Here Today: Moving Images of Climate Change

The Significance of Sound

2011-03-14T05:06:00.000-07:00

I want us to think about sound. I went to a talk last week on the rhythm of sound by Frauke Behrendt. It got me thinking about the importance of sound as a form of movement and embodiment - how sound interacts with and moves our body, but in relation to the landscape or the different scapes/spaces around us. Frauke was discussing an example of mobile sound art in Boston, USA, which attempts to translate the topography of the landscape and its rhythms into sound to create a soundscape in conversation with the land and its history (including that of its inhabitants). Walkers navigate the spaces of the island through the movement of sound which is communicated to them via GPS. Sound may be the missing element in our artwork - sound links us to the embodied, the body, through movement, music, sonics. It can create a connection, or a disconnection. I'm really interested in how sound can enhance the visual experience - either synchronically or non-synchronically. Sound interesting?

Project Update

2011-01-26T20:51:00.000-08:00

After David received a commission from National Theatre Wales to create a project about the weather in Snowdonia, we have had to suspend the project for a few months. We'll be back together - and back online - from February 2011, so watch this space...

Movement

2010-05-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

The subtitle of our project is 'Moving Images of Climate Change'. We want to change existing (media) images of climate change, because they often focus upon climate impacts, and we want to use moving image as a medium to do this. We want to use bodies in movement in our moving images.

But, the most profound image of the last few weeks has been related to the lack of movement. I mean, grounded planes, not moving, no movement in the skies. How odd that the planes don't fly. How wonderful that they don't. Stillness and lack of movement can also make us think, reflect and question. Where does this leave us in relation to movement in our artwork?

Response to Madeleine Bunting essay on RSA Website

2010-05-11T09:56:00.001-07:00

Just read Madeleine Bunting's essay for the RSA Arts and Ecology website. Here are a few things it provoked and raised for me...

Bunting says that "the crisis [of climate change] is not just one of climate change but of epistemology - of how we know the world and our place in it" and goes on to state that "we all have as much information about climate change as we need". This made me think again about different forms of knowledge, and in particular about embodied knowledge, about knowledge that is felt and carried and learned and understood through the body itself. A general tone running through the essay is that climate-themed art exhibitions are underattended: that they do little to engage people in thinking (or feeling) about climate change if they're not doing it already. Bunting describes her experience at one of the RETHINK exhibitions in Denmark that were linked to the Climate Summit last year, writing about how the pieces that engaged her body and her senses were most affective and effective in terms of getting her to think about the physical world and her/our place in it.

We've talked before about embodiment, and about embodied ways of knowing, and also about our anxiety that an artwork framed in an art context is always already somehow removed from the everyday context in which climate change feeling and thinking most urgently needs to be embedded. The essay has returned me again to these questions, and it feel every more important for us to think about the public context and presentation and physical, sensual, emotional form of this project as fundamental to its creation: not making an artwork and then installing it in a place; rather, making an artwork for a place, with a place, and as such somehow with and for the people that inhabit that place in their everyday lives...

I don't know what this means in terms of our manifesto, and our idea that the work will take many forms, appearing in more than one place, in more than one form, at more than one time...

Our Manifesto

2010-04-23T01:28:00.001-07:00

Earth: Art in a Changing World

2010-04-23T01:27:00.003-07:00

Thoughts on the "Earth" exhibition at the Royal Academy

The Weather

2010-04-23T01:27:00.001-07:00

Thinking about whether the weather is an important theme for this project...

Here and Elsewhere

2010-04-23T01:25:00.000-07:00

Thinking about places and spaces...