederick Law Olmstead and the Dialectical Landscape”, Artforum, 1973, pp 62-68.
Mozingo, The Aesthetics of Ecological Design, Landscape Journal, 16:1 1997 pp. 46-59

Week Four: Cultural Ecology
Mann, Charles, “1491”, Atlantic Monthly Vol 289, issue 3 pp. 41-53
Weatherford, Jack, Indian Givers
Tuan,Yi-Fu, Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values

Week Five: Cultural Ecology
Jackson, J. B., A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time
Leopold, Aldo, The Sand County Almanac, Thinking Like a Mountain.
Weisman, Alan, A World Without Us

Week Six: Food
Pollan, Michael, “Farmer in Chief”, New York Times Magazine, pp. 62-71, Oct. 12, 2008
Kingsolver, Barbara, Animal, Vegetable Miracle
Pollan Michael, Omnivore’s Dilemma
Kloppenburg, Jack, “Coming into the Foodshed”, Agriculture and Human Values, 13:3, 1966, p 33-42

Provocation 2

2009-03-23T11:48:00.001-07:00

I’d like to begin with saying congratulations to Kim on her new JackRabbit Homestead site. I look forward to the book.

Susan, you have given us a complicated provocation. I hope this response doesn’t completely miss your point. I see the current hybridity in the arts as being the result of several factors. One is the very fact of how the arts are situated in the larger culture. We are a marginalized practice. This means that the support levels for our practice fall far below those for more mainstream interests likes sports and science. As a result, we have all had to juggle our art practice with some other endeavor to pay the bills and support our art habit at one point or another in our careers. We have been forced to hybridize. I’m not complaining, I think this fact has us well positioned for a new dynamic sweeping the culture. For me personally this meant building houses in Santa Fe for eight years after school. During that period, my sculpture was all native material based (adobe, juniper and aspen), so, building houses out of adobe with viga and latilla ceilings was just a different context for the same practice. It directly lead to adding shelter to the conceptual focus of my work.

Over the past century (or centuries) our culture has been on a course of ever increasing specialization. Scientific disciplines have pursued their own interests, and developed their own languages with which to communicate. This was equally true of the visual arts under modernism. Painting was involved with the formal issues particular to painting, sculpture pursued a separate, if related set of inquiries.

There seems to be a growing awareness throughout western culture that this specialization has become a dead end and that we need to cross reference between disciplines to reach larger understandings. The result is a hybridization movement in the arts and sciences. Biologists are talking to physicists and mathematicians. Artists are not only combining sculpture, painting and photography, they are reaching out to the sciences (hard and social) to effect a reintegration of these currently distinct pursuits and thereby the cultural psyche. Those of us in the field of Environmental or Eco Art are participants in this hybridization.

I’d suggest that the fact that artists in our culture have been forced to operate in the zone of professional hybrids has provided us with the skills necessary to function in this new paradigm. We’re used to juggling realities.

By the way, we will be attempting the feature these hybrid forms in our LAND/ART project this summer and fall in New Mexico.( landartnm.org) .
BG

hybridity, pits and stomachs

2009-03-23T10:40:00.000-07:00

I liked the idea of feeling hybridity in the pit of a stomach and perhaps its necessity to survival. I see hybridity as a re-enactment of renaissance ideology. Homo faber becomes art's resistance to the dominant "buy everything" paradigm. Making in and of itself is a revolutionary act.

In our conversation in Art and Ecology class we came upon an analogy of creative process to ecological process. I queried the students as to how such a relationship worked and we discussed a kind of gap, we assume exists in creative process -- input in, output out, but in between the human mind/experience/hand creates something unknown, and not replicable from one maker to another. Then we wondered about where that gap exists in ecological process. Bill proposed procreation as such a gap. I, intially, having just been through having a baby and seeing its prosaic side, thought not, but in mulling and caring for the now six month old, have found a mystery in the replication of species that does seem to mirror the creative gap, as well as seeking a deeper understanding of the preciousness of the mundane creative. Rather than elevating any one act to higher, seeking to look deeply into every act.

I spent last week on spring break with my husband, hiking the borders of Albuquerque with eight teenagers, carrying my six month old son on my chest. The creative process of understanding the city from its edges became a real exercise in detail. The plants are ever so different on each edge. The whiffs of danger, from the lawless west side with a newly excavated set of bodies dumped some ten years ago and the memorials to a teenager burned alive by his peers, contrast with the east side's friendly hikers in the latest Patagonia shorts carrying nothing but keys as they exercise for their hearts. North and south are both pueblo boundaries. Northern is populated up to the edge with large horse estates. South is empty and our hike ended at a 1915 survey marker showing the edge of the airforce base while helocopters buzzed by checking us out.

As we walked, I found myself pondering the fragile wetness of human life often. My son's mouth searches for my hand and chomps, a surpising silky wet orifice in a dry land. We often keep him diaperless, so I was stopping to let him pee at the side of the trail. So wet on both ends. The students were charmingly unprepared to walk at the beginning of the week and not so charmingly wedded to their electronic devices.

thoughts

Week 3 Provocation on Time: A Gesture of Time from Karen

2009-03-23T10:07:00.000-07:00

On my fortieth birthday, I gathered my sketches, paintings, hair trimmings, and other gestures from the year and sewed them in layers with bulges, hidden parts, and revealing cut-aways. The process is visible, while the specifics are not, in my political self-representation of the connecting lines of my art, life, and body. In the end, the watercolor could not be protected with a glass frame, and thus I began a series of watercolors throughout my next decade that could not be confined in a traditional framing process. Instead the shape (in)formed the meaning. I mounted the multi-edged watercolors on wooden embroidery hoops. These supports represented and hid the hiddenstream art history of my grandmother, her sister, mother, and prior generations of mothers.

Cultural Hybridity Week 2 Provocation Comments from Karen Keifer-Boyd on Hyphen-UnPress

2009-03-23T09:38:00.000-07:00

Provocation 2 on Cultural Hybridity: How do artists who are interested in the environment address their own cultural histories, roots, and biases -- and those of the people they encounter -- as they work globally?

My response considers the use of a hyphen to suggest cultural hybridity and critical landscape. The hyphen forms a condensed metaphor in which the relationship is highlighted to question familiarity of the ideas on either side of the hyphen, and in order to arrive at a problematic insight of an unknown unity (e.g., see Wimsatt’s theory of hyphen as literary aesthetics). What is privileged in the symbolic conjunction indicated by the hyphen, both visible and/or erased? Consider mid-life, youth-oriented, body-enhancement, knowledge-producing, lip-service, half-full, pre-moistened, post-menopausal, cross-town, arts-based, and other hyphenated creations. Oft times, a hyphen indicates a previously hostile or unsympathetic relationship. Consider race-nation hyphenated constructions.

We move through our lives with multiple identities, sharing one facet of ourselves with one group and a different facet with another, at times, very visible and at other times, hidden in the wrinkles of our lives. Participating in multiple small cultures, our lives are coded in many hyphenated ways. Hyphen-UnPress signifies Deborah Smith-Shank’s and my own (Karen Keifer-Boyd’s) hyphenated names, and it also honors the multiple other intersections and detours that encompass our lives. From this premise, Debbie and I have created Hyphen-UnPress. Our devotion to social and political pursuits was the germinating impetus for creating the new Press, and it now serves as the umbrella under which the creation of the Visual Culture & Gender journal is one subsidiary. This multimedia journal is situated in the online environment and in the lives of its readers enlarged little by little with the translations into different languages.

belated week one and two

2009-03-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

Dear everyone,
Hello from california. So sorry that I have not posted over the past couple of weeks. I have been reading and thinking and writing, but just have not found the time to compose a few paragraphs. it has been a particularly busy month.

Back to Bill Fox’s first question about appropriating terminology… My work often crosses over into the fields of architecture, urban planning, sociology, etc—all fields in which I have never had serious academic training. The wonderful thing about coming to these related issues as an artist, rather than an academic grounded in a specific field, is that I am able to re-frame these terms, placing accepted truths in new contexts, with new interpretations. As an artist I feel quite comfortable borrowing terms from a variety of disciplines, I can mash them together, put them in a different light. These “borrowed” terms” not only inform the way we make/articulate artwork; in an ideal situation, our appropriation can also inform the way those academics use their own terms too, actually expanding definition and context for them. I teach in a liberal arts college, and to me it is incredibly important that the arts remain the hub of the liberal arts, rather than an adjunct department off to the side. At Oberlin, more students pass through art classes from other departments than most any other department on campus, so we are constantly seeing the infusion of many varied lingos and contexts into our students’ paintings and sculptures and net art. The creative process of re-working ideas and putting them in new contexts is central to the arts––and increasingly, the artists’ re-imagined use of these terms and ideas is becoming integral to the development/progress in other fields. I had an environmental studies student last semester make a sculptural visualization of some principles she had been studying in her environmental economics class, an experience that deepened her own understanding not only of what art can be, but what economics can be. http://youwillneverfind.us/landarts/exhibit/margaret

On to week two---In terms of hybridity… Again, I think of my students. I am reminded every day that they learn in a different way than I did when I was in school, simply because they have grown up in a dramatically more hybridized world, and many of the creative tools that I use in my art practice have been a part of their lives since they could sit at the computer. I will be emphatic about the impact of a networked culture, a google culture, a facebook culture. And they shrug and remind me that they started their first blog when they were in 6th grade, a few years after they learned to use digital cameras, Final Cut Pro, their iPod, their first cell phone. Often I am invited to take part in conferences or symposiums about digital arts and the institution, questioning how museums and colleges are changing in light of digital/media/hybrid arts. And I generally feel like it would have been important to include a few 20 year olds in those conversations. When I am talking about integrating digital media into say, my tenured painting friend’s painting class, I often feel like I am explaining to her how she can use digital media, not how a kid-who-has-used-the-internet-since-the-age-of-3 can use the media. Which can lead to some circular conversations. Same with hybridity. My college students cross over between the silos on campus so fluidly, their painting projects intersect with my electronic music classes and their economics with my "land arts in an electronic age" class, while the institution is scratching its head.

All to say: I am excited for the future, cant wait to see how things change when these 20 year olds start taking part in these conversations. (This conversation that we are having on this blog, is, by the way, totally interesting and compelling, and I am not saying it is not worth having these conversations. I just think my students are having a very different version of this conversation, and I learn a lot from them too.)

Light Moving in Time

2009-03-21T07:21:00.000-07:00

dried zinnia

The film historian William Wees entitled one of his books Light Moving in Time. I always think that his is as good a description of film as any. In film making, light and time (and space) are our basic elements. Time is always manipulated in film making. I can use camera technology to show you a flower blooming in a minute of screen time--something that would take hours or days of "real" time. I can tell some one's life story in an hour of screen time. I can challenge your patience with a film that asks you to spend a lot of time watching as I perform some banal task in real time (eat, sleep, clean the house). Right now, I am filming my backyard garden as it bursts into spring, taking two seconds a day for many days, so that the entire burst will unfold in three minutes of screen time.

a fresh zinnia, from "Flora and Fauna"

In the films I make with plants, I am always aware of layers of time. Not only am I trying to figure out how long I want to see each handmade frame on the screen, but I'm also trying to work with or against the gradual decay process the plants undergo in the frame over time. In "Flora and Fauna," which combines handmade frames with live action footage, I raced (time, again) to create and rephotograph the handmade frames while the flowers, herbs, and vegetables I was using were still fresh. I ended up not using a lot of handmade frames that I thought were too dried out. Those "old" frames will become part of a different work, in which the decaying process itself is the subject. Regardless, time is always central to my work. Like the play of scale (or space, really), which I wrote about in an earlier post, the play of time calls attention to the materials and the experience, presenting what I hope is a compelling way to look at something from the botanical world that we might otherwise not see, or take for granted.

rendering geologic time sensible

2009-03-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

passing through the Cambrian Manhattan Formation (central park), 2009

Hi Colin,

I'd like to offer a couple of ideas and a project I am working on in response to your provocation.

I just finished a book by Elizabeth Grosz called chaos, territory, art: deleuze and the framing of the earth. In the book she uses the following quote from Deleuze which seems relevant to your provocation:

"To render Time sensible is itself the task common to the painter, the musician, and sometimes the writer. It is a task beyond all measure or cadence"
- Deleuze, Francis Bacon, the Logic of Sensation

Geologic time is a topic that looms large in my imagination right now. Despite an immense gap existing between a human time scale and a geologic time scale, I'm hoping to find ways to make geologic time sensible and relate-able through my work. I think artists such as those you posted in your provocation offer powerful contexts for experiencing sensations of time and change that are graspable by humans (a day at the Lightning Field or time in a river over the course of season). I think this kind of work helps humans re-connect their sense of time with a larger rhythm of the planet. It can be a humbling experience.

I am finding it very difficult to take on something as enormous as "deep time", also known as "vast time" or "infinite time", depending on the source. This is a concept of time that strikes me as out-of-sync with the human, it greatly exceeds us even though we are "of it". Perhaps as much asynchronous as diachronic. I'm drawn to this concept of vast time because I feel that contemporary humans could greatly benefit from having a deeper relationship and awareness of our "passing" through the time that makes the earth --- something incredibly brief and momentary within this immensely larger scale. It truly is a miracle that we even get to exist at all! Perhaps in turn, such sensations might not only create a context for considering the immense impact that our contemporary selves continuously have on the earth (and the time span that this impact will last) but also restore some basic, but powerful sensations such as wonder and awe in response to our very existence (within this incredibly long time scale). At least, this is the effect geologic time is having on me as I learn more...

I've started a series of images that are called "humans passing through the geologic". They are about specific places and moments in time, but also about the immense spans of time that have lead up to and will exist after the moment and place as "documented". I'd love to have some feedback on them. The link to the gallery and descriptive text for the project can be found here.

March 19-26, 2009

2009-03-18T22:13:00.000-07:00

We’ve been spending time considering the implications of appropriation and hybridity in the field of art + environment in the first two weeks of this conversation. I’d like to shift gears to raise a question about time as a concept in this discussion.

First disclaimer: I’m no linguist. Second disclaimer: I know just enough about linguistics to be dangerous. Now that I have my disclaimers out of the way, what I recall from my very introductory undergraduate training in linguistics was the impact of lectures Ferdinand de Saussure presented between 1906-1911. The resulting compilation of the lectures, Course in General Linguistics, more or less shaped the field of historical linguistics throughout the twentieth century. To deeply simplify and summarize one component of his proposed/theorized methodologies: linguistic analysis is conditioned by the relationship of linguistic study to time. The primary methodological concern in early-twentieth-century historical linguistics had to do with a debate over analysis: synchronic analysis (for example, the examination of a language at a single moment in time or in the language’s history, specifically limiting study of the language’s development over time) as compared to diachronic analysis (for example, the examination of a word’s development over time, and its relationship to other language changes in that same period of time). So what does any of it have to do with art?

I would argue that a good deal of what might be considered “traditional” landscape art would appear to be synchronically oriented. That is, paintings or photographs depicting landscape depict, generally, a moment in time. Even the language we use to describe more traditional landscape art has to do with “capturing the moment.”

In comparison, many contemporary artists—especially, perhaps, those artists working at the intersection of art + environment—create work that is about the experience and perception of time in relation to the work’s space | place | context. By way of a very famous example, Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) was created with very specific expectations of visitors’ experience over time—hours and even days (Figure 1).

Fig. 1 Walter de Maria, The Lightning Field (1977)

Similarly, the artist Mario Reis’s “watercolors” (Figure 2) are also very much about time—but perhaps on a hydrological or geological scale. Leaving a canvas in a specific creek, stream, or river, Reis captures the sediments and silts of a particular place, both reflecting and creating a sense of time and place in his creative practice. His work physically embodies the places from which they are literally made, but they also reveal the effects of time—the rivers’ currents, changes in weather patterns, and so on (Figure 3).Fig. 2 Mario Reis, Nature Watercolors Fig. 3 Mario Reis, Nature Watercolor in Process

So my question for this group of provocateurs is what do you think time has to do with any of this? How does time play into your work or creative process? What are the promises and pitfalls of thinking about time conceptually, particularly in relation to work located somewhere near the intersection of art + environment?

Response to Week 2 Provocation

2009-03-17T19:49:00.000-07:00

Susan asks a question that is, from my point of view, important to think about if we claim an allegiance or at least identification with the intersections between art + environment. She writes: "Of course, ecology and environmental work transcends borders or cultural boundaries. Or does it?" It's a fabulous question--one which I think is about as generative and provocative as we'll encounter. The scientific notion of an ecological system defies cultural boundaries (the Columbia River watershed has very little interest in national boundaries, for example), and yet ecological systems are also conditioned by culture--consider, for example, the effects of historical-cultural (mis)information regarding the restoration of grey wolf populations in Wyoming, Montana, and Minnesota. What I find compelling, ultimately, about art + environment is the power of art and other creative production to reveal, reflect, challenge, and perhaps even reinforce ecological and environmental thought and practice; to elicit complex dialogue; to effect change. I think it is also tied to Bill Gilbert's response to Bill Fox's Week 1 provocation, so bear with me as I try to connect the thoughts.
Hybridity, hybrid identity, hybrid artwork, hybrid practice all seem to permit a kind of freedom from categorization that is very attractive in contemporary culture. Perhaps it's the promise of more possibility, less limitation--a kind of artistic resistance to the homogenizing influence of the economically-driven mainstream art world. And yet hybridity bears such currency in today's art world that this concept too has been altered and commodified. Yet I think that in the field of art + environment hybridity as an artistic goal might be linked to an ecological/environmental framework (agenda?) productively. Bill Gilbert mentioned the ecological concept of ecotones being used as a framing device for the art + ecology program at UNM. As a transition area between two or more ecolgical communities, an ecotone is a profoundly rich area of ecological diversity, full of organisms practicing hybridity for survival. Do artists find more possibility, more "strategies for survival," in hybridity? Will a museum such as the one in which I work find some similar prospect in the "+" of art + environment?
The artist Ray Kass inhabits a hybrid identity as an artist, and also hybridizes the creative process. In his work Broad Channel: Vorticella Polyptych, Kass worked with a number of participants of the Mountain Lake Workshop to create an enormous, multi-paneled (polyptych) mixed media piece (it's approximately 30 feet wide in total). The work is actually paper stretched like canvas over stretcher bars. Working collaboratively, and thus more like an ecological system, Mountain Lake Workshop participants held the paper over smoking fires, capturing the smoke in the papers' fibers; they applied watercolor pigments randomly, and then buffed the surface of the paper using beeswax. Interestingly, the vaguely ziggurat-shaped areas of each dominant color in the piece resemble the structure of an organism called Vorticella, a single-celled protozoa, one species of which is endemic to the New River Gorge in West Virginia, part of the piece's inspiration. The process of the work's creation "imitates the chance processes of nature," according to a statement on Kass's website. If so, might this be a new typology of landscape painting in the 21st century? What might it teach us about how to live well in place?

Response to Susan

2009-03-16T22:12:00.001-07:00

I am going to go back to the questions put out by Susan at the end of her Week 2 provocation.

“Do you think this is a valuable conversation to have, or are we at the point where it is no longer relevant to include our choices of media and techniques when we express an idea or theory?”

I would like to talk about this from a pedagogical point of view, as this is an issue that is constantly bombarding me where I teach at SDSU. I am now an associate professor at SDSU teaching in the Multimedia emphasis area, a term that a colleague and I ended up using for our emphasis area to define the type of interdisciplinary practice our students are interested in—who work with computers and other “new” media.

For me, multimedia is somewhat awkward as it implies a reference to a specific media as the definition of artistic practice. I am much more interested in creative practice that is defined by issues such as Art/Ecology or Identity/Gender. When people ask what I do, I suggest that my practice investigates the built environment, ecology, environmental issues, cultural geography, and activism through a variety of mediated forms such as Web projects or installations. Still, it is sometimes hard for an layperson interested in the arts to grasp this concept. Most are still looking for a concise description such as photographer or painter unfortunately. Because I am interested in sharing my work outside of the art world with this lay “art” public it has become important for me to educate my audience about the breadth of interdisciplinary practice occurring in contemporary art. For the most part, many are open to this interpretation.

“Do you think of yourself as a hybrid artist?”

Yes, I do feel that this label suits my practice well. Sometimes I like to use the term “cultural producer” instead of artist but then that can be confusing.

“Is it necessary to cross, mix and blend disciplines in order to be truly relevant in our practice?”

Let’s just say that I feel it is perhaps harder not to do so in contemporary art practice these days.

week 2

2009-03-16T19:35:00.000-07:00

Hi All,

[“…ecology and environmental work transcends borders or cultural boundaries. Or does it? Is this practice really above the global issues of cultural hybridity? How do artists who are interested in the environment address their own cultural histories, roots, and biases -- and those of the people they encounter -- as they work globally?”]
-- Susan

Regarding whether ecology and environmental work transcends cultural boundaries I present the ecology of the much-maligned tick!

The tick’s “environment” is defined by its sensory perception of 3 and only 3 things (effectors) – heat, light and the scent of butyric acid, which is emitted by the tick's warm-blooded mammal prey. The tick lives life in relation to these sensory elements and often waits for long periods of time on a blade of grass for the perfect moment to jump and attach itself to its prey. Its environment is defined by these 3 effectors, for lack of a better word.

Thinking of the environment in this way, in terms of what affects us and what we affect, the environment is hardly universal. My environment as an urban North American is quite different from someone living in a rural jungle setting (for example). As such, I am proposing a totally relativistic idea of “environment” that necessitates that work on issues related to ecology and the environment consider boundaries both political and spatial between the body and the given environment. Perhaps more apt way to describe these boundaries could be our respective levels of insulation from the world that surrounds us.

Jamie & Elizabeth:

“…hybrid works create zones of contact between things that are usually kept apart (because of habits of thinking, seeing, or acting). They activate spaces between and make them available for making something else than the same old categories.”

I love the way you’ve articulated this and I’d like to add that those points of contact are where in our recent work we have been focused. For us the points of contact are where sparks occur. Our recent work is hybrid in that it combines or makes use of multiple normally segregated systems of knowledge in order to draw out or shine a light on ideas that don’t naturally emerge for those systems of knowledge in isolation. In the exhibit we are currently installing, we combine geologic and ethnographic images to place human time in the context of geologic time.

Live Blogging from the New Museum

2009-03-16T17:29:00.000-07:00

Experimental Geography Panel Discussion: An Aesthetic Investigation of Space

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;altcast_code=ab3b45dcb6" &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Experimental Geographies (New Museum)&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;
As part of Generative Conversations, smudge studio will be live-blogging from the New Museum on Saturday, March 21st at 3 p.m. We welcome you to join us!

"Creative Time curator Nato Thompson will lead a discussion on Experimental Geography with Lize Mogel and Damon Rich, two artists who participated in his exhibition (for Independent Curators International) and book (Melville House) of the same name. The discussion will focus on the creative use of landscape hacking, cartography, locative media, and radical urbanism as a means of engaging with the politics of contested spaces. In presenting work from the show and book, the panelists will explore the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, and the juncture where the two realms collide."

Learn more about the panelists:
Nato Thompson
Liza Mogel
Damon Rich

Heart and Solar Plexus

2009-03-15T04:01:00.000-07:00

Jamie and Elizabeth - I really appreciated your digital pinholes of my Sierra Cloud Chamber. Mainly because the first idea for that piece was to close it into a dark space with a door and white floor with an aperture in the roof, so it would have worked like a camera obscura, projecting clouds onto the floor. However, its location was going to be the roof of NMA in August and it would have been so hot in there that you could never have stayed long enough to see a cloud. So to have you turn that around and produce pinhole images of what might have been, was very apt. Thank you.

and Caryn - I think you are right about the solar plexus - that is exactly where that connection lodges. It was what I meant by pit of the stomach. It is also the place of the centre of gravity/balance where you are most rooted to the earth. When things later begin to hit you emotionally, and this comes after, then that feeling moves closer to the heart.

I read about an interesting study done on the heart and and it seems that the brain and the heart are intimately connected. People who have heart transplants weirdly seem to take on the interests and skills of the donor. The solar plexus however is a visceral, survival type connection which then seems to feed into the brain and heart.

Maybe the need to categorise art into terms like hybridity is quite an American thing to do, because I haven't registered it happening here in Europe, although to tell you the truth I don't have big connections to museums over here. I think however there is more of a presumption here that things overlap. Tate Modern are for ever changing their categories of how they display their collections. but the science terms are definitely the metaphors of the moment.

Working/Hybrid

2009-03-14T14:14:00.000-07:00

an image from my "found footage" film, "Perchance"

As Bill observed in his provocation week one, science-derived terms like “hybridity” are appropriated loosely by artists. I have been using it in the way Susan uses it—as a way of naming the “slash” in my self-description and in my tool kit and my techniques: I’m an artist/educator/gardener. I work in film/video/photography/sound design. My pieces are experimental/narrative or experimental/documentary or documentary/memoir. In a multi-mediated world, the tools I use to create media converge, to some degree. I still have one foot firmly planted in the analog world, and hope to continue to work analogically as long as the tools and materials hold out.

Does this matter? I think so. I’m interested in the ways in which the analog world still engages my whole self. I’m much more conscious as I work in the film world of the importance of my hands, of working with my hands, and of the ways my body moves in space. I’m interested in working in film with students, teaching them handmade film techniques, and in having them experience media-making while working with their hands, placing them directly on the materials. Students could then bring this new (old) knowledge with them (back) into the digital realm in which they are already comfortable. Even directionality shifts. Another hybridity.

I appreciated Chris’s articulation of an artistic process. In his week 2-post, Chris writes:

So the way I work is very instinctive, I often start with what I can only describe as a feeling in the pit of my stomach. That is me feeling instantly connected to something. Then you work out how you will go about doing something about this. I.e. method, approach, material, form etc. It is all quite non verbal. Sometimes there is the germ of an idea, but it is missing a bit, so you may put it aside and wait awhile. At some point that last piece of the jigsaw will drop into place; you see something or read something. Maybe its an idea about the material to use, or the way to work. Whatever, it completes a circle whereby everything is related and whole. Then you can make the work.

I’ve been struggling to articulate this process myself. For me, the feeling isn’t in the “pit of my stomach” but rather in my solar plexus, under my heart. It feels like a physical “buzz,” and I try to foster it. It is the buzz that leads, for me.

As a pair of crazy philosophers remind me:

This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.
– Deleuze and Guattari , A Thousand Plateaus

If it is indeed a buzz, an instant connection, a flow, something non-verbal, we reach for different tools and materials to express or connect with it. Is that “hybridity”? Maybe. The word we used to use was “eclectic.” Sometimes, we reached for language metaphors. The scientific analogies, the appropriations, have their day now because it is these metaphors that seem most urgent, most relevant, perhaps even most fundable.

Feeling the Reality of Relation

2009-03-14T06:48:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody,

One of the questions that Susan asks is: "Is it necessary to cross, mix and blend disciplines in order to be truly relevant in our practice?"

I guess I see the crossing, mixing, and blending of disciplines, styles, etc. as a means, not as an end. And I think that as a means, hybridity is extremely relevant to issues that are shaping conversations in Art + Environment.

Mixing Chris's and Susan's postings :-), I'll try to explain why I think so:

It seems to me that you can use the term "hybridity" to talk about "mixing" materials, genres, even perspectives. But you can also use it to emphasize the growing recognition that no categories, materials, identities, or perspectives are ever purely themselves: every thing is deeply interconnected with everything else--all there is is "mutual contamination" and "co-shaping." (I think Chris is talking about this in his first post in week 2.) Wherever we, as humans and as artists, draw lines that separate this from that, juxtapose this to that, compare and contrast this to that--we are temporarily, and purposefully, "punctuating" the otherwise continuous flow of the world's unfolding. It's what we do in order to act and make things in the world.

So for me, the idea of hybridity and the works called "hybrid" speak to more than mixing things already defined as things (media, materials, styles). Hybrid works are also saying something about the impossibility of hermetically sealed boundaries and the ways that categories leak and spill over. They draw our attention to what Chris says is his "first step" as an artist: "an instinctive connection with no labels"-- a dipping into that continuous, uncategorized flow of the world's becoming.

At their best, I think, hybrid works create zones of contact between things that are usually kept apart (because of habits of thinking, seeing, or acting). They activate spaces between and make them available for making something else than the same old categories. Hybrid works can do what Chris says is such a marvel: they can help us NOT to miss what we mostly miss, namely, how stuff is interrelated.

For someone like me who is working in media studies--hybridity is a hot topic. Media scholars are pointing out that "new" media are never wholly new because they "re-mediate" old media. Digital cameras re-mediate film cameras re-media camera obscuras, etc. Each new medium comments on, replaces, or reproduces earlier ones by borrowing, repurposing, refashioning (encyclopedias on the internet, art museums on CD-ROMs, digital scans of polaroids).

I've been making digital camera obscura photographs by taking digital photos of images that appear on the screen inside a homemade camera obscura. It's a hybrid camera--part camera obscura, part canon coolpix. It creates a hybrid image: part analog projection of light's passage-through the world and part digital record of that passage.

Here's an artist statement about the results:

"Digital camera obscuras depict a world in which every thing is shaped and reshaped by all that surrounds it. Subjects appear as “in-relation” rather than as “in-themselves.”

Here are a couple of digital camera obscuras that I took of Chris Dury's installation at the Nevada Museum of Art last October/November.

What I hope for with this experiment--and what I think might be the power and relevance of hybridity--is that instead of just being additive (digital + analogue, or old camera + new camera, or smoke + video) --hybrid practices can generate entirely new, previously unexperienced sensations (and actions) of interrelatedness. The desire, to quote one media studies philosopher, is "the felt reality of relation."

Would love to hear what you think!!

relationship and interconnectedness

2009-03-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

Hi Susan,

Its interesting to hear from curators and teachers because you have to make sense of what artists do. For myself, as an artist, I would never start with a label, like 'shall I make a hybrid work?'. For me the world is about relationship and so you explore connections. Always you start with what is here now and you come towards this with who you are now with all your history, culture and biases. You are the product of own indoctrination, so you always see the world through that veil. I guess it's important to see that. Nobody and no thing is an isolated entity, we are all bits of stuff related to other stuff, and half the time we don't see the connections. But it is how stuff is interrelated which is interesting, its interesting because we mostly miss it all, but when we see it and recognise it then it is worth drawing out in a work. That is a kind of marvel, really.

So the way I work is very instinctive, I often start with what I can only describe as a feeling in the pit of my stomach. That is me feeling instantly connected to something. Then you work out how you will go about doing something about this. I.e. method, approach, material, form etc. It is all quite non verbal. Sometimes there is the germ of an idea, but it is missing a bit, so you may put it aside and wait awhile. At some point that last piece of the jigsaw will drop into place; you see something or read something. Maybe its an idea about the material to use, or the way to work. Whatever, it completes a circle whereby everything is related and whole. Then you can make the work.

Later that piece fits into the unfolding story of your work and you can begin to view it objectively, even give it a label, see that it relates to and adds to a particular area of your work. Putting things into categories is how we try to make sense of the world and how artists can objectively relate one work to another and see how what they are doing might relate to others in the field. these are all words and thoughts after the event. The first step is a instinctive connection with no labels. Its like a kind of floating into something, but at the same time very tense and excited.

That's how it is with me anyway.

Chris.

'Howling at the Universe' a homage to Kurt Schwitters - spore print, screen printed in porridge on black paper.

'Shattered Peace, Broken promises' - video stills from a film of the smoke from a sage bundle, effected by the sound of an explosion.

March 12-19, 2009

2009-03-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about my turn to post a provocation this week and would like to pick up the strand begun by Bill Gilbert in his post and open up the idea of “hybridity” to more conversation. On one hand, this is another term appropriated from science, so it makes some sense to follow Bill Fox’s week 1 provocation. But beyond that, of the five terms I have been working with at the Walker Art Center, this one has given me the most trouble conceptually. While a hybrid is at its root a biological term about mixing species, the post colonial cultural discourse around this term has taken over and made it much more problematic. In the Elements/Principles of Contemporary Art materials that I have been developing, I have attempted to bring the discussion to a point that might engage high school students, but fear that I am over simplifying the very complex idea of cultural hybridity in a globalized world.

Even the Center for Art + Environment is a hybrid form of institution (note the “+”). Of course, ecology and environmental work transcends borders or cultural boundaries. Or does it? Is this practice really above the global issues of cultural hybridity? How do artists who are interested in the environment address their own cultural histories, roots, and biases -- and those of the people they encounter -- as they work globally?

I also have been aware that another way of thinking about hybridity is emerging (or has been emerging for a long time) in the practice of artists. I found myself noting in many of the introductions for this conversation that we describe ourselves with a blend of interests, professions, and pursuits. (artist / author / educator /scholar / researcher / scientist / writer / musician / architect / printmaker / activist / etc.). We all seem to hybrid-ize our practices in our artistic and professional work and, further, in how we craft our lives. Mixing media is common among artistic practice today, but this seems to go further to impact how we view ourselves as creative individuals. Do you think this is a valuable conversation to have, or are we at the point where it is no longer relevant to include our choices of media and techniques when we express an idea or theory? Do you think of yourself as a hybrid artist? Is it necessary to cross, mix and blend disciplines in order to be truly relevant in our practice?

Response to Week 1 provocation

2009-03-10T20:29:00.000-07:00

First of all, sorry to respond to Bill Fox’s week one provocation so late in the game—I just launched a new Web-based project over the weekend, which has taken up most of my time & energy for the last few days.

In terms of borrowing “constructs and terms from science for the purpose of art & environment projects” I have been less interested in farming/appropriating scientific discourse and specific terms as my themes for my projects and more interested in illustrating scientific concepts for my audience to connect complex human/ecological relationships to a specific environment or area I’m studying and documenting.

For instance, when I began focusing (my camera) on the Salton Sea in the mid to late ‘90s, I realized that I could not show the images without some in depth explanation of what was depicted within them. (Foremost, it was important for me to understand this myself). A title or caption did not work, as it just didn’t really convey the complexity of the condition, the history, or even the humor/irony of a particular scene. Hence, writing became just as important as the photographic images in defining what was happening to these places.

Consequently, I realized that I had to do my homework understand the biological and scientific terms and conditions I was seeing while working on site. Not trained in these fields I did a lot of reading and research. I began to seek out scientific resources such as the Dr. Victoria Matey and her late, husband, Dr. Borris Kuperman at SDSU who were imaging parasite infestations on tilapia found at the Salton Sea. (This non-native species suffered sporadic catastrophic die-offs throughout the ‘90s into the turn of the century and would cover the shore with thousands of rotting carcasses at various times). Matey and Kuperman’s published scientific findings showed that the infestation (a beautiful image in itself) was one of the many related environmental hazards causing the tilapia population to implode. (Tilapia is a prolific breeder and the population at the Salton has always managed to recover from die-offs).

I included some of the Matey/Kuperman scanning electron microscope from their Salton study in my book seeing them as beautiful aesthetic images and also a way to inform the viewer about biological systems/relationships within the sea. I guess I’m interested in ways artist projects can help relate scientific discourse visually or in some other creative way to an audience and still incorporate scientific rigor without making it as dry as can be when reading the same information in a textbook. Artists such as Mark Dion are really good at this. Perhaps there’s something that the scientific community can learn from us artists as well?

Week 1-Claude Glass

2009-03-10T18:37:00.000-07:00

A while back I read Arnaud Maillet's "The Claude Glass" (Zone Books 2004) and it got me pretty excited about a simple use of optics and an early way of reading one's environs. The Claude glass was a dark piece of reflective material that an artist would hold in one hand while facing away from the landscape to be depicted. I imagined that this piece of magic collapsed the view onto a two dimensional surface and took away its color, making the tonal reading for which it was made. Thinking about it and then testing, it doesn't really work that way: not the easy way to make the world black and white I had expected. I began using the method though within installations, so that with every building move, there was also a reflection, an image of the three dimensional, often one that was scaled to include the observer.

In my last installation I used a black reflective material (big sheets of black plexi) as a flooring that that the viewer moved across to view a model of a landscape I had cast in the space. By the end of the installation the landscape model was repositioned and the flooring (now covered in the results of the casting process) hung vertically as a wall-like division in the space.

Accuracy Matters to Us

2009-03-10T07:06:00.000-07:00

For the past three years we have been working exclusively on climate change. In this work, we aim for as little slippage as possible in our use of scientific or quasi-scientific terms. We recognize that we have no independent means by which to gauge the claims of the IPCC or any other scientific body with respect to perceived changes in global mean temperatures and the likely cause for this change (anthropegenic forcing from greenhouse gas emissions). We seek to confirm rather than subvert the authority of these scientific bodies. We would like, as much as possible, to use their langauge according to the rules of their language game.

Which is not to say we have no epistomological agenda. We consider our work research. We are very concerned with knowing the landscape and how we know it. We are concerned with the limits of this knowing and and are concerned to respect and inspire respect for those limits.

The photographs of our project (such as the one above of the mountain with vanished glacier) say nothing in and of themselves about climate change. They are like a blank stare. Only by placing them in context (the context provided by science and history) can we begin to penetrate that stare.

Where we have begun to appropriate material is in the use of imagery from various disciplines mostly ethnographic, archaeological and scientific. We are interested in understanding this present moment (so sudden and dangerous-seeming) as the culmination of various histories. We believe that we can only progress in this understanding by being comfortable with fragments and contradictions, complexity. (Even if in certain iterations of our project we banish such complexity).

This interest has led us to use images such as those above from the Peabody Musuem at Harvard. Like our original photograph, they from Peru. (Peru, which depends so heavily on the Andean glaciers that will be gone by the middle of the century).

Complexity and fractal algorithms

2009-03-10T02:35:00.000-07:00

I really liked cph piece on the appropriation of surveying equipment and slavery - it's wonderful, but this is really in response to Bill Gilbert's post on planting plans based on fractal algorithms. I wonder how the planting turned out and whether it did actually increase the plants chance of survival.
When I designed 'Heart of Reeds' in my home town I worked with ecologists to find a pattern which would give us the most likelihood of biodiversity. Given that we were designing the shape of land and water, the ecologists felt that the more 'borderlands' we could make, the more biodiversity we would get, so in effect I was drawing with islands. In the end I settled on a a double vortex complex pattern from the apex of a heart, where the pattern of the muscles is laid down in the pattern of the most efficient flow of blood. This in medical terms is a Cardiac Twist. Simplified this pattern, which symbolically connects us to nature, also provides what amounts to ribbons of islands.

2 Cardiac Twist drawings: blood and river mud on paper

The work was excavated in 2004, planted with reeds, one metre apart, and the vegetation which was there before, allowed to regenerate. It is managed for the benefit of biodiversity and the only plant which is discouraged is willow, to prevent woodland developing. In terms of wildlife it has been specacularly successful and there are many species which have colonised the land and water. It is teaming with life and this makes it a much loved place for people of the town.

I wonder if this complex pattern is also a fractal algorithm, since it is also found in river and weather systems and also the formation of galaxies. If you go up or down in scale similar patterns exist. Is this universal pattern of flow the most conducive to life?

theodolite

2009-03-09T20:41:00.000-07:00

theodolite "the great grey greasy limpopo" magnifying plumb bob

these three images all come from work about surveying. i borrow the terms and the objects and remake them into creatures of my own devising. the theodolite has a mirror and lens added to a basic sighting mechanism that allows a viewer to superimpose his/her own image on the landscape. the drawing shows the area adjacent to the limpopo river -- land my great-grandfather owned and ran cattle on which i have an ongoing proposal to do a perimeter walk and understand the changes in south africa as they read on this piece of land. the magnifying plumb bob is a measuring device altered to a viewing eyepiece, hung at foot level allowing a closeup view of the hands digging in video below the bob. the two brass pieces i made on a lathe and mill -- borrowing further the 18th century technologies of hand production. the map is hand drawn as well. so i borrow and transform past technology, seen as science at the time. surveyers in the 18th century were highly valued and highly rewarded. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, both were surveyors and thus acquired land. the men who worked for them were not so lucky -- hard work and not much credit in wading swamps and throwing chains around.

just a thought on appropriation

provocation:1

2009-03-09T14:58:00.000-07:00

The responses coming from UNM are being generated in the context of our Art & Ecology studio and seminar this semester. Bill’s provocation regarding the appropriation of scientific terms is most applicable to those endeavors. At UNM I have repeatedly heard the complaint from my colleagues in the “hard sciences” that the use of the term Ecology in naming our course has incorrectly appropriated the territory of science. I will leave it to historians of linguistics to sort out the true cultural location from which the term ecology has sprung.

ecol·o·gy
German Ökologie, from öko- eco- + -logie –logy

1: a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments
2: the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment
3: human ecology
4: environment , climate , the moral ecology ; also : an often delicate or intricate system or complex, the ecology of language

I’d be interested in applying another of the terms supplied by our Walker contingent to the question. It seems to me that in the migration of scientific terms is the direct result of the current wave of trans-disciplinary collaboration that is happening in academia and the art world at large. The result is an inevitable Hybridity in which two or more disciplines bring their interpretations to any given term.

I have experienced this several times of late in my practice, one example being our project for Lucy Lippard’s Weather Report exhibition. For this show, artists were charged with finding a scientist with whom to partner in creating a work that addressed climate change. I put together a team at UNM consisting of myself, Erika Osborne, artist and colleague in the Land Arts of the American West program and Bruce Milne, biologist and head of Sustainability Studies. We also consulted with plant biologists at the US Forest Service station in Fort Collins, CO. The focus of the piece was to plant species at our chosen site at the National Center for Atmospheric Research that stood to prosper
over the long term as the climate warmed.

Central to the conception of the piece was the idea that our site was situated at an Ecotone (a scientific term) and would therefore demonstrate a significant and rapid change in plant community.

eco·tone:
ec- + Greek tonos tension — more at tone

1: a transition area between two adjacent ecological communities

The question I brought to Bruce Milne was what scientific principle could we use to define the planting plan to maximize our possibility of success. He suggested we apply a fractal (another scientific term) algorithm.

frac·tal ,
French fractale, from Latin fractus broken,
1: any of various extremely irregular curves or shapes for which any suitably chosen part is similar in shape to a given larger or smaller part when magnified or reduced to the same size

The resulting proposal that we submitted contains a planting plan with Erika’s drawing of our chosen native species that is based on the “bough” fractal. In the end, the work combines several scientific concepts/terms in an art piece. It’s a hybrid.

Scale

2009-03-09T10:31:00.001-07:00

Hi Everyone,

I responded to Bill's provocation with a comment back to him. I probably should have responded with a "week one" post. Here's what I wrote:

It isn't really a scientific term, exactly, but the concept of "scale" and scale shifting comes up a lot in the introductions people have made to their work. Scientists investigate phenomena using microscopes and other technologies that shift the visual/aural/tactile/time/space scale. Artists have long appropriated these investigative technologies. In our own group, just to pick a few examples, Chris's juxtaposed scales-- echogram and echocardiogram--call attention to each and invite us to consider the relationship between them. Julia's BigBoxReuse (I love this project) documents the scale shift as communities take over nationally-based, large scale buildings and turn them to local, community-based uses. The Canary Project tracks the time-scale of climate change. . . .

In my own work, I would love to be able to acquire a scientific instrument that would allow me to take very thin cross-sections of plants in order to use those in my films. I'm using much cruder kitchen and artist tools to achieve these results now. Such science lab instruments are prohibitively expensive or potentially contaminated, from what I understand. I realize I'm talking about appropriating tools rather than concepts, but this is where I am.

entropic attractions

2009-03-09T09:19:00.000-07:00

Well, it seems like there is a whole lot of entropy out there. People are disappearing before they even appear! Maybe Bill is a strange attractor.

Or maybe he has brought on an Uncertainty Wave!

Who can tell.

Chris

appropriating the "limit case"

2009-03-08T18:44:00.000-07:00

Hi all,
Thanks to Bill for a great provocation for this week ... I'd like to respond to his invitation to:
"hear a bit about how any of us have borrowed constructs and terms from science for the purpose of art & environment projects, and how we’ve bent them to our purposes. In short, instead of arguing about whether we’re using a scientific concept correctly or not, I’d like to propose that it may not matter--that, in fact, it’s the entire point to not use the word or concept in the same fashion as a scientist. That’s a mechanism typical of a living language, hence a culture."

In 2007, smudge studio (Jamie Kruse and I) appropriated the term "limit case" from calculus and used it for the purpose of an art + environment project called the "Limit Case Postcards." In calculus, as far as I can make it out, "limit case" refers to the point at which "we have gone as far as we can go within the terms of a particular theorem." It addresses the question: What is happening to a function as it approaches a certain point?

I really don't understand calculus at all. But while on a research and art-making trip, we were drawn to the phrase "limit case' because it somehow captured the force and energy of the landscapes, land uses, and extreme social environments that we were passing through. We decided that we would respond to our experiences by making what we called "limit case postcards." Here is our artist statement:

We traveled through the American southwest for 28 days.The trip consisted of 3700 miles (a figure 8 of sorts). We selected sites that would offer us experiences of intensity: intensity of landscape, color, climate, remoteness, shape, history, and site-responsive built environments. We found ourselves arriving at sites where humans, the landscape and the built environment converged to create exquisitely concentrated zones of contact. State borderlines converged with deep economic divisions; remote desert "wasteland" converged with garish tourist attractions; a quonset hut used to develop the atomic bomb converged with present day efforts to redesign it for sustainable living practices in the desert.

The experiences compounded and we began to regard such moments as "limit cases": intense points where natural and built forces mutually contaminate as they play out to their most extreme forms, levels, and junctures. The postcards visualize sites reaching their "limits" and passing into something else.

Bill's provocation resonated for me because as you can see in the artist statement, we took great liberty with the idea of a "limit case" when we used it to help us visualize what it felt like to us to encounter natural and built forces as they reached their most extreme forms, levels and junctures and passed into something else.

I'm not sure if our sense of "limit case" is at all close to what mathemeticians call limit cases ... but our appropriation of these words and as much of the concept as we could grasp helped us immensely in finding some language to express what was otherwise difficult to describe in words. Here's one of the post cards that resulted:

Greetings!

2009-03-08T13:22:00.001-07:00

I am an artist/teacher/researcher living now in Pennsylvania. My work has been strongly influenced by impressions of multiple geographies layered with my life experience as I have lived and moved from many locations beginning in early childhood. I see posted images here that remind me of my strong feelings for the Mojave desert landscape which is where I spent my teenage years.
A student in the 'Web 2.0 Pedagogy' class at Penn State, I am exploring themes that include: New technologies and their practical and theoretical implications for learning in the art classroom, innovative teacher practice, and social and collaborative learning.

Digital entropy

2009-03-07T05:18:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

Bill's question made me wonder how context and/or environment might effect how the appropriation of terms and materials are experienced. It seems that part of dialogue evolving around the emerging field of art + environment is related to how the "virtual" environment might be taken into consideration as well as the "natural" and "built". When Robert Smithson appropriated the concept of entropy he enacted this through works in both the landscape (natural) and within the gallery (built). I wonder how he (or we) might take up those same interests within the virtual environment today?

A couple of weeks ago a most incredible image of a rock was posted on the BLDG BLOG.

I ended up not paying much attention to the content of the post, but was struck by how much I enjoyed encountering this image online. I realized how rare it is to see such a clear piece of the natural environment existing within the virtual- and how encountering it online simultaneously altered my habitual experience of the virtual, as well as of the natural. Ironically, I have taken the time to look more closely at a rocks since finding this image.

It made me think further about the work of Robert Smithson and what might be an example of "digital entropy" today. I'm just starting to think about this, but for the purposes of this conversation I thought I would give it a try.

I've appropriated the original image from Vicente Guallert and dematerialized it from 100% to 0% over a span of images (my process was to "save for the web" in photoshop at 100%, then 50%, then 25%, then 11%, then 5%, then 0%. "Save for the web" is a process that is key to the "environment" of web-publishing). I offer it here as a possible visualization of how a scientific term such as entropy might be re-appropriated in the virtual environment today. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else has ideas about how concepts appropriated from science into the field of art might begin to take on new and different (and potentially less or more productive) dimensions when taken up in the virtual environment.

click image to enlarge to full-size

write/erase/ap/prop/ri/ate/appropriation

2009-03-06T21:25:00.000-08:00

My gaze was caught by a site-specific 9,000-year-old rock painting of a woman wearing a skirt and lying on her side painted as a “hole” in her body. Scholarship into the history of the Paint Rock site located near Junction, Texas, failed to note a faint voice bubble issuing from her mouth, creating a paradox in interpretation: why had a white female captive (according to scholars) been given a voice at that time? I used this sight/incite to call attention to the erased cultural memory of women’s contributions to society by filling the “hole” (symbolically a water bowl in her womb) with water so that viewers could dampen a cloth and erase another’s history written on the stones at her feet, and then write their own stories on the stones. In this way, my artwork connects the history of a woman painted at Paint Rock to contemporary issues of women’s erased cultural memory, thus providing a palimpsest of the pictograph that “floats” simultaneously with each and every erasure to (re)create a fresh historical trace concerning this continuous erasure of women’s contributary cultures.

Cloud Chambers and Strange Attractors

2009-03-06T07:40:00.000-08:00

Hi Bill,

Yes I love the idea of taking a scientific term and turning it on its head. Caryn was right I definitely appropriated not only the terminology but the images themselves (echogram/echocardiogram). I have been making Cloud Chambers for years and the scientific definition of this is 'a devise for detecting particles of ionising radiation.' mine puts clouds at your feet.

Here are some images from inside Star Chamber in Nashville

and the Cloud pool Chamber at NMA

I also made a work called 'Edge of Chaos', which linked winds and ocean currents.

Edge Of Chaos - Hand written text listing all the names of winds from different cultures in the pattern of a double vortex from the apex of a heart, and all the names of ocean currents in the pattern of wood in a Redwood tree. Ink and peat on paper. 4'7" x 16'5"

\

detail.

Just now I am listening in on the conversations of climate change scientists trying to make more accurate models of prediction using Chaos Theory. Most of it, all of it in fact, goes way over my head and I grope for comprehension: math is definitely not my strong point. However I am drawn to the term 'Strange Attractor', and I feel it might be worth subverting it in some way. I am also interested in what they are talking about in terms of their methodology, which might move between a logical set of steps to randomness, and I am thinking that that could be acted out in another context, like canoeing and walking across the watery landscapes of the Outer Hebrides, which I am planning on doing later in the year. There is also something in there that really interests me: the idea of there being a pattern to Chaos.

Greetings from New Mexico

2009-03-05T21:53:00.000-08:00

Hi all,
We’ve enjoyed reading your introductions. Thanks from New Mexico!

Bill Gilbert here:
I am an artist and educator who has been working in recent years on blurring the boundaries between those two practices. In my research, I have followed a trail that has led me from ceramics to earth art to environmental art/performance/mapping. I am currently involved in a performative series based on the disjunction between our abstract conceptions of the environment and our physical experience of actual sites. These works are enacted on sites visited by the Land Arts of the American West program and translated to viewers using topo maps, gps devices, video and audio recordings.

On the educator side I have been pursuing the possibilities over the past twenty years for a pedagogical model based on a mobile studio. In pursuing this idea we have made stops along the way at Acoma Pueblo, Juan Mata Ortiz, Mexico and the Sierra Madre Mountains and Pastaza, Ecuador in the Amazon jungle. In 2000, I founded Land Arts of the American West at the University of New Mexico as a semester long studio arts program committed to providing students with direct physical engagement with the environmental and social aspects of place and
uninterrupted time to work.

Working in collaboration with professor emeritus Basia Irland, I have started a new Art & Ecology concentration at UNM. This spring we are conducting a national search to hire a new faculty member. I am currently team teaching an Art and Ecology seminar and an Art and Ecology studio practices course with Catherine Harris from our Landscape Architecture Department. These classes will both be participating in our generative conversations as we grapple with a cross disciplinary definition of ecological art as a particular subset of Art + Environment.
Adelante,
Bill

Catherine Harris here:

I am an artist and educator working on both sides of the art and design divide. My art practice uses the lines cultures draw on the land to frame boundaries and use. I trace virtual lines, property lines and waterlines with walks and objects referring to the histories of surveying – theodolites, Gunter’s chains and satellite hats. My production varies from large-scale installation to tiny video, with metal work in between. I began my art practice twenty years ago in photography, detoured by way of Fluxus assistant, garnered an environmental focus through masters in landscape architecture and earned an MFA from Stanford University in 2005.

As an educator, I most recently have been teaching environmental art and theory in the Landscape Architecture Department and Art and Ecology Seminar and Studio at the University of New Mexico. I have also taught Land Art at Deep Springs College and Landscape Architecture studios at UC Berkeley, with a brief thesis advisory role at CCA.

March 5-12, 2009

2009-03-05T13:00:00.000-08:00

I’d like to make a provocation over the theme of appropriation, or rather the verb, appropriate, which according to the Oxford American Dictionary, is a word that has two meanings: to take something for one’s own use (usually without the owner’s permission); and, to devote assets for a special purpose. And I’d like specifically to deal with appropriation by artists of scientific constructs and terminology.

I’m thinking about this because of the word “environment,” which we all deploy with abandon in the arts community. My dictionary defines the word as “the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates,” and we most often think of it as a word taken from the science community. In fact, the word comes from “environs,” which means the neighborhood, or the surroundings. The sense in which we use it today stems from usage in 1827 by Carlyle, the Victorian Scottish writer, philosopher, and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. So here’s a case where science took a word from the literary world.

As a side note, I’d draw your attention to the fact that the word “appropriate” when used as an adjective--as in “It was the appropriate use of the word”--means something which is suitable to a circumstance. So we appropriate ideas and words because they are suitable to the need at hand. I would argue that calling the world, our environment, our neighborhood, is supremely apt--but as a rhetorical trope to promote environmentalism, and not as a scientific term.

In terms of the first definition of “appropriate,” the science community doesn’t care if artists borrow from their endeavors. They do care about accuracy, however--if a term is used appropriately. And that’s the beginning of a controversy, because it seems to me that artists don’t really care if their use of the word is exactly that of the scientists. A term such as entropy might mean one thing in the mind of physicist Freeman Dyson (an equation in classical thermodynamics) and another to artist Robert Smithson (a term in information theory). The first might be used to design a nuclear rocket, the second Spiral Jetty.

I’d like to hear a bit about how any of us have borrowed constructs and terms from science for the purpose of art & environment projects, and how we’ve bent them to our purposes. In short, instead of arguing about whether we’re using a scientific concept correctly or not, I’d like to propose that it may not matter--that, in fact, it’s the entire point to not use the word or concept in the same fashion as a scientist. That’s a mechanism typical of a living language, hence a culture.

Introduction from Julia Christensen

2009-03-05T08:42:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone,

Glad to be in conversation with all of you. My name is Julia Christensen, and I am an artist/writer/musician/teacher living in the plains of Ohio. I am professor of the “emerging arts” at Oberlin College and Conservatory. When people ask me what my job title means, I generally say that my courses explore the hybrid forms of art-making that emerge from experiments and crossovers between disciplines, naturally. Furthermore, I am interested in promoting the emergence of art and creativity amongst my students across their traditional academic silos. With creative and artistic environmental scientists, chemists, geographers, and economists around––working together with our artists, filmmakers, composers, and writers––a compelling future is within our reach. I have a joint appointment between the College and the music Conservatory here at Oberlin, and my classes often are cross-listed between Environmental Studies, Art, and Electronic Music.

My work straddles the lines between art and research, electronic and non-electronic, audience and performer, and I work across media (film, photo, net, sound, installation, etc). I have been working on a long-term project about the reuse of abandoned big box stores in the United States since 2002. This project intends to raise a platform for people to talk and think critically about the impacts of this sort of construction on our communities and the future development of our cities and towns. The image I posted is of the Spam Museum, a corporate museum in a renovated Kmart building in Austin, MN.

A few other projects:
UnBox: I recently built a 1500 sf structure called the UnBox, which is modular and folds up into a box 9x5x5 feet in size. It is made of locally milled wood, and locally sourced materials, and I never stepped foot inside a big box building in order to construct the UnBox. It is part of my traveling solo exhibition, Your Town Inc., which premiered at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon last fall (curated by Astria Suparak).

Rust Belt/Bayou: Last year I completed a net art project called Rust Belt/Bayou, a net art commission from Turbulence. It explores the aural landscapes of Cleveland and New Orleans.

Land Arts in an Electronic Age: A course at Oberlin exploring how artists connect with and interpret the landscape in a post-digital world. Matt Coolidge and I took the students on a field trip to Gary, Indiana for several days as a part of this class, and the work the students produced ranged from sound installations to interactive maps to video pieces to dance performances.

Some links:

My website: http://www.juliachristensen.com
List of recent works: http://www.juliachristensen.com/recent/recent
Big Box Reuse project site: http://www.bigboxreuse.com
Big Box Reuse Book: http://www.bigboxreuse.com/book
UnBox: http://www.juliachristensen.com/unbox.html
Teaching: http://www.youwillneverfind.us
Rust Belt/Bayou: http://turbulence.org/Works/rustbelt_bayou
WIKIREUSE : http://turbulence.org/Works/wikireuse
Land Arts in an Electronic Age: http://youwillneverfind.us/landarts/gary/main
WAM! Women and Art Music Ensemble: http://www.youwillneverfind.us/wam/
Your Town Inc: http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibitions/yourtowninc

Jarrod Beck Introduction

2009-03-04T22:08:00.000-08:00

Hello Con-Generates. I'm Jarrod, an architect turned printmaker and back again. (Installation Artist?) I remake spaces by introducing a degree of entropy into places that have been "cleaned" to challenge the architectural frame of order. I use banal materials associated with the trade of the design/builder: drafting film, silver mylar, lath, plaster, light, and exact ideas of memory, loss, distance on them: the mylar collects the remnants of a painted wall, becoming the formwork for a poured plaster piece, which breaks, but not before it takes the information with it, and is rested carefully on a table, and then packed away. All these pieces add up until finding a new space to generate the next piece.

I've just finished packing all the bits of my last installation into my studio, so I'm hoping to unpack it again with all of you.

Below is the sign posted to the door of my last piece at the South Street Seaport Museum. A twisted frame:

Welcome to Visitor Center. Yes, we’re open. It’s free and open to the public Wednesday - Sunday, 11-5., through February 21st.

Visitor Center is a temporary installation that began with a question:
What could happen if you built a visitor center for many landscapes at once, a space far removed from the landscape(s) it was meant to frame?

The structure of the piece is influenced by visitor centers typical to national parks and historic sites. A model, or large scale map is shown in the center of the space, with artifacts, artist illustrations, images, moving and still displayed to give context for the visitor attempting to understand the journey on which they are about to embark. Here, architectural elements, or framing devices, have collided with material chaos: namely plaster, paper, plastic, ink and dye.

To build the model, plaster was cast into flexible plastic molds on wooden horizontal planes that filled the gallery. Vertical elements: paper, plastic and thread were hung from the rafters to define a labyrinthal path around and through the plaster piece. Last week, the structure of the piece was removed, causing this “landscape” to collapse. Elements are now being pulled from the rubble and displayed as artifacts along the perimeter of the gallery space.

The installation changes everyday: you are invited to come in and be a part of the process, or simply to walk through and sit for awhile. Ultimately this is a space for contemplation, akin to the bench found perched on the edge of a natural vista. Tea and hot cocoa are available (free of charge), just ask.

Introduction: The Canary Project (Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris)

2009-03-04T20:56:00.000-08:00

We are two representatives of The Canary Project, Ed Morris and Susannah. We happen to be the founding members. We are a husband and a wife.

The Canary Project produces visual media and artworks that deepen public understanding of climate change and/or energize commitment to solutions. In addition to us (Susannah and Ed), The Canary Project consists of more than 30 participating artists, volunteers, designers, researchers, etc. of various degrees of involvement. We make fact-based art and art-based activism.

Our most substantial project is photo-based. (We used to just say photography and not photography-based). The photographs are of landscapes impacted by climate change. We now say photo-based because we are combining these large scale photos with archival images and other material borne out of research into the implications of the photographs. (None of this is reflected on our website, which like all websites older than a year is in bad need of a makeover, but for the record it is www.canary-project.org. Another recent website is: www.greenpatriotosters.org. We are currently Loeb Fellows at The Harvard University Graduate School of Design).

We believe that era of Galieo sitting in one room and the priests in another is past.

To play by the rules: our practice involves:

Time because we are interested in appreciating the many histories that are culminating in this moment (human, geologic, scientific, etc.) and are interested in the time-scale of climate change as it relates to the human presence on the planet.

Appropriation because we are interested in the found object of scientific data, of old images, and of recylced material such as white dress shirts.

Hybridity because we are a collective. (And need to make this felt more on our damn out of date website by which hundreds of people misjudge us every day).

(Susannah did not approve this message as she is sleeping at the moment, but I thought it might add some dramatic tension for us to quibble periodically throughout this public exchange).

Introductions

2009-03-04T13:28:00.001-08:00

Hello from Nevada!

My name is Colin Robertson. I'm the Curator of Education at the Nevada Museum of Art. I lead the education department of the Museum, overseeing programs offered by the Museum, including lectures, discussions, colloquia, tours, gallery interpretation and new media inititatives, and school and teacher services. I also collaborate on the museum's art + environment initiatives, including the newly founded Center for Art + Environment, directed by Bill Fox, and the Art + Environment Conference held in October 2008. I work closely with Ann M. Wolfe, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections. I truly love my work.

I came to the Nevada Museum of Art from the University of Nevada, Reno, where I formerly taught English, and where I also received my Master's degree in the University's Literature & Environment Program. The program and its faculty are integrally linked to the Association for the Study of Literature & Environment, or ASLE, all three components of which were interdisciplinary enough and encouraging enough to support me looking at the intersections of art and environment, which ultimately led me to the Museum. I've written about the environmental sensibilities of writers, architects, and artists, most recently in an essay about Chris Drury (Hi Chris!) and his beautiful work about time, place, and inhabitation in my region of the country. The Museum's book about Chris's exhibition, Chris Drury: Mushrooms | Clouds, is forthcoming from the Center for American Places and the University of Chicago Press in October 2009. Chris's work was the highlighted feature exhibition during the Art + Environment Conference in October.

I'm fascinated by the many connections, conversations, and perhaps even provocations this group will explore, and look forward to the conversation.

Bill Fox Introduction

2009-03-04T11:18:00.000-08:00

Hi All,
I'm a writer and sometimes independent scholar who inquires how we transform land into landscape--or space into place, terrain into territory, depending on the context. I spend most of my travel time in extreme environments where human cognition fails in this process--for example, the Antarctic, the High Canadian Arctic, the Atacama Desert in Chile--and examining how we deploy cultural means to make up for shortcomings in our "natural" abilities. I spend most of my field time with artists and scientists looking at the evidence we leave behind, the art and architecture and narratives of such environments.

I'm also the Director of the new Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. Our mission is: To be a global leader in supporting the practice, study, and awareness of creative interactions between people and their environments. We're currently building an archive and library of relevant materials, such as early materials by Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria, and have up our first exhibition in a small "CA+E Lab" space, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline show from the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

My most recent book is "Aereality: Essays on the World from Above," which appears in bookstores this month, and I'm currently working on a book about "The Art of the Anthropocene."

If you want a more complete description of my work, you can visit my website at www.wlfox.net.

I look forward to the upcoming conversation--talk with you soon.

Bill Fox

Kim Stringfellow: Introduction

2009-03-03T17:51:00.000-08:00

Greetings—I’m an artist and educator currently living in Los Angeles. I teach multimedia studies in the School of Art, Design, and Art History at San Diego State University as an associate professor. I received my MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000.

My practice and research interests address ecological, historical, and activist issues related to land use and the built environment through hybrid documentary forms incorporating writing, digital media, photography, sound, video, installation, and locative media. My work investigates the repercussions of human development within the western United States evolving out of a rigorously researched area of interest focused on a particular subject, community or region to discuss complex, interrelated issues of the chosen site. Within my research I attempt to expose human values and political agendas that form our collective understanding of these places. Ultimately, my projects are designed to create awareness, educate and create a rich dialogue in relation to the subject at hand.

I have several projects that could possible relate to the conversation. I would say that these projects fit into the conversation within the ‘hybridity’ principle, as they are often multimedia, multi-form documentary projects. Below is an outline of these projects. Visit these sites directly or go to www.kimstringfellow.com for individual project overviews.

Jackrabbit Homestead (www.jackrabbithomestead.com): A very soon to be released (launch is this weekend) web-based multimedia presentation featuring a downloadable car audio tour exploring the cultural legacy of the Small Tract Act in Southern California's Morongo Basin region near Joshua Tree National Park.
Invisible-5 (www.invisible5.org): A collaboratively-created audio tour project of the Interstate 5 corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco exploring the stories of individuals and communities fighting for environmental justice as well as natural, social, and economic histories along the route.
Greetings from the Salton Sea (www.greetingsfromsaltonsea.com): A website and book (Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905-2005) examining the built and natural environment of Southern California’s Salton Sea.
Safe As Mother’s Milk: The Hanford Project (www.hanfordproject.com): A website and physical installation examining the atomic history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation through declassified photos, media and other documents available online from Dept. Of Energy’s Hanford Website.

Susan Rotilie, Introduction

2009-03-02T09:49:00.001-08:00

Greetings!
I have been working in the field of museum education for over 30 years, which probably makes me a different generation than most of you all, but I am excited to be part of this conversation ( event? class? ). Bear with me if I get stuck with the "translations" of how to function in this environment. You are experiencing a learning curve happening live.
So my work as an educator at the Walker Art Center has taken me on very interesting journeys through the evolving practices of contemporary artists and visitor engagement. I usually say that at one point in my life I aspired to be an artist, but now spend most of my time discussing the work of others who are artists. But I am always energized by the way these conversations have stretched my thinking and understandings and enjoy when I am present to see others stretch as well.
So I look forward to having conversations with you and growing together.
-- Susan

Chris Drury - an introduction to my work

2009-03-02T01:46:00.000-08:00

Double Echo
An echogram of 3 km of ice and the underlying landscape, made with radar from a Twin Otter plane flying over the icefields of Antarctica, superimposed with the echocardiogram of the pilot who flew the flight.

My work seeks to make connections between different phenomena in the world, specifically between:
 
• Nature and Culture 
• Inner and Outer 
• Microcosm and Macrocosm  

All of my works, over the past 25 years have been concerned with these connections. This is what unites the whole body of work. I do not have a particular style, nor do I prefer one material or process over another, rather I will seek the most appropriate means and material to find, and make explicit, those connections.   To this end I collaborate with scientists and technicians from a broad spectrum of disciplines and technology. This may mean that one exhibition or work outside may look very different to another. Each work starts from zero and breaks new ground. Its starting point is the place and/or the situation. My work therefore is a continuing dialogue with the world, exploring our place in the universe.

In many ways the nature of how I work has become more complex and yet out of this complexity I seek simple solutions, presented in the most direct and simple ways. For instance micro organisms found growing in the most hostile places on Earth like the Ellsworth Mountains of Antarctica or The Nevada Test site, are presented as gene sequences, stenciled in those particular soils themselves, directly onto the wall.

Labels are useful only in so far as they allow a way in to start thinking about the work. But usually as soon as you label or categories something it will slip its leach and move into another category. That is how it should be, for these works are not static, they are states of connection. For a new book on the last 15 years of work I am using the catagories: 'Landscapes of the Mind', 'Systems in the Body/Systems on the Planet', 'Heaven and Earth' and 'Life and Death'. For a series of Art/Science seminars I am using Earth, air, Fire and Water. Just as there are elements of Time, Hybridity, Space, Performance and Appropriation in all of my works, none of them quite fit.

Winnemucca Whirlwind made in Nevada last year on the edge of The Paiute Reservation, was a time based piece made in time with the knowledge that with the first shower it would disappear. There was an element of performance in its making with an invitation to people to find it and leave notes etc in a tin nearby. It was definitely concerned with the space of its site and it appropriated a native whirlwind basket design to bring together ideas of history, social cohesion, land and water use, and the question just how does a population of several million, live on a land that in reality will only support a few thousand. Of course the implication of this question can be moved up a notch. In a world fast approaching population levels of 7 billion, and which may possibly only be able to sustainably support 2 or 3 billion, how do we act both practically and morally?

If you would like to know more about my work I have a blog on Antarctica and Nevada on: http://chrisdrury.blogspot.com/
and you can visit my web site on. http://chrisdrury.co.uk

Greetings from Karen!

2009-03-01T10:13:00.000-08:00

Students in my "Web 2.0 Pedagogy" course directed me today to a humorous "elements" chart of the Internet with categories such as "aggregators" and "get stuff" and "miscellaneous". See http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/2007-06-23--periodic-table-of-the-internet.html as one way to introduce the Penn State students who will be involved in the generative conversations. The categories could be considered a warm up to notions of hybridity (aggregators), appropriation (get stuff), and time/space/performance (mis/CELLaneous).

Another way to meet the students is to look at Hongkyu's blog in which he facilitated discussion with the class last week about "Ecological Perspective, Consumerism, Art Education, and Web 2.0 Pedagogy" at http://ecologicalperspectiveconsumerism.blogspot.com/?zx=984232fe1111b508. Or, the image avatar is an aggregate of their introductions both in text and in creating an avatar they use in meeting in Second Life.

I invite you to my Web site at: http://www.personal.psu.edu/ktk2 if you want to know about me, or you can find and "friend" me in Facebook.

I look forward to the generative conversations on this blog. I, along with several of the Penn State art education students who are participating in the generative conversations will be at a conference in Minneapolis in mid April and will visit the Walker Art Center within the National Art Education Association conference dates of April 16-21. Susan, I hope that we can meet in person then.

Caryn's Introduction

2009-03-01T10:12:00.000-08:00

(still from my film "Alstromeria")

I’m a filmmaker and media artist living and working in New York and Seattle. I was a teacher for many years at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Recently, though, I returned to school to make films and re-tool my technological skill set. I left the Pacific Northwest with an image of myself as a budding “urban farmer”: I was a gardener and composter, in my very own small urban yard. I’ve tried to find a way to maintain that aspect of my identity while living most of the time in New York City. I’m engaged in art-making activities and I frequent sites in the city that allow me to exercise those commitments in the new environment. Activities like cooking, gardening and composting are central to my work as well as my life. At screenings of an early short film, “Recipe,” I handed out copies of my soup recipes to viewers. Thus, I extended the theme of the film into the lives of audiences who viewed the work, especially if viewers went home and made, revised, and shared my soup recipes with others.

Here in New York, under the influence of Stan Brakhage and his exquisite works “Mothlight,” and “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” and under the tutelage of artist, filmmaker, and mentor Jeanne Liotta, I began to create short collage films working with plants and flowers. My first film of this type, “Alstromeria” (see the image, above), explored the various aspects of that one fascinating flower. “Seattle Solstice” (from which the still for my blog is taken) used fresh and dried plants to map the landscape in my Seattle garden in winter. I have several more films of this type in various stages of production. Each is species or site specific: I made one from plants I gathered on my neighbor’s terrace garden (“Lucy’s Terrace”). Another film (“Riverside”) used plants (even weeds) gathered at Riverside Park in late spring. “In the Conservatory” makes use of plants from the Volunteer Park Conservatory in Seattle. I believe that site specificity is central to the work, that the plants carry with them a sense of the site, and that that element is a subtle but important aspect, a kind of aura if you will, in the work.

I’m also captivated by the continual surprises inherent in the materials. For example, in making “Riverside” I discovered a weed with little heart-shaped flowers. I don’t even know the name of the weed, but it is the kind of plant you would step on or mow over without even thinking about it, and yet, especially projected in a frame, the leaves are delicate and beautiful, and that interaction changes the way I feel about the weed. For “In the Conservatory,” I wanted to preserve the freshness of the plants I used in the film, so I kept the film refrigerated before I took it into the optical printer (where I re-photograph the frames, so that I can alter the movement between frames and make it possible to really see the plants themselves). I discovered that some of the flowers retained a lot of moisture, and that the water moving through them was visible on the screen—contributing a natural animated element that I hadn’t tried to create.

I theorize that a change in scale alters the way a viewer looks at the environment the work includes and evokes. As cultural critic Richard Lanham observes,

To change scale is, as with repetition, to transform reality utterly, without changing it at all. To make art of scaling changes means making us self-conscious about perceptual distance and the conventions, neural and social, that cluster around it. That distance itself can so change an object—give it, to use Duchamp’s phrase, a “new look”—locks us into a conception of art as essentially interactive. This interactivity is the very opposite of canonical passivity. (The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts, p. 42)

I would like to find opportunities to work with young people making DIO films using this technique, in conjunction with a botanist and in the context of a sustainability or environmental program. Making art films out of plants, exploring the immediate natural environment to find materials, understanding the way plants are put together in order to take them apart, might lead to a new and different understanding about the important role plants play in the world.

Brakhage referred to many of his experimental films as documentaries. I think of my films that way as well. They are experimental documentaries, a hybrid form. I submitted “Seattle Solstice” to a documentary festival, and I will be interested to see whether it is accepted. Right now, I am mostly working on 16mm film, but I’m exploring another kind of hybridization, that of working between the analog and digital worlds, and trying to make sense of what approaches and techniques work best, and when. On a basic level, it is necessary to digitize the film in order to work on a sound track using sound editing software. I edit a silent workprint of the film on a Steenbeck first, then digitize the negative, then further refine the cut using digital editing software, add the soundtrack digitally, then go back to the Steenbeck with a mag track of the sound for further refining before I submit the film to a negative cutter. Stills from the film are created digitally. These days, it is difficult to share a 16mm print in many venues, and impossible online. I love the look of film, and seeing my pieces projected with light behind them is the best way to view them, but sound is more robust and detailed when it is presented digitally, and digital films are more accessible. I'm still exploring these techonologically hybrid possiblities.

Resources: Project Documents

2009-02-17T07:44:00.000-08:00

Documents for "ARTISTS + ENVIRONMENTS: GENERATIVE PRACTICES AND CONVERSATIONS"

Download a PDF of the PRESS RELEASE HERE.

Download a PDF of the PROJECT DESCRIPTION AND BACKGROUND HERE

Download a PDF of the PROJECT FLOW HERE

Resources: The 5 principles from the Walker Art Center

2009-01-31T10:33:00.003-08:00

Link to the Walker's Art Today site and learn more about the 5 principles.

Introduction: ExtremeMediaStudies.org (smudge studio inc.)

2009-01-30T20:18:00.000-08:00

Hi from Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth, co-directors of smudge studio. We're excited to be facilitating this conversation.

We think that our studio's project, ExtremeMediaStudies.org, activates the principle of "hybridity" as a strategy in contemporary art, because it cross-pollinates education, journalism, art, media, and design. We are using media to experiment with a hybrid voice for public discussion and education--one that actualizes the power of art and aesthetic experience as ways of knowing the world. We hope to make ExtremeMediaStudies.org a generative resource and outlet for expanding the fields of art and media by orchestrating collaborations among artists, art educators, museum educators, college teachers, and teacher educators.

smudge is also a collaborative art practice and design/media studio based in New York. The artist statement for our practice is: Humans, the landscape, and the built environment are forces in play. At times their relationality creates intense points of contact that necessitate extraordinary acts of creativity and invention. Our practice uses media to locate and pass through these "limit cases."

Much of our work addresses Art + Environment, especially the "limit case" project and our projects of "topographical signaling."

Here's the abstract for an online article that we published based on the Limit Case project:
The Limit Case project grew out of a 3700 mile trip that we took, as artists, through the American southwest for 28 days. We selected destinations that would offer us experiences of intensity: intensity of landscape, color, climate, remoteness, shape, history, and site-responsive built environments. We found ourselves arriving at sites where humans, the landscape and the built environment converged to create exquisitely concentrated zones of contact. State borderlines converged with deep economic divisions; remote desert "wasteland" converged with garish tourist attractions; a quonset hut used to develop the atomic bomb converged with present day efforts to redesign it for sustainable living practices in the desert. The experiences compounded and we began to regard such moments as "limit cases": intense points where natural and built forces mutually contaminate as they play out to their most extreme forms, levels, and junctures.

In response, we created a series of 30 postcards. Each evokes sensations of humans, the landscape, and the built environment themselves converging at and as crossroads, where they compound, reach their "limits" and pass into something else.

Litter Reaches A Limit, from the Limit Case postcard series, 2007

Our interest in "topographical signaling" comes from our fascination with how natural and built forces shape and shift the topographies of landscapes, urban environments, and human experiences. We go to emerging edges of places in the making. There, we invent transmission devices and responsive practices that move with, change shape, frame light and sound, mark rhythms, and indicate direction and intensity of forces in play. With the resulting topographical signals, we try to make the emergence of natural and built topographies material and palpable--and available for creative expression and making. We hope that our work offers experiences of what cannot be grasped by words: namely, sensations of emergence ... the felt reality of being in relation.

We welcome you to view signals of topographical forces (wind, tide, waves, light) that we generated from Marconi Beach, Cape Cod and shared with listeners of WOMR outermost radio.

Visit the site for our art practice smudgestudio.org