Posts tagged ‘ecology’

Jun 4

Revisiting Fukushima: responses to an ongoing disaster

Fukushima exclusion zone, film still from Project Fukushima by Hikaru Fujii

I visited Fukushima in 2014. Fukushima. The word – like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island – is synonymous with nuclear disaster, with the release of radionuclides into the atmosphere. It is an ongoing disaster that began in March 2011, when the reactor cores at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant over-heated and exploded, releasing a catastrophic amount of radiation over a vast area of Fukushima precinct, formerly one of the largest farming regions in Japan and a travel destination with many beautiful landscapes. More than 100,000 people were displaced from their homes by the disaster. Today, those people are faced with tough choices: whether to return home (those who lived in areas that are now deemed “safe” by the government) and live with radiological risk, or to try to integrate in – sometimes hostile – host communities without government assistance, or to attempt to resettle elsewhere in Japan, far from friends and family.

Fukushima was – is – vital to Tokyo’s prosperity, as Arts Catalyst’s recent visitor, social critic and activist Sabu Khoso explained. Fukushima supplied Tokyo with food, electricity and cheap day labourers. The pressure to revive, repopulate and restore Fukushima, despite this ongoing disaster, is immense. Thus, there is no assistance offered to those who don’t want to return to their homes because of the risk.

View of the Fukushima exclusion zone. Courtesy of Don’t Follow the Wind

Fukushima was a manmade disaster, caused by the negligence of Tepco (the private company running the Daiichi power plant) and poor regulation on the part of the industry watchdog and the government. Tepco failed to develop the most basic safety requirements in the case of a tsunami, despite warnings going as far back as 2006 that a such an event could cause a blackout at the plant or worse. Now it is everyone’s problem, for radiation is uncontainable and uncontrollable once released into the environment. Tepco, who profited from the production of radiation (an expensive and – clearly – risky way to heat water to create electricity), disowned the radiation after its release. It was, it claimed, no longer its responsibility. The radiation became, to use Sabu Kohso’s phrase, a “masterless object”, one that has no owner, that became part of the commons, or, rather, a negative commons: the responsibility of us all. Spread over the hills, fields, villages and cities of Fukishima, trodden and distributed regionally by departing feet and cars, inhaled, eaten and drunk, then urinated, defecated and breathed out across Japan, spread around the country in a deliberate policy of using low-level contaminated material in road works, blown into the high atmosphere, and deliberately released in vast quantities into the Pacific Ocean, to be distributed by currents and through the food chain around the Pacific basin.

Curatorial team on a site visit in the Fukushima exclusion zone. Courtesy of Don’t Follow the Wind

Arts Catalyst’s current programme, Real Lives Half Lives: Fukushima, is a season exploring artistic, cultural and societal responses to disaster, displacement and poisoned lands through the example of Fukushima. It asks what can art do in such an ongoing catastrophe and how citizens respond to a situation that forces tens of thousands of people out of their homes, land, and communities.

Map of Fukushima exclusion zones, as at September 2015

The two solo exhibitions we are showing, by the curatorial collective Don’t Follow the Wind and the artist Hikaru Fujii, have involved collaboration with displaced people in Fukushima.

One of the most unsettling aspects of radiation contamination is its invisibility and undetectability (without specialist equipment), along with the uncertainty around its distribution and effects. Don’t Follow the Wind (Chim↑Pom, Kenji Kubota, Eva and Franco Mattes, Jason Waite) highlighted this invisibility and uncertainty by setting up an exhibition inside the evacuated area surrounding the power plant, in sites lent by former residents, including a warehouse, a farm and a recreation centre. The exhibition opened in 2015, but remains unseen. It will continue to unvisitable for years, even decades. In their exhibition, A Walk in Fukushima, visitors don special headsets made by the former residents to watch an immersive 360-degree video which takes them on a walk through the inaccessible radioactive area.

A Walk in Fukushima, Don’t Follow the Wind, Installation shot, 2017. Headsets made by three generations of the Fukushima family of artist Bontaro Dokuyama, who live just outside of the zone in a contaminated area deemed “safe to live” by the government.

Another response to the ongoing disaster was the setting up of the Fukushima! Festival by a group of artists and musicians. The first festival took place in Fukushima City, which is situated outside the designated exclusion zone but was still radiologically contaminated and subject to a major clean up, just five months after the disaster started. Artist Hikaru Fujii’s documentary film Project Fukushima! follows the preparations for a festival, as the organisers tussle with questions around the ethics of bringing people to Fukushima, and whether the festival should be an attempt to “rebrand” Fukushima in a more positive light or take a more critical stance. In the end, the film is both hopeful and profoundly unsettling.

Project Fukushima!, Hikaru Fujii, installation, the flooring was stitched for the Fukushima festival by Fukushima City residents and has been loaned for the Arts Catalyst exhibition.

Alongside these two exhibitions, a series of talks, events and activities are exploring the social, cultural and political impact of Fukushima in Japan and the lessons we may learn. These include the acts of mass protest that were held countrywide in the years following the disaster, the citizen science movement that sprang up in response to the slow release (some claimed withholding) of radiation data by the authorities, and the legal challenges and petitions against nuclear power in Japan. Despite these actions, our visitor Sabu Khoso was pessimistic that any real change in power relations or attitudes had been effected in Japanese society.

Real Lives Half Lives: Fukushima continues until July 2017. Upcoming events include a series of screenings of artists’ films about Fukushima, programmed and introduced by Kodwo Eshun of the Otolith Group; a film-making workshop using the surrealist game of Consequences to make a collaborative film; talks by curators and artists; and a workshop exploring ways of working with displaced and peripheral communities.

Nov 16

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All at sea

Let us talk about oceans. About resilience. About the sailor.

During the past week, I have had the joy of spending three days with a large group of oceanographers and other scientists and artists interested in the state of our seas. The theme of this year’s NAKFI conference, intended to foster interdisciplinary research, was ‘The Deep Blue Sea’. Beginning on the evening of the US presidential election result announcement, there was a sense of despair among the participants – from the prospects for climate change mitigation with a denier as president-elect to a deep fear about the future of academic research and science. However, by the end of our three days together, we had generated an array of new ideas, both for new research into the mesopelagic zone of the ocean (the specific focus of the conference) and for how to engage more people with ocean science and conservation, as well as a powerful sense of community and of direction around a shared matter of concern.

Part of the magic was that we all stayed in a hotel on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, the sound of endless rolling waves during our evenings together giving a powerful sense of place. It was unsurprising perhaps that there were so many sailors at this conference (as well as surfers, swimmers and divers). It seems that lovers of the sea like to encounter it in embodied as well as intellectual ways. This is my understanding of the sea: the smell of salt, the sting of spray, the power of the waves, the shifting winds and cloud shadows.

Philip Steinberg suggests that, if we wish to appreciate the ocean fully, we need to engage with its material, dynamic and aqueous nature, with its creatures and flora, as well as its political and economic role and connections and its poetic and metaphorical role in human culture. We need to think about it in ways that incorporate its endless flux of diverse elements: non-human and human, biological and geophysical, historic and contemporary. How better to do that than in the company of ocean scientists who study its ecosystems, flows and inhabitants?

Michel Foucault writes of the ship as an “other” space, one that operates socially and culturally in a very different way from most spaces: “… the boat has been for our civilisation, not only the greatest instrument of economic development, but also the greatest reservoir of imagination …. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage replaces adventure, and the police the pirates”. This conference was our small boat. More ‘sandpit’ than conference, it took a broadly open space structure this year, with people forming and reforming their own groups around ideas, thematically focused on the changing conditions of the mesopelagic zone. Extending from around 200 to 1000 metres below the ocean surface, where light is dim, the mesopelagic is home to many creatures: microorganisms, many species of fish, and other semi-deep sea animals. With so much life, the mesopelagic plays a significant role in global carbon cycling and so is critical in our changing climate.

My small group gathered around the topic of resilience: what does it mean and how is it measured? Resilience in ecology is the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb or withstand disturbances or other stressors, enabling it to resist damage and recover quickly. As people depend on ecosystems for our survival and we continuously impact the ecosystems in which we live, resilience is also a property of these interlinked social-ecological systems. And it seems that cooperation and diversity (a mix of expertise) are key to resilient systems. It was impossible not to relate – if only metaphorically – our discussions of the resilience of organisms in the mesopelagic zone to our own resilience in the face of the enormous pressures and disruptions facing human society.

Mark Dion, The Trouble With Jellyfish (2016)

Being so close to the sea made me think about the sailor, and of a sailing friend of mine whom we lost recently, the artist Nathalie Magnan.

In 2005, Nathalie and I conceived a project with some other sailing colleagues to follow the migration route across the Mediterranean by sailing boat. Sailing for Geeks 2: Ship to Shore linked Tarifa (Spain) and Tanger (Morocco). In high winds, we sailed across the Straits of Gibralter, entering each country from the sea, cooperating with the processes of immigration control. Even in a strong and well-crewed boat, with a radio, crossing the straits under sail is still dangerous, with its high winds, strong currents and busy shipping channel. As we sailed over the large waves and changed course suddenly at night to avoid a large ship, we felt some sense of what it might be like to cross this zone in one of the “pateras”, the fragile boats of fortune of the illegal migrants. In Tanger, we met two men from an organisation which works with immigrants, trying to give them “a boat for life”: a craft to succeed in Africa, rather than trying to seek happiness over the sea.

The sea means many things to me at this moment: a deeply threatened global commons, a transport arena for our consumer and fossil fuelled society, a mysterious and barely explored territory, a deep world inhabited by other species and intelligences, a contested zone of border crossings, a space of stories, and a place of death and of hope and of resilience.

Nathalie Magnan (centre in headband), me at the wheel behind her (just visible), Ewen Chardronnet (left), Peter the boat owner (right). Sailing for Geeks 2: Ship to Shore. Photo: Jacques Servin

This is a memory of a friend who taught me much and a small remembrance of two hundred people who recently died in the Mediterranean. This is also a thanks to the scientists who try to understand and protect our oceans and to the people who help migrants making dangerous crossings.

Sep 7

Graveyard of Lost Species: a monument for a changing estuary

Boat with engraved letter on its hull on a marsh.

Graveyard of Lost Species, 2016. Photo: Simon Fowler

A few weeks ago, Arts Catalyst launched the Graveyard of Lost Species, a public monument by artists YoHa (Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji) and Critical Art Ensemble in partnership with Arts Catalyst.

Graveyard of Lost Species is an outcome from an ambitious 3-year collaborative inquiry with people of Leigh-on-Sea and Southend on the Thames Estuary. Created from a Thames bawley fishing boat, rescued from the estuary mud by the partners, the names of lost species gathered through research with local people in Leigh-on-Sea and Southend, including fishermen, amateur ecologists, divers, walkers, artists, sailors and others, have been laser cut onto its hull and decks. These lost species include not just wildlife and fauna but also – recognising the inter-connections of ecology, industry, society and culture – traditional industries and occupations that have declined or disappeared, as well as objects, words and phrases associated with these. The artwork is dedicated to the people of Leigh and Southend-on-Sea.

The trigger for the collaborative project (its overall title being Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone) was YoHa artist Graham Harwood’s observations of the vast industrial infrastructures being constructed along the Thames estuary, where he lives in Leigh-on-Sea, their impact on local people, traditional industries and the estuary’s ecology, and the lack of local voices in these processes.

Traditional marine based industries (such as fishing, cockling and boat building) have for centuries provided employment for communities along the estuary. However, this heritage is rapidly declining. The government and large corporations have devised new schemes for the area, including the London Gateway, the largest deepwater port in the UK, which was under construction when we began the project. Such rapidly changing situations and intense economic interests in the area greatly concern people in local communities, but they feel they have had little or no say. Harwood, Steve Kurtz (Critical Art Ensemble) and I, drawing on their artistic practices and my curatorial interest in developing collaborative inquiries that combine art and citizen science, decided to initiate a new project. We wanted to explore whether, by using art as a critical and investigatory tool and working with a growing group of local people, we might be able to make a difference to how people think about the estuary and how it might survive the pressures that face it.

Interior of boat with carved words visible

Graveyard of Lost Species (interior).

From 2013, we have led a set of enquiries with people in Leigh-on-Sea and Southend to gather local knowledge of and expertise about what is being lost or is disappearing and what changes are taking places in the area. These began with consultation workshop to ask local people what their concerns were in respect to the new wave of industrialisation of the estuary and the impact on local culture and estuarine ecology. Much of the discussion focused on local concerns about the impact of the super port dredging activity on fish stocks, diversity and the cockle beds, and potential impact of the port’s activity on estuary wildlife, including migrating birds. Another area of discussion was the nature reserve of Two Tree Island, where many local people walk their dogs and forage for blackberries, which is built on a former landfill site that has no records of what was dumped there (as there were no regulations in force at the time).

Two main strands for our inquiry emerged. One was to uncover and highlight local knowledge about the changing ecology, society and industry of the Thames estuary by collecting stories of lost and declining species, and then to create an appropriate public monument to Leigh’s past and future. Kurtz asks: “How do you make a monument that, rather than creating a smooth ideological space in which all people are expected to feel and believe in the same way, instead accounts for difference and allows for the contradictions and conflict of history, that lets all the different voices speak out? It might be a community but there is not unity of story – there are vastly indifferent interpretations of what’s going on.” The artists’ answer was to create an ‘anti-monument’, one that would come apart, like the memories it marked, over time, and return back into the mud.

A second strand of inquiry was to investigate Two Tree Island to try to build up a picture of what might lie under the nature reserve and how toxic it might be, through speaking with people who worked there and by running citizen science workshops, and to develop creative responses to the relationship between people, soil, water and what grows in a polluted environment.

Graveyard of Lost Species in situ. Photo: Steve Barnes.

During 2014, with little funding confirmed, the team decided to run some public activities and workshops for local people to get things going, raise awareness of the project and attract participants and contributors. We set up an event at Leigh on Sea Marine Festival at which YoHa and Claudia Lastra with artists Andy Freeman and Fran Gallardo invited visitors to “eat, small and taste the Thames estuary”: tasting estuary vapours through e-cigs, smelling distilled oils from local fauna, and eating delicacies made from foraged and prepared foods from Two Tree Island. Alongside this, Freeman presented several proposed citizen science and monitoring initiatives. Following this event, we offered a series of free public exploratory workshops focused on Two Tree Island. These included a mud walk led by local amateur biologist Paul Huxster, studying eelgrass and cordgrass spatial fluctuations across the tidelands, a digital mapping workshop led by Freeman, introducing participants to a range of citizen science tools and techniques, and a wild eating and foraging workshop led by YoHa and Gallardo, guiding participants through the potential hazards of eating wild herbs, plants and fruits on this former landfill site.

Man sniffing something in the hand of smiling woman

Wrecked team at the Leigh Maritime Festival, 2014

With some funding secured from Arts Council England and the Wellcome Trust, activities and investigations were able to unfold in a more structured way in 2015. We invited Critical Art Ensemble to the UK for a month-long residency. Two local artists – Warren Harper and Stuart Bowditch – joined the team as researchers, conducting research with local people, connecting stories and examples of the ‘species’ that once flourished in the Estuary and are now disappearing. Harwood identified a local wreck – the ‘Souvenir’, a 40ft 12-ton Thames bawley grounded on the estuary mudflats. Over the summer, Harwood and Stuart Mchardy cleaned and reconfigured the boat. They sailed it ashore, siting it for its preparation and engraving in a prominent public setting by the shore on Belton Way, the main thoroughfare between Leigh station and the old town, with a large noticeboard outlining the nature of the project and the monument to lost species. The Souvenir attracted the attention of hundreds of interested passers-by, many of whom stopped to share their memories and stories with the artists and researchers.

Gallardo, YoHa, Freeman and Arts Catalyst, supported by the expertise of environmental chemist and food scientist Mark Scrimshaw, led the Two Tree inquiry. We organised a series of public events involving local foods, their source, preparation and consumption, to explore environmental change. Alongside these tastings, citizen science workshops further investigated the traces of waste disposal on Two Tree Island.

This intertwining of contemporary art practice, expert scientific knowledge, citizen science techniques and various forms of local situated knowledge has co-produced, and continues to generate, a significant new knowledge archive about the estuary, as well as generating a public conversation around the many changes to the ecology and community of Leigh on Sea. We are collecting the knowledge archive on a website – http://wrecked.artscatalyst.org/, which includes transcripts of interviews, photographs and short films.

This collective knowledge is now also taking physical and visual form, giving voice to the contributors and giving back to the community, through the public monument Graveyard to Lost Species and a soon-to-be published ecopolitical book of recipes from the local area, co-authored by Gallardo and Claudia Lastra. As the project moves forward, we are looking at other ways in which local views can be creatively expressed and heard in the governance of the estuary.

This summer, with planning permission granted from Southend Council and Natural England for its siting and installation, the Graveyard to Lost Species was sailed back onto Leigh Marshes to become part of the local landscape. With the names of many lost species carved into the boat’s hull, decks and interior, the artwork is visible to the public from the shore, and publicly accessible by foot at low tide, so that visitors can read the text on and inside the boat. It will gradually decay over many years back into the mud.

I hope that you will feel inspired to visit the monument, which is sited a short walk from the road as you enter Two Tree Island coming from Leigh-on-Sea station. Ordnance survey grid reference is TQ 82738 85478.

Further outputs, writing and discourse will continue to unfold over the coming year.

Feb 17

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Arts Catalyst’s new Centre for Art, Science and Technology opens in London

Arts Catalyst Centre for Art, Science & Technology, London. Photo: Alec Steadman

I’ve been back in the UK for the opening of Arts Catalyst’s new Centre for Art, Science and Technology in King’s Cross London, an exciting initiative for Arts Catalyst after more than twenty years pioneering art that engages with science and technology in society. In those two decades, we have commissioned over 13o artists’ projects and many exhibitions, presented in partnership with galleries, museums and other spaces across the UK and internationally. So what has driven us to set up our own Centre now?

At Arts Catalyst we remain committed, since our very first projects in 1994, to enabling and promoting artists who are investigating topics relating to contemporary science and technology and its interplay with society and the environment. Our mission is to commission and exhibit artworks that challenge our contemporary science and technology saturated society to reflect on its present shape and consider the future. We want to prompt artists, scientists, participants and audiences to ask fresh questions, explore new ideas and perspectives, and co-produce alternative solutions.

Underpinning our work is a belief that the most compelling challenges facing society, including stewardship of the planet’s natural resources, healthcare for all, future energy choices and managing emerging technologies (such as human gene editing), need transdisciplinary approaches and the voices of many diverse stakeholders. We see artistic projects as catalysts to serendipitous ideas and new directions for research, and for opening dynamic public conversations about the challenges of our changing world.

In recent years, we have keenly felt the need to have a physical space where artists and scientists can meet to experiment and generate new projects and ideas, and where we can enable more frequent direct interactions between artists, experts and audiences. We also want to use the Centre as a site for consolidation and reflection on our work further afield. Over the past decade, our investigative interests have often engaged with the ‘global commons’: those transnational realms such as outer space, the polar regions, the atmosphere, the oceans, and Earth’s biodiversity. Now we are keen to investigate the ‘commons’ – the idea that certain cultural and natural resources should be accessible to all members of a society, held in common and not owned privately – closer to home, in London and the UK.

Our opening project presents some of these themes. ‘Notes From the Field: Commoning Practice in Art and Science’ explores art as an investigative social process and experience, and reflects on science in this light too. The exhibition is built around two key elements: our ongoing art and citizen science project, led by artists YoHa and Critical Art Ensemble, with communities on the Thames Estuary – Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone, alongside a presentation of the Arte Util Archive, a project initiated by artist Tania Bruguera, that chronicles the history of art as a useful tool or tactic for changing how we act in society.

Wrecked on the Inter-tidal Zone – installation shot. Photo: Alec Steadman

Arte Util Archive, installation at Arts Catalyst Centre. Photo: Alec Steadman

The exhibition activated by talks, workshops, and resident researchers, exploring the contention that art – and science – should work collectively within society to be more useful. Contributing artists and scientists include Alistair Hudson, Co-Director of the Arte Util Association, Graham Harwood, artist from YoHa, Kit Jones from the Centre for Alternative Technology, Dimitri Launder, ‘the artist-gardener’, Dr Sylvia Nagl, transdisciplinary complexity scientist, Professor Jonathan Rosenhead from the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, design-activist Lisa Ma, artist Fernando Garcia-Dory, Sue Hull, Co-Director of the UK Wolf Conservation Trust, hacker and electronic engineer Paolo Cavagnolo, artist and technologist Andy Freeman, and artist researcher Fran Gallardo.

Lisa Ma Workshop in Notes from the Field. Photo: Alec Steadman

During the exhibition, we will be contributing to the Arte Util Archive, proposing projects particularly relating to the archive sections ‘Science’, ‘Technology’ and ‘Environment’, both from Arts Catalyst’s back catalogue and further afield. Projects we have proposed for inclusion in the archive so far include Biosphere 2, Makrolab, East of Eden, Arctic Perspective Initiative, Open Sailing, and Aerocene.’

The criteria of Arte Util state that initiatives should:
1- Propose new uses for art within society
2- Challenge the field within which it operates (civic, legislative, pedagogical, scientific, economic, etc)
3- Be ‘timing specific’, responding to current urgencies
4- Be implemented and function in real situations
5- Replace authors with initiators and spectators with users
6- Have practical, beneficial outcomes for its users
7- Pursue sustainability whilst adapting to changing conditions
8- Re-establish aesthetics as a system of transformation

We invite you to drop in, view the exhibition, chat to resident researchers, join talks and workshops, and propose projects for the archive yourself.

Notes from the Field: Commoning Practices in Art and Science is on until 12 March at Arts Catalyst Centre for Art, Science & Technology, 74-76 Cromer Street. London WC1H 8DR. On Thursday 18 February, artist Fernando Garcia-Dory presents a discussion and workshop on his Bionic Sheep project, part of the Arte Util Archive. You can also propose projects for the Arte Util Archive directly on their website.

Arte Util Archive, Arts Catalyst Centre installation. Photo: Alec Steadman

Arte Util Archive, installation at Arts Catalyst Centre. Photo: Alec Steadman

Nov 17

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Aerocene – flight without borders

black balloon, person suspended, white desert, blue sky

Tomás Saraceno. Aerocene, pilot launch at White Sands Desert, 2015. Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Rubin Center for the Visual Arts

In the dunes of White Sands desert, on Sunday 8th November 2015, for the first time in the world, a registered solar heat powered balloon carrying a human person floated for more than 2 hours without touching ground and without burning any gas.

Tomás Saraceno’s work is as conceptually rich as it is aesthetically captivating. His pursuit of a borderless existence in the sky unfolds in a bewitching succession of floating structures, transparent aerial habitations, and human-scale suspended webs. Saraceno’s artistic visions seek to defy the constraints – social, technological, political and cultural – that bind us to a ground-based, bordered, fossil-fuelled, restricted existence. And he underpins these visions with relentless research, technical experimentation and scientific collaborations.

Saraceno’s sculpture Aerocene last week had its pilot flight in the dramatic landscape White Sands desert, New Mexico, in an event organised by the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts in El Paso, curated by my former colleague Rob La Frenais with Tomas Saraceno Studio. This extraordinary flight marked the first milestone in a Saraceno’s new project the Aerocene, which takes forward his vision in the flights of aerosolar sculptures that are inflated by air, lifted by the heat of the sun alone, and transported by the wind.

Tomás Saraceno. Aerocene, air heating as the sun rises, White Sands Desert, 2015. Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Ewen Chardronnet

The artist has been experimenting with solar balloons for some years, driven by his dream of habitations in space without polluting the atmosphere with black carbon. Black carbon particles (soot) are emitted by hydrocarbon-fueled rockets and a recent scientific study has indicated that, if the space transport industry grows significantly in coming years, this black carbon could contribute to global climate change. Emissions from 1,000 private rocket launches a year would persist high in the stratosphere, potentially greatly altering global atmospheric circulation and distributions of ozone and contributing to polar temperature rises and sea ice melt.

Saraceno’s siting his new launch in the New Mexico White Sands desert area – where the first rocket launches in the United States were made and where the first tourist spaceport in the world is located – is therefore particularly significant.

Black balloon, white desert, blue sky, person suspended

Tomás Saraceno. Aerocene, White Sands Desert, 2015. Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Ewen Chardronnet

Prior to the launch, Saraceno put out a call for people to be part of a collaborative action to help the launch of his new solar balloon. The experimental flight was preceded by a conference ‘Space Without Rockets’ at the Rubin Center, organized to explore the vision, potential and contexts for the project.

On the morning of Sunday 8 November, around 25 people, including Saraceno’s team of engineers and balloonists, arrived well before dawn at the White Sands Missile Range entry point for security clearance by the US Army (having previously submitted our passport information), which controls a large part of the White Sands area.

We drove out in a convoy of cars across the desert, as twilight spread across the flat landscape. After an hour’s driving, with the sun coming up over the distant mountains, we arrived in the launch site in the heart of the white sand dunes.

Tomás Saraceno. Aerocene, White Sands Desert, 2015. Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Studio Tomás Saraceno

Saraceno’s black solar balloon was stretched out across the white sand, partially inflated with air. It lay rather limply and lop-sided in the cool dawn air, awaiting the full power of the sun’s heat to emerge. Miraculously, despite an ominous weather forecast that had made some of us a little reluctant to get out of our warm El Paso hotel beds at 3am in the morning, the sky was clear and nor was there a breath of wind.

The Aerocene sculpture materializes more than ten years of research by Saraceno and his team on material properties, thermodynamics and atmospheric science. In principle, as the sun warms the air within the balloon, the air molecules becomes less dense than the outside air, causing the balloon to rise without the burning of propane or the use of lighter-than-air gases (helium or hydrogen).

The flight of this prototype balloon was planned as a tethered flight, always connected to the ground by ropes, as its venting and control had not been tested. The radical action was to lift a person off the ground by the power of the sun itself. In the early morning, the balloon looked as though it could barely lift itself, let alone a person. But, as the desert heat gathered force and the sun’s energy bounced back off the dazzling white sand into the balloon, adding to the heating effect, the balloon gathered strength. With Marija, an experienced balloonist from Croatia, suspended by a skydiver harness below the balloon, it lifted off the ground, controlled by the volunteers holding its ropes. A gentle breeze moved the balloon along the dunes and between them.

As the sun rose further, the balloon’s strength increased, lifting Marija higher. Danja from the Studio took Marija’s place and was allowed to rise to a height of perhaps 100 feet. The balloon strained against its tethers. Six people hung onto each rope to prevent the balloon taking off. Tomas was finally persuaded to take his place below the balloon, and a few others followed him, careful checks on the harness and attachments taking places each time. The balloon became a formidable beast striving to rush upwards to its home in the blue sky. More people joined the ropes to control it. After a few hours, the expert balloonists decided it had become too powerful to control and, after some less than successful testing of the venting, the balloon was gradually brought to the ground and emptied of its blisteringly hot air.

black balloon, person suspended, blue sky

Tomás Saraceno flies his Aerocene, White Sands Desert, 2015.

Saraceno’s fascination for structures in the sky stems from his family’s exile from Argentina (when the artist was a baby) because of the Perón dictatorship. When he returned there ten years later, he felt it was no longer his home, a place where he didn’t belong. Since then, he has travelled a lot and has become interested in challenging how the nations, divisions and borders we inhabit are created on Planet Earth.

His conceptual challenge of the territorialisation of the earth by a move into the sky seems particularly relevant at this time, Europe’s new border crisis, and appropriate for exploration in El Paso, situated on the tense border between Mexico and the USA. Saraceno’s is a utopian project, both in terms of finding a new way of existing borderless, and of reaching the skies and space without polluting them.

But another factor seems apparent in the Aerocene’s connection to a more elemental and human-centered mode of existence. Our severe control over our environment and the elements (as I realised shivering in the glacial air conditioned terminal of Houston airport looking out over a shimmering landscape on my connection to El Paso) has physical and environmental impacts, as detrimental to us, I suggest, as they are beneficial.

Suspended above the desert under a vast black solar balloon, I could feel the sun burning my face, the slight breeze moving me gently, the force of the balloon tugging upwards. I looked out over a white desert dazzling under a violently blue sky, and at the scraps of vegetation struggling in this landscape, and felt the immediacy of the possibility of flying up and off in whatever direction – and across whatever border – the elements might choose, should my colleagues on the ground let go of those two slight ropes. It was an intensely sensorial experience that left me feeling profoundly alive.

Tomás Saraceno’s artistic project Aerocene is a series of sculptures that will float in the longest 0-fossil fuel journey around the world, becoming buoyant only by the heat of the Sun and infrared radiation from the surface of Earth. For COP21 Paris, December 2015, Saraceno presents Aerocene in a sculptural installation at Grand Palais.

http://www.aerocene.com/

Nicola Triscott flies Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene, pilot launch at White Sands Desert, 2015. Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Studio Tomás Saraceno

Nov 3

A personal update – seeking the view from Stateside

Neal White with Tina O'Connell, 1x1, Transformer, Washington DC, 2012

Neal White and Tina O’Connell, 1×1, Transformer, Washington DC, 2012. Photo: Tear – Tidal Basin (c) the artists *

I’m excited to let you know that, for the next 12 months, I’ll be based in Washington D.C., from where I’ll be exploring opportunities for the Arts Catalyst in the US, as well as – after 21 years leading the organisation – taking a semi-sabbatical to extend my own research and writing.

One exciting initiative that I’m involved in is as a member of the Steering Committee for the US National Academies’ Keck Futures Initiative ‘Art and Science, Engineering and Medicine Frontier Collaborations: Ideation, Translation & Realization’. The conference at the heart of this initiative takes place next week in Irvine, California, and brings together a diverse group of participants (selected from an open international call) to explore how arts, design, sciences, engineering and medicine can stimulate a renaissance of innovation to solve real-world problems, and create concrete projects that can lead to educational, cultural, social and scientific impacts. As a steering committee member, I’ll be mentoring a couple of the ‘seed idea’ groups that I’ve been involved in putting together: Developing Programs to Engage and Empower Communities to Address Threats to Ecosystems, and Creating Open Data Culture.

Another couple of conferences I’ll be participating in during the year are Aerosolar: Space Without Rockets at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts in El Paso, Texas, this week, curated by my former colleague Rob La Frenais, where I’ll be talking about the peaceful uses of outer space and attending an experimental balloon launch by artist Tomas Saraceno at White Sands, and the Association of American Geographers (AAG)’s annual meeting in San Francisco, on a panel about Geographies of Outer Space, convened by Julie Klinger and Dan Bednar of Western University in Canada, in March 2016. Also on the space-related side of my work, I’m eagerly awaiting the publication of a book to which I’ve contributed a chapter, The Palgrave Handbook of Society, Culture and Outer Space, a vital collection of texts from a broad range of disciplines that examine outer space as a dynamic and contested field, edited by Peter Dickens and James S. Ormrod. Whilst on the pricey side for most of us, I’m sure many institutions will order a copy for their libraries and I’ll ensure that the Arts Catalyst has a copy in its reference library. We’re also thinking about holding a seminar or event in London next year to explore and open up some of the book’s key themes and ideas.

During the coming year, I’ll continue to oversee the Arts Catalyst’s artistic programme whilst handing over most executive leadership to an interim Managing Director. I’m therefore delighted to announce that we’ve appointed Gary Sangster as Arts Catalyst’s Interim Managing Director. Gary has an exceptional international track record as a museum director, curator, educator and writer, and brings his vast wealth of knowledge and experience to the company. This all comes at a very exciting time for Arts Catalyst. Following our highly successful crowdfunding campaign, the Arts Catalyst’s new Centre for Art, Science and Technology opens in Cromer Street, King’s Cross in January 2016 (I’ll be back in the UK for the opening). Our opening project at the centre will be ‘Notes From the Field: Commoning Practices in Art and Science’ – details upcoming.

You can follow my work both in the USA and the UK (and anywhere else I get invited to!) via this blog and my twitter.

* Image: Neal White and Tina O’Connell’s 1×1, as part of 5×5, comprised 1,000 small vials of “tears” – water collected in Japan after the earthquake and Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant disaster (my small role in this project was in facilitating the collection of the water from Japan). Visitors were encouraged to pour the water on a cherry tree bringing about a symbolic rebirth, drawing on the specific historical connection to the gift of the Cherry Trees to Washington DC one hundred years ago. 1×1 reflected upon the range of experience and responses to the Tsunami and Fukushima Diaichi catastrophe in Japan a year before the project.

Dec 31

2014 at The Arts Catalyst

Arts Catalyst’s 20th anniversary party (photo: Shiraz Ksaiba)

Mixed reviews of 2014 as a year in the media. The Arts Catalyst meanwhile has had a pretty darned good 2014 – our 20^th anniversary year – which is remarkable considering the difficult political and economic climate in which the non-profit arts sector is situated. Our projects continued our ongoing artistic and cultural investigations into space exploration, infrastructure, nuclear energy, ecology, polar studies, and ‘epic’ residencies for artists.

We launched our year in January, in the wake of China landing a probe on the Moon triggering fears of mining operations on the Moon, by declaring an artists’ ‘Republic of the Moon’ and transforming the Bargehouse on London’s South Bank into the lunar republic’s Earth-based embassy. The exhibition was a popular and critical success. It included works by Agnes Meyer Brandis, Liliane Lijn, Leonid Tishkov, Katie Paterson, and Joanna Griffin and the Moon Vehicle Group, and an evolving installation and residency by artists We Colonised the Moon (Sue Corke and Hagen Betzwieser). We animated the exhibition with performances, workshops, music, talks, a pop-up moon shop by super/collider and playful protests against lunar exploitation.

Republic of the Moon at the Bargehouse, 2014

Lunar protest, We Colonised the Moon in Republic of the Moon

We Colonised the Moon’s lunar protest, in Republic of the Moon

Leonid Tishkov, Private Moon (installation view), RotM 2014

In June, we brought the spectacular artist road-rail vehicle SEFT-1 to London. SEFT-1 was created by Mexican artists Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene to explore the abandoned and ruined passenger railway networks of Mexico and Ecuador. Arts Catalyst, in partnership Furtherfield commissioned a new exhibition about their journeys, with video, photographs, objects, and a scale-model diorama of a viaduct ruin in Mexico, which the artists had explored on their travels. The exhibition reflected on how the ideology of progress is imprinted onto historic landscapes through the modern ruin.

SEFT-1 at Furtherfield Gallery, 2014

Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene, SEFT-1 over Metlac Bridge

Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene, SEFT-1 over Metlac Viaduct

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Model of the Metlac Viaduct, 2014

July saw us visit Japan with a group of artists to explore the artistic, societal and political responses to nuclear energy post-Fukushima. In partnership with S-AIR in Sapporo, and curated by Arts Catalyst’s associate curator Ele Carpenter, we organized the Actinium exhibition, which included works by James Acord, Shuji Akagi, Chim↑Pom, Crowe & Rawlinson, Karen Kramer, Cécile Massart, Eva & Franco Mattes, and Thomson & Craighead, which formed part of the Sapporo International Art Festival Collaborative Program and acted as a base for discussions, screenings and field trips to nuclear facilities around Hokkaido, and further afield to Eastern Japan around Fukushima.

Actinium exhibition, Oyoyo, Sapporo, 2014. Photo: Ele Carpenter

Actinium exhibition, Sapporo, 2014. Photo: Ele Carpenter

Temporary storage site for radioactively contaminated topsoil, Fukushima City,2014

Meanwhile, our curated exhibition Ice Lab: New Architecture and Science in Antarctica, commissioned by the British Council, and featuring some of the most innovative and progressive examples of contemporary architecture in Antarctica, toured from MOSI (Manchester Museum of Science & Industry) to New Zealand’s IceFest in Christchurch and then to Otago Museum, New Zealand.

Princess Elisabeth Antarctica, the first "Zero emission" polar research station in the mist at Utsteinen -Belare 2008-2009

Princess Elisabeth Antarctica, “Zero emission” polar research station, Ice Lab

Torsten Lauschmann, Whistler (in Ice Lab)

As part of our ongoing investigatory project with YoHa, Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone, we organized workshops in Leigh-on-Sea over the summer months to involve local people and artists in exploring and mapping the changing ecology of the Thames estuary. Wrecked is setting up a network of local people, artists and technologists to explore how local “situated” knowledge of the estuary can be combined with artistic investigations and citizen science techniques to explore and respond to a changing, contested estuary.

Thames Estuary, Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone. Photo: Fran Galardo

Yours truly, stuck in the mud off Leigh-on-Sea, Wrecked

Yours truly stuck in the mud off Leigh-on-Sea (the reality of being Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone). Photo: Jo Fells

The Arts Catalyst’s 20^th anniversary party in October was delightfully celebrated with many friends, glow-in-the-dark cocktails, a moon landing darts game organized by We Colonised the Moon, a whisky tornado by Bompas & Parr, and music by Teleplasmiste and the Pond Scum Light Orchestra.

Arts Catalyst’s 20th party: We Colonised the Moon’s moon landing darts. Photo: Marek Kukula

Arts Catalyst’s 20th party: Teleplasmiste & the Pond Scum Light Show

Kosmica Mexico moved into its third festival in Mexico City in November in partnership with Laboratorio Arte Alameda and the Centro Cultura Digitale, programmed by Nahum Mantra. Artists, scientists, performers, scholars, space explorers, workshop leaders and musicians from Mexico, UK, France, Canada and USA came together to explore the cultural and artistic aspects of space exploration, including Bompas and Parr and super/collider’s recreation and extension of their intoxicating and wildly popular event ‘A brief history of drinking in space’ from Republic of the Moon’ as well as topics such as sex and sexuality in space, and nostalgia for the Earth.

Bompas & Parr's Whiskey Tornado at Kosmica Mexico

Marie-Pier Boucher, Nahum Mantra and Ale de la Puente try out Bompas & Parr’s Whisky Soda Vaporisation Chamber in ‘A Brief History of Drinking in Space’ at Kosmica Mexico 2014

In a series of international “epic residencies” throughout the year, we enabled artist Alistair McClymont to spend several weeks at the Central Laser Facility in Didcot with some of the most powerful lasers in the world, facilitated visits and field trips for six artists and curators to Japan (Revital Cohen, Tuur Van Balen, Ele Carpenter, Jon Thomson, Alison Craighead, Karen Kramer and Susan Schuppli), and supported Kuai Shen’s research in Yasuni National Park, Ecuador. We also advised and supported the Mexican project La Gravedad de los Asuntos, led by Nahum Mantra, which – inspired by The Arts Catalyst’s zero gravity programme (2000-2005) – saw a group of Mexican artists and scientists, including Ivan Puig, Ale de la Puente, Arcángel Constantini, Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, Gilberto Esparza, Iván Puig, Juan José Díaz Infante, Marcela Armas, Miguel Alcubierre, Tania Candiani and Nahum, go to Star City Russia and undertake artistic research in zero gravity.

All that and a new website, our first e-reader, and a map of the Arts Catalyst’s two decades of experimental, trail-blazing projects.

20 years of Arts Catalyst projects

And, towards the end of the year, we said ‘au revoir’ to curator Rob La Frenais, off to undertake new freelance projects (although he will be working with Arts Catalyst on one-off projects in the future) …

HAPPY 2015!!!

Art, Science, Technology & Society

Posts tagged ‘ecology’

Revisiting Fukushima: responses to an ongoing disaster

All at sea

Graveyard of Lost Species: a monument for a changing estuary

Arts Catalyst’s new Centre for Art, Science and Technology opens in London

Aerocene – flight without borders

A personal update – seeking the view from Stateside

2014 at The Arts Catalyst

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