Prone to Collapse
Beth Weinstein & Ellen McMahon
In the last decade the Southwestern United States has lost more than 20% of its conifer forests. A group of scientists based at the University of Arizona is working to understand why trees are dying so they can better predict what will happen in the future. One of their primary tools for determining the extent and effects of forest die-off (also known as conifer collapse) is hemispherical photography. These 360-degree fisheye images are taken in forests at different stages of mortality to determine the increased amount of radiant energy (sunlight) hitting the earth’s surface as trees die. This information is critical to their study, which reveals that, added to drought and beetle infestation, the slight increase in global temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions has created the fatal tipping point.
Prone to Collapse is a new work developed from ongoing scientific research and several months of creative research and reflection on the raw material. As an installation it re-presents and re-contextualizes the hemispherical photographs used by these scientists in an immersive, sensory experience.
Animated hemispheric photographs are projected onto a scrim suspended within an installation made of repurposed materials derived from trees. Viewers are invited to recline within the installation to experience the transition from lush healthy forests through death and disappearance. As a complement to the embodied sensing of the issues, info-graphics convey critical information about the research and the implications of the scientists’ findings. By combining the multisensory visceral experience of lying in a forest as it dies and the conveyed graphic information, the collaborators seek to create conditions to awaken people to the problem of forest die-off, become receptive to learning about it, and become inclined to take action.
Polar View
Cecily Culver
I am submitting a digital video installation, digital prints and three sculptures that are a part of the same body of work that uses Polar Pop cups to consider the point of view of a thing that is celebrated for its function in hydrating humans. However, they are disregarded beyond their use-life, despite making a significant contribution to the contamination of the environment. These works call into question the life of things, materials like expanded polystyrene foam, environmentalism and the cost of our anthropocentrism.
Polar View is a nine-channel video exploring a day in the life of a 44-ounce Expanded Polystyrene cup--more specifically, a “Polar Pop” from the Circle K convenience store. From the point of purchase to its eventual toss into the rubbish pile, Polar View presents multiple viewpoints from the oculus of a mundane part of our reality. Despite being ubiquitous, the existence, and moreover, the agency, of these cups is easily looked over. Polar View points at the life of a particular thing that is clearly an active player in our world.
The sculptures abstract a Polar Pop straw and lid, integrating it with the environment as if the disregarded rubbish has evolved to blend with the environment; in one it stares down at the viewer as if prompting him or her to take a sip. Polar View includes a series of digital prints from the video. Polar View was shown in the Juried MFA Summer show in the Harry Wood Gallery at the ASU Tempe campus in the summer of 2014.
Drainage
Dannon Schroeder
From the very first existence of humankind, an ongoing fragility between man and nature has been stretched and strained like a rubber band. Not completely snapping in two, the balance has been sustainable thus far. The human need to rely on nature for its abundance of resources exposes the weaknesses and strengths of our existence. The examination of human perspective towards the natural world has been a progressive tool for cognitive development since the origin of our species.
Drainage is a fine art exhibition/installation displaying intricately crafted wood sculptures that both visually and conceptually address many of the key topics presented at the Balance-Unbalance 2015 Conference. Created within this past year, these artworks resonate with deeply rooted references to ecology, biology and sociobiology. The sculptures directly address topics such as water access and sustainability, climate change, environmental awareness, and urban growth. The work has been crafted using locally salvaged woods and desert foliage, as well as reclaimed hardwoods.
Drainage infuses delicate natural forms with highly manipulated wood surface finishes that mimic constructed/casted metals. The striking contrast may not seem so striking to all as the viewer reflects on how their personal interaction with the natural world correlates with the artwork displayed in front of them.
Desert Breeze
James White
This installation, simply put, is of two sloop-rigged sailboats with neon and argon sails, competing on a sea of loose white sand. Sand rills are in the configuration of fingerprints. The whole installation is constructed on two 4’ x 8’ black platforms, which are horizontal to the floor.
The relationship between the rills of desert sand and the rills of the ocean floor are self-evident. The “competing” boats are healing over as they “ride” the desert or ocean breeze, a familiar sight to anyone who has sailed or observed sailing and its constant balance between tipping and forward motion across the waves.
The neon and argon in the luminous sails are uniquely powered by high frequency radio waves to eliminate wires, with light transmitted up through the mast, emitted fiber-optically onto the edges and surface engravings of the polycarbonate transparent sails.
The fingerprint reference is one of humanity and identity, caught up in competitive adventures, whether it be between individuals or between man and his environment. This piece is best displayed without gallery lighting or much external light, as the neon creates its own light and shadows.
This sculpture is the latest in a 45-year exploration of light and its relationship to human activity. This sculpture has been displayed at the Arizona State University Night Gallery in Tempe.
Planets
Mary Hood
Planets is a suite of eight images created in 2010, in which water is pooling, overflowing, diverting and escaping. The water in turn becomes the substance of reflection and a symbol for our collective sub-consciousness. The prints are an extension of the Ten Thousand Tears (2007-2009) and Collective Pooling print series (2008), in the fact that they are using my fingerprints as a representation of water and our collective identity. These projects were an important tool for me to reflect upon the environmental, social and political unrest in our chaotic global theatre. However, with Planets, I feel that the "water" is more representative of our human presence on the earth, slowly eroding a path for our existence, leaving canyons and valleys in our wake. The spill over into the larger "pool" is representative of the passage of time and our collective unconsciousness.
The process is a combination of inkjet printing from digital photographs I took during a trip to the Red Rock National Monument in Nevada, combined with layers of monotype and relief printmaking methods. The sky blends and rock "details" are monotypes overprinted on the inkjet layer, giving the print a bit more depth and texture. The final layer is the relief fingerprint, layered in three colors. Each print is 20 x 24” framed in whitewashed maple frames.
Climate Change
Mary Neubauer
Climate Change is a related series of six 15" x 30"digital Lambda prints created in 2012. They are framed with museum mounting. These works were modeled in Rhino 3D in response to my observations of weather and changing cloud patterns throughout the Arizona seasonal year. The 3D models were surface-mapped with changing weather patterns and endowed with qualities of light and transparency. In larger 96" x 72" formats, three of the same images have been printed on silk and can act as a triptych panel or wall-hanging. The works are largely an intuitive response to what I know scientifically about climate change. Because I also work with data visualization of environmental statistics, these intuitive works have a strong empirical foundation. They are meant to deliver a visual signal or sign of what is to come in terms of climate extremes. For this reason, they use a repeating iconic whirlwind shape as a significator. Sometimes the shape is benign and delicate, but as the series progresses, the storm icon becomes more strange and intense. Accompanying these images is a singular data-driven sculptural form that visualizes 25 years of Sonoran Desert Weather through daily high and low temperatures arranged in a 13w month periodicity.
Louisiana Re-storied
Meredith Drum
Louisiana Re-storied is an interactive, documentary installation about envir
Prone to Collapse
Beth Weinstein & Ellen McMahon
In the last decade the Southwestern United States has lost more than 20% of its conifer forests. A group of scientists based at the University of Arizona is working to understand why trees are dying so they can better predict what will happen in the future. One of their primary tools for determining the extent and effects of forest die-off (also known as conifer collapse) is hemispherical photography. These 360-degree fisheye images are taken in forests at different stages of mortality to determine the increased amount of radiant energy (sunlight) hitting the earth’s surface as trees die. This information is critical to their study, which reveals that, added to drought and beetle infestation, the slight increase in global temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions has created the fatal tipping point.
Prone to Collapse is a new work developed from ongoing scientific research and several months of creative research and reflection on the raw material. As an installation it re-presents and re-contextualizes the hemispherical photographs used by these scientists in an immersive, sensory experience.
Animated hemispheric photographs are projected onto a scrim suspended within an installation made of repurposed materials derived from trees. Viewers are invited to recline within the installation to experience the transition from lush healthy forests through death and disappearance. As a complement to the embodied sensing of the issues, info-graphics convey critical information about the research and the implications of the scientists’ findings. By combining the multisensory visceral experience of lying in a forest as it dies and the conveyed graphic information, the collaborators seek to create conditions to awaken people to the problem of forest die-off, become receptive to learning about it, and become inclined to take action.
Polar View
Cecily Culver
I am submitting a digital video installation, digital prints and three sculptures that are a part of the same body of work that uses Polar Pop cups to consider the point of view of a thing that is celebrated for its function in hydrating humans. However, they are disregarded beyond their use-life, despite making a significant contribution to the contamination of the environment. These works call into question the life of things, materials like expanded polystyrene foam, environmentalism and the cost of our anthropocentrism.
Polar View is a nine-channel video exploring a day in the life of a 44-ounce Expanded Polystyrene cup--more specifically, a “Polar Pop” from the Circle K convenience store. From the point of purchase to its eventual toss into the rubbish pile, Polar View presents multiple viewpoints from the oculus of a mundane part of our reality. Despite being ubiquitous, the existence, and moreover, the agency, of these cups is easily looked over. Polar View points at the life of a particular thing that is clearly an active player in our world.
The sculptures abstract a Polar Pop straw and lid, integrating it with the environment as if the disregarded rubbish has evolved to blend with the environment; in one it stares down at the viewer as if prompting him or her to take a sip. Polar View includes a series of digital prints from the video. Polar View was shown in the Juried MFA Summer show in the Harry Wood Gallery at the ASU Tempe campus in the summer of 2014.
Drainage
Dannon Schroeder
From the very first existence of humankind, an ongoing fragility between man and nature has been stretched and strained like a rubber band. Not completely snapping in two, the balance has been sustainable thus far. The human need to rely on nature for its abundance of resources exposes the weaknesses and strengths of our existence. The examination of human perspective towards the natural world has been a progressive tool for cognitive development since the origin of our species.
Drainage is a fine art exhibition/installation displaying intricately crafted wood sculptures that both visually and conceptually address many of the key topics presented at the Balance-Unbalance 2015 Conference. Created within this past year, these artworks resonate with deeply rooted references to ecology, biology and sociobiology. The sculptures directly address topics such as water access and sustainability, climate change, environmental awareness, and urban growth. The work has been crafted using locally salvaged woods and desert foliage, as well as reclaimed hardwoods.
Drainage infuses delicate natural forms with highly manipulated wood surface finishes that mimic constructed/casted metals. The striking contrast may not seem so striking to all as the viewer reflects on how their personal interaction with the natural world correlates with the artwork displayed in front of them.
Desert Breeze
James White
This installation, simply put, is of two sloop-rigged sailboats with neon and argon sails, competing on a sea of loose white sand. Sand rills are in the configuration of fingerprints. The whole installation is constructed on two 4’ x 8’ black platforms, which are horizontal to the floor.
The relationship between the rills of desert sand and the rills of the ocean floor are self-evident. The “competing” boats are healing over as they “ride” the desert or ocean breeze, a familiar sight to anyone who has sailed or observed sailing and its constant balance between tipping and forward motion across the waves.
The neon and argon in the luminous sails are uniquely powered by high frequency radio waves to eliminate wires, with light transmitted up through the mast, emitted fiber-optically onto the edges and surface engravings of the polycarbonate transparent sails.
The fingerprint reference is one of humanity and identity, caught up in competitive adventures, whether it be between individuals or between man and his environment. This piece is best displayed without gallery lighting or much external light, as the neon creates its own light and shadows.
This sculpture is the latest in a 45-year exploration of light and its relationship to human activity. This sculpture has been displayed at the Arizona State University Night Gallery in Tempe.
Planets
Mary Hood
Planets is a suite of eight images created in 2010, in which water is pooling, overflowing, diverting and escaping. The water in turn becomes the substance of reflection and a symbol for our collective sub-consciousness. The prints are an extension of the Ten Thousand Tears (2007-2009) and Collective Pooling print series (2008), in the fact that they are using my fingerprints as a representation of water and our collective identity. These projects were an important tool for me to reflect upon the environmental, social and political unrest in our chaotic global theatre. However, with Planets, I feel that the "water" is more representative of our human presence on the earth, slowly eroding a path for our existence, leaving canyons and valleys in our wake. The spill over into the larger "pool" is representative of the passage of time and our collective unconsciousness.
The process is a combination of inkjet printing from digital photographs I took during a trip to the Red Rock National Monument in Nevada, combined with layers of monotype and relief printmaking methods. The sky blends and rock "details" are monotypes overprinted on the inkjet layer, giving the print a bit more depth and texture. The final layer is the relief fingerprint, layered in three colors. Each print is 20 x 24” framed in whitewashed maple frames.
Climate Change
Mary Neubauer
Climate Change is a related series of six 15" x 30"digital Lambda prints created in 2012. They are framed with museum mounting. These works were modeled in Rhino 3D in response to my observations of weather and changing cloud patterns throughout the Arizona seasonal year. The 3D models were surface-mapped with changing weather patterns and endowed with qualities of light and transparency. In larger 96" x 72" formats, three of the same images have been printed on silk and can act as a triptych panel or wall-hanging. The works are largely an intuitive response to what I know scientifically about climate change. Because I also work with data visualization of environmental statistics, these intuitive works have a strong empirical foundation. They are meant to deliver a visual signal or sign of what is to come in terms of climate extremes. For this reason, they use a repeating iconic whirlwind shape as a significator. Sometimes the shape is benign and delicate, but as the series progresses, the storm icon becomes more strange and intense. Accompanying these images is a singular data-driven sculptural form that visualizes 25 years of Sonoran Desert Weather through daily high and low temperatures arranged in a 13w month periodicity.
Louisiana Re-storied
Meredith Drum
Louisiana Re-storied is an interactive, documentary installation about envir
http://water-wheel.net/taps/dock/792
The program launch event begins at 4pm Phoenix time. You can use this link to find the start time at your location - http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=%22Water+Views:+Caring+and+Daring%22+e-book+launch,+part+1&iso=20150322T09&p1=47
STREAMING LINK FOR VANUATU WOMEN'S WATER MUSIC FILM: https://theplanetspins.vhx.tv/buy/vanuatu-women-s-water-music
Please click the link above to stream the film at the programmed time on World Water Day. Please note, the cost to stream the film is $5.00.
This fee will also enable you to download a HD copy of the film that you can watch anytime, forever! It's your digital copy.
The funding generated from the film streaming goes directly to the communities in Vanuatu and will assist in the difficult process of rebuilding their communities after the catastrophic damage of Cyclone Pam last week.
The film received a five star review in the current issue of Songlines, the internationally renowned world music magazine.
We are encouraging everyone to stream the film simultaneously at the programmed time and join the conversation via social media. It is no problem if you start slightly earlier or later or need to pause the film during the stream.
We encourage everyone to show their support for Vanuatu on World Water Day by using the following official hashtags on social media platforms during or after the virtual event.
Balance-Unbalance International Conference 2015 - #Balance15
Vanuatu Women’s Water Music Film - #WaterMusic #Vanuatu
World Water Day 2015 - #WorldWaterDay #WWD2015
We will collect tweets and social media posts and share them with the communities after the event.
Prone to Collapse
Beth Weinstein & Ellen McMahon
In the last decade the Southwestern United States has lost more than 20% of its conifer forests. A group of scientists based at the University of Arizona is working to understand why trees are dying so they can better predict what will happen in the future. One of their primary tools for determining the extent and effects of forest die-off (also known as conifer collapse) is hemispherical photography. These 360-degree fisheye images are taken in forests at different stages of mortality to determine the increased amount of radiant energy (sunlight) hitting the earth’s surface as trees die. This information is critical to their study, which reveals that, added to drought and beetle infestation, the slight increase in global temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions has created the fatal tipping point.
Prone to Collapse is a new work developed from ongoing scientific research and several months of creative research and reflection on the raw material. As an installation it re-presents and re-contextualizes the hemispherical photographs used by these scientists in an immersive, sensory experience.
Animated hemispheric photographs are projected onto a scrim suspended within an installation made of repurposed materials derived from trees. Viewers are invited to recline within the installation to experience the transition from lush healthy forests through death and disappearance. As a complement to the embodied sensing of the issues, info-graphics convey critical information about the research and the implications of the scientists’ findings. By combining the multisensory visceral experience of lying in a forest as it dies and the conveyed graphic information, the collaborators seek to create conditions to awaken people to the problem of forest die-off, become receptive to learning about it, and become inclined to take action.
Polar View
Cecily Culver
I am submitting a digital video installation, digital prints and three sculptures that are a part of the same body of work that uses Polar Pop cups to consider the point of view of a thing that is celebrated for its function in hydrating humans. However, they are disregarded beyond their use-life, despite making a significant contribution to the contamination of the environment. These works call into question the life of things, materials like expanded polystyrene foam, environmentalism and the cost of our anthropocentrism.
Polar View is a nine-channel video exploring a day in the life of a 44-ounce Expanded Polystyrene cup--more specifically, a “Polar Pop” from the Circle K convenience store. From the point of purchase to its eventual toss into the rubbish pile, Polar View presents multiple viewpoints from the oculus of a mundane part of our reality. Despite being ubiquitous, the existence, and moreover, the agency, of these cups is easily looked over. Polar View points at the life of a particular thing that is clearly an active player in our world.
The sculptures abstract a Polar Pop straw and lid, integrating it with the environment as if the disregarded rubbish has evolved to blend with the environment; in one it stares down at the viewer as if prompting him or her to take a sip. Polar View includes a series of digital prints from the video. Polar View was shown in the Juried MFA Summer show in the Harry Wood Gallery at the ASU Tempe campus in the summer of 2014.
Drainage
Dannon Schroeder
From the very first existence of humankind, an ongoing fragility between man and nature has been stretched and strained like a rubber band. Not completely snapping in two, the balance has been sustainable thus far. The human need to rely on nature for its abundance of resources exposes the weaknesses and strengths of our existence. The examination of human perspective towards the natural world has been a progressive tool for cognitive development since the origin of our species.
Drainage is a fine art exhibition/installation displaying intricately crafted wood sculptures that both visually and conceptually address many of the key topics presented at the Balance-Unbalance 2015 Conference. Created within this past year, these artworks resonate with deeply rooted references to ecology, biology and sociobiology. The sculptures directly address topics such as water access and sustainability, climate change, environmental awareness, and urban growth. The work has been crafted using locally salvaged woods and desert foliage, as well as reclaimed hardwoods.
Drainage infuses delicate natural forms with highly manipulated wood surface finishes that mimic constructed/casted metals. The striking contrast may not seem so striking to all as the viewer reflects on how their personal interaction with the natural world correlates with the artwork displayed in front of them.
Desert Breeze
James White
This installation, simply put, is of two sloop-rigged sailboats with neon and argon sails, competing on a sea of loose white sand. Sand rills are in the configuration of fingerprints. The whole installation is constructed on two 4’ x 8’ black platforms, which are horizontal to the floor.
The relationship between the rills of desert sand and the rills of the ocean floor are self-evident. The “competing” boats are healing over as they “ride” the desert or ocean breeze, a familiar sight to anyone who has sailed or observed sailing and its constant balance between tipping and forward motion across the waves.
The neon and argon in the luminous sails are uniquely powered by high frequency radio waves to eliminate wires, with light transmitted up through the mast, emitted fiber-optically onto the edges and surface engravings of the polycarbonate transparent sails.
The fingerprint reference is one of humanity and identity, caught up in competitive adventures, whether it be between individuals or between man and his environment. This piece is best displayed without gallery lighting or much external light, as the neon creates its own light and shadows.
This sculpture is the latest in a 45-year exploration of light and its relationship to human activity. This sculpture has been displayed at the Arizona State University Night Gallery in Tempe.
Planets
Mary Hood
Planets is a suite of eight images created in 2010, in which water is pooling, overflowing, diverting and escaping. The water in turn becomes the substance of reflection and a symbol for our collective sub-consciousness. The prints are an extension of the Ten Thousand Tears (2007-2009) and Collective Pooling print series (2008), in the fact that they are using my fingerprints as a representation of water and our collective identity. These projects were an important tool for me to reflect upon the environmental, social and political unrest in our chaotic global theatre. However, with Planets, I feel that the "water" is more representative of our human presence on the earth, slowly eroding a path for our existence, leaving canyons and valleys in our wake. The spill over into the larger "pool" is representative of the passage of time and our collective unconsciousness.
The process is a combination of inkjet printing from digital photographs I took during a trip to the Red Rock National Monument in Nevada, combined with layers of monotype and relief printmaking methods. The sky blends and rock "details" are monotypes overprinted on the inkjet layer, giving the print a bit more depth and texture. The final layer is the relief fingerprint, layered in three colors. Each print is 20 x 24” framed in whitewashed maple frames.
Climate Change
Mary Neubauer
Climate Change is a related series of six 15" x 30"digital Lambda prints created in 2012. They are framed with museum mounting. These works were modeled in Rhino 3D in response to my observations of weather and changing cloud patterns throughout the Arizona seasonal year. The 3D models were surface-mapped with changing weather patterns and endowed with qualities of light and transparency. In larger 96" x 72" formats, three of the same images have been printed on silk and can act as a triptych panel or wall-hanging. The works are largely an intuitive response to what I know scientifically about climate change. Because I also work with data visualization of environmental statistics, these intuitive works have a strong empirical foundation. They are meant to deliver a visual signal or sign of what is to come in terms of climate extremes. For this reason, they use a repeating iconic whirlwind shape as a significator. Sometimes the shape is benign and delicate, but as the series progresses, the storm icon becomes more strange and intense. Accompanying these images is a singular data-driven sculptural form that visualizes 25 years of Sonoran Desert Weather through daily high and low temperatures arranged in a 13w month periodicity.
Louisiana Re-storied
Meredith Drum
Louisiana Re-storied is an interactive, documentary installation about envir
The exhibit is open 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, March 22-29.
Water Imbalance is a curated exhibition planned for the Balance-Unbalance 2015 conference at the Arizona State University Tempe Campus.
Featuring the work of:
Kim Abeles
Sukey Bryan
Betsy Damon
Danielle Eubank
J.J. L’Heureux
Sandra Mueller
Melissa Reischman
Eco Art Collective
Curated by Sandra Mueller and Danielle Eubank
As the majority of the world’s population, it is incumbent upon women to be guardians of the future. We need to look after our people, our natural environment, and our water. Water is a shared resource amongst all people. It is our provider – for sustenance, fishing, farming and regulation of the earth’s climate. This is an exhibition that makes a statement about the unifying preciousness of water by documenting it all over the world with paintings, photography, mixed media, and installations by leading environmental women artists.
The conceptual theme of the exhibition addresses the consequences of the human footprint globally by looking at the imbalance of the availability and cleanliness of water. We have specifically examined water scarcity, cleanliness, access, expanding deserts, urban engagement, climate change and diminishing glaciers that all reflect an unworkable imbalance. Artists included a written statement addressing water imbalance. For the visual theme, emphasis is on the view of water from a geographical perspective as well as a state of mind. – Danielle Eubank, March 2015
Sandra Mueller
Sandra Mueller is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer who has been on a lifelong journey of social concern and creative expression. She spent much of the 1990s working on the cutting edge of interactive media before returning to make her own visual art and launch the BeARTrageous Creativity Workshops for Women. Mueller serves on the Women's Caucus for Art national board and as a strategic advisor for A Window Between Worlds. Her colorful abstract paintings and photographs have been shown broadly throughout the Pacific Rim region.
Danielle Eubank
Danielle Eubank is a painter interested in exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2014-15. Danielle Eubank is an expedition artist in pursuit of painting all of the major bodies of water in the world. She is beginning by painting all of Earth’s oceans. She sailed aboard the barquentine tall ship, The Antigua, on an expedition to the High Arctic in Autumn 2014. She was an Expedition Artist on the Phoenicia, a replica 600 B.C. Phoenician vessel that circumnavigated Africa and was the Expedition Artist on the Borobudur Ship, a replica of an 8th century Indonesian boat that sailed around the African continent.
Mobile Eco Studio is a social art project involving artist-led workshops, planting indigenous species in unused bits of land. It integrates indigenous culture, biology, and community engagement, and adds a unique approach to the related subjects of climate and culture. Its special relationship to the climate and culture of Arizona will help visitors at the conference become more familiar with this unique place and ecosystem.
Words for Water
Tracey Benson
Words for Water explores a diversity of languages, including Indigenous Australian languages, as a starting point to evoke a connection to water as the sustaining element of all life. Indigenous cultures have an acute understanding of and connection to the relationship between body, environment (site) and identity, and this project seeks to awaken this connection more broadly across cultures and practices.
Words for Water is an exploration into the many aspects of the chemical of H2O. Water makes up over 70 percent of the human body; it is essential for sustaining life and has massive social and cultural significance.
Water may seem ubiquitous, but it has some rather uncommon properties. At the atomic level, water can influence how life and landscapes are formed, such as how water moves through a plant and how rivers meander around bends. It is also the only chemical that be formed in three states – vapour, liquid and solid.
This project uses a range of mixed reality media approaches – the use of augmented media to ‘trigger’ sound and video, the development of a smart phone/tablet app, gallery and installation based exhibitions, and a projection work that bring this project together in a filmic, linear narrative.
Words for Water is seen as an ever-expanding project, allowing for infinite expansion of words, thoughts and stories related to water. The project has appeared at SCANZ2015, New Plymouth, New Zealand; Photoacess, October 2014; 3WDS14, Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium, March 2014; and Stage One of Words for Water was presented as part of the Transreal Topologies exhibition at the Royal Institute of Science in Adelaide, October 2013, held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).
Prone to Collapse
Beth Weinstein & Ellen McMahon
In the last decade the Southwestern United States has lost more than 20% of its conifer forests. A group of scientists based at the University of Arizona is working to understand why trees are dying so they can better predict what will happen in the future. One of their primary tools for determining the extent and effects of forest die-off (also known as conifer collapse) is hemispherical photography. These 360-degree fisheye images are taken in forests at different stages of mortality to determine the increased amount of radiant energy (sunlight) hitting the earth’s surface as trees die. This information is critical to their study, which reveals that, added to drought and beetle infestation, the slight increase in global temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions has created the fatal tipping point.
Prone to Collapse is a new work developed from ongoing scientific research and several months of creative research and reflection on the raw material. As an installation it re-presents and re-contextualizes the hemispherical photographs used by these scientists in an immersive, sensory experience.
Animated hemispheric photographs are projected onto a scrim suspended within an installation made of repurposed materials derived from trees. Viewers are invited to recline within the installation to experience the transition from lush healthy forests through death and disappearance. As a complement to the embodied sensing of the issues, info-graphics convey critical information about the research and the implications of the scientists’ findings. By combining the multisensory visceral experience of lying in a forest as it dies and the conveyed graphic information, the collaborators seek to create conditions to awaken people to the problem of forest die-off, become receptive to learning about it, and become inclined to take action.
Polar View
Cecily Culver
I am submitting a digital video installation, digital prints and three sculptures that are a part of the same body of work that uses Polar Pop cups to consider the point of view of a thing that is celebrated for its function in hydrating humans. However, they are disregarded beyond their use-life, despite making a significant contribution to the contamination of the environment. These works call into question the life of things, materials like expanded polystyrene foam, environmentalism and the cost of our anthropocentrism.
Polar View is a nine-channel video exploring a day in the life of a 44-ounce Expanded Polystyrene cup--more specifically, a “Polar Pop” from the Circle K convenience store. From the point of purchase to its eventual toss into the rubbish pile, Polar View presents multiple viewpoints from the oculus of a mundane part of our reality. Despite being ubiquitous, the existence, and moreover, the agency, of these cups is easily looked over. Polar View points at the life of a particular thing that is clearly an active player in our world.
The sculptures abstract a Polar Pop straw and lid, integrating it with the environment as if the disregarded rubbish has evolved to blend with the environment; in one it stares down at the viewer as if prompting him or her to take a sip. Polar View includes a series of digital prints from the video. Polar View was shown in the Juried MFA Summer show in the Harry Wood Gallery at the ASU Tempe campus in the summer of 2014.
Drainage
Dannon Schroeder
From the very first existence of humankind, an ongoing fragility between man and nature has been stretched and strained like a rubber band. Not completely snapping in two, the balance has been sustainable thus far. The human need to rely on nature for its abundance of resources exposes the weaknesses and strengths of our existence. The examination of human perspective towards the natural world has been a progressive tool for cognitive development since the origin of our species.
Drainage is a fine art exhibition/installation displaying intricately crafted wood sculptures that both visually and conceptually address many of the key topics presented at the Balance-Unbalance 2015 Conference. Created within this past year, these artworks resonate with deeply rooted references to ecology, biology and sociobiology. The sculptures directly address topics such as water access and sustainability, climate change, environmental awareness, and urban growth. The work has been crafted using locally salvaged woods and desert foliage, as well as reclaimed hardwoods.
Drainage infuses delicate natural forms with highly manipulated wood surface finishes that mimic constructed/casted metals. The striking contrast may not seem so striking to all as the viewer reflects on how their personal interaction with the natural world correlates with the artwork displayed in front of them.
Desert Breeze
James White
This installation, simply put, is of two sloop-rigged sailboats with neon and argon sails, competing on a sea of loose white sand. Sand rills are in the configuration of fingerprints. The whole installation is constructed on two 4’ x 8’ black platforms, which are horizontal to the floor.
The relationship between the rills of desert sand and the rills of the ocean floor are self-evident. The “competing” boats are healing over as they “ride” the desert or ocean breeze, a familiar sight to anyone who has sailed or observed sailing and its constant balance between tipping and forward motion across the waves.
The neon and argon in the luminous sails are uniquely powered by high frequency radio waves to eliminate wires, with light transmitted up through the mast, emitted fiber-optically onto the edges and surface engravings of the polycarbonate transparent sails.
The fingerprint reference is one of humanity and identity, caught up in competitive adventures, whether it be between individuals or between man and his environment. This piece is best displayed without gallery lighting or much external light, as the neon creates its own light and shadows.
This sculpture is the latest in a 45-year exploration of light and its relationship to human activity. This sculpture has been displayed at the Arizona State University Night Gallery in Tempe.
Planets
Mary Hood
Planets is a suite of eight images created in 2010, in which water is pooling, overflowing, diverting and escaping. The water in turn becomes the substance of reflection and a symbol for our collective sub-consciousness. The prints are an extension of the Ten Thousand Tears (2007-2009) and Collective Pooling print series (2008), in the fact that they are using my fingerprints as a representation of water and our collective identity. These projects were an important tool for me to reflect upon the environmental, social and political unrest in our chaotic global theatre. However, with Planets, I feel that the "water" is more representative of our human presence on the earth, slowly eroding a path for our existence, leaving canyons and valleys in our wake. The spill over into the larger "pool" is representative of the passage of time and our collective unconsciousness.
The process is a combination of inkjet printing from digital photographs I took during a trip to the Red Rock National Monument in Nevada, combined with layers of monotype and relief printmaking methods. The sky blends and rock "details" are monotypes overprinted on the inkjet layer, giving the print a bit more depth and texture. The final layer is the relief fingerprint, layered in three colors. Each print is 20 x 24” framed in whitewashed maple frames.
Climate Change
Mary Neubauer
Climate Change is a related series of six 15" x 30"digital Lambda prints created in 2012. They are framed with museum mounting. These works were modeled in Rhino 3D in response to my observations of weather and changing cloud patterns throughout the Arizona seasonal year. The 3D models were surface-mapped with changing weather patterns and endowed with qualities of light and transparency. In larger 96" x 72" formats, three of the same images have been printed on silk and can act as a triptych panel or wall-hanging. The works are largely an intuitive response to what I know scientifically about climate change. Because I also work with data visualization of environmental statistics, these intuitive works have a strong empirical foundation. They are meant to deliver a visual signal or sign of what is to come in terms of climate extremes. For this reason, they use a repeating iconic whirlwind shape as a significator. Sometimes the shape is benign and delicate, but as the series progresses, the storm icon becomes more strange and intense. Accompanying these images is a singular data-driven sculptural form that visualizes 25 years of Sonoran Desert Weather through daily high and low temperatures arranged in a 13w month periodicity.
Louisiana Re-storied
Meredith Drum
Louisiana Re-storied is an interactive, documentary installation about envir
The exhibit is open 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, March 22-29.
Water Imbalance is a curated exhibition planned for the Balance-Unbalance 2015 conference at the Arizona State University Tempe Campus.
Featuring the work of:
Kim Abeles
Sukey Bryan
Betsy Damon
Danielle Eubank
J.J. L’Heureux
Sandra Mueller
Melissa Reischman
Eco Art Collective
Curated by Sandra Mueller and Danielle Eubank
As the majority of the world’s population, it is incumbent upon women to be guardians of the future. We need to look after our people, our natural environment, and our water. Water is a shared resource amongst all people. It is our provider – for sustenance, fishing, farming and regulation of the earth’s climate. This is an exhibition that makes a statement about the unifying preciousness of water by documenting it all over the world with paintings, photography, mixed media, and installations by leading environmental women artists.
The conceptual theme of the exhibition addresses the consequences of the human footprint globally by looking at the imbalance of the availability and cleanliness of water. We have specifically examined water scarcity, cleanliness, access, expanding deserts, urban engagement, climate change and diminishing glaciers that all reflect an unworkable imbalance. Artists included a written statement addressing water imbalance. For the visual theme, emphasis is on the view of water from a geographical perspective as well as a state of mind. – Danielle Eubank, March 2015
Sandra Mueller
Sandra Mueller is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer who has been on a lifelong journey of social concern and creative expression. She spent much of the 1990s working on the cutting edge of interactive media before returning to make her own visual art and launch the BeARTrageous Creativity Workshops for Women. Mueller serves on the Women's Caucus for Art national board and as a strategic advisor for A Window Between Worlds. Her colorful abstract paintings and photographs have been shown broadly throughout the Pacific Rim region.
Danielle Eubank
Danielle Eubank is a painter interested in exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2014-15. Danielle Eubank is an expedition artist in pursuit of painting all of the major bodies of water in the world. She is beginning by painting all of Earth’s oceans. She sailed aboard the barquentine tall ship, The Antigua, on an expedition to the High Arctic in Autumn 2014. She was an Expedition Artist on the Phoenicia, a replica 600 B.C. Phoenician vessel that circumnavigated Africa and was the Expedition Artist on the Borobudur Ship, a replica of an 8th century Indonesian boat that sailed around the African continent.
Mobile Eco Studio is a social art project involving artist-led workshops, planting indigenous species in unused bits of land. It integrates indigenous culture, biology, and community engagement, and adds a unique approach to the related subjects of climate and culture. Its special relationship to the climate and culture of Arizona will help visitors at the conference become more familiar with this unique place and ecosystem.
Words for Water
Tracey Benson
Words for Water explores a diversity of languages, including Indigenous Australian languages, as a starting point to evoke a connection to water as the sustaining element of all life. Indigenous cultures have an acute understanding of and connection to the relationship between body, environment (site) and identity, and this project seeks to awaken this connection more broadly across cultures and practices.
Words for Water is an exploration into the many aspects of the chemical of H2O. Water makes up over 70 percent of the human body; it is essential for sustaining life and has massive social and cultural significance.
Water may seem ubiquitous, but it has some rather uncommon properties. At the atomic level, water can influence how life and landscapes are formed, such as how water moves through a plant and how rivers meander around bends. It is also the only chemical that be formed in three states – vapour, liquid and solid.
This project uses a range of mixed reality media approaches – the use of augmented media to ‘trigger’ sound and video, the development of a smart phone/tablet app, gallery and installation based exhibitions, and a projection work that bring this project together in a filmic, linear narrative.
Words for Water is seen as an ever-expanding project, allowing for infinite expansion of words, thoughts and stories related to water. The project has appeared at SCANZ2015, New Plymouth, New Zealand; Photoacess, October 2014; 3WDS14, Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium, March 2014; and Stage One of Words for Water was presented as part of the Transreal Topologies exhibition at the Royal Institute of Science in Adelaide, October 2013, held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).
The exhibit is open 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, March 22-29.
Water Imbalance is a curated exhibition planned for the Balance-Unbalance 2015 conference at the Arizona State University Tempe Campus.
Featuring the work of:
Kim Abeles
Sukey Bryan
Betsy Damon
Danielle Eubank
J.J. L’Heureux
Sandra Mueller
Melissa Reischman
Eco Art Collective
Curated by Sandra Mueller and Danielle Eubank
As the majority of the world’s population, it is incumbent upon women to be guardians of the future. We need to look after our people, our natural environment, and our water. Water is a shared resource amongst all people. It is our provider – for sustenance, fishing, farming and regulation of the earth’s climate. This is an exhibition that makes a statement about the unifying preciousness of water by documenting it all over the world with paintings, photography, mixed media, and installations by leading environmental women artists.
The conceptual theme of the exhibition addresses the consequences of the human footprint globally by looking at the imbalance of the availability and cleanliness of water. We have specifically examined water scarcity, cleanliness, access, expanding deserts, urban engagement, climate change and diminishing glaciers that all reflect an unworkable imbalance. Artists included a written statement addressing water imbalance. For the visual theme, emphasis is on the view of water from a geographical perspective as well as a state of mind. – Danielle Eubank, March 2015
Sandra Mueller
Sandra Mueller is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer who has been on a lifelong journey of social concern and creative expression. She spent much of the 1990s working on the cutting edge of interactive media before returning to make her own visual art and launch the BeARTrageous Creativity Workshops for Women. Mueller serves on the Women's Caucus for Art national board and as a strategic advisor for A Window Between Worlds. Her colorful abstract paintings and photographs have been shown broadly throughout the Pacific Rim region.
Danielle Eubank
Danielle Eubank is a painter interested in exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2014-15. Danielle Eubank is an expedition artist in pursuit of painting all of the major bodies of water in the world. She is beginning by painting all of Earth’s oceans. She sailed aboard the barquentine tall ship, The Antigua, on an expedition to the High Arctic in Autumn 2014. She was an Expedition Artist on the Phoenicia, a replica 600 B.C. Phoenician vessel that circumnavigated Africa and was the Expedition Artist on the Borobudur Ship, a replica of an 8th century Indonesian boat that sailed around the African continent.
Mobile Eco Studio is a social art project involving artist-led workshops, planting indigenous species in unused bits of land. It integrates indigenous culture, biology, and community engagement, and adds a unique approach to the related subjects of climate and culture. Its special relationship to the climate and culture of Arizona will help visitors at the conference become more familiar with this unique place and ecosystem.
Words for Water
Tracey Benson
Words for Water explores a diversity of languages, including Indigenous Australian languages, as a starting point to evoke a connection to water as the sustaining element of all life. Indigenous cultures have an acute understanding of and connection to the relationship between body, environment (site) and identity, and this project seeks to awaken this connection more broadly across cultures and practices.
Words for Water is an exploration into the many aspects of the chemical of H2O. Water makes up over 70 percent of the human body; it is essential for sustaining life and has massive social and cultural significance.
Water may seem ubiquitous, but it has some rather uncommon properties. At the atomic level, water can influence how life and landscapes are formed, such as how water moves through a plant and how rivers meander around bends. It is also the only chemical that be formed in three states – vapour, liquid and solid.
This project uses a range of mixed reality media approaches – the use of augmented media to ‘trigger’ sound and video, the development of a smart phone/tablet app, gallery and installation based exhibitions, and a projection work that bring this project together in a filmic, linear narrative.
Words for Water is seen as an ever-expanding project, allowing for infinite expansion of words, thoughts and stories related to water. The project has appeared at SCANZ2015, New Plymouth, New Zealand; Photoacess, October 2014; 3WDS14, Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium, March 2014; and Stage One of Words for Water was presented as part of the Transreal Topologies exhibition at the Royal Institute of Science in Adelaide, October 2013, held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).
Prone to Collapse
Beth Weinstein & Ellen McMahon
In the last decade the Southwestern United States has lost more than 20% of its conifer forests. A group of scientists based at the University of Arizona is working to understand why trees are dying so they can better predict what will happen in the future. One of their primary tools for determining the extent and effects of forest die-off (also known as conifer collapse) is hemispherical photography. These 360-degree fisheye images are taken in forests at different stages of mortality to determine the increased amount of radiant energy (sunlight) hitting the earth’s surface as trees die. This information is critical to their study, which reveals that, added to drought and beetle infestation, the slight increase in global temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions has created the fatal tipping point.
Prone to Collapse is a new work developed from ongoing scientific research and several months of creative research and reflection on the raw material. As an installation it re-presents and re-contextualizes the hemispherical photographs used by these scientists in an immersive, sensory experience.
Animated hemispheric photographs are projected onto a scrim suspended within an installation made of repurposed materials derived from trees. Viewers are invited to recline within the installation to experience the transition from lush healthy forests through death and disappearance. As a complement to the embodied sensing of the issues, info-graphics convey critical information about the research and the implications of the scientists’ findings. By combining the multisensory visceral experience of lying in a forest as it dies and the conveyed graphic information, the collaborators seek to create conditions to awaken people to the problem of forest die-off, become receptive to learning about it, and become inclined to take action.
Polar View
Cecily Culver
I am submitting a digital video installation, digital prints and three sculptures that are a part of the same body of work that uses Polar Pop cups to consider the point of view of a thing that is celebrated for its function in hydrating humans. However, they are disregarded beyond their use-life, despite making a significant contribution to the contamination of the environment. These works call into question the life of things, materials like expanded polystyrene foam, environmentalism and the cost of our anthropocentrism.
Polar View is a nine-channel video exploring a day in the life of a 44-ounce Expanded Polystyrene cup--more specifically, a “Polar Pop” from the Circle K convenience store. From the point of purchase to its eventual toss into the rubbish pile, Polar View presents multiple viewpoints from the oculus of a mundane part of our reality. Despite being ubiquitous, the existence, and moreover, the agency, of these cups is easily looked over. Polar View points at the life of a particular thing that is clearly an active player in our world.
The sculptures abstract a Polar Pop straw and lid, integrating it with the environment as if the disregarded rubbish has evolved to blend with the environment; in one it stares down at the viewer as if prompting him or her to take a sip. Polar View includes a series of digital prints from the video. Polar View was shown in the Juried MFA Summer show in the Harry Wood Gallery at the ASU Tempe campus in the summer of 2014.
Drainage
Dannon Schroeder
From the very first existence of humankind, an ongoing fragility between man and nature has been stretched and strained like a rubber band. Not completely snapping in two, the balance has been sustainable thus far. The human need to rely on nature for its abundance of resources exposes the weaknesses and strengths of our existence. The examination of human perspective towards the natural world has been a progressive tool for cognitive development since the origin of our species.
Drainage is a fine art exhibition/installation displaying intricately crafted wood sculptures that both visually and conceptually address many of the key topics presented at the Balance-Unbalance 2015 Conference. Created within this past year, these artworks resonate with deeply rooted references to ecology, biology and sociobiology. The sculptures directly address topics such as water access and sustainability, climate change, environmental awareness, and urban growth. The work has been crafted using locally salvaged woods and desert foliage, as well as reclaimed hardwoods.
Drainage infuses delicate natural forms with highly manipulated wood surface finishes that mimic constructed/casted metals. The striking contrast may not seem so striking to all as the viewer reflects on how their personal interaction with the natural world correlates with the artwork displayed in front of them.
Desert Breeze
James White
This installation, simply put, is of two sloop-rigged sailboats with neon and argon sails, competing on a sea of loose white sand. Sand rills are in the configuration of fingerprints. The whole installation is constructed on two 4’ x 8’ black platforms, which are horizontal to the floor.
The relationship between the rills of desert sand and the rills of the ocean floor are self-evident. The “competing” boats are healing over as they “ride” the desert or ocean breeze, a familiar sight to anyone who has sailed or observed sailing and its constant balance between tipping and forward motion across the waves.
The neon and argon in the luminous sails are uniquely powered by high frequency radio waves to eliminate wires, with light transmitted up through the mast, emitted fiber-optically onto the edges and surface engravings of the polycarbonate transparent sails.
The fingerprint reference is one of humanity and identity, caught up in competitive adventures, whether it be between individuals or between man and his environment. This piece is best displayed without gallery lighting or much external light, as the neon creates its own light and shadows.
This sculpture is the latest in a 45-year exploration of light and its relationship to human activity. This sculpture has been displayed at the Arizona State University Night Gallery in Tempe.
Planets
Mary Hood
Planets is a suite of eight images created in 2010, in which water is pooling, overflowing, diverting and escaping. The water in turn becomes the substance of reflection and a symbol for our collective sub-consciousness. The prints are an extension of the Ten Thousand Tears (2007-2009) and Collective Pooling print series (2008), in the fact that they are using my fingerprints as a representation of water and our collective identity. These projects were an important tool for me to reflect upon the environmental, social and political unrest in our chaotic global theatre. However, with Planets, I feel that the "water" is more representative of our human presence on the earth, slowly eroding a path for our existence, leaving canyons and valleys in our wake. The spill over into the larger "pool" is representative of the passage of time and our collective unconsciousness.
The process is a combination of inkjet printing from digital photographs I took during a trip to the Red Rock National Monument in Nevada, combined with layers of monotype and relief printmaking methods. The sky blends and rock "details" are monotypes overprinted on the inkjet layer, giving the print a bit more depth and texture. The final layer is the relief fingerprint, layered in three colors. Each print is 20 x 24” framed in whitewashed maple frames.
Climate Change
Mary Neubauer
Climate Change is a related series of six 15" x 30"digital Lambda prints created in 2012. They are framed with museum mounting. These works were modeled in Rhino 3D in response to my observations of weather and changing cloud patterns throughout the Arizona seasonal year. The 3D models were surface-mapped with changing weather patterns and endowed with qualities of light and transparency. In larger 96" x 72" formats, three of the same images have been printed on silk and can act as a triptych panel or wall-hanging. The works are largely an intuitive response to what I know scientifically about climate change. Because I also work with data visualization of environmental statistics, these intuitive works have a strong empirical foundation. They are meant to deliver a visual signal or sign of what is to come in terms of climate extremes. For this reason, they use a repeating iconic whirlwind shape as a significator. Sometimes the shape is benign and delicate, but as the series progresses, the storm icon becomes more strange and intense. Accompanying these images is a singular data-driven sculptural form that visualizes 25 years of Sonoran Desert Weather through daily high and low temperatures arranged in a 13w month periodicity.
Louisiana Re-storied
Meredith Drum
Louisiana Re-storied is an interactive, documentary installation about environmental justice and pollution governance in Southern Louisiana. The work revisits th
The exhibit is open 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, March 22-29.
Water Imbalance is a curated exhibition planned for the Balance-Unbalance 2015 conference at the Arizona State University Tempe Campus.
Featuring the work of:
Kim Abeles
Sukey Bryan
Betsy Damon
Danielle Eubank
J.J. L’Heureux
Sandra Mueller
Melissa Reischman
Eco Art Collective
Curated by Sandra Mueller and Danielle Eubank
As the majority of the world’s population, it is incumbent upon women to be guardians of the future. We need to look after our people, our natural environment, and our water. Water is a shared resource amongst all people. It is our provider – for sustenance, fishing, farming and regulation of the earth’s climate. This is an exhibition that makes a statement about the unifying preciousness of water by documenting it all over the world with paintings, photography, mixed media, and installations by leading environmental women artists.
The conceptual theme of the exhibition addresses the consequences of the human footprint globally by looking at the imbalance of the availability and cleanliness of water. We have specifically examined water scarcity, cleanliness, access, expanding deserts, urban engagement, climate change and diminishing glaciers that all reflect an unworkable imbalance. Artists included a written statement addressing water imbalance. For the visual theme, emphasis is on the view of water from a geographical perspective as well as a state of mind. – Danielle Eubank, March 2015
Sandra Mueller
Sandra Mueller is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer who has been on a lifelong journey of social concern and creative expression. She spent much of the 1990s working on the cutting edge of interactive media before returning to make her own visual art and launch the BeARTrageous Creativity Workshops for Women. Mueller serves on the Women's Caucus for Art national board and as a strategic advisor for A Window Between Worlds. Her colorful abstract paintings and photographs have been shown broadly throughout the Pacific Rim region.
Danielle Eubank
Danielle Eubank is a painter interested in exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2014-15. Danielle Eubank is an expedition artist in pursuit of painting all of the major bodies of water in the world. She is beginning by painting all of Earth’s oceans. She sailed aboard the barquentine tall ship, The Antigua, on an expedition to the High Arctic in Autumn 2014. She was an Expedition Artist on the Phoenicia, a replica 600 B.C. Phoenician vessel that circumnavigated Africa and was the Expedition Artist on the Borobudur Ship, a replica of an 8th century Indonesian boat that sailed around the African continent.
Using water to spark opportunities from the debris of ecocide.
As part of the Balance/Unbalance 2015 Conference, Latorica Studio presents a 2-day transdisciplinary quest, a re-imagining of our environmental crises as opportunities for transformation toward earth-centred paradigms.
A TRANSDISCIPLINARY STARTING POINT
“Indeed, there are two possible attitudes towards the severe Poly-crisis of the present, 1…]: either we chose to remain prisoners inside the ‘double-binds’ of the simple binary thinking, the comfortable inertia that can lead to self-destruction, or we dare to convert the crisis into an opportunity to go beyond the frustrating contradictions and double-binds and to discover the marvellous complexity of our Reality.” (Morin quoted in Dincᾰ)
WORKSHOP BRIEF
This workshop engages complexity, ruptures the linear and rational, and reaches into the unknown. As a group, we’ll aim to map out a blueprint for re-enchantment: we’ll be focusing specifically on `governance'; how do we re-enchant governing bodies/systems/structures toward an earth-centred paradigm which holds fluid respect for the Other. This is about discovering “the marvellous complexity of our Reality” (ibid.).
HOW & WHY
Practically, the workshop will employ several creative exercises, walking and dialogue sessions. Guided by transdisciplinary thinking, we’ll immerse ourselves in a 2-day mythological quest, using water as our central metaphor — the elixir of life. The aim of the workshop is to produce a piece that can be presented to governing bodies (such as the United Nations, National or State Environmental Departments, Companies and Communities), as a blueprint for working on the ground with complexity and in respect of the Other.
“In the long way towards yourself, you should rather explore the Other with the infinite of [their] being.”
(Nicolescu quoted in Dincᾰ.).
A LITTLE MORE DETAIL
Inspired by one of the main goals of transdisciplinarity, ‘an awakening of consciousness’, this workshop will be a creative-knowledge-outcome-based investigation into the opportunity for water to be our re-enchantment. It is possible that the future of human potential will be determined most explicitly, by how (well) we relate with water: culturally (politically), biologically, and spiritually.
The 2-day workshop brings together a maximum of 12 participants, ideally with diverse/different ‘knowledge’, who will work collectively to produce a ‘poetic’ piece exemplifying the transdisciplinary vision toward the ‘unity of human knowledge’. The workshop itself will be practice-led, incorporating creative, walking and dialogue sessions, which are grounded in the transdisciplinary principles of rigour, open-mindedness and tolerance. The final materiality and content of the poetic piece will be determined by the intersections of participants and workshop practices. However, the piece will be framed within the ‘Charter of Transdisciplinarity’ and have the specific objective of re-imagining our global environmental crisis as an opportunity for transformation toward an earth-centred paradigm (whether manifested as interior or exterior realities).
Requirements: Participants are not required to possess specific experience or skills, but will need openness, alacrity, and be eager for the challenge of a 2-day quest. After registering, participants will be sent three readings to consider and asked to find one object, prior to the workshop.
www.latorica.net
FEE
$50 covers both days, including lunch and refreshments. Places limited to 12 participants — early registration recommended.
As part of the conference, keynote speaker Pablo Suarez, Associate Director of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, presents The Way Forward, a quest to collectively construct a large solar hot air balloon made of plastic bags that would otherwise be trash.
THE WAY FORWARD: Balloon-Enabled RedCross WorkshopCo-creating wonder-producing artwork from a pernicious source of waste – the plastic bag – produces a powerful experience for all communities threatened by a changing climate. It attracts viewers and offers a means to re-imagine the world and its possibilities. The proposed crowd-made solar hot air balloon can be used as part of participatory processes to explore climate change science, adaptation, and mitigation. A flying solar balloon can promote resilience in any local context, offering local media a simple story for reporting community efforts in understanding and addressing climate change.
ASU alumni and artist Bobby Zokaites will lead a drop-in workshop on March 25 and 26 at Arizona State University. The workshop participants will actively construct this 30-foot hot air balloon, so come for a day or just an hour to help realize this project!
Contact Bobby
Future-Energy: Research and Design Storm is a 2-day workshop.
What: To investigate pressing energy issues facing the Phoenix area and the US Southwest, and to use research and design thinking to generate ideas for potential sustainable solutions. This workshop is designed for interested conference participants and an interdisciplinary group of college students from ASU and the University of New Mexico.
Who: The workshop will be facilitated by Megan Halpern (ASU), Dan Collins (ASU) and Andrea Polli (The University of New Mexico) with students from ASU and The University of New Mexico
Day 1
Research: Participants take on the role of “energy investigators” with the goal of building a visual “energy ethnography” for Phoenix and the Valley. In the morning session, interdisciplinary teams are formed (participants remain in these teams for the rest of the workshop), and sent on a visual and other-data-gathering scavenger hunt. Using smartphones, teams walk through parts of downtown Phoenix, taking photographs, gathering data and making brief observations, which they share over Twitter and other databases. Tweets relating to the workshop will include #BunB2015, and participants will be given a list of predetermined hashtags such as #waste, #surplus, or #scarcity, and “collect” images and observations with these tags. This exercise is designed to help participants build their observational skills related to ethnography and visual ethnography, and to help the larger group to build a catalog that can be used as inspiration during the rest of the workshop. During the scavenger hunt process, groups will also be able to observe and work with student technicians and organizers to use a Leica LIDAR system to rapidly capture sections of the downtown area as 3D point clouds. These images will be among the images tweeted with the hashtag #BunB2015, and may also include thematic hashtags from the hunt. At the end of the day, teams share their results with the larger group of participants.
Day 2
In the morning, participants choose a topic area or problem with which to engage, and begin their design projects. Design Storm: Teams will undergo a series of three structured creative design-storming exercises (or design ‘sprints’) that incorporate the catalog of materials gathered during the scavenger hunt. After each of the three activities, participants will briefly share their progress. During the afternoon session, groups will work independently to complete a proposal or prototype for a solution to their energy-related issue. Finally, the workshop will reconvene for reporting from each group on their project results.
After the workshop, the results of Future-Energy: Research and Design Storm are presented by participants in a poster-style session at the Balance/Unbalance conference.
Registration Link coming soon
Participating Courses:
ASU Visualization and Prototyping
UNM Computational Sustainability
From our perspective as engineers, designers, artists and economists, working with resilient cities around the world there is no doubt that you we have to be thinking about how to redesign so that people can move back off the coast so they’re at less risk. How can any politician build a career on telling people they have to move?
We can design the solutions. We can make a rational argument based on science, fact and current examples – but people do not make decisions based on rationality, they make decisions based on personal beliefs, tribal beliefs, nostalgia, fear and a whole host of other emotional factors. The big question for the design community is:
“When are we going to realize we’re in a political situation and stop believing that better design will be compelling enough to create massive change?”
The world’s most developed societies are failing to respond to the warnings. The choice to act is a political one – and cities are forgetting their social contract.
A survey conducted in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the United States revealed that if residents of Houston, Texas could be guaranteed the same job with an equitable salary in another city, 60% would choose to leave rather than stay and fight for the future success of their city.
How can a City ensure that the people it nurtures and educates choose to stay and invest in the successful future of their City?
Objective
In almost every case, any proposed high budget solution meets with strong public resistance. This is inevitably because investments can only be made in one area of concern at the expense of another.
It can be all too easy for professionals to propose solutions to problems that stakeholders either do not think need addressing or are of lower priority than other issues cared about. Part of this is the result of not getting the question right. Part is what is referred to as “the tyranny of experts” where the public is expected to simply defer to the intellectual superiority of others when experience is clear that this is often a path to heartache. Part is a failure to appreciate and incorporate the wisdom of the masses when they are provided unbiased information that is accessible to them, not just to the experts. This is not to suggest that majority must rule. The literature is pretty clear however that if institutions and individuals that the majority trusts and for whom they feel some kinship are not convinced that the problem at hand is a priority then the majority will withhold their permission.
Objective
There can be greater confidence (and influence) in addressing attributes of problems rather than fundamentals. Design can go a long way towards addressing aspects of some problems, but it cannot address the fundamentals. The fundamentals are political.
Is the money we’re spending today going to be value added given what we can reasonably predict? How are we going to ensure that our investment in the future is actually based upon a strong foundation and an integrated approach to the future of communities? How do we understand the whole range of risks and how do we optimize available resources so that every investment we make helps address risk across the whole spectrum? What is the opportunity cost of not addressing the future?
Objective
Be able to answer the following questions:
Without the choice to act differently, conventional wisdom will dominate and we will make much less progress than would otherwise be possible. The choice to act differently is a risk management issue – political risk, financial risk, resource management risk. Good design and good science can help reduce the risk of different choices of course. More fundamental however are culture, nostalgia, aspiration, fear and what Frances Bacon described as the preference for truths that we would rather believe.
How can we communicate honestly and openly with the public about the levels of confidence we have in the decisions being made, and the limits to their impact?
Objective
Reimagining Resilience is a workshop that utilizes walking as a medium to create a sensory experience that reimagines urban geography. Beneath the Phoenix Metropolitan area exist the remnants of a complex canal system that sustained a desert society for approximately 1,500 years. At its apex, the canal system consisted of over 500 miles of canals supplying over 100,000 acres of farmland with water. Today, this legacy of sustainable desert living is concealed by a postindustrial landscape of asphalt parking lots, roadways, and suburban, residential and commercial developments.
This project intends to recognize and honor the ancient waterways and the indigenous ecologies that thrived in the pre-Columbian southwest of North America. Participants will be led on a walking tour along the paths of ancient Huhugam canals that once traveled through the area where the Arizona State University Campus and the City of Tempe now rest. They will be guided through a tour using their wireless mobile devices, allowing them to imagine and visualize layers of infrastructure and recover lost knowledge.
Workshop participants will collect GPS data, photographs and video, using their mobile handheld devices. Utilizing a collective process, we will brainstorm creative uses of this data, such as explorations of mapping, place-making, way-finding and geocaching interventions in public space. Participants will also construct a series of situations, real and virtual, which will inform a mediated guide that will be available to Balance-Unbalance attendees for the duration of the conference.
The guide will allow the public to visualize the past while considering how ancient master water engineers, the Huhugam, can inform a discussion about building resilient communities in the desert today. This is also a project that will continue beyond the conference. Participants will be asked to contribute to a collaborative photo essay that will be exhibited at a local gallery following the conference. The outcomes of the workshop will also be used to inform the development of future projects involving Huhugam history, technology and culture, such as interactive installations and mobile augmented reality experiences. The long-term goal is to further draw from Oasisamerican culture in order to construct an ecological and historical portrait of this region that combines quantitative and subjective characteristics of past and present ecologies and landscapes. In essence, this project will construct virtual ecologies and landscapes that will inform discussions surrounding resilient practices in response to climate change and ecological disruption.
This will be a 2-day workshop. Each daily workshop will be approximately 5 hours. Below is a tentative schedule:
Day 1: Short lecture on the history of the Huhugam canals and overview of their cultural and ecological practices. Tutorial on GPS, mapping, etc. Preliminary walking tour. Project brainstorming session. The first day will take place at the Pueblo Grande Museum, which has a $4.80 entrance fee.
Day 2: Main walking tour and data collection expedition. Sorting and cataloging of the data. Brainstorming and design of situations, mediated guide, etc.
Method of registration: mattgarcia@ksu.edu
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
– Registration cutoff for this workshop is March 18, 2015.
– The registration fee includes transportation, but does not include the your stay at the Days Inn in Camp Verde, AZ on the evening of March 25, 2015. Participants will need to book this on their own. The Days Inn website.
Mobile Eco Studio is a social art project involving artist-led workshops, planting indigenous species in unused bits of land. It integrates indigenous culture, biology, and community engagement, and adds a unique approach to the related subjects of climate and culture. Its special relationship to the climate and culture of Arizona will help visitors at the conference become more familiar with this unique place and ecosystem.
Words for Water
Tracey Benson
Words for Water explores a diversity of languages, including Indigenous Australian languages, as a starting point to evoke a connection to water as the sustaining element of all life. Indigenous cultures have an acute understanding of and connection to the relationship between body, environment (site) and identity, and this project seeks to awaken this connection more broadly across cultures and practices.
Words for Water is an exploration into the many aspects of the chemical of H2O. Water makes up over 70 percent of the human body; it is essential for sustaining life and has massive social and cultural significance.
Water may seem ubiquitous, but it has some rather uncommon properties. At the atomic level, water can influence how life and landscapes are formed, such as how water moves through a plant and how rivers meander around bends. It is also the only chemical that be formed in three states – vapour, liquid and solid.
This project uses a range of mixed reality media approaches – the use of augmented media to ‘trigger’ sound and video, the development of a smart phone/tablet app, gallery and installation based exhibitions, and a projection work that bring this project together in a filmic, linear narrative.
Words for Water is seen as an ever-expanding project, allowing for infinite expansion of words, thoughts and stories related to water. The project has appeared at SCANZ2015, New Plymouth, New Zealand; Photoacess, October 2014; 3WDS14, Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium, March 2014; and Stage One of Words for Water was presented as part of the Transreal Topologies exhibition at the Royal Institute of Science in Adelaide, October 2013, held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).
Prone to Collapse
Beth Weinstein & Ellen McMahon
In the last decade the Southwestern United States has lost more than 20% of its conifer forests. A group of scientists based at the University of Arizona is working to understand why trees are dying so they can better predict what will happen in the future. One of their primary tools for determining the extent and effects of forest die-off (also known as conifer collapse) is hemispherical photography. These 360-degree fisheye images are taken in forests at different stages of mortality to determine the increased amount of radiant energy (sunlight) hitting the earth’s surface as trees die. This information is critical to their study, which reveals that, added to drought and beetle infestation, the slight increase in global temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions has created the fatal tipping point.
Prone to Collapse is a new work developed from ongoing scientific research and several months of creative research and reflection on the raw material. As an installation it re-presents and re-contextualizes the hemispherical photographs used by these scientists in an immersive, sensory experience.
Animated hemispheric photographs are projected onto a scrim suspended within an installation made of repurposed materials derived from trees. Viewers are invited to recline within the installation to experience the transition from lush healthy forests through death and disappearance. As a complement to the embodied sensing of the issues, info-graphics convey critical information about the research and the implications of the scientists’ findings. By combining the multisensory visceral experience of lying in a forest as it dies and the conveyed graphic information, the collaborators seek to create conditions to awaken people to the problem of forest die-off, become receptive to learning about it, and become inclined to take action.
Polar View
Cecily Culver
I am submitting a digital video installation, digital prints and three sculptures that are a part of the same body of work that uses Polar Pop cups to consider the point of view of a thing that is celebrated for its function in hydrating humans. However, they are disregarded beyond their use-life, despite making a significant contribution to the contamination of the environment. These works call into question the life of things, materials like expanded polystyrene foam, environmentalism and the cost of our anthropocentrism.
Polar View is a nine-channel video exploring a day in the life of a 44-ounce Expanded Polystyrene cup--more specifically, a “Polar Pop” from the Circle K convenience store. From the point of purchase to its eventual toss into the rubbish pile, Polar View presents multiple viewpoints from the oculus of a mundane part of our reality. Despite being ubiquitous, the existence, and moreover, the agency, of these cups is easily looked over. Polar View points at the life of a particular thing that is clearly an active player in our world.
The sculptures abstract a Polar Pop straw and lid, integrating it with the environment as if the disregarded rubbish has evolved to blend with the environment; in one it stares down at the viewer as if prompting him or her to take a sip. Polar View includes a series of digital prints from the video. Polar View was shown in the Juried MFA Summer show in the Harry Wood Gallery at the ASU Tempe campus in the summer of 2014.
Drainage
Dannon Schroeder
From the very first existence of humankind, an ongoing fragility between man and nature has been stretched and strained like a rubber band. Not completely snapping in two, the balance has been sustainable thus far. The human need to rely on nature for its abundance of resources exposes the weaknesses and strengths of our existence. The examination of human perspective towards the natural world has been a progressive tool for cognitive development since the origin of our species.
Drainage is a fine art exhibition/installation displaying intricately crafted wood sculptures that both visually and conceptually address many of the key topics presented at the Balance-Unbalance 2015 Conference. Created within this past year, these artworks resonate with deeply rooted references to ecology, biology and sociobiology. The sculptures directly address topics such as water access and sustainability, climate change, environmental awareness, and urban growth. The work has been crafted using locally salvaged woods and desert foliage, as well as reclaimed hardwoods.
Drainage infuses delicate natural forms with highly manipulated wood surface finishes that mimic constructed/casted metals. The striking contrast may not seem so striking to all as the viewer reflects on how their personal interaction with the natural world correlates with the artwork displayed in front of them.
Desert Breeze
James White
This installation, simply put, is of two sloop-rigged sailboats with neon and argon sails, competing on a sea of loose white sand. Sand rills are in the configuration of fingerprints. The whole installation is constructed on two 4’ x 8’ black platforms, which are horizontal to the floor.
The relationship between the rills of desert sand and the rills of the ocean floor are self-evident. The “competing” boats are healing over as they “ride” the desert or ocean breeze, a familiar sight to anyone who has sailed or observed sailing and its constant balance between tipping and forward motion across the waves.
The neon and argon in the luminous sails are uniquely powered by high frequency radio waves to eliminate wires, with light transmitted up through the mast, emitted fiber-optically onto the edges and surface engravings of the polycarbonate transparent sails.
The fingerprint reference is one of humanity and identity, caught up in competitive adventures, whether it be between individuals or between man and his environment. This piece is best displayed without gallery lighting or much external light, as the neon creates its own light and shadows.
This sculpture is the latest in a 45-year exploration of light and its relationship to human activity. This sculpture has been displayed at the Arizona State University Night Gallery in Tempe.
Planets
Mary Hood
Planets is a suite of eight images created in 2010, in which water is pooling, overflowing, diverting and escaping. The water in turn becomes the substance of reflection and a symbol for our collective sub-consciousness. The prints are an extension of the Ten Thousand Tears (2007-2009) and Collective Pooling print series (2008), in the fact that they are using my fingerprints as a representation of water and our collective identity. These projects were an important tool for me to reflect upon the environmental, social and political unrest in our chaotic global theatre. However, with Planets, I feel that the "water" is more representative of our human presence on the earth, slowly eroding a path for our existence, leaving canyons and valleys in our wake. The spill over into the larger "pool" is representative of the passage of time and our collective unconsciousness.
The process is a combination of inkjet printing from digital photographs I took during a trip to the Red Rock National Monument in Nevada, combined with layers of monotype and relief printmaking methods. The sky blends and rock "details" are monotypes overprinted on the inkjet layer, giving the print a bit more depth and texture. The final layer is the relief fingerprint, layered in three colors. Each print is 20 x 24” framed in whitewashed maple frames.
Climate Change
Mary Neubauer
Climate Change is a related series of six 15" x 30"digital Lambda prints created in 2012. They are framed with museum mounting. These works were modeled in Rhino 3D in response to my observations of weather and changing cloud patterns throughout the Arizona seasonal year. The 3D models were surface-mapped with changing weather patterns and endowed with qualities of light and transparency. In larger 96" x 72" formats, three of the same images have been printed on silk and can act as a triptych panel or wall-hanging. The works are largely an intuitive response to what I know scientifically about climate change. Because I also work with data visualization of environmental statistics, these intuitive works have a strong empirical foundation. They are meant to deliver a visual signal or sign of what is to come in terms of climate extremes. For this reason, they use a repeating iconic whirlwind shape as a significator. Sometimes the shape is benign and delicate, but as the series progresses, the storm icon becomes more strange and intense. Accompanying these images is a singular data-driven sculptural form that visualizes 25 years of Sonoran Desert Weather through daily high and low temperatures arranged in a 13w month periodicity.
Louisiana Re-storied
Meredith Drum
Louisiana Re-storied is an interactive, documentary installation about environmental justice and pollution governance in Southern Louisiana. The work revisits th
The exhibit is open 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, March 22-29.
Water Imbalance is a curated exhibition planned for the Balance-Unbalance 2015 conference at the Arizona State University Tempe Campus.
Featuring the work of:
Kim Abeles
Sukey Bryan
Betsy Damon
Danielle Eubank
J.J. L’Heureux
Sandra Mueller
Melissa Reischman
Eco Art Collective
Curated by Sandra Mueller and Danielle Eubank
As the majority of the world’s population, it is incumbent upon women to be guardians of the future. We need to look after our people, our natural environment, and our water. Water is a shared resource amongst all people. It is our provider – for sustenance, fishing, farming and regulation of the earth’s climate. This is an exhibition that makes a statement about the unifying preciousness of water by documenting it all over the world with paintings, photography, mixed media, and installations by leading environmental women artists.
The conceptual theme of the exhibition addresses the consequences of the human footprint globally by looking at the imbalance of the availability and cleanliness of water. We have specifically examined water scarcity, cleanliness, access, expanding deserts, urban engagement, climate change and diminishing glaciers that all reflect an unworkable imbalance. Artists included a written statement addressing water imbalance. For the visual theme, emphasis is on the view of water from a geographical perspective as well as a state of mind. – Danielle Eubank, March 2015
Sandra Mueller
Sandra Mueller is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer who has been on a lifelong journey of social concern and creative expression. She spent much of the 1990s working on the cutting edge of interactive media before returning to make her own visual art and launch the BeARTrageous Creativity Workshops for Women. Mueller serves on the Women's Caucus for Art national board and as a strategic advisor for A Window Between Worlds. Her colorful abstract paintings and photographs have been shown broadly throughout the Pacific Rim region.
Danielle Eubank
Danielle Eubank is a painter interested in exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2014-15. Danielle Eubank is an expedition artist in pursuit of painting all of the major bodies of water in the world. She is beginning by painting all of Earth’s oceans. She sailed aboard the barquentine tall ship, The Antigua, on an expedition to the High Arctic in Autumn 2014. She was an Expedition Artist on the Phoenicia, a replica 600 B.C. Phoenician vessel that circumnavigated Africa and was the Expedition Artist on the Borobudur Ship, a replica of an 8th century Indonesian boat that sailed around the African continent.
Waste Water
Kristian Derek Ball
As unavoidable as it is, water is something that we as humans have to waste to some degree. But we still have options on how we approach, view and interact with our water-related activities.
The idea behind this new installation is to raise a hyper-awareness of the process of water draining away from us during its usage. The sonic experience of listening to the phenomenon of water in action and its interfacing with those using it, can lead us into this mode of listening which may juxtapose traditional symbolic references.
The Human Delta
Rachel Mayeri
A delta is a place where a river meets another body of water. A river carries sediment that leaves a triangular pattern where the two bodies of water intersperse. Human bodies are nutrient-rich water and sediment transportation systems. The Human Delta occurs at the toilet, an effluence of millions of gallons of sediment-rich water, which mixes with rivers, aquifers, bays, land, and the ocean.
Environmentalists are dealing with the human delta as toxic concentrations of bacteria, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals in partially treated wastewater routinely pollute waterways. Some chemicals which course through human bodies--heart medicine, antibiotics, estrogen--may adversely affect fish populations and their habitats. Yet, the chemicals which are naturally produced in urine--nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium--rather than be construed as waste or pollution, can be used as important nutrients for the soil in which plants grow. Agrobusiness uses fertilizers derived from fossil fuels and mined from limited reserves, contributing to global warming. A more sustainable solution would be to recycle human urine, treat it, and use it as fertilizer, linking the Human Delta back to the ecological cycle productively, rather than destructively.
The Human Delta is an art-science project intended to increase public awareness about the human "waste" at its point of departure: the bathroom. A series of posters are installed in conference bathrooms, and are available for distribution. Toilets are interstitial, potentially contemplative spaces, which underscore the hidden, segregated, white-tiled, and taboo nature of the subject.
One poster is about the flow of pharmaceuticals from human bodies into a river delta. Informed by scientific research which has found concentrations of caffeine in the Puget Sound, the poster depicts the Starbucks logo as a flow of caffeine, hormones, antibiotics, and medicines entering and leaving the human body, and cycling back as disturbed (caffeinated, aggressive, effeminate) fish. Another poster is about the potential of urine as a fertilizer. It depicts a farmer fountain: a stream of water pours forth from kidneys and bladder, fertilizing a field of corn. Text on the poster reads: "urine is fertilizer" / "nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium."
Using water to spark opportunities from the debris of ecocide.
As part of the Balance/Unbalance 2015 Conference, Latorica Studio presents a 2-day transdisciplinary quest, a re-imagining of our environmental crises as opportunities for transformation toward earth-centred paradigms.
A TRANSDISCIPLINARY STARTING POINT
“Indeed, there are two possible attitudes towards the severe Poly-crisis of the present, 1…]: either we chose to remain prisoners inside the ‘double-binds’ of the simple binary thinking, the comfortable inertia that can lead to self-destruction, or we dare to convert the crisis into an opportunity to go beyond the frustrating contradictions and double-binds and to discover the marvellous complexity of our Reality.” (Morin quoted in Dincᾰ)
WORKSHOP BRIEF
This workshop engages complexity, ruptures the linear and rational, and reaches into the unknown. As a group, we’ll aim to map out a blueprint for re-enchantment: we’ll be focusing specifically on `governance'; how do we re-enchant governing bodies/systems/structures toward an earth-centred paradigm which holds fluid respect for the Other. This is about discovering “the marvellous complexity of our Reality” (ibid.).
HOW & WHY
Practically, the workshop will employ several creative exercises, walking and dialogue sessions. Guided by transdisciplinary thinking, we’ll immerse ourselves in a 2-day mythological quest, using water as our central metaphor — the elixir of life. The aim of the workshop is to produce a piece that can be presented to governing bodies (such as the United Nations, National or State Environmental Departments, Companies and Communities), as a blueprint for working on the ground with complexity and in respect of the Other.
“In the long way towards yourself, you should rather explore the Other with the infinite of [their] being.”
(Nicolescu quoted in Dincᾰ.).
A LITTLE MORE DETAIL
Inspired by one of the main goals of transdisciplinarity, ‘an awakening of consciousness’, this workshop will be a creative-knowledge-outcome-based investigation into the opportunity for water to be our re-enchantment. It is possible that the future of human potential will be determined most explicitly, by how (well) we relate with water: culturally (politically), biologically, and spiritually.
The 2-day workshop brings together a maximum of 12 participants, ideally with diverse/different ‘knowledge’, who will work collectively to produce a ‘poetic’ piece exemplifying the transdisciplinary vision toward the ‘unity of human knowledge’. The workshop itself will be practice-led, incorporating creative, walking and dialogue sessions, which are grounded in the transdisciplinary principles of rigour, open-mindedness and tolerance. The final materiality and content of the poetic piece will be determined by the intersections of participants and workshop practices. However, the piece will be framed within the ‘Charter of Transdisciplinarity’ and have the specific objective of re-imagining our global environmental crisis as an opportunity for transformation toward an earth-centred paradigm (whether manifested as interior or exterior realities).
Requirements: Participants are not required to possess specific experience or skills, but will need openness, alacrity, and be eager for the challenge of a 2-day quest. After registering, participants will be sent three readings to consider and asked to find one object, prior to the workshop.
www.latorica.net
FEE
$50 covers both days, including lunch and refreshments. Places limited to 12 participants — early registration recommended.
As part of the conference, keynote speaker Pablo Suarez, Associate Director of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, presents The Way Forward, a quest to collectively construct a large solar hot air balloon made of plastic bags that would otherwise be trash.
THE WAY FORWARD: Balloon-Enabled RedCross WorkshopCo-creating wonder-producing artwork from a pernicious source of waste – the plastic bag – produces a powerful experience for all communities threatened by a changing climate. It attracts viewers and offers a means to re-imagine the world and its possibilities. The proposed crowd-made solar hot air balloon can be used as part of participatory processes to explore climate change science, adaptation, and mitigation. A flying solar balloon can promote resilience in any local context, offering local media a simple story for reporting community efforts in understanding and addressing climate change.
ASU alumni and artist Bobby Zokaites will lead a drop-in workshop on March 25 and 26 at Arizona State University. The workshop participants will actively construct this 30-foot hot air balloon, so come for a day or just an hour to help realize this project!
Contact Bobby
From our perspective as engineers, designers, artists and economists, working with resilient cities around the world there is no doubt that you we have to be thinking about how to redesign so that people can move back off the coast so they’re at less risk. How can any politician build a career on telling people they have to move?
We can design the solutions. We can make a rational argument based on science, fact and current examples – but people do not make decisions based on rationality, they make decisions based on personal beliefs, tribal beliefs, nostalgia, fear and a whole host of other emotional factors. The big question for the design community is:
“When are we going to realize we’re in a political situation and stop believing that better design will be compelling enough to create massive change?”
The world’s most developed societies are failing to respond to the warnings. The choice to act is a political one – and cities are forgetting their social contract.
A survey conducted in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the United States revealed that if residents of Houston, Texas could be guaranteed the same job with an equitable salary in another city, 60% would choose to leave rather than stay and fight for the future success of their city.
How can a City ensure that the people it nurtures and educates choose to stay and invest in the successful future of their City?
Objective
In almost every case, any proposed high budget solution meets with strong public resistance. This is inevitably because investments can only be made in one area of concern at the expense of another.
It can be all too easy for professionals to propose solutions to problems that stakeholders either do not think need addressing or are of lower priority than other issues cared about. Part of this is the result of not getting the question right. Part is what is referred to as “the tyranny of experts” where the public is expected to simply defer to the intellectual superiority of others when experience is clear that this is often a path to heartache. Part is a failure to appreciate and incorporate the wisdom of the masses when they are provided unbiased information that is accessible to them, not just to the experts. This is not to suggest that majority must rule. The literature is pretty clear however that if institutions and individuals that the majority trusts and for whom they feel some kinship are not convinced that the problem at hand is a priority then the majority will withhold their permission.
Objective
There can be greater confidence (and influence) in addressing attributes of problems rather than fundamentals. Design can go a long way towards addressing aspects of some problems, but it cannot address the fundamentals. The fundamentals are political.
Is the money we’re spending today going to be value added given what we can reasonably predict? How are we going to ensure that our investment in the future is actually based upon a strong foundation and an integrated approach to the future of communities? How do we understand the whole range of risks and how do we optimize available resources so that every investment we make helps address risk across the whole spectrum? What is the opportunity cost of not addressing the future?
Objective
Be able to answer the following questions:
Without the choice to act differently, conventional wisdom will dominate and we will make much less progress than would otherwise be possible. The choice to act differently is a risk management issue – political risk, financial risk, resource management risk. Good design and good science can help reduce the risk of different choices of course. More fundamental however are culture, nostalgia, aspiration, fear and what Frances Bacon described as the preference for truths that we would rather believe.
How can we communicate honestly and openly with the public about the levels of confidence we have in the decisions being made, and the limits to their impact?
Objective
Future-Energy: Research and Design Storm is a 2-day workshop.
What: To investigate pressing energy issues facing the Phoenix area and the US Southwest, and to use research and design thinking to generate ideas for potential sustainable solutions. This workshop is designed for interested conference participants and an interdisciplinary group of college students from ASU and the University of New Mexico.
Who: The workshop will be facilitated by Megan Halpern (ASU), Dan Collins (ASU) and Andrea Polli (The University of New Mexico)with students from ASU and The University of New Mexico
Day 1
Research: Participants take on the role of “energy investigators” with the goal of building a visual “energy ethnography” for Phoenix and the Valley. In the morning session, interdisciplinary teams are formed (participants remain in these teams for the rest of the workshop), and sent on a visual and other-data-gathering scavenger hunt. Using smartphones, teams walk through parts of downtown Phoenix, taking photographs, gathering data and making brief observations, which they share over Twitter and other databases. Tweets relating to the workshop will include #BunB2015, and participants will be given a list of predetermined hashtags such as #waste, #surplus, or #scarcity, and “collect” images and observations with these tags. This exercise is designed to help participants build their observational skills related to ethnography and visual ethnography, and to help the larger group to build a catalog that can be used as inspiration during the rest of the workshop. During the scavenger hunt process, groups will also be able to observe and work with student technicians and organizers to use a Leica LIDAR system to rapidly capture sections of the downtown area as 3D point clouds. These images will be among the images tweeted with the hashtag #BunB2015, and may also include thematic hashtags from the hunt. At the end of the day, teams share their results with the larger group of participants.
Day 2
In the morning, participants choose a topic area or problem with which to engage, and begin their design projects. Design Storm: Teams will undergo a series of three structured creative design-storming exercises (or design ‘sprints’) that incorporate the catalog of materials gathered during the scavenger hunt. After each of the three activities, participants will briefly share their progress. During the afternoon session, groups will work independently to complete a proposal or prototype for a solution to their energy-related issue. Finally, the workshop will reconvene for reporting from each group on their project results.
After the workshop, the results of Future-Energy: Research and Design Storm are presented by participants in a poster-style session at the Balance/Unbalance conference.
Registration Link coming soon
Participating Courses:
ASU Visualization and Prototyping
UNM Computational Sustainability
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
– Registration cutoff for this workshop is March 18, 2015.
– The registration fee includes transportation, but does not include the your stay at the Days Inn in Camp Verde, AZ on the evening of March 25, 2015. Participants will need to book this on their own. The Days Inn website.
Reimagining Resilience is a workshop that utilizes walking as a medium to create a sensory experience that reimagines urban geography. Beneath the Phoenix Metropolitan area exist the remnants of a complex canal system that sustained a desert society for approximately 1,500 years. At its apex, the canal system consisted of over 500 miles of canals supplying over 100,000 acres of farmland with water. Today, this legacy of sustainable desert living is concealed by a postindustrial landscape of asphalt parking lots, roadways, and suburban, residential and commercial developments.
This project intends to recognize and honor the ancient waterways and the indigenous ecologies that thrived in the pre-Columbian southwest of North America. Participants will be led on a walking tour along the paths of ancient Huhugam canals that once traveled through the area where the Arizona State University Campus and the City of Tempe now rest. They will be guided through a tour using their wireless mobile devices, allowing them to imagine and visualize layers of infrastructure and recover lost knowledge.
Workshop participants will collect GPS data, photographs and video, using their mobile handheld devices. Utilizing a collective process, we will brainstorm creative uses of this data, such as explorations of mapping, place-making, way-finding and geocaching interventions in public space. Participants will also construct a series of situations, real and virtual, which will inform a mediated guide that will be available to Balance-Unbalance attendees for the duration of the conference.
The guide will allow the public to visualize the past while considering how ancient master water engineers, the Huhugam, can inform a discussion about building resilient communities in the desert today. This is also a project that will continue beyond the conference. Participants will be asked to contribute to a collaborative photo essay that will be exhibited at a local gallery following the conference. The outcomes of the workshop will also be used to inform the development of future projects involving Huhugam history, technology and culture, such as interactive installations and mobile augmented reality experiences. The long-term goal is to further draw from Oasisamerican culture in order to construct an ecological and historical portrait of this region that combines quantitative and subjective characteristics of past and present ecologies and landscapes. In essence, this project will construct virtual ecologies and landscapes that will inform discussions surrounding resilient practices in response to climate change and ecological disruption.
This will be a 2-day workshop. Each daily workshop will be approximately 5 hours. Below is a tentative schedule:
Day 1: Short lecture on the history of the Huhugam canals and overview of their cultural and ecological practices. Tutorial on GPS, mapping, etc. Preliminary walking tour. Project brainstorming session.
Day 2: Main walking tour and data collection expedition. Sorting and cataloging of the data. Brainstorming and design of situations, mediated guide, etc.
Method of registration: e-mail
This workshop is based on the belief that the crisis in the environment is a crisis of education. It introduces strategies to cultivate eco literacy in the public, starting with young learners, teachers and school communities, to better address challenges in today’s society. It introduces life-long learning strategies that network systems thinking with art, science, design, and environmental practices, supporting critique of human progress and instilling a new ecology of stewardship.
This workshop takes place on Thursday, March 26 from 2:30 – 4:30 at Arizona State University. It will be led by two architects and professors of architecture and environmental design with practice and experience working with diverse public groups and teachers and schools. More information about their workshops and recognitions can be found at www.NEXT.cc, which provides 24/7 eLearning Eco-Literacy support to all fifty states and over one hundred fifty countries.
Participants will leave empowered to facilitate change in their schools and school communities, supported by an open discovery network of learning resources to share with teachers, administrators and changemakers.
Eco Literacy, a term coined by David Orr, author of Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment and Human Prospect, has been added to social and emotional intelligence as a third and necessary intelligence (Coleman, 2009). Social and emotional intelligence extend empathy and ability to see from another’s perspective. Ecological intelligence applies this capacity to an understanding of natural systems and larger Meta cognitive skills of empathy for all life. Inculcating and inspiring wonder of the natural and built world and a developing a sense of place and purpose is the path toward eco literacy. This workshop will share strategies for greening imagination through environmental awareness, engagement and advocacy concentrating on young imaginations. Introducing the OXFAM concept of the environmental ceiling and conditions that are exceeding it and social foundations that are not being met, participants will access organizations working to raise awareness, build knowledge and create change in the synthesis of water, energy and food systems. Development of environmental stewardship, or respect for and caretaking of places--natural systems in relation to human constructed ideas--requires individuals who have “a basic comprehension of ecology, human ecology and the concepts of sustainability” (Orr, 2006). This workshop shares an accessible systems thinking approach that topically connects virtual field trips, museum interactive and global art, science, and design practices with trans-disciplinary activities, rethinking relationships between the built and natural worlds. Participants will locate their watershed, map their closest river, and evaluate their daily water use in relation to water use in other parts of the world. Water equivalencies of everyday things will change thinking about how to conserve, consume and choose to use water and for what purposes. Issues of food surplus will be set against food deserts and access to food, and shared with strategies for localization. Carbon footprints will be examined to rethink wellbeing and progress. Comparisons of material extraction, production, manufacturing, transportation and life cycle will be featured that expand normal consumerism to include embodied energy, maintenance and longevity as factors of choice. Participants will find that imagination and creativity are essential energies for rethinking relationships starting at an early age, using new ways of learning, sharing data and making. Eco Literacy, a necessary form of intelligence and a necessity of 21st century local-to-global learning as part of the public imagination, is essential to creating a culture of care and affectingly changing perceptions, awareness, understanding and citizen actions.
WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES
REGISTRATION & PAYMENT
Registration for the workshop is $25 and supports continued evolution and maintenance of the eLearning network. Please send confirmation of attendance to Mark Keane at Keane@uwm.edu.
Payments can be made to www.NEXT.cc, Inc. PayPal. Alternate payment arrangements will be accepted at the workshop.
In this 2-hour workshop facilitated by dance artists Mary Fitzgerald and Jessica Rajko, participants will engage in various movement activities using the environment and natural surroundings as an impulse for creativity and trans-disciplinary composition. We will explore a multi-sensory approach to the creative process that draws upon sight, sound, proprioception, and touch to examine our relationship to the urban desert. Throughout this experience we will consider the following questions: How do we observe, engage with and draw inspiration from our surroundings? How do we compose place-based work that is reflective of and sensitive to that place? How does place influence an experience? How is place a multi-sensory experience?
Participants who take this workshop will come away with methods for:
SCHEDULE
5-5:20 pm: Brief introduction to the facilitators and discussion about current site dance practices and multi-sensory approaches to place-inspired composition
5:20-5:30 pm: Simple movement warm-up (no prior experience necessary)
5:30-6:15 pm: Experiential exploration of site, involving simple movement activities that “document” the environment through the filter of particular senses; this process will serve as the impetus for creating short compositions with partners
6:15-6:45 pm: Brief sharing of work
6:45-7:00 pm: Closing discussion about questions that emerge and possible applications of this process to other disciplines
REGISTRATION
No fee is required to participate in this workshop.
Please register by emailing Mary Fitzgerald or Jessica Rajko byMarch 25, 2015.
Mobile Eco Studio is a social art project involving artist-led workshops, planting indigenous species in unused bits of land. It integrates indigenous culture, biology, and community engagement, and adds a unique approach to the related subjects of climate and culture. Its special relationship to the climate and culture of Arizona will help visitors at the conference become more familiar with this unique place and ecosystem.
Words for Water
Tracey Benson
Words for Water explores a diversity of languages, including Indigenous Australian languages, as a starting point to evoke a connection to water as the sustaining element of all life. Indigenous cultures have an acute understanding of and connection to the relationship between body, environment (site) and identity, and this project seeks to awaken this connection more broadly across cultures and practices.
Words for Water is an exploration into the many aspects of the chemical of H2O. Water makes up over 70 percent of the human body; it is essential for sustaining life and has massive social and cultural significance.
Water may seem ubiquitous, but it has some rather uncommon properties. At the atomic level, water can influence how life and landscapes are formed, such as how water moves through a plant and how rivers meander around bends. It is also the only chemical that be formed in three states – vapour, liquid and solid.
This project uses a range of mixed reality media approaches – the use of augmented media to ‘trigger’ sound and video, the development of a smart phone/tablet app, gallery and installation based exhibitions, and a projection work that bring this project together in a filmic, linear narrative.
Words for Water is seen as an ever-expanding project, allowing for infinite expansion of words, thoughts and stories related to water. The project has appeared at SCANZ2015, New Plymouth, New Zealand; Photoacess, October 2014; 3WDS14, Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium, March 2014; and Stage One of Words for Water was presented as part of the Transreal Topologies exhibition at the Royal Institute of Science in Adelaide, October 2013, held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).
Prone to Collapse
Beth Weinstein & Ellen McMahon
In the last decade the Southwestern United States has lost more than 20% of its conifer forests. A group of scientists based at the University of Arizona is working to understand why trees are dying so they can better predict what will happen in the future. One of their primary tools for determining the extent and effects of forest die-off (also known as conifer collapse) is hemispherical photography. These 360-degree fisheye images are taken in forests at different stages of mortality to determine the increased amount of radiant energy (sunlight) hitting the earth’s surface as trees die. This information is critical to their study, which reveals that, added to drought and beetle infestation, the slight increase in global temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions has created the fatal tipping point.
Prone to Collapse is a new work developed from ongoing scientific research and several months of creative research and reflection on the raw material. As an installation it re-presents and re-contextualizes the hemispherical photographs used by these scientists in an immersive, sensory experience.
Animated hemispheric photographs are projected onto a scrim suspended within an installation made of repurposed materials derived from trees. Viewers are invited to recline within the installation to experience the transition from lush healthy forests through death and disappearance. As a complement to the embodied sensing of the issues, info-graphics convey critical information about the research and the implications of the scientists’ findings. By combining the multisensory visceral experience of lying in a forest as it dies and the conveyed graphic information, the collaborators seek to create conditions to awaken people to the problem of forest die-off, become receptive to learning about it, and become inclined to take action.
Polar View
Cecily Culver
I am submitting a digital video installation, digital prints and three sculptures that are a part of the same body of work that uses Polar Pop cups to consider the point of view of a thing that is celebrated for its function in hydrating humans. However, they are disregarded beyond their use-life, despite making a significant contribution to the contamination of the environment. These works call into question the life of things, materials like expanded polystyrene foam, environmentalism and the cost of our anthropocentrism.
Polar View is a nine-channel video exploring a day in the life of a 44-ounce Expanded Polystyrene cup--more specifically, a “Polar Pop” from the Circle K convenience store. From the point of purchase to its eventual toss into the rubbish pile, Polar View presents multiple viewpoints from the oculus of a mundane part of our reality. Despite being ubiquitous, the existence, and moreover, the agency, of these cups is easily looked over. Polar View points at the life of a particular thing that is clearly an active player in our world.
The sculptures abstract a Polar Pop straw and lid, integrating it with the environment as if the disregarded rubbish has evolved to blend with the environment; in one it stares down at the viewer as if prompting him or her to take a sip. Polar View includes a series of digital prints from the video. Polar View was shown in the Juried MFA Summer show in the Harry Wood Gallery at the ASU Tempe campus in the summer of 2014.
Drainage
Dannon Schroeder
From the very first existence of humankind, an ongoing fragility between man and nature has been stretched and strained like a rubber band. Not completely snapping in two, the balance has been sustainable thus far. The human need to rely on nature for its abundance of resources exposes the weaknesses and strengths of our existence. The examination of human perspective towards the natural world has been a progressive tool for cognitive development since the origin of our species.
Drainage is a fine art exhibition/installation displaying intricately crafted wood sculptures that both visually and conceptually address many of the key topics presented at the Balance-Unbalance 2015 Conference. Created within this past year, these artworks resonate with deeply rooted references to ecology, biology and sociobiology. The sculptures directly address topics such as water access and sustainability, climate change, environmental awareness, and urban growth. The work has been crafted using locally salvaged woods and desert foliage, as well as reclaimed hardwoods.
Drainage infuses delicate natural forms with highly manipulated wood surface finishes that mimic constructed/casted metals. The striking contrast may not seem so striking to all as the viewer reflects on how their personal interaction with the natural world correlates with the artwork displayed in front of them.
Desert Breeze
James White
This installation, simply put, is of two sloop-rigged sailboats with neon and argon sails, competing on a sea of loose white sand. Sand rills are in the configuration of fingerprints. The whole installation is constructed on two 4’ x 8’ black platforms, which are horizontal to the floor.
The relationship between the rills of desert sand and the rills of the ocean floor are self-evident. The “competing” boats are healing over as they “ride” the desert or ocean breeze, a familiar sight to anyone who has sailed or observed sailing and its constant balance between tipping and forward motion across the waves.
The neon and argon in the luminous sails are uniquely powered by high frequency radio waves to eliminate wires, with light transmitted up through the mast, emitted fiber-optically onto the edges and surface engravings of the polycarbonate transparent sails.
The fingerprint reference is one of humanity and identity, caught up in competitive adventures, whether it be between individuals or between man and his environment. This piece is best displayed without gallery lighting or much external light, as the neon creates its own light and shadows.
This sculpture is the latest in a 45-year exploration of light and its relationship to human activity. This sculpture has been displayed at the Arizona State University Night Gallery in Tempe.
Planets
Mary Hood
Planets is a suite of eight images created in 2010, in which water is pooling, overflowing, diverting and escaping. The water in turn becomes the substance of reflection and a symbol for our collective sub-consciousness. The prints are an extension of the Ten Thousand Tears (2007-2009) and Collective Pooling print series (2008), in the fact that they are using my fingerprints as a representation of water and our collective identity. These projects were an important tool for me to reflect upon the environmental, social and political unrest in our chaotic global theatre. However, with Planets, I feel that the "water" is more representative of our human presence on the earth, slowly eroding a path for our existence, leaving canyons and valleys in our wake. The spill over into the larger "pool" is representative of the passage of time and our collective unconsciousness.
The process is a combination of inkjet printing from digital photographs I took during a trip to the Red Rock National Monument in Nevada, combined with layers of monotype and relief printmaking methods. The sky blends and rock "details" are monotypes overprinted on the inkjet layer, giving the print a bit more depth and texture. The final layer is the relief fingerprint, layered in three colors. Each print is 20 x 24” framed in whitewashed maple frames.
Climate Change
Mary Neubauer
Climate Change is a related series of six 15" x 30"digital Lambda prints created in 2012. They are framed with museum mounting. These works were modeled in Rhino 3D in response to my observations of weather and changing cloud patterns throughout the Arizona seasonal year. The 3D models were surface-mapped with changing weather patterns and endowed with qualities of light and transparency. In larger 96" x 72" formats, three of the same images have been printed on silk and can act as a triptych panel or wall-hanging. The works are largely an intuitive response to what I know scientifically about climate change. Because I also work with data visualization of environmental statistics, these intuitive works have a strong empirical foundation. They are meant to deliver a visual signal or sign of what is to come in terms of climate extremes. For this reason, they use a repeating iconic whirlwind shape as a significator. Sometimes the shape is benign and delicate, but as the series progresses, the storm icon becomes more strange and intense. Accompanying these images is a singular data-driven sculptural form that visualizes 25 years of Sonoran Desert Weather through daily high and low temperatures arranged in a 13w month periodicity.
Louisiana Re-storied
Meredith Drum
Louisiana Re-storied is an interactive, documentary installation about envir
This event marks the launching of The Way Forward, a collectively constructed, large solar hot air balloon made of 11,000 plastic bags that would otherwise be trash. A project suggested by Keynote speaker Pablo Suarez, Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, based on the invitation to an artistic experimental performance by artist Tomás Saraceno.
Co-created in a conference workshop, is this wonder-producing artwork from a pernicious source of waste – the plastic bag – produces a powerful experience for all communities threatened by a changing climate. It attracts viewers and offers a means to re-imagine the world and its possibilities. The proposed crowd-made solar hot air balloon can be used as part of participatory processes to explore climate change science, adaptation, and mitigation. A flying solar balloon can promote resilience in any local context, offering local media a simple story for reporting community efforts in understanding and addressing climate change.
This iteration of the project has been managed by sculptor Bobby Zokaites
The exhibit is open 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, March 22-29.
Water Imbalance is a curated exhibition planned for the Balance-Unbalance 2015 conference at the Arizona State University Tempe Campus.
Featuring the work of:
Kim Abeles
Sukey Bryan
Betsy Damon
Danielle Eubank
J.J. L’Heureux
Sandra Mueller
Melissa Reischman
Eco Art Collective
Curated by Sandra Mueller and Danielle Eubank
As the majority of the world’s population, it is incumbent upon women to be guardians of the future. We need to look after our people, our natural environment, and our water. Water is a shared resource amongst all people. It is our provider – for sustenance, fishing, farming and regulation of the earth’s climate. This is an exhibition that makes a statement about the unifying preciousness of water by documenting it all over the world with paintings, photography, mixed media, and installations by leading environmental women artists.
The conceptual theme of the exhibition addresses the consequences of the human footprint globally by looking at the imbalance of the availability and cleanliness of water. We have specifically examined water scarcity, cleanliness, access, expanding deserts, urban engagement, climate change and diminishing glaciers that all reflect an unworkable imbalance. Artists included a written statement addressing water imbalance. For the visual theme, emphasis is on the view of water from a geographical perspective as well as a state of mind. – Danielle Eubank, March 2015
Sandra Mueller
Sandra Mueller is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer who has been on a lifelong journey of social concern and creative expression. She spent much of the 1990s working on the cutting edge of interactive media before returning to make her own visual art and launch the BeARTrageous Creativity Workshops for Women. Mueller serves on the Women's Caucus for Art national board and as a strategic advisor for A Window Between Worlds. Her colorful abstract paintings and photographs have been shown broadly throughout the Pacific Rim region.
Danielle Eubank
Danielle Eubank is a painter interested in exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2014-15. Danielle Eubank is an expedition artist in pursuit of painting all of the major bodies of water in the world. She is beginning by painting all of Earth’s oceans. She sailed aboard the barquentine tall ship, The Antigua, on an expedition to the High Arctic in Autumn 2014. She was an Expedition Artist on the Phoenicia, a replica 600 B.C. Phoenician vessel that circumnavigated Africa and was the Expedition Artist on the Borobudur Ship, a replica of an 8th century Indonesian boat that sailed around the African continent.
Waste Water
Kristian Derek Ball
As unavoidable as it is, water is something that we as humans have to waste to some degree. But we still have options on how we approach, view and interact with our water-related activities.
The idea behind this new installation is to raise a hyper-awareness of the process of water draining away from us during its usage. The sonic experience of listening to the phenomenon of water in action and its interfacing with those using it, can lead us into this mode of listening which may juxtapose traditional symbolic references.
The Human Delta
Rachel Mayeri
A delta is a place where a river meets another body of water. A river carries sediment that leaves a triangular pattern where the two bodies of water intersperse. Human bodies are nutrient-rich water and sediment transportation systems. The Human Delta occurs at the toilet, an effluence of millions of gallons of sediment-rich water, which mixes with rivers, aquifers, bays, land, and the ocean.
Environmentalists are dealing with the human delta as toxic concentrations of bacteria, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals in partially treated wastewater routinely pollute waterways. Some chemicals which course through human bodies--heart medicine, antibiotics, estrogen--may adversely affect fish populations and their habitats. Yet, the chemicals which are naturally produced in urine--nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium--rather than be construed as waste or pollution, can be used as important nutrients for the soil in which plants grow. Agrobusiness uses fertilizers derived from fossil fuels and mined from limited reserves, contributing to global warming. A more sustainable solution would be to recycle human urine, treat it, and use it as fertilizer, linking the Human Delta back to the ecological cycle productively, rather than destructively.
The Human Delta is an art-science project intended to increase public awareness about the human "waste" at its point of departure: the bathroom. A series of posters are installed in conference bathrooms, and are available for distribution. Toilets are interstitial, potentially contemplative spaces, which underscore the hidden, segregated, white-tiled, and taboo nature of the subject.
One poster is about the flow of pharmaceuticals from human bodies into a river delta. Informed by scientific research which has found concentrations of caffeine in the Puget Sound, the poster depicts the Starbucks logo as a flow of caffeine, hormones, antibiotics, and medicines entering and leaving the human body, and cycling back as disturbed (caffeinated, aggressive, effeminate) fish. Another poster is about the potential of urine as a fertilizer. It depicts a farmer fountain: a stream of water pours forth from kidneys and bladder, fertilizing a field of corn. Text on the poster reads: "urine is fertilizer" / "nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium."
Ofelia Rivas - O'odham Elder:
Statement by Ofelia Rivas on Shu-da’g (Water)
Water is life for all life, not just humans.
The physical altering of whole terrains impacts all life. From the leveling of mountains and hills, to the altering of bodies of water and the pollution of the seas and oceans, to the contamination and damming of the rivers, and the massive destruction caused by the extraction of metals and minerals – these things impact all life.
Mother Earth is altered and destroyed by extensive modern human habitation. She is altered and destroyed through mass unconscious consumerism. She is altered and destroyed by the mass extraction of minerals including uranium, silver, and gold. These things alter the quality and quantity of water for all life.
Mother Earth is altered by the massive irresponsibility of humans, and this is speeding up climate change. Our modern society is unbalanced and is driven by instant gratification without regard for the future.
The entire O'odham way of life is based on water. Our ceremonies, songs, and dances all pay homage to water in the form of rain, clouds, and the water animals. The O'odham continue to exist on this land. We have been here for hundreds of thousands of years living in balance with Mother Earth. We are a natural part of the world, and we have an obligation to live in balance with Mother Earth.
The O’odham conduct offerings to the sea to raise the clouds, and then we prepare our seeds. We conduct our ceremonies and wait for the rains to come, and then we plant in the water ways all over the land. First the jegos, the great cleansing winds, will arrive; then the rains will come. We plant our seeds in the natural mouth of the desert washes, where water flows only after the rains. We also plant in natural flood areas. We greatly appreciate all the natural water holes, the springs, and the rivers that flow from the mountains. The natural water storage areas of our homelands are being impacted by industry and the great landscape altering that comes with it.
All the desert plants of my homeland live in balance with the water. The ha'san, the giant saguaro, waits for the rains and stores the water in her porous insides. She blooms and produces fruit for the O'odham to harvest, for the animals to eat, and for the sustenance of all life. Many greens like wild spinach, onions, and tubers come up on the land in days after the rain waters come to the lands. Animals such as the deer, the Bighorn Sheep, the Javalina, the Mountain Tortoise, and the Rabbit graze to their fill. The o’odham collect and dry the harvest so that it can be rehydrated to eat throughout the year.
We consider the continuous destruction of our sacred water by modern society to be genocide against all life. We, the people of conscience, must no longer allow this oppressive system to contaminate the water that is our life. John Trudell said that "We are power," that we human beings have the essence of power. With this power we can stop the destruction.
Kate Genevieve, Ian Winters, Andrea Polli and Leah Barclay: "Choreographies of Attention and Control: Climate Data, Networks and Visceral Experience in Installation and Performance"
The rapid proliferation of networked sensors and ubiquity of sensor data from mobile phones, game controllers and portable devices provide fresh possibilities for artists working with climate and environmental data at the intersection of performance, installation and networks.
After the Snowden revelations on how individuals’ data is used, it seems that the great interpreters and choreographers of attention and control of our time may be government agencies and commercial interests. Data and its use is currently a resolutely political subject and a thoroughly emotional one.
What can artists do in this terrain?
This panel considers the visceral, emotional aspect of data and how artists are working with environmental data to explore emotional and visceral dimensions. It is clear that a real barrier to change - in the face of bleak climate research - is the inability to really feel what the data being shared might mean on a human and emotional level. How are artists using narrative, choreography, improvisation, and composition to handle data in imaginative and collaborative ways that allows people to listen, feel and understand on a personal, visceral level? And how vital is this work?
This panel gathers together artists creatively exploring climate and environmental data, focusing on the different approaches, strategies and questions that they ask through their work. Using the idea of exploring data compositionally to create visceral effects as a point of departure, our roundtable hopes to open an informal discussion between practitioners and researchers working in the rich intersections of environmental work and performance/installation practice.
The members of the panel work directly with these technological and compositional issues. The discussion is centered on a number of questions/provocations for discussion, posed to round table members to consider, both in the context of their own creative & technical practice, and through observations of others’ work. Through focusing on trans-disciplinary projects that combine creative vision, incisive data analysis and emotional reach, the panelists will consider what kind of effects ambitious creative work can have at this crisis point in human history.
Our goal is to instigate an open discussion among round table members and audience about the opportunities and difficulties presented by using climate data to generate compositional material.
How does the current expansion of the kinds of climate data made available in 2015 inflect your work?
What implications does the ability to transform, across many media, the data extracted from environmental phenomenon have on the compositional process?
How do you model and represent your work as it spans software, algorithm, choreography, sound and visual?
If underlying compositional structures are being derived from environmental patterns, who is the ‘author’?
Is the mobile phone sensor a special case in terms of facilitating collaboration, large scale participation and encouraging action and improvisation?
How do you design how data effects the body?
Mobile Eco Studio is a social art project involving artist-led workshops, planting indigenous species in unused bits of land. It integrates indigenous culture, biology, and community engagement, and adds a unique approach to the related subjects of climate and culture. Its special relationship to the climate and culture of Arizona will help visitors at the conference become more familiar with this unique place and ecosystem.
Words for Water
Tracey Benson
Words for Water explores a diversity of languages, including Indigenous Australian languages, as a starting point to evoke a connection to water as the sustaining element of all life. Indigenous cultures have an acute understanding of and connection to the relationship between body, environment (site) and identity, and this project seeks to awaken this connection more broadly across cultures and practices.
Words for Water is an exploration into the many aspects of the chemical of H2O. Water makes up over 70 percent of the human body; it is essential for sustaining life and has massive social and cultural significance.
Water may seem ubiquitous, but it has some rather uncommon properties. At the atomic level, water can influence how life and landscapes are formed, such as how water moves through a plant and how rivers meander around bends. It is also the only chemical that be formed in three states – vapour, liquid and solid.
This project uses a range of mixed reality media approaches – the use of augmented media to ‘trigger’ sound and video, the development of a smart phone/tablet app, gallery and installation based exhibitions, and a projection work that bring this project together in a filmic, linear narrative.
Words for Water is seen as an ever-expanding project, allowing for infinite expansion of words, thoughts and stories related to water. The project has appeared at SCANZ2015, New Plymouth, New Zealand; Photoacess, October 2014; 3WDS14, Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium, March 2014; and Stage One of Words for Water was presented as part of the Transreal Topologies exhibition at the Royal Institute of Science in Adelaide, October 2013, held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).
Prone to Collapse
Beth Weinstein & Ellen McMahon
In the last decade the Southwestern United States has lost more than 20% of its conifer forests. A group of scientists based at the University of Arizona is working to understand why trees are dying so they can better predict what will happen in the future. One of their primary tools for determining the extent and effects of forest die-off (also known as conifer collapse) is hemispherical photography. These 360-degree fisheye images are taken in forests at different stages of mortality to determine the increased amount of radiant energy (sunlight) hitting the earth’s surface as trees die. This information is critical to their study, which reveals that, added to drought and beetle infestation, the slight increase in global temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions has created the fatal tipping point.
Prone to Collapse is a new work developed from ongoing scientific research and several months of creative research and reflection on the raw material. As an installation it re-presents and re-contextualizes the hemispherical photographs used by these scientists in an immersive, sensory experience.
Animated hemispheric photographs are projected onto a scrim suspended within an installation made of repurposed materials derived from trees. Viewers are invited to recline within the installation to experience the transition from lush healthy forests through death and disappearance. As a complement to the embodied sensing of the issues, info-graphics convey critical information about the research and the implications of the scientists’ findings. By combining the multisensory visceral experience of lying in a forest as it dies and the conveyed graphic information, the collaborators seek to create conditions to awaken people to the problem of forest die-off, become receptive to learning about it, and become inclined to take action.
Polar View
Cecily Culver
I am submitting a digital video installation, digital prints and three sculptures that are a part of the same body of work that uses Polar Pop cups to consider the point of view of a thing that is celebrated for its function in hydrating humans. However, they are disregarded beyond their use-life, despite making a significant contribution to the contamination of the environment. These works call into question the life of things, materials like expanded polystyrene foam, environmentalism and the cost of our anthropocentrism.
Polar View is a nine-channel video exploring a day in the life of a 44-ounce Expanded Polystyrene cup--more specifically, a “Polar Pop” from the Circle K convenience store. From the point of purchase to its eventual toss into the rubbish pile, Polar View presents multiple viewpoints from the oculus of a mundane part of our reality. Despite being ubiquitous, the existence, and moreover, the agency, of these cups is easily looked over. Polar View points at the life of a particular thing that is clearly an active player in our world.
The sculptures abstract a Polar Pop straw and lid, integrating it with the environment as if the disregarded rubbish has evolved to blend with the environment; in one it stares down at the viewer as if prompting him or her to take a sip. Polar View includes a series of digital prints from the video. Polar View was shown in the Juried MFA Summer show in the Harry Wood Gallery at the ASU Tempe campus in the summer of 2014.
Drainage
Dannon Schroeder
From the very first existence of humankind, an ongoing fragility between man and nature has been stretched and strained like a rubber band. Not completely snapping in two, the balance has been sustainable thus far. The human need to rely on nature for its abundance of resources exposes the weaknesses and strengths of our existence. The examination of human perspective towards the natural world has been a progressive tool for cognitive development since the origin of our species.
Drainage is a fine art exhibition/installation displaying intricately crafted wood sculptures that both visually and conceptually address many of the key topics presented at the Balance-Unbalance 2015 Conference. Created within this past year, these artworks resonate with deeply rooted references to ecology, biology and sociobiology. The sculptures directly address topics such as water access and sustainability, climate change, environmental awareness, and urban growth. The work has been crafted using locally salvaged woods and desert foliage, as well as reclaimed hardwoods.
Drainage infuses delicate natural forms with highly manipulated wood surface finishes that mimic constructed/casted metals. The striking contrast may not seem so striking to all as the viewer reflects on how their personal interaction with the natural world correlates with the artwork displayed in front of them.
Desert Breeze
James White
This installation, simply put, is of two sloop-rigged sailboats with neon and argon sails, competing on a sea of loose white sand. Sand rills are in the configuration of fingerprints. The whole installation is constructed on two 4’ x 8’ black platforms, which are horizontal to the floor.
The relationship between the rills of desert sand and the rills of the ocean floor are self-evident. The “competing” boats are healing over as they “ride” the desert or ocean breeze, a familiar sight to anyone who has sailed or observed sailing and its constant balance between tipping and forward motion across the waves.
The neon and argon in the luminous sails are uniquely powered by high frequency radio waves to eliminate wires, with light transmitted up through the mast, emitted fiber-optically onto the edges and surface engravings of the polycarbonate transparent sails.
The fingerprint reference is one of humanity and identity, caught up in competitive adventures, whether it be between individuals or between man and his environment. This piece is best displayed without gallery lighting or much external light, as the neon creates its own light and shadows.
This sculpture is the latest in a 45-year exploration of light and its relationship to human activity. This sculpture has been displayed at the Arizona State University Night Gallery in Tempe.
Planets
Mary Hood
Planets is a suite of eight images created in 2010, in which water is pooling, overflowing, diverting and escaping. The water in turn becomes the substance of reflection and a symbol for our collective sub-consciousness. The prints are an extension of the Ten Thousand Tears (2007-2009) and Collective Pooling print series (2008), in the fact that they are using my fingerprints as a representation of water and our collective identity. These projects were an important tool for me to reflect upon the environmental, social and political unrest in our chaotic global theatre. However, with Planets, I feel that the "water" is more representative of our human presence on the earth, slowly eroding a path for our existence, leaving canyons and valleys in our wake. The spill over into the larger "pool" is representative of the passage of time and our collective unconsciousness.
The process is a combination of inkjet printing from digital photographs I took during a trip to the Red Rock National Monument in Nevada, combined with layers of monotype and relief printmaking methods. The sky blends and rock "details" are monotypes overprinted on the inkjet layer, giving the print a bit more depth and texture. The final layer is the relief fingerprint, layered in three colors. Each print is 20 x 24” framed in whitewashed maple frames.
Climate Change
Mary Neubauer
Climate Change is a related series of six 15" x 30"digital Lambda prints created in 2012. They are framed with museum mounting. These works were modeled in Rhino 3D in response to my observations of weather and changing cloud patterns throughout the Arizona seasonal year. The 3D models were surface-mapped with changing weather patterns and endowed with qualities of light and transparency. In larger 96" x 72" formats, three of the same images have been printed on silk and can act as a triptych panel or wall-hanging. The works are largely an intuitive response to what I know scientifically about climate change. Because I also work with data visualization of environmental statistics, these intuitive works have a strong empirical foundation. They are meant to deliver a visual signal or sign of what is to come in terms of climate extremes. For this reason, they use a repeating iconic whirlwind shape as a significator. Sometimes the shape is benign and delicate, but as the series progresses, the storm icon becomes more strange and intense. Accompanying these images is a singular data-driven sculptural form that visualizes 25 years of Sonoran Desert Weather through daily high and low temperatures arranged in a 13w month periodicity.
Louisiana Re-storied
Meredith Drum
Louisiana Re-storied is an interactive, documentary installation about environmental justice and pollution governance in Southern Louisiana. The work revisits th
The exhibit is open 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, March 22-29.
Water Imbalance is a curated exhibition planned for the Balance-Unbalance 2015 conference at the Arizona State University Tempe Campus.
Featuring the work of:
Kim Abeles
Sukey Bryan
Betsy Damon
Danielle Eubank
J.J. L’Heureux
Sandra Mueller
Melissa Reischman
Eco Art Collective
Curated by Sandra Mueller and Danielle Eubank
As the majority of the world’s population, it is incumbent upon women to be guardians of the future. We need to look after our people, our natural environment, and our water. Water is a shared resource amongst all people. It is our provider – for sustenance, fishing, farming and regulation of the earth’s climate. This is an exhibition that makes a statement about the unifying preciousness of water by documenting it all over the world with paintings, photography, mixed media, and installations by leading environmental women artists.
The conceptual theme of the exhibition addresses the consequences of the human footprint globally by looking at the imbalance of the availability and cleanliness of water. We have specifically examined water scarcity, cleanliness, access, expanding deserts, urban engagement, climate change and diminishing glaciers that all reflect an unworkable imbalance. Artists included a written statement addressing water imbalance. For the visual theme, emphasis is on the view of water from a geographical perspective as well as a state of mind. – Danielle Eubank, March 2015
Sandra Mueller
Sandra Mueller is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer who has been on a lifelong journey of social concern and creative expression. She spent much of the 1990s working on the cutting edge of interactive media before returning to make her own visual art and launch the BeARTrageous Creativity Workshops for Women. Mueller serves on the Women's Caucus for Art national board and as a strategic advisor for A Window Between Worlds. Her colorful abstract paintings and photographs have been shown broadly throughout the Pacific Rim region.
Danielle Eubank
Danielle Eubank is a painter interested in exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2014-15. Danielle Eubank is an expedition artist in pursuit of painting all of the major bodies of water in the world. She is beginning by painting all of Earth’s oceans. She sailed aboard the barquentine tall ship, The Antigua, on an expedition to the High Arctic in Autumn 2014. She was an Expedition Artist on the Phoenicia, a replica 600 B.C. Phoenician vessel that circumnavigated Africa and was the Expedition Artist on the Borobudur Ship, a replica of an 8th century Indonesian boat that sailed around the African continent.
Waste Water
Kristian Derek Ball
As unavoidable as it is, water is something that we as humans have to waste to some degree. But we still have options on how we approach, view and interact with our water-related activities.
The idea behind this new installation is to raise a hyper-awareness of the process of water draining away from us during its usage. The sonic experience of listening to the phenomenon of water in action and its interfacing with those using it, can lead us into this mode of listening which may juxtapose traditional symbolic references.
The Human Delta
Rachel Mayeri
A delta is a place where a river meets another body of water. A river carries sediment that leaves a triangular pattern where the two bodies of water intersperse. Human bodies are nutrient-rich water and sediment transportation systems. The Human Delta occurs at the toilet, an effluence of millions of gallons of sediment-rich water, which mixes with rivers, aquifers, bays, land, and the ocean.
Environmentalists are dealing with the human delta as toxic concentrations of bacteria, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals in partially treated wastewater routinely pollute waterways. Some chemicals which course through human bodies--heart medicine, antibiotics, estrogen--may adversely affect fish populations and their habitats. Yet, the chemicals which are naturally produced in urine--nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium--rather than be construed as waste or pollution, can be used as important nutrients for the soil in which plants grow. Agrobusiness uses fertilizers derived from fossil fuels and mined from limited reserves, contributing to global warming. A more sustainable solution would be to recycle human urine, treat it, and use it as fertilizer, linking the Human Delta back to the ecological cycle productively, rather than destructively.
The Human Delta is an art-science project intended to increase public awareness about the human "waste" at its point of departure: the bathroom. A series of posters are installed in conference bathrooms, and are available for distribution. Toilets are interstitial, potentially contemplative spaces, which underscore the hidden, segregated, white-tiled, and taboo nature of the subject.
One poster is about the flow of pharmaceuticals from human bodies into a river delta. Informed by scientific research which has found concentrations of caffeine in the Puget Sound, the poster depicts the Starbucks logo as a flow of caffeine, hormones, antibiotics, and medicines entering and leaving the human body, and cycling back as disturbed (caffeinated, aggressive, effeminate) fish. Another poster is about the potential of urine as a fertilizer. It depicts a farmer fountain: a stream of water pours forth from kidneys and bladder, fertilizing a field of corn. Text on the poster reads: "urine is fertilizer" / "nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium."
Session 2 Panel Stream: Place Issues and Art-Science Interactions: Tree Mortality and Big Copper in the American Southwest
Ellen McMahon, Beth Weinstein, David Breshears, Jesse Chehak and Karen Zimmermann: "On Tree Mortality Through the Lens of Art and Science"
The Southwestern United States has lost more than 20% of its conifer forests during the last decade. Scientists based at the University of Arizona are working to understand the exact mechanisms of this tree mortality so they can better predict how fast and far-reaching die-offs will be in coming years. Research indicates that the combination of drought and beetle infestation, which trees were able to survive in the past, is now becoming fatal given the addition of a third factor — global warming.
Creating the necessary change in public attitudes to motivate adaptation to climate change requires a well-considered combination of artistic and scientific means. The Southwestern United States is predicted to be hit harder and sooner by the effects of climate change than almost any other heavily populated region in the world. In this threat lies the opportunity to demonstrate how the arts and sciences can work together to spur public debate and understanding and inspire the civic action needed to face the challenges. The Southwest will be a test case and and an example for other similarly threatened regions of the world. Aware of art and design as potent means of changing the way people see and feel about the natural world, this group of artists, designers and scientists is collaborating in order to raise public awareness and catalyze action.
The panel highlights diverse forms of research, representation and expression characteristic of science, art and design as they work in concert to communicate the effect of climate change—in this particular case, forest die-off. The panel gathers five people: the lead scientist studying conifer collapse in the Southwest, the designer of the scientist’s information graphics, the artist of a body of work catalysed by a personal experience of forest die-off and the artist-architect team of the installation Prone to Collapse (on view in the ASU Night Gallery). The presentations will explore how meaning changes and accumulates as the same content moves from one disciplinary form to another, providing insights into the roles of these disciplines in helping us meet the environmental challenges that lie ahead.
Kimi Eisele and Josh Schachter: "Arizona Artists to Respond to Big Copper"
This panel brings together artists, conservationists, and indigenous leaders to discuss how the arts can address critical environmental and resource extraction issues in creative ways and through innovative partnerships. The proposed Rosemont Copper mine in Southern Arizona would permanently disturb over 3,700 acres of public land, including habitat for nine endangered and threatened species (including the only jaguar living in the U.S.) and key cultural heritage sites for the Tohono O’odom, and severely impact Tucson and critical water resources in the region. Speakers will highlight a series of arts-based projects, which aimed to increase awareness of and generate dialogue about what could be lost. Projects include a photography exhibit: Lens on the Land - Rosemont: What’s at Stake?, showcasing 50 images by over 30 different local and regional photographers, biologists and community members in collaboration with Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, Sonoran Institute, and other key partners; and Rosemont Ours: A Field Guide, a dance film produced by New ARTiculations Dance Theatre with visual artist Ben Johnson, celebrating the plant and animal species of the threatened region. Additional artistic efforts include drawings and paintings and writings by poets. Key partners in the effort were the Sonoran Institute and Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, two conservation organizations working to oppose the mine who have demonstrated a commitment to working with artists to increase public dialogue and awareness.
Panelists include lead artists Kimi Eisele and Josh Schachter; Ofelia Rivas, Tohono O’odham leader; and Brian Powell, a wildlife biologist working to monitor species in the area and cocoordinator of Lens on the Land. Panelists will discuss the challenges and benefits of building partnerships, the power of leveraging partnerships to extend the project’s reach, and the difference between the arts as an advocacy strategy and the arts as a general awareness-raising tool.
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?
Session 2 Paper Stream 3: Remote Experiences of Place
Yolande Harris: "Listening to the Ocean in the Desert"
My paper examines how we relate to distant locations through listening. In particular, it explores the insights that can be gained by re-contextualizing sounds from the ocean within a desert environment. Building on Acoustic Ecology and environmental art practice and theory (Kahn, Dunn, Lippard, Harrison and Harrison, CLUI), I propose that expanded forms of awareness can emerge through technological media and critical listening techniques. My artistic practice and theoretical proposals on techno-intuition and sonic consciousness further claim that increasing auditory awareness of one’s environment promotes a sense of belonging, environmental stewardship, and engagement.
Recent developments in oceanographic technology enable unprecedented access to sounds, video, and other data from the deep ocean. I am developing artistic and theoretical approaches to interpreting and communicating this information, based on current research by oceanographers at the University of Washington. My artwork Listening to the Distance (2015) is a two-part project consisting of an audio-visual installation – Eagle – and sound walk – Whale – that explore how we can experience and share distant environments through animal visions, remote presence, and underwater sound. In Eagle, I re-contextualize ocean hydrophone recordings collected from an autonomous vehicle, called a “sea glider”, as it tracks through the ocean recording its environment. In Whale, different voices of marine mammals speak from the ocean into your ear, acting as a remote guide through the desert environment. Juxtaposing these oceanic voices, both technological and animal, with the desert asks us to imagine connections to environments that are remote but nevertheless essentially connected via global climate systems and ancient imaginings.
My work makes explicit the dependence on technological instruments to access these distant environments and it critically examines the layers of mediation and interpretation involved in both artistic and scientific investigations. However, by bringing underwater sound to individual listeners in the desert, these disparate environments are connected in a direct, embodied artistic experience that parallels their interdependence as part of global climate systems. By provoking an underlying empathy through a sense of remote presence, I argue that Listening to the Distance personalizes the extreme diversity, systemic interconnection, and planetary scale of oceans and deserts.
Garth Paine, Sabine Feisst, Leah Barclay, and Daniel Gilfillan: "The Listen(n) Project: Embodied Experiences of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves through Acoustic Ecology and Digital Technology"
Listen(n) is an interdisciplinary collaborative project that explores remote embodied landscapes of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves through sound. The project focuses on community awareness, sustainability, environmental engagement, critical enquiry and interpretative discourse around questions of how digital technology and rich media environments can be used to create experiences of being present in remote environments.
Specifically it engages with notions of community place-making through six UNESCO Biosphere Reserves in Arizona, New Mexico and California to promote sustainable development based on local community efforts whilst representing the richness and diversity of the southwest desert ecosystem. Through extensive sound-based fieldwork in each location, Listen(n) explores how a notion of belonging to landscape/environment can develop environmental stewardship. In our current state of ecological crisis, the Listen(n) project is designed to explore how these notions of immersive environmental engagement through virtual technologies could cultivate environmental engagement through sound.
The Listen(n) project questions what constitutes attention in sound and through the embodied experiences actively engage participants in consideration of the question: what is listening and how central is the sonic environment to our communal, social and global health? It asks if acoustic ecology, the critical examination and creative representation of sonic environments, can focus communities on their local environment whilst simultaneously building national and international communities for stewardship and sustainability.
At its core, the Listen(n) project explores a range of research questions about the role and function of sound and the perception of sound for a deeper understanding of questions pertaining to place, presence, belonging and sustainability. As a perceptive mode that inherently engages an intermedial relationship to the world, sound both conveys and withholds knowledge, adopting and adapting the realms of the vocal, the textual, the spatial, and the affective to be mediated for reception and parsing aurally, and by extension epistemologically, in the mind of the listener. Sound’s ability to capture and convey movement, spatiality, and emotion in very distinct ways works synergistically with the human mind’s ability to unify within consciousness a number of perceptual inputs, such that a cognitive picture of the world and one’s position within it comes to light. The immersive sonic productions, which form the foundation of Listen(n), provide a palpable framework within which such a phenomenology of human experience of the world can be experienced, shared, examined and understood.
Grant Smith, Maria Papadomanolaki and Dawn Scarfe: "Reveil: New Experiments with Environmental Radio"
This presentation introduces Reveil, a project of the London-based artist collective, soundCamp. It includes extracts from the first Reveil broadcast over 3-4 May 2014 and proposes contexts and reflections towards a second event in 2015.
Reveil is a 24-hour broadcast of live daybreak sounds, realized by a global network of streamers, along with sounds from webcams, hydrophone observatories and independent channels. Relayed from a soundcamp near the Greenwich Meridian, Reveil travels West from microphone to microphone in a continuous live transmission lasting one earth day.
Reveil is anticipated by the work of Maryanne Amacher, Bill Fontana, Max Neuhaus, Tetsuo Kogawa and more recent practitioners (eg at Locus Sonus), who have found ways and means to stream live audio from one location to another.
It has antecedents in the transects imagined by ornithologist Don Kroodsma and the sound collages of field recordists Gordon Hempton and Bernie Krause, which extend and re-present the transient experience of daybreak, as well as 'capturing' fragile, endangered soundscapes.
And it resonates with calls by Murray Schafer and Bruce Davis for an 'Environmental' or 'Wilderness Radio' that would relay rural sounds to urban places, prefiguring the emerging live audio networks which Reveil taps into and extends.
At the same time, Reveil involves practical activities which focus on the experiences of camping, streaming, or listening in situations that combine the routine and the exceptional (such as camping overnight in an inner city nature reserve). Participants encounter local and remote soundscapes that are equally 'always already there' and previously unheard. Daily tasks - cooking, sleeping, fetching water - take place to a broader rhythm correlated with our physical displacement on a moving planet.
We speculate on what is at stake in these activities, with reference to key terms drawn from the sources above: displacement / emplacement; rural / urban; hi-fi / low-fi; human / natural; wild / constructed; local / remote; artist / audience. And we consider how such a practice can contribute to contesting and re-imagining the distinctions and values they imply.
Finally, we invite contributions to the next soundCamp / reveil, which coincides with International Dawn Chorus Day 2015.
Currently the APP runs only on iPhone or iPAD with 3G/4G Sim card. (Wifi only ipads do work but will mean you can only walk within the reliable parts of the ASU network)
If you are on an Android phone please consider coming for the talk before regardless, and then hopefully we can team you up for a walk with an iPhone/Ipad person and share a walk together
Live stream here
The Choice to Stay: Here and There
From her work in indigenous rainforest communities Niyanta Spelman has witnessed the way people’s lives are changing as a result of external pressures. Already struggling to adapt to the pressures of deforestation, local communities are now facing new threats from climate change with very unexpected consequences. Weather patterns are changing and the sources of food and income they have relied on for centuries are moving, changing or disappearing. What happens when forest people cannot live off the forest? What happens when their only source of income disappears? Where do they go? Can they go? Rainforest communities are struggling to find ways to maintain their way of life. Niyanta will illustrate the difficulty in choosing between potentially lucrative, short term gains and the obscured yet devastating long term consequences of those choices.
Back in the United States, Gary Lawrence has been in the front lines of the ideological struggle between scientific probability and society’s preferred reality. He will make the case that humanity, regardless of geographic location, is all in the same boat. There are important technical issues that need to be solved but the capacity of government and the ability of societies to make informed choices together will be the real challenge of our next generation. In the Rainforest and in Arizona communities are having to adapt to external stressors in ways they have never anticipated. These pressures come from changing natural patterns and from increased urbanization and population growth. The geographic context of Chipaota, Peru and Mesa, Arizona may be very different – but in both places societies and political leadership are having to adjust to something far outside their experience with no proven methods to rely upon.
Session 3 Panel Stream: Eco-Sensing in Higher Education Curriculum
Andrea Polli, Eric Leonardson, Linda Keane, Leah Barclay, Christopher Preissing, Lindsay French, and Meredith Hoy
A conversation between an international group of academic practitioners and artists about the design and delivery of interdisciplinary curriculum in the arts, engineering and architecture that engages university students with listening and other forms of environmental sensing to promote creative ways to address ecological problems. Panelists will present examples and experiences using listening, field recording, sensors, data gathering, and other ways of sensing ecosystems.
The single glance cannot sufficiently capture the fact that the environment is a complex ecological system formed by the intersection of both visible and invisible phenomena. Ubiquitous computing and data collection can provide a variety of non visual cross-sections through which a more complicated understanding of the environment can be experienced. When does the collection of a quantity of data becoming meaningful or useful for scientific and/or creative purposes?
Sound provides a sensory framework that imparts depth and texture to the listener’s surroundings. It does not simply enrich the visual experience of landscape, according primacy to vision, but actively shapes the interaction between listener and environment. Sound collection, and its related data collection, complicate any single experience of environment as complete, and the observation of sound, as it is based in time, cannot exist without memory. Events are accumulated over time, and it is this accumulation that affects our observation, and perception of the environment.
In digital art practice, the 1970s brought about an interest in the relationship between sound and space, and particularly, the use of sound as an augmentation of the primacy of visual representation. Sound was identified as a new form of location-based practice that could enrich the phenomenological experience of space and landscape.
While visual maps create an instantaneous impression, sound maps create a richly textured, durational experience that refuses to foreclose the space in question. Sound maps are exploratory and open-ended, providing, as Schafer argues, only offered details, rather than a totalized view. As opposed to the tradition of landscape painting, which situates the viewer in a frontal relationship to a carefully enframed array of visual information, sound art affirms the materiality of the invisible world. It shows an environment to be a multi-layered, multi-sensory, and dynamic interplay of forces that cannot be encapsulated and circumscribed by the frame.
Since the 1970s, the advancement of sound art has been heavily concerned with the material density of the sonic environment. Eco-sensing projects gather data and translate it into a sonic fabric that communicates informational content in alternative ways to traditional visualization practices. The phenomenological thickness of sonic presentation reveals the ways in which ecological data need not be merely visual to be interpreted and absorbed by the human sensorium. The complexity of sound mirrors the complexity of ecosystems and environment, demonstrating how environmental knowledge and understanding can develop through practices of sonifying data.
Session 3 Paper Stream 1: Environmental Awareness in Urban Contexts Through Workshops and Sound and Media Art
Nina Czegledy: "DIY Water Sensing Workshop in an Urban Context"
Water decontamination is a central challenge in the 21st century. This applies not only to potable water but also to industrial process water, cooling water and swimming pools. The goal is environmentally sound disinfection that is also time-effective and cost efficient. We dispose of human and animal wastes and chemical substances into the environment at such a rate that even some of the largest lakes and river systems are seriously difficult to clean, to sustain life. Undoubtedly, this situation influenced the rise of many activist cultural and art projects linked to water & climate change. Several of these are presented outside the white cube of museum/gallery spaces.
Three of us (Nina Czegledy, Adriana Ieraci, Antonio Gomba-Bari,) chose an alternate participatory workshop approach to address this issue. In May 2013 we co-organized the DIY Water Sensing workshop at Subtle Technologies Festival in Toronto. Our aim was:
- to facilitate an activity fostering the discussion of environmental issues.
- to engage the community in experimental analysis and monitoring of water quality
- to engage participants in developing toolkits for testing
We began by posing the question: Have you ever wondered where the water you drink, cook with, or shower in comes from? In Toronto, Lake Ontario (representing 1% of the world's total surface freshwater supply) is the only source of drinking water. Although Lake Ontario is impressively clean, before reaching households, it is filtered. How effectively?
Following a thematic overview, David Lawrie of Citizen Scientists presented the volunteer group’s activities including ecological monitoring, environmental training and education. Ramon Guardans, pollution expert from Madrid, spoke on global water pollution. Participants brought water samples from their own homes and built take-home water kits to test chemical components in their water supply.
The goal was to create a more informed understanding of our climate and environment - hopefully effecting positive societal change. In summary, we aimed to improve the literacy of workshop participants through active participation in experimental water sensing. We remain convinced that such workshops will eventually contribute to grassroots participation in governmental policy-making.
Alan Dormer: "The Recontextualization of Urban Spaces Through Site-Specific Sonic Interventionism"
This paper attempts to highlight and address issues relating to site-specific urban sound art and its relationship with a ‘sense of place’. Through both a theoretical and artistic framework the paper explores concepts of topophilia, insidedness, ambiences, place and non-place and how these theories may be applied within the field of site-specific urban sound art.
Topophilia, as described by Tuan, “… is the affective bond between people and place or setting”. In what Auge describes as a world of super modernity, this bond - particularly within urban spaces - is disappearing, leaving what can be described as non-places, places that are void of meaning and definition acquired through human activity and social practice. “Place ignored, unseen, or unknown” (Lippard).
In many of our urban spaces a sense of place or ‘genius loci’ has been lost due to sensory overload; our sonic environments and soundscapes have become something we avoid rather than listen to. Dixon proclaims our evolution from hunter-gatherer: “learning though listening” to “learnt listening” has led to a “switching off, tuning out” attitude of urban users.
Site-specific sound installations allow for the reconceptualization of space through sonic relocation or interventionism. Within the spatial boundaries in which the work exists a new space is created. The transformation of sound into a spatio-temporal entity not only changes the way in which we experience the sonic material but also our relationship with the space of the work's existence through “sonic articulation” or the “conditioning of space” (Minard). The result is that the work becomes part of the space and restructures its organization both conceptually and perceptually (Serra).
Discussing urban artists from various fields, along with recent works by the author, the paper will highlight how a greater understanding of our relationship with the spaces and places we inhabit and traverse through can lead toward a better lived environment and social experience.
Mobile Eco Studio is a social art project involving artist-led workshops, planting indigenous species in unused bits of land. It integrates indigenous culture, biology, and community engagement, and adds a unique approach to the related subjects of climate and culture. Its special relationship to the climate and culture of Arizona will help visitors at the conference become more familiar with this unique place and ecosystem.
Words for Water
Tracey Benson
Words for Water explores a diversity of languages, including Indigenous Australian languages, as a starting point to evoke a connection to water as the sustaining element of all life. Indigenous cultures have an acute understanding of and connection to the relationship between body, environment (site) and identity, and this project seeks to awaken this connection more broadly across cultures and practices.
Words for Water is an exploration into the many aspects of the chemical of H2O. Water makes up over 70 percent of the human body; it is essential for sustaining life and has massive social and cultural significance.
Water may seem ubiquitous, but it has some rather uncommon properties. At the atomic level, water can influence how life and landscapes are formed, such as how water moves through a plant and how rivers meander around bends. It is also the only chemical that be formed in three states – vapour, liquid and solid.
This project uses a range of mixed reality media approaches – the use of augmented media to ‘trigger’ sound and video, the development of a smart phone/tablet app, gallery and installation based exhibitions, and a projection work that bring this project together in a filmic, linear narrative.
Words for Water is seen as an ever-expanding project, allowing for infinite expansion of words, thoughts and stories related to water. The project has appeared at SCANZ2015, New Plymouth, New Zealand; Photoacess, October 2014; 3WDS14, Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium, March 2014; and Stage One of Words for Water was presented as part of the Transreal Topologies exhibition at the Royal Institute of Science in Adelaide, October 2013, held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).
The piece includes nature and ambient sounds, filtered, modified and re-organized. Those elements are used to build up a short music piece. Sound elements, both natural and derived from the engine or the machinery of a vessel are elaborated, mixed and overlapped several times in order to give birth to an evocative sound landscape. The take-off sound of a seaplane becomes the fundamental note of the last ending chord.
In a certain sense the goal of this short work is to bring forth the voices of the things and their aesthetic value, but not through a documentary approach. The underlying question is:“could the whole world be seen and manipulated as a protean musical instrument?”
Forest by Garth Paine
This musical composition is part of a series of works that Garth Paine describes as "improvised conversations" with nature. In "Forest," Dr. Paine plays a flute that is electronically reprocessed with bird song recorded at Bundanon in Australia and frogs recorded in Arizona in a kind of real-time call and response, an example of what he says is "an ongoing inquiry into the ways in which we converse with nature on a daily basis."
RACING EXTINCTION - Film Preview
Scientists predict that the human footprint on the planet may cause the loss of half of the world’s species by the end of the century. They believe we have entered the sixth major extinction in Earth’s history, following the fifth great extinction which took out the dinosaurs. Our era is called the Anthropocene, or “Age of Man,” because evidence shows that humanity has sparked a cataclysmic change of the world’s natural environment and animal life. Yet, we are the only ones who can stop the change we have created.
The Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), the group behind the Academy Award®-winning film THE COVE, is back with the new groundbreaking documentary RACING EXTINCTION. Joined by new innovators, OPS brings a voice to the thousands of species teetering on the very edge of life.
This highly charged, impassioned collective of activists is out to expose the two major threats to endangered wild species across the globe. The first comes from the international wildlife trade, and the bogus medicinal cures and tonics that are marketed to the public at the expense of creatures who have survived on this planet for millions of years. The second threat is all around us, hiding in plain sight. It is a hidden world of carbon emissions and acidified oceans that are incompatible with existing animal life. It is a world, revealed with state-of-the-art photographic technology, that oil and gas companies don’t want us to see.
Director Louie Psihoyos has crafted an ambitious mission to clearly and artfully pull into focus our impact on the planet, while inspiring us all to embrace the solutions that will ensure a thriving, biodiverse world for future generations.
At Balance-Unbalance 2015, we are pleased to screen a short preview of RACING EXTINCTION prior to the global release in late 2015. The film’s director, Louie Psihoyos, says “Film can still be the most powerful weapon in the world — a weapon of mass construction. I’m interested in radically changing how people perceive a documentary by making it entertaining and using narrative filmmaking conventions. In our new film, RACING EXTINCTION, we used the highest quality production values and a collective of environmental activists to raise awareness of the issue.”
For information about the campaign against species extinction and to join this global movement please visit: www.racingextinction.com.
Prone to Collapse
Beth Weinstein & Ellen McMahon
In the last decade the Southwestern United States has lost more than 20% of its conifer forests. A group of scientists based at the University of Arizona is working to understand why trees are dying so they can better predict what will happen in the future. One of their primary tools for determining the extent and effects of forest die-off (also known as conifer collapse) is hemispherical photography. These 360-degree fisheye images are taken in forests at different stages of mortality to determine the increased amount of radiant energy (sunlight) hitting the earth’s surface as trees die. This information is critical to their study, which reveals that, added to drought and beetle infestation, the slight increase in global temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions has created the fatal tipping point.
Prone to Collapse is a new work developed from ongoing scientific research and several months of creative research and reflection on the raw material. As an installation it re-presents and re-contextualizes the hemispherical photographs used by these scientists in an immersive, sensory experience.
Animated hemispheric photographs are projected onto a scrim suspended within an installation made of repurposed materials derived from trees. Viewers are invited to recline within the installation to experience the transition from lush healthy forests through death and disappearance. As a complement to the embodied sensing of the issues, info-graphics convey critical information about the research and the implications of the scientists’ findings. By combining the multisensory visceral experience of lying in a forest as it dies and the conveyed graphic information, the collaborators seek to create conditions to awaken people to the problem of forest die-off, become receptive to learning about it, and become inclined to take action.
Polar View
Cecily Culver
I am submitting a digital video installation, digital prints and three sculptures that are a part of the same body of work that uses Polar Pop cups to consider the point of view of a thing that is celebrated for its function in hydrating humans. However, they are disregarded beyond their use-life, despite making a significant contribution to the contamination of the environment. These works call into question the life of things, materials like expanded polystyrene foam, environmentalism and the cost of our anthropocentrism.
Polar View is a nine-channel video exploring a day in the life of a 44-ounce Expanded Polystyrene cup--more specifically, a “Polar Pop” from the Circle K convenience store. From the point of purchase to its eventual toss into the rubbish pile, Polar View presents multiple viewpoints from the oculus of a mundane part of our reality. Despite being ubiquitous, the existence, and moreover, the agency, of these cups is easily looked over. Polar View points at the life of a particular thing that is clearly an active player in our world.
The sculptures abstract a Polar Pop straw and lid, integrating it with the environment as if the disregarded rubbish has evolved to blend with the environment; in one it stares down at the viewer as if prompting him or her to take a sip. Polar View includes a series of digital prints from the video. Polar View was shown in the Juried MFA Summer show in the Harry Wood Gallery at the ASU Tempe campus in the summer of 2014.
Drainage
Dannon Schroeder
From the very first existence of humankind, an ongoing fragility between man and nature has been stretched and strained like a rubber band. Not completely snapping in two, the balance has been sustainable thus far. The human need to rely on nature for its abundance of resources exposes the weaknesses and strengths of our existence. The examination of human perspective towards the natural world has been a progressive tool for cognitive development since the origin of our species.
Drainage is a fine art exhibition/installation displaying intricately crafted wood sculptures that both visually and conceptually address many of the key topics presented at the Balance-Unbalance 2015 Conference. Created within this past year, these artworks resonate with deeply rooted references to ecology, biology and sociobiology. The sculptures directly address topics such as water access and sustainability, climate change, environmental awareness, and urban growth. The work has been crafted using locally salvaged woods and desert foliage, as well as reclaimed hardwoods.
Drainage infuses delicate natural forms with highly manipulated wood surface finishes that mimic constructed/casted metals. The striking contrast may not seem so striking to all as the viewer reflects on how their personal interaction with the natural world correlates with the artwork displayed in front of them.
Desert Breeze
James White
This installation, simply put, is of two sloop-rigged sailboats with neon and argon sails, competing on a sea of loose white sand. Sand rills are in the configuration of fingerprints. The whole installation is constructed on two 4’ x 8’ black platforms, which are horizontal to the floor.
The relationship between the rills of desert sand and the rills of the ocean floor are self-evident. The “competing” boats are healing over as they “ride” the desert or ocean breeze, a familiar sight to anyone who has sailed or observed sailing and its constant balance between tipping and forward motion across the waves.
The neon and argon in the luminous sails are uniquely powered by high frequency radio waves to eliminate wires, with light transmitted up through the mast, emitted fiber-optically onto the edges and surface engravings of the polycarbonate transparent sails.
The fingerprint reference is one of humanity and identity, caught up in competitive adventures, whether it be between individuals or between man and his environment. This piece is best displayed without gallery lighting or much external light, as the neon creates its own light and shadows.
This sculpture is the latest in a 45-year exploration of light and its relationship to human activity. This sculpture has been displayed at the Arizona State University Night Gallery in Tempe.
Planets
Mary Hood
Planets is a suite of eight images created in 2010, in which water is pooling, overflowing, diverting and escaping. The water in turn becomes the substance of reflection and a symbol for our collective sub-consciousness. The prints are an extension of the Ten Thousand Tears (2007-2009) and Collective Pooling print series (2008), in the fact that they are using my fingerprints as a representation of water and our collective identity. These projects were an important tool for me to reflect upon the environmental, social and political unrest in our chaotic global theatre. However, with Planets, I feel that the "water" is more representative of our human presence on the earth, slowly eroding a path for our existence, leaving canyons and valleys in our wake. The spill over into the larger "pool" is representative of the passage of time and our collective unconsciousness.
The process is a combination of inkjet printing from digital photographs I took during a trip to the Red Rock National Monument in Nevada, combined with layers of monotype and relief printmaking methods. The sky blends and rock "details" are monotypes overprinted on the inkjet layer, giving the print a bit more depth and texture. The final layer is the relief fingerprint, layered in three colors. Each print is 20 x 24” framed in whitewashed maple frames.
Climate Change
Mary Neubauer
Climate Change is a related series of six 15" x 30"digital Lambda prints created in 2012. They are framed with museum mounting. These works were modeled in Rhino 3D in response to my observations of weather and changing cloud patterns throughout the Arizona seasonal year. The 3D models were surface-mapped with changing weather patterns and endowed with qualities of light and transparency. In larger 96" x 72" formats, three of the same images have been printed on silk and can act as a triptych panel or wall-hanging. The works are largely an intuitive response to what I know scientifically about climate change. Because I also work with data visualization of environmental statistics, these intuitive works have a strong empirical foundation. They are meant to deliver a visual signal or sign of what is to come in terms of climate extremes. For this reason, they use a repeating iconic whirlwind shape as a significator. Sometimes the shape is benign and delicate, but as the series progresses, the storm icon becomes more strange and intense. Accompanying these images is a singular data-driven sculptural form that visualizes 25 years of Sonoran Desert Weather through daily high and low temperatures arranged in a 13w month periodicity.
Louisiana Re-storied
Meredith Drum
Louisiana Re-storied is an interactive, documentary installation about environmental justice and pollution governance in Southern Louisiana. The work revisits th
The exhibit is open 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, March 22-29.
Water Imbalance is a curated exhibition planned for the Balance-Unbalance 2015 conference at the Arizona State University Tempe Campus.
Featuring the work of:
Kim Abeles
Sukey Bryan
Betsy Damon
Danielle Eubank
J.J. L’Heureux
Sandra Mueller
Melissa Reischman
Eco Art Collective
Curated by Sandra Mueller and Danielle Eubank
As the majority of the world’s population, it is incumbent upon women to be guardians of the future. We need to look after our people, our natural environment, and our water. Water is a shared resource amongst all people. It is our provider – for sustenance, fishing, farming and regulation of the earth’s climate. This is an exhibition that makes a statement about the unifying preciousness of water by documenting it all over the world with paintings, photography, mixed media, and installations by leading environmental women artists.
The conceptual theme of the exhibition addresses the consequences of the human footprint globally by looking at the imbalance of the availability and cleanliness of water. We have specifically examined water scarcity, cleanliness, access, expanding deserts, urban engagement, climate change and diminishing glaciers that all reflect an unworkable imbalance. Artists included a written statement addressing water imbalance. For the visual theme, emphasis is on the view of water from a geographical perspective as well as a state of mind. – Danielle Eubank, March 2015
Sandra Mueller
Sandra Mueller is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer who has been on a lifelong journey of social concern and creative expression. She spent much of the 1990s working on the cutting edge of interactive media before returning to make her own visual art and launch the BeARTrageous Creativity Workshops for Women. Mueller serves on the Women's Caucus for Art national board and as a strategic advisor for A Window Between Worlds. Her colorful abstract paintings and photographs have been shown broadly throughout the Pacific Rim region.
Danielle Eubank
Danielle Eubank is a painter interested in exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2014-15. Danielle Eubank is an expedition artist in pursuit of painting all of the major bodies of water in the world. She is beginning by painting all of Earth’s oceans. She sailed aboard the barquentine tall ship, The Antigua, on an expedition to the High Arctic in Autumn 2014. She was an Expedition Artist on the Phoenicia, a replica 600 B.C. Phoenician vessel that circumnavigated Africa and was the Expedition Artist on the Borobudur Ship, a replica of an 8th century Indonesian boat that sailed around the African continent.
Waste Water
Kristian Derek Ball
As unavoidable as it is, water is something that we as humans have to waste to some degree. But we still have options on how we approach, view and interact with our water-related activities.
The idea behind this new installation is to raise a hyper-awareness of the process of water draining away from us during its usage. The sonic experience of listening to the phenomenon of water in action and its interfacing with those using it, can lead us into this mode of listening which may juxtapose traditional symbolic references.
The Human Delta
Rachel Mayeri
A delta is a place where a river meets another body of water. A river carries sediment that leaves a triangular pattern where the two bodies of water intersperse. Human bodies are nutrient-rich water and sediment transportation systems. The Human Delta occurs at the toilet, an effluence of millions of gallons of sediment-rich water, which mixes with rivers, aquifers, bays, land, and the ocean.
Environmentalists are dealing with the human delta as toxic concentrations of bacteria, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals in partially treated wastewater routinely pollute waterways. Some chemicals which course through human bodies--heart medicine, antibiotics, estrogen--may adversely affect fish populations and their habitats. Yet, the chemicals which are naturally produced in urine--nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium--rather than be construed as waste or pollution, can be used as important nutrients for the soil in which plants grow. Agrobusiness uses fertilizers derived from fossil fuels and mined from limited reserves, contributing to global warming. A more sustainable solution would be to recycle human urine, treat it, and use it as fertilizer, linking the Human Delta back to the ecological cycle productively, rather than destructively.
The Human Delta is an art-science project intended to increase public awareness about the human "waste" at its point of departure: the bathroom. A series of posters are installed in conference bathrooms, and are available for distribution. Toilets are interstitial, potentially contemplative spaces, which underscore the hidden, segregated, white-tiled, and taboo nature of the subject.
One poster is about the flow of pharmaceuticals from human bodies into a river delta. Informed by scientific research which has found concentrations of caffeine in the Puget Sound, the poster depicts the Starbucks logo as a flow of caffeine, hormones, antibiotics, and medicines entering and leaving the human body, and cycling back as disturbed (caffeinated, aggressive, effeminate) fish. Another poster is about the potential of urine as a fertilizer. It depicts a farmer fountain: a stream of water pours forth from kidneys and bladder, fertilizing a field of corn. Text on the poster reads: "urine is fertilizer" / "nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium."
Session 4 Paper Stream 1: Climate Change and Desertscapes in the Americas
Richard Lowenberg: "The Energy & Information Eco-Systems of the Colorado Plateau: A Field Study"
A presentation on initial partnering, collaborations, inventorying, mapping, assessment and creative understanding of the energy and information ecosystems of the four-state Colorado Plateau.
Our greatest local-global ‘Grand Challenge’ is to develop ‘an ecological unified field theory’, integrating physical, biological, environmental, information, social and economic processes, to move our understandings, intents and actions towards the most challenging, yet ultimately most important humane goals of our networked contemporary society: ‘demosophia’ (people wisdom). We cannot address the critical issues of changing climate, water, energy, food or health without better understanding the dynamically integrated matter-energy-information environment, and our need to take “steps toward an ecology of mind”.
1st-Mile Institute’s “Mapping the Information Eco-System of the Colorado Plateau” is a new multi-year project. It is a personal extension of Richard Lowenberg’s having prepared the New Mexico “Integrated Strategic Broadband Initiative” plan and report for Governor Richardson in 2008, and having coordinated all federal Broadband Stimulus projects in the state and neighboring states from 2009-13. These efforts and continuing work now make possible access to greater public and private sector network infrastructure and services data, which has not been used to date for eco-social or cultural benefit.
Mapped relational data layers will include: natural resources (water, mountains, forests), population centers, tribal areas, other primary infrastructure, telecom. services coverage, government, corporate and military facilities, socio-economic strata and much more.
A long-term objective of this project is use of the integrated information mapping as basis for regional ecological-economic modelling. Information, like water, the air we breathe and the sounds of healthy children, is designated as ‘intangibles and externalities’ by our dominant political (dismal science) economic systems. Such ‘common pool resources’ are the true determinants of quality of life. The flows of water, energy and of information are fundamental constituents of an ecological Earth Economy.
“The Energy & Information EcoSystems of the Colorado Plateau” is intended to creatively augment other Four Corners regional ecosystem assessments, mappings, learning and decision-support initiatives, providing emergent patterns for interactions and interventions.
Research + GIS Mapping + Drawings + Photographs + + Performance + Narratives + Interactive Web Site
Peter Friederici and Peter Goin: "A New Start at the End of Nature: Lake Powell in the Era of Climate Change"
What happens to a beloved water recreation area—and a place vital to the West’s thin-stretched water infrastructure—when the climate changes? That’s the question this photo/text project examines. A New Start at the End of Nature is a lyrical exploration, in words and photographs, of Glen Canyon/Lake Powell as a quintessential landscape in the new era of climate change. Made with a large-format 4x5 Horseman view camera and a 40-megapixel Mamiya medium-format camera, the color images by a renowned photographer of human/nature interactions present in lavish detail the ambiguities and incongruities that make up the lake and canyon landscape today. The text, by a writer who has published several books of reporting and essays about today’s natural landscape, will examine why the uncertainties inherent in the future of the lake and canyon landscape herald an unpredictable new future for many places around the world. This presentation will be a lyrical exploration of place that points a way to the questions that need to be raised as people negotiate new understandings with their surroundings in a world of climate change.
Stacie Widdifield and Jeffrey Banister: "Mexico City's Water and its Objects: An Archive of Interventions"
Mexico’s past is archived into the present through a host of spectacular museums located in its capital, constituting an itinerary of objects, places, and interpretations. No visit to Mexico City would be complete without a pilgrimage to Chapultepec Park, with its many compelling sites and monuments, chief among them the National History Museum and the National Anthropology Museum. Recently, however, a previously neglected area of the park, Chapultepec’s “second section,” has become an important part of the itinerary for its Water Garden Museum. Here, visitors can experience a number of monuments to the capital’s complex history as a hydraulic city that, since the 14th century, was developed over a series of ancient, and now mostly drained, lakes. The museum’s two centerpieces are the Cárcamo de Dolores, with its mid-twentieth-century water-tank mural and mosaic fountain, created by Diego Rivera, and four early-20th-century towers that mark the presence of enormous underground water storage tanks. Just as the park’s other museums create a particular narrative of Mexican visual culture and history, the Garden neatly packages within a beautiful green space the complicated story of environmental control within the Basin of Mexico. Water is not, however, necessarily central to the display; rather, visitors are presented with a collection of hydraulic-control objects. In other words, the intricate geography of springs, rivers, canals, and lakes that once constituted Mexico City as a hydraulic wonder are now effectively represented or replaced by a network of memorials and plans for future commemorative objects and sites. Such objects and sites thus appear in inverse proportion to the historic disappearance of water -- both potable and flood water -- from view. Using the geo-temporal exhibit builder, Neatline, we will present our ongoing research on the visual culture of the Mexico City water system, drawing from spatial, historical, and visual data to explore the relationship between water and the objects that manage it into and within the basin landscape. In doing so, we hope to contribute to ongoing efforts “reintroduce” the city to its hydraulic history and geography.
Session 5 Panel Stream: HOT WATER--Water, Peace, and War
"HOT WATER—Water, Peace & War" virtual exhibition and discussion panel. Online at: http://water-wheel.net/taps/view/791.
A panel of international guests will discuss selected contributions of "digital postcards, poems or texts" uploaded to the Waterwheel website (water-wheel.net) on the theme of "HOT WATER—Water, Peace & War". The call invited artists, scientists, activists, teachers and young people to contribute videos, images, animations, audio, texts or slideshows.
The virtual exhibition and panel will take place on the Tap, the videoconferencing/media-mixing system of Waterwheel. The site is accessible to anyone without the need to log in or register. Online audience can comment in the chat, and join in on the discussion.
Event URL: http://water-wheel.net/taps/view/791
Event time in your current timezone: http://bit.ly/1GLWKfC
Panelists at Balance-Unbalance include Leah Barclay, Nina Czegledy, Ilka Nelson and Eric Leonardson.
Online Panelists include Lorraine Beaulieu, Molly Hankwitz and Alberto Vazquez.
The call for contributions, released in English, French and Spanish, contained the following text: “The English expression ‘To be in HOT WATER’ means to be in trouble. Currently, climate change, environmental decline, rights violations, volatile politics and conflict all suggest ‘HOT WATER’. Water is a fundamental element for all beings on Earth. A symbol of life and a 'common good' which should be available to all, water is quickly becoming a commodity to some, and often taken hostage in conflicts to besiege and displace populations. Corporations, governments, and industries such as mining and tourism use it for their own short-term benefits, depriving people—especially Indigenous people and farmers—of their rights, causing pollution, threatening health and the environment, and compromising long-term water management.
How can art, science, design, and activism reinstate the social, cultural and environmental value of water? How can we share the responsibility of water in a positive way? How can we all preserve the right of access to water? How can intergenerational knowledge-sharing get us out of ‘HOT WATER’, end conflict and find peace?”
Session 6 Panel Stream: Models and Challenges of Art-Science Collaboration
Carlos Castellanos and Matt Garcia: “Towards Ecological Equality: Collaborative Practice in Art and Technology”
This panel will discuss models of collaboration that artists, scientists, engineers and technologists can deploy in order to respond to ecological and environmental health problems, particularly in marginalized and underserved communities.
With a general focus on transdisciplinarity and participatory, community-based practices that can achieve practical and lasting on-the-ground impact, we will explore how experimentation, observation and direct action in local ecologies by artists, scientists, technologists, and activists can lead to unique perspectives and showcase possibilities for catalyzing change and establishing a greater sense of community agency and control over environmental and ecological issues.
Many artists employing ecological practices are attracted by its interdisciplinary holism and opportunity for environmental activism. Since the conceptual and systems art movements of the 1960s and 70s, artists have shown a considerable interest in forging new aesthetics and systems of ideas by combining living matter, transdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement. Contemporary new media artists have expanded upon this tradition by employing new technologies alongside critical and conceptual analyses of biology, the environment and the landscape. In the same manner as their progenitors, these artists are engaging conceptually and critically with the latest technologies and scientific methods used in the environmental, ecological and biological sciences that are changing conceptions of life, the environment and the planet. Likewise many scientists and engineers have become interested in science literacy, public engagement and developing and contributing to open source and citizen science initiatives. We believe untapped opportunities exist for fruitful collaborations that can have a lasting impact on ecologically underprivileged communities.
Questions the panel will raise include (but are not limited to):
• How can artists, scientists, engineers, and the general public deploy methods and technologies to create platforms for conversation, awareness and action on ecological and environmental issues?
• What novel strategies for knowledge sharing and collaboration can artists and scientists devise that may serve as models for participatory community action and lead to networks of community association and cooperation around issues of climate change, energy and the environment?
• What novel and creative uses of ecological research, environmental data, landscape data and renewable energy technologies can be deployed to foster greater awareness and community agency over issues of energy production, climate change, ecological stewardship and environmental health?
• How can art-science collaborations help to rediscover and/or reclaim lost or neglected ecologies and landscapes?
• What theoretical frameworks and methodologies can each of us bring to this work?
Within the context of ecological restoration, specific topic areas that may be discussed include (but are not limited to):
• Environmental and climate data visualization
• Ecological restoration and remediation technologies
• Citizen science and diy/open source/open data culture
• Mapping and landscape practices
• Environmental justice and activism
• Ecologically Empowered Communities
• Bioenergy and renewable energy technologies
• Eco-droning: use of unmanned aerial vehicles in ecological and environmental contexts
• Pedagogy: engaging art and technology students with environmental issues
• Ubiquitous computing, locative media and mobile technologies
• Food and agricultural practices
• Sound: soundscape and acoustic ecology
Edgar Cardenas and Sandra Rodegher: “Sustainability and Its Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Challenges”
Sustainability research hopes to link knowledge to social action for a better future (Cash et al., 2003; Clark, 2007; Jasanoff, 1996), this knowledge needs to address the social, political, and cultural processes involved in creating a sustainable vision (Bryan G Norton, 2005; Thompson, 2010) as much as the scientific and technological ones (Miller, 2012). In order to tackle these challenges interdisciplinary research has become a cornerstone of sustainability (Lang et al., 2012). However, the emphasis has been on research in the sciences, rarely including the arts and humanities (Fischer et al., 2007; Kagan, 2011). Furthermore, sustainability projects have not only moved towards interdisciplinarity but have emphasized collaborative participation, which broadens the epistemological and ontological palette for grappling with wicked problems (Kinzig, 2001; Miller, 2012; Bryan G Norton, 2005; Bryan G. Norton, 2012; Thompson & Whyte, 2012).
While these are promising avenues for addressing sustainability problems, they raise their own operational challenges. Specifically, how are different knowledge sets synthesized, and what are the necessary conditions for increasing the likelihood of authentic and productive collaborations? Panel participants will discuss their work and how they have addressed these challenges in their own research.
Edgar Cardenas will discuss his efforts to integrate his art and research practice both at the individual and collaborative level. He will discuss how his research revisits the wilderness aesthetic, its challenges for sustainability, and how Aldo Leopold’s ideas can take us into a more productive direction for aesthetics in sustainability. He will also discuss how this work has informed his art practice, which led to his exhibit, “one hundred little dramas.,” an exploration of the backyard as an ecological space. Finally, he will discuss how his research addresses these interdisciplinary challenges in artist-scientist collaborations by investigating the conditions that aid or hinder these types of radical collaborations, which can then lead to creative sustainability solutions.
Sandra Rodegher will discuss her research efforts to identify and foster authentic participation in scenario planning processes and the ethical implications of failing to do so. She will discuss the challenges of combining multiple methodological approaches and technologies in an effort to develop a more systemic understanding of participation in scenario planning processes. Furthermore she will discuss her process in linking scenario planning, philosophy, and psychology to approach sustainability from multiple dimensions.
Both panelists have taken a radically interdisciplinary path in an effort to produce creative and relevant work that strikes at the heart of how to create a solid foundation for strengthening and expanding collaborative/participative efforts for advancing sustainability. They will not only share their own processes but also their research findings from their investigations.
Shannon Acevedo, Amanda Bagley, Charlie Blanco, Ashley Burrows, Theron Jenkins, Mary Price, and Kimberly Stevenson: "Aquatic Sound Invasion: Weapons of Acoustic Destruction"
Andrea Ivis, Siu Yin Lie, David Myer, Alli Villines, and Ruth Wenger: "Come On, Hear the Noise! A Study Of Noise Pollution In Our Environment"
Lilian Kong, Ruth Wylie, and Ed Finn: "Collaborative and Immersive Geo-Narratives"
Rachel Mayeri: "The Human Delta"