“Can art ask the questions? Can art give us some of the answers on, how we as humans have to change not to destroy the planet we inhabit?” (Adrian Hughes, TV-host at Smagsdommerne, TV-show at DR, Danish public broadcast)

“The aesthetic can affect you and make you realize that there are something you have to relate and respond to anyway. Because that’s where we are now. We are in a place, where we have to learn to relate to climate change.” (Barbara Stephensen, guest at Smagsdommerne)

“Can and shall they [artists] artists respond to ethical questions, as they do here at this exhibition, RETHINK?” (Barbara Stephensen, guest at Smagsdommerne)

“Now the question is, if they [artists] are able to take part in the debate about ethic and not just stay at the aesthetic level?”

(Barbara Stephensen, guest at Smagsdommerne)

“If not art should answer current questions and give us hope and faith and answers and knowledge, then I don’t know what the role of art is! And that is also why, excuse me for the expression, damn disappointed about this [RETHINK]!”

(Simon Andersen, guest at Smagsdommerne)

These are questions and comments from the Danish art and culture magazin,

Smagsdommerne
(The Tasting Panel). Last Thursday (11.05.09) RETHINK was discussed and reviewed on Danish public broadcast. See a presentation of the RETHINK exhibition and judge the tasting panel’s opinions (if you understand Danish). And/or read our many interesting articles about these questions and discuss, here on this blog, your opinion about the role of art and the RETHINK exhibition with the authors, the artists, and other people interested in climate art.

“I believe that one of the reasons for this is that common science does not make common sense.” (Malina)

Sciences have long been separated from society and been perceived as something we cant really grasp or understand. The scientist sees everything mediated, through tools and instruments, almost none is captured directly by the naked senses, and the everyday man doesn’t have a decent change to understand this. Looking at climate change as phenomenon is not something we can really look at or feel, just as we can see the rain or feel temperature. The way our brains and senses works and are trained, are simply not capable of confronting us with the reality of climate change, argues Roger Malina, editor of Leonardo, MIT Press. 

But in order to survive the changes in climate we need a rapid cultural mutation. Art has an important role to play in this societal transformation: “The work of artists in promoting art-science and art-technology collaboration is in a very real sense part of the tool kit for survival.” (Malina).

Malina writes about how science is changing due to this new paradigm and about how we have to create knowledge and educate our brains to be able to perceive and realize climate change. The arising new kind of science and knowledge is a science that breaks out of the laboratories and become accessible for you, me, and everybody. It becomes decentralized, collaborative, and works rather bottom-up than top-dowm. Through the internet, more open education, and new public access to scientific data and instruments there are signs that kinds of ‘micro science’ are developing-- a new form of people’s science, Malina argues.

Exemplified through the work of a variety of climate artists, Malina shows how these artists are part of this new movement of ‘micro science’ and people’s science. “I think one of the interesting new developments is a generation of artists that is now collecting data about their world using scientific instruments but for their cultural purposes. Not only are they making powerful art, they are making science intimate, sensual, intuitive. And we need our children to experience the work of these artists.” (Malina).

How can art provide us with a survival kit for surviving? How can art change the way we understand science and how can this new mutation of as well art as science possibly slow down climate change?

Please read Roger Malinas article Rethinking Art as Intimate Science: Climate Art as a Hard Humanity and share your opinion about the future role of art and the ways in which science might change.
 

The Finnish culture is based on tribal, ethnical, and often nomadic cultures largely dependent on their surrounding nature and environmental realities. These societies are/were closely connected to mythical religions and rituals. Urbanisation is a relatively recent phenomenon in Finland.

In their essay The Position of Art in the Survival Society Taina Kinnunen (Professor of cultural anthropology) and Ilmari Leppihalme (Ph.Lic. and researcher in literature) give us a glimpse of Finnish art dealing with climate change. Specifically, they analyse the work of two contemporary artists: Osmo Rauhala and Kari Sallamaa. “Without doubt, the mythopolitics of both artists is nostalgic but, simultaneously, they are future oriented.”

Kinnunen and Leppihalme argue that these two artists provide us with a possible alternative to our rational and individualized western society and life style, and believe that these artists might well be right in their prophesy of a future ethnic renaissance for tribal societies and their way of living.  “Rauhala and Sallamaa are pioneers of mythopolitics, which is likely to gain ground in the survival society and which sets the mythical and natural worldview against the technological and economic rationalism of the dominant Western culture. In art, mythopolitics represent an alternative to individualism, the cult of genius, and the canons of genre.”

Is art really sensible enough to tell us how we will live in the future? Or is art just the only discipline that dares to reveal for us how life will really be for us in the future? Do we need to go BACK to the so-called ‘primitive’ lifestyle to deal with the climate crises, or are there other paths for us to go?
 

In her essay, The Art of Recognition Emma Ridgway, curator at the RSA Arts and Ecology Centre, argues that we now find ourselves in a time and situation, a new, improbable form of life, where we humans have become co-creaters of our environment – we have become as gods, but we do not yet fully recognize and accept this very frightening responsibility and even less do we know what to do with it! Rigdway claims that the arts have the potential to help us realize and submit to this new position. 

“The message that human progress has damaged nature is holding us back – we have become an integral and powerful part of nature – it is an uneasy responsibility.” (Rigdway) So how can we get good at being as gods? How can we become enlightened enough to generate technologies, behaviors and ways of thinking that will be adequate responses to the changes ahead of us? And what role might art play in this necessary rethink of our relationship to our world?” (Ridgway)

Read Rigdway’s essay and debate her statement and her questions here at the blog.
 

“We are the Google Earth generation. We need to observe everything from above, from afar, through the glasses of a scientific model.” (Pold)

In his article Imaginary Interfaces in the Blue Sky, Søren Pold, Associate Professor of Digital Aesthetics at University of Aarhus, gives a broad overview of different digital artworks dealing with climate change. Pold argues that climate art offers us the necessary goggles to understand and deal with the complexity of the changing climate, which has turned into yet another layer of structures and signs that demands involved interpretation. However difficult and opaque for the lay(wo)man the climate has become an issue we all should have an opinion to and do something about.

“The climate crisis introduces us to the fact that our immediate surroundings are being mediated by complex visualisations, interfaces, statistics and carbon quotas” (Pold).

Art’s role is, as it has been so often before, to explore and discuss how we perceive and take possession of our surrounding. To just mention some examples, this can be done by visualizing complex structures and connections in new ways, by making physical rooms we can step into and feel the changed surroundings, by making information tactile and present for the viewer, by making humoristic or obscure media events, by creating social network structures, which can mobilize people. The art should give us the possibility to “change our perception of our environment in order to better understand and deal with it.” (Pold)

It is true, that art really has the power to change our perception on the environment? Can artworks deliver interfaces for change? Can a visualization of Helsinki’s energy use really make a difference in the long run, or is it just a short time impact? Can artists expose empty rhetoric and green washing? Can art open up to the process and the blind spots in science labs? Can art really address and let us experience the epistemological challenges?

Please read Søren Pold’s article and let us know your opinion.
 

Welcome to the debate forum for rethinking and discussing the character and role of art and climate change. It is my hope to establish and moderate a discussion covering a broad variety of art and art forms that in different ways deal with global warming. The debate forum is still only in its initial phase but more content will soon be added

At the RETHINK exhibition you can experience a broad range of artworks dealing with climate change from different perspectives. Artists collaborating with scientists, artists using and reforming scientific data, aesthetic art showing nature, social networks and activist movements aiming to intervene in people’s lives or make them more aware of climate change, political art discussing climate change, new technological designs, live role plays etc.-- artworks that opens up a wide discussion about the role of art today.

Can art really tell us something about complex matters as climate change?
Where are the borders between art, design/technology and science, and do we need to maintain these borders to protect science as well as art? What do artists do different from scientists or engineers? Can art help us change the way we live, the way we consume and the way we understand the ecological system we live in? Does the artist have a special position in the discussion about climate change, or is it just a lucrative area for the artist to get involved in? How can artworks, as those presented at RETHINK, influence public awareness and opinion and the political negotiations at COP15?

These questions and many more Will be on this blog for you to read about and debate.

Writers that contribute articles, which you will soon be able to read:

• Emma Ridgway, Arts and Ecology, RSA, UK
• Amanda McDonald Cowley, Curator and director of Eyebeam, NY
• Marda Kirn, EcoArts
• Troels Degn Johansson, Lector at the Danish School of Design, Denmark
• Roger Malina, Leonardo Books, USA