Quotations from: Giannachi, Gabriella. “Representing, Performing and Mitigating Climate Change in Contemporary Art Practice.” Leonardo (Oxford) 45, no. 2 (2012): 124-31.

This is a great article for me to read and return to later to consider. It introduces several artists and projects I should know about as well as a summary of a few approaches to responding to climate change in art.

While artists have dealt with the growing realization that our climate is changing in different ways, it is noticeable that, among the types of works analyzed in this article, artists have tended to adopt one or more of three strategies:

1. Representations – emphasizing visualization and communication

2. Performance environments – emphasizing immersion and experience

3. Interventions – emphasizing mitigation and behavioral change. (125)

I propose here that each of these strategies has so far led to important and efficacious works and that each of them is of aesthetic, social and political value. (125)

Cape Farewell, an organization aiming to communicate the realities of climate change within the artistic and educational contexts, tends to generate work belonging to the first category, although, as an organization, it also operates through the other two categories. Its primary objective is the communication of climate change through art (hence the title of their world-touring exhibition Art and Climate Change [2006]), which they achieve by organizing expeditions (emphasizing experience) (Fig. 1) intended to encourage interdisciplinary debate on climate change and to affect artists so that they may create inspiring work on this topic (emphasizing behavioral change). The organization states as its mission “to develop the production of art founded in scientific research,” “by exposing artists to the world’s climate tipping points” and incorporating scientific collaboration into artistic practice. (125)

Among the most interesting works generated through Cape Farewell was Antony Gormley’s Marker 1 (2005), an imposing ice statue with human contours, which brought together in one image the causes and effects of climate change [10]. The statue, which stood on the frozen sea of the Qord until it melted the following spring, was finally reclaimed by the sea. (125)

David Buckland’s video Sinking Ice (2004), showing the top of an iceberg hanging precariously over the ocean and finally sinking into it. The video, playing on the notion of the sublime, was watched, according to Julian Knebusch, for over 40 minutes by a number of visitors to the Cape Farewell touring exhibition, almost as if they were waiting for the accident and the catharsis it offered to the tragedy of climate change – to happen (2008). (125-26)

[…] German art collective artcircolo. The group, consisting of artists, technologists, curators and scientists, has worked for a number of years specifically on the theme of water, developing transdisciplinary research, talks involving the general public, commercial products and artwork. (126)

Participants in events curated by artcircolo are often encouraged to consider their behavior and to imagine change. This was particularly noticeable in work developed as part of their collaboration with Dutch artist Wapke Feenstra, who often transforms spectators into participants by asking them to reflect about local histories in an attempt to tie particular environments to the socioeconomic conditions that generated them. (126)

Other examples of works curated by artcircolo are German sound artist Kalle Laar’s Calling the Glacier (2007) (Fig. 5), an interactive installation that allowed people who dialed a given telephone number to listen live to the sound of a melting glacier, and Icelandic artist Rúrí’s gigantic video projections showing waterfalls in Iceland, such as Tortimi/Fall – Passage (2009), in which a metal framework supports a very long photograph of a waterfall on a roll, the end of which continually disappears into a machine to symbolize how waterfalls are vanishing from the Icelandic landscape. (127)

As is typical for artists curated by artcircolo, both Laar and Rúrí’s works focus on water, and both attempt to sonify and visualize the unfolding of environmental catastrophe. Laar’s work, which broadcasts a live phenomenon succeeds in bringing a remote occurrence close by, thus also dealing with one of the biggest difficulties in climate change communication: the rendering of something occurring over time, often in remote environments, to diverse and distributed audiences. (127)

YES — see Rob Nixon Slow Violence

Other examples of artworks belonging to the first category – art that facilitates communication on climate change – include dystopian works, often using shock, such as Petko Dourmana’s Post Global Warming Survival Kit (2008). (127)

[…] Chris Bodle ‘s The Watermarks Project (2009), a public art project visualizing the effects of climate change on the British coastline through a series of large- scale “flood marks” showing potential future high-water levels projected onto the facades of buildings across Bristol.

I’m confused: Eve S. Mosher’s Highwaterline project in Bristol did the same thing, basically.

While all these works variously engage the public in what climate change may mean to different communities around the globe, often utilizing icons of climate change in shocking ways, they tend to be grounded in representation and privilege visualization over a haptic, multi-sensory and performative experience. (127)

Examples of work belonging to the second category – art facilitating the experience of climate change – are numerous and often adopt performance strategies, as we have seen with artcircolo and Cape Farewell, to generate immersive environments, so that climate change may be experienced directly as well as analyzed. (128)

Andrea Polli ‘s powerful Sonic Antarctica project (2007-) (Article Frontispiece), a radio broadcast, live performance and sound and visual installation featuring recordings of the Antarctic soundscape made during Polli ‘s 7-week National Science Foundation residency in Antarctica. (128)

Crucially, Polli draws attention to one of the most important aspects of interdisciplinary work addressing climate change, namely, the translational work involved in presenting data to the public within an artistic context. (128)

Polli has been able to generate evocative and compelling works that operate as representations – effectively communicating climate change by translating data – as well as events, since the sonifications are reconstituted as performances and installations that allow for an immersive, multi-sensory experience. (128)

The third strategy entails works that encourage behavioral change. While all art may generate some level of change, these works operate by producing change in a particular community as part of the work (128).

(About Sustainable Bandung) This hybrid work entailed research, community work, the development of a new ecology and an artwork, operating ecologically, environmentally and aesthetically to effect change. (129)

(About a project by architect Uzman Haque) Among their numerous important projects is Natural Fuse (2008-), which “harnesses the carbon-sinking capabilities of plants to create a city-wide network of electronically assisted plants that act both as energy providers and as shared ‘carbon sink.'” (129)

As noted by Bruno Latour, contemporary environmental problems are “hybrid” and involve both nature and culture [20] . Culture therefore is not only a means to represent, perform and understand nature but also a way of changing nature. Likewise, nature is a fundamental axis for cultural change. A change in nature is a change in culture. (129)

To understand what this means more precisely, I return to Ingold and his definition of nature. For him nature is not opposed to landscape – although it is not the same either – and neither is it space, but rather “it is the world as it is known to those that dwell therein, who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them” [21]. (129)

Look up Ingold, T. (2000), The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London and New York: Routledge, p. 41. Read what he says about “taskscapes”

The use of a taskscape as an artistic process, as is evident, for example, in Francisco’s Agua Benita and Iskandar’s Babakan Asih Water Story, which use performance as a task to effect environmental change, then becomes a direct engagement, or, to use Ingold’s words, a “mutual interlocking” between humans and their environment. Environment here is not only seen but is experienced as process and encountered in its performance – with the participants, in the case of Babakan Asih Water Story, generating societal change.

We have seen how in order to address climate, and its encompassing of cultural and physical factors, some of the most interesting works in this area utilize inter- disciplinary methodologies, usually drawing from art and science. This has often generated aesthetically hybrid works. (130)

Furthermore, a number of works have simultaneously offered insight into climate change as a “natural” phenomenon (occurring in nature) and a “cultural” one (generated by and modifiable through cultural behavior) . This has frequently led to the simultaneous presentation of climate change in nature and in culture, which has required a repositioning of the viewer from spectator to participant, thinker, citizen scientist or even activist. (130)

Finally, a number of intertextual and intermedial forms are often utilized concurrently, pairing, for example, modernist uses of “shock” with romantic notions of the “sublime” and postmodernist discourses on trace and erasure. Some of the artists privilege representation, others generate performance environments and a few aim to effect behavioral change, at either an individual or a community level. A number of works utilize these strategies concurrently to provoke instinctive reactions and encourage analysis. (130)

Reflecting on the work of The Climate Project (TCP), Buontempo noted that their strategies can be read in conjunction with those discussed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan (2007), where he describes two systems: (1) “the experiential” and (2) “the cognitive,” in which emotions fall within the former. System 1, for Taleb, is “effortless, automatic, fast, opaque (we don’t know that we are using it)” and constitutes an “intuition.” System 2, on the other hand, is what we call “thinking.” It is “slow, logical, serial, progressive, and self-aware.” Mistakes, Taleb notes, occur when we use System 1 when in fact we should use System 2 [28] . Buontempo suggests that to make decisions on scales (both spatial and temporal) that we cannot grasp directly, as is necessary in climate analysis, we need to switch off our emotional reaction and relay to the cognitive system, bringing into play System 2. The best way to bridge the gap, for him, in order to then communicate findings to the public, is to identify a narrative that is understood by System 1 in an instinctive way but can also convey the results obtained by System 2 while offering the opportunity for further analysis and debate. (130)

By juxtaposing Systems 1 and 2 through the identified strategies, a number of the artworks described in this article are able to capture attention and produce strong instinctive reactions while also being informative and generating important and possibly impactful debates on one of the most controversial and pressing imperatives of our time. (130)

Look up Carlo Buontempo, senior scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research (MOHC) and Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s The Black Swan (2007)