Session 2 Paper Stream 2: Values of Water & Participatory Engagement
Adeela Arshad-Ayaz and Muhammad Naseem: "Whose Survival? The Planet Will Be There, What About Us? Interrogating the Neo-Liberal Context for Relationship Between Education, Sustainability, and Water"This presentation is premised on the argument that the contemporary mainstream economics is focused on the flow of money and markets, ignoring how economic activity is unconditionally dependent on the goods and services supplied by the natural environment. For example, the neo-liberal trade practices predicated on the production-consumption fetish are vitally linked and detrimental to the world water sources. Presented as a panacea for development and growth issues, these practices ignore this vital link to the natural environment, including water. Given that human population will reach around nine billion people in the middle of this century (UN, 2004), the supply and consumption of water is going to be one of the foremost problems facing the people across the globe. Against this backdrop the paper will address important questions and issues related to water, such as: What will be the implications of continuing with environmentally unsustainable practices for the availability/consumption of water in the developed as well as the developing world? What are the various levels of efforts required to enact the policies and practices, which will allow the sustainability standards to be met? What types of radical reforms are needed to change the equation from human-nature relation – in favor of nature–human relation? Specifically, the paper examines environmental impacts resulting from a huge, unmediated increase in human economic activity under neo-liberal discourse. It especially examines neo-liberal production and free trade policies to understand how these policies adversely affect the availability and consumption of water. It argues that neo-liberal policies deliberately obscure critical questions that can be raised about climate change, the political economy of resource preservation and redistribution, and especially about the shortages of water. Finally, the paper will explore how can educators get (and disseminate) the message that it is not about the survival of the planet—rather it is about saving ourselves, by saving those features of the planet, such as water, on which mankind depends and which are now seriously at risk.
Ksenia Fedorova and Marc Barasch: "Mission to Earth: Visual Interfaces for Participatory Geo-Engineering"
Our sense of the self and its relation to its surroundings is being reshaped by telematic prostheses that expand our felt sense of inhabiting and interacting with the wider environment. Heidegger famously wrote that we need to hear the wind whistling in the chimney to perceive it not as an abstraction but in its "thingness." Similarly, can new-media maps be the "chimney" to evoke an experience of the living complexities of the environment for those of us in the house of urban civilization? This paper will consider a number of artistic/technological strategies for visual interfaces addressing ecological issues. Each form implies its own principles of engaging public participation, visual codes, and spatial contexts. Using the tools of GIS (Geographic Information System), artists and environmental ‘entrepreneurs’ display imagery on screens ranging from mobile handheld to building-sized media facades that show not only graphic representations of data but invite public interaction. An installation by the environmental nonprofit Green World Campaign – inspired by Joseph Beuys' notion of "social sculpture" – consisted of ten jumbo screens in Times Square that enabled passersby to "text TREE" and catalyze global treeplanting. This idea has been also adopted to be used for the screen displays at a series of music concerts "Every Concert Plants a Forest". The audience's cellphones are turned from "glowing sticks" into "planting sticks": shaking a phone instigates direct action and feedback on the Green World Map documenting real-time progress in tree-planting and land restoration. Another Green World project in development, "Rumuruti Forest," is a "positive feedback loop" mapping real-time complexities and perplexities of restoring a 15,000-tree Kenyan forest in multiple info-layers (including radiotagging elephants, geotagging tree-planting, the state of soil biota, CO2 absorption, impact of local culture, etc.). Spectators will experience and interact with these data in a variety of interface forms: a panorama screen, online, via cellphones. These and other projects pose questions: How can crowd-sourced environmental representations and digitally mediated forms of distributed intelligence conceptually and pragmatically transform current ecological strategies? How does the new agenda of environmental activism become a productive challenge for the conventions within the artistic world?
Esteban Garcia and Tim McGraw: "Ideal Flow: The Art and Science of Early Computational Models by Aldo Giorgini"
Simulating is a way of learning and deeply understanding natural phenomena. In the mid 1960s, scientists started to use computers to visualize complex mathematical models to further understand the behavior of large bodies of water. At Purdue University, Aldo Giorgini created algorithms to simulate turbulence and other water perturbations beginning in 1967 as part of his research at the School of Civil Engineering. The resulting visual outputs awoke Giorgini’s inner artist and motivated him to incorporate the computer-based water simulations as the base for his compositions. This paper analyzes primary sources found at Giorgini’s estate and revisits Giorgini’s contribution through a modern-day and interactive application.
