Jarvis Cocker saves the world
Invited to guest edit Radio 4′s Today Programme this morning, Jarvis Cocker launched into a passionate plea to government to take a less foot-dragging laissez-faire response to climate change:
A few months ago I went on a trip to the Arctic set up by an organisation called Cape
Farwell to see the effects of climate change at first hand. Whilst on
board we also went to lectures by scientists who told us, among other
things, what it was that individuals could do to try and help with the
biggest problem facing the world at this time, and that part I found
profoundly depressing because it basically came down to things like,
“Go and buy some energy changing light bulbs.”
Although
I believe that the actions of individuals are important, it seemed to
me that the problem was so large and so profound that it would be nice
if we got a bit of help from somewhere else. If the only things that
would have the necessary impact would be to make radical changes to
things like food transportation, deforestation or air travel, it would
be nice to think that the government might help out with some
legislation designed to address those issues. And that’s why I got
depressed. Because non-interventionist laissez-faire free market
policies have been the order of the day for so long, why would they
change now?
Then I came home.
The thing about being on a boat in the middle of the arctic ocean is
there’s no telephone or wi-fi coverage. Whilst we’d been up there
observing one kind of meltdown, it seemed that another kind of meltdown
had been taking place in the world’s financial markets. In fact, we
came through Reykjavik airport on the day that Iceland basically went
bust, though none of us knew it at the time.
Banks were going under and a massive stock market collapse had
occurred. And lo and behold, one of the first things that followed was
a massive government intervention. And I thought, “Hang on, perhaps,
bizarrely, there’s a chink of light here. If the government is wiling
to intervene decisively in such a huge way in this area, maybe it would
intervene in another area – climate change – too.”
Read more here.
Seoul searching
Earlier this year I interviewed Winy Maas of architects MVRDV about a beautiful small-scale project he was doing in Rotterdam called Didden Village. Back then I wrote: “MVRDV’s signature “obsession” — the word Maas uses for it — is density:
the idea of using urban space intensely to create a sustainable future.”
When I met him he was just off a plane from Seoul. It turns out what he was doing there is this: Gwanggyo, a competition-winning future city which MVRDV have imagined to house 77,000 people self-sufficently. The terraces provide green space, also creating ventilation and minimising water use.
MVRDV have a great history of radically reimagining cityscapes, from their book Five Minute City (everything you need within five minutes travel), to radical urban farming, Pig City, to thought experiments like Skycar City (what if someone invented a car that worked in 3D). They make the future sound fun again.
I found news of this latest project this on Bruce Sterling’s Wired Blog. Sterling comments giddily on MRVDV’s prize-winning design: “Great to see some out-there major building for people who aren’t,
like, bloated panic-bankers and outre Bond-villain petrocrats.
If we could just pry the red-hot cash away from the jittery financial overlords
and bloodstained fossil merchants, and spread it around the general
planetary population, man, tomorrow’s cities could look great.”
To the barricades!
Heather and Ivan Morison’s latest work at the first One Day Sculpture event in New Zealand was this gargantuan work filling a street in the centre of Wellington, Journée des barricades. The brief was: “to produce a new work that will occur during a discrete 24-hour period over the course of one year.” The scuplture, continuing the Morison’s vision of a world teetering on the edge of impending chaos, was erected on the night of 13th December, created out of urban debris including wrecked vehicles, and dismantled the following night.
2008
From the main website:
As the year ends and a new one begins, it’s time to take stock of the
work we saw in 2008. One thing is conspicuous; the volume of art that
in some way encountered the subject matter of ecology suggests there is
an increasing sense of urgency and engagement in the arts world. 2008
was also a year of major art events focussing on the environment, from Greenwashing in Turin to 48 Degrees Celcius public.art.ecology in Delhi – both of which featured artworks that were RSA Arts & Ecology
commissions. In London, Frieze commissioned artists around the loose
theme of “engaging with the ecology of the fair and its surroundings.”
This
is a list of personal choices by ourselves and our colleagues, pieces
that we thought were worth revisiting. It includes work by major name
artists like Olafur Eliasson and Catherine Yass, and also a few names we hope you’ll be hearing more of in the future. Take a look here. And let us know the artworks you thought shone out in 2008.
Greenwashing: even the Pope does it
The Pope draws a parallel between the advance of gay rights and the destruction of the rainforest, (“The tropical forests do deserve our protection; but man, as a creature, does not deserve any less,”). Millions scratch their heads.
Art as a Trojan horse
The latest print edition of Neural Magazine includes a single piece of yellow notepad paper – apparently at least. I haven’t seen it yet. On this sheet, readers are encouraged to write a letter to the White House. This letter will be then filed away alongside the billions of others.
The special notepaper has been produced by computer artists Douglas Easterly and Matt Kenyon of SWAMP. Each line on the notepaper contains the micro-printed details of civilian casualties in Iraq. By sending it to the White House smuggling the ignored officially-ignored consequences of the Iraq war it created back into the White House. It’s a kind of Trojan horse. Sometimes it’s symbolically important just to get your own back on a culture that has ignored so many of the consequences of its actions.
This isn’t the first SWAMP project to commemorate the civilian dead in Iraq, largely ignored by the media. In 2005 they created their IED – improvised empathetic device, an electronic band worn around the arm. The armband was linked to the website icasualties.org. Whenever news of a new US army fataility was posed on the site, the armband would be triggered to plunge a needle into the arm of the wearer, drawing blood and enforcing empathy through pain. “The LCD
readout displays the soldiers’ name, rank, cause of death and
location and then triggers an electric solenoid to drive a
needle into the wearers arm, drawing blood and immediate
attention to the reality that a soldier has just died in the
Iraq war.”
(Which sounds kind of brutal, but it’s probably less painful than the experience of seeing something like Thomas Hirshhorn’s The Incommensurable – yards and yards of photographs of the mutilated Iraqi dead culled from the web – at Fabrica a couple of months ago.)
Pessimism, optimism, pt 2
After hearing the latest news about the increasing rate of Arctic melt, Bibi van der Zee burst into tears. She wonders whether it’s time to give up. Conventional social wisdom says that bad news does not make people act. Maybe she’s an example of that.
The current poll question on the RSA Arts & Ecology page, posed by Gemma Lloyd, is, Are apocalyptic facts more effective in motivating people to change than positive messages? As it stands, the voting is Yes 52%, No 40% and undecided 8%.
Photo: Museo Aero Solar, by Tomas Saraceno, as mentioned by matthew here. A more heart-lifting artistic act of collective intervention.
Pessimism, optimism, pt 1
There is a massive gulf between what we now know about climate change and what we’re prepared to do about it. There’s a phrase that people use at the RSA to describe the difference between what we say we want to do and what we actually do; researchers here talk about the social aspiration gap.
I caught up with this post from Bill McKibben on Grist yesterday, about Al Gore’s speech at Poznan. McKibben was there to observe and to proselytise for 350.org, the campaign to hold the allowable limit for atmospheric CO2 concentrations at 350 parts per million.
This figure is based on research by NASA scientist James Hansen’s paper released in April this year which concluded baldly: “If humanity
wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and
to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate
change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at
most 350 ppm.”
Recent research – including new reports that the thawing of Arctic permafrost is already releasing methane quantities that suggest warming feedback is already galloping away – is not particularly good news for the UN process leading up to COP15 at Copenhagen next year. The world’s political machinery is already having a very hard time dragging reluctant governments to the target of between 445 and 535ppm, numbers which this newer research says are way too high. Our current idea of civilisation is unstustainable at the targets that the UN is already struggling to meet.
McKibben writes about the mixture of euphoria and despair, pessimism and optimism, in the response to Gore’s speech:
And then, on the last day of the talks, Al Gore gave his speech,
which drew everyone into the main conference hall. It was a good talk,
but by far the longest and loudest applause came when he formally
announced the new reality. “Even a goal of 450 parts per million, which
seems so difficult today, is inadequate,” he said, adding that we “need
to toughen that goal to 350 parts per million.” People erupted –
probably not the Chinese and American delegations, and definitely not
the Saudis and the Russians, but all the people who’d spent the last
few years struggling with the idea that their work was getting
increasingly off-the-point. It was a way of saying: We’ve been engaged
in saving the treaty, not saving the world — and we’d rather save the
world.
Currently, projections of CO2 emissions for this century put the world at somewhere in the region of 680ppm. In RSA-speak, we’re looking at a quantifiable social aspiration gap of a whopping 680-350= 330ppm.
Photo: Villagers threatened by flooding in Munshiganj, Bangladesh, 2007. Photo courtesy of the Canary Project which uses photography and artwork to help visualise the consequences of human-induced climate change to stimulate people to action.
Art, peak oil and imagining the future
David Cross of Cornford and Cross writes on the RSA Arts & Ecology website today about how he believes the rules of artistic engagement are about to change :
As producers of visual culture, our moments of autonomy can be
frustratingly elusive. We must inform and persuade, and appeal to both
reason and emotion if we are to replace passive spectatorship with
conscious action. 
But in the market, attention is finite, and the
demands on our audiences’ time are many. Even our most original and
radical messages are assembled from borrowed fragments and framed by
preconceptions. To be meaningful, they must be palatable to audiences
accustomed to more familiar narratives.
Following established procedures can bring acceptance, and conforming to received ideas is often well
rewarded. But now the cheap oil is gone and the climate is badly
damaged; we are entering a new era. Though the nature of the coming
risks cannot be exactly predicted, a safe bet is that their reach,
scale and variety will demand many different responses. We cannot
prepare for all the uncertainties and surprises ahead, so diversity
offers a better chance of success than centralization and uniformity.
Besides, experiments are more interesting than blueprints…
Of course it is vital that visual communication is used to promote a
massive reduction in consumption. But if society is to adapt in time,
the issue is no longer simply about raising awareness. Rather, it is
about developing more radical ideas and alternatives. In
addition to producing aesthetic and contemplative experiences,
contemporary art and design should test concepts, assumptions and
boundaries in everyday life, and imagine new ways — material and
intellectual — of going about the world.
More here.
Santasmagoria
Marc Quinn reimagines Santa for The Guardian. “Santa is usually seen as an old man, but I imagine him as having a one-year lifespan. Every January 1 he’s reborn as a baby, in an eternal cycle”.
See also the contributions from Bob and Roberta Smith, Polly Borland and Gillian Wearing’s Disgraced Santa of Selfridges.
RSA Bookshop
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Future RSA Events- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - State of Emergency October 20, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Reporting Live From The End of the World October 15, 2010
- The Flaw October 11, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Dispatches from the Dark Side -The Death Of Justice October 8, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-One Can Pay October 7, 2010