Archives of the Present-Future: Climate Change and Representational Breakdown (Avery Review, 2016) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The fiction of aftermath: Public Art, public imagination and the aesthetics of climate change
[From introduction]What contribution can public art make to public understandings of climate change? Posing such a question opens the door to well-traversed debates regarding the social role and political aesthetics of art, and specifically, art’s capacity to engage the public in pressing local and global crisis. But the concern here is not whether public art can generate any tangible outcomes or social benefits in relation to Anthropogenic crisis as has been the purview of some recent research in the field of socially engaged eco-art (Mar, Lally, Ang and Kelly). But rather how, within the context of current and immanent ecological crisis, art may catalyse critical, affective conceptions of climate change on the level of the imagination. To this end the imagination is not to be treated as something that mediates the interior of the mind and the exterior of the world but rather, as an affective force that underpins our relations with the world and the discourses through which we make meaning of our everyday lives (Yusoff and Gabrys). Adopting such an approach is critical to understanding what can be described as the futurist orientation of climate change, because, as Yusoff and Gabrys argue, ‘the imagination not only shapes the perception of climate change but co-fabricates it in ways that effect the possibilities to act upon it’ (520). In this light, this essay is specifically concerned with the ways in which public art is in dialogue with political rhetoric and media imagery to shape imaginings of climate change. Thus, it takes into consideration the wider field of discourses that shape public perceptions, and proceeds from the premise that art does not have a monopoly on aesthetics, but is rather competing with forms of knowledge production and transmission in the public arena that also have aesthetic capacities. This means that it seeks to interrogate how anthropogenic crisis and its dominant narrative of climate change are given cultural meaning and communicated in the public arena, drawing upon both sociological and art theoretical understandings of the relationship between aesthetics and social change. It focuses on one specific public artwork, Activate 2750 (2009) [Figure 1], by the Australian artist Ash Keating, and one specific aspect of climate change politics that is central to this work: catastrophe and apocalypse. Ultimately it argues that through Keating’s fictionalisation of apocalypse, Activate 2750 offers the public an opportunity to engage with the figure of catastrophe in a manner that, however dystopian, is not constrained by the moral binaries which frequently circumscribe public discussions around the future implications of climate change.
Climate Change and the Problem of Representation
Australian Humanities Review, 2009
How do we know climate change? How do we encounter its reality? This question brings to mind a history of scepticism and denial-those who ask 'where is the evidence?' against scientific efforts to model and map out predicted temperature rises. Yet the word prediction is telling here: how can you know something that is still unfolding? In order to respond to the manifesting consequences of environmental change, there is an imperative to capture and convey change in the midst of process. Somewhere between scepticism and prediction is the problem of representation-a concern that unites scientists and artists in the desire to say something of truth about the world. Signs of change obsess us and we look to science for orientation through these. Poetic representation is valued as a tool of communication and inspiration-to educate, warn and motivate responses. Yet as the consequences of climate change continue to manifest, representation sits ambiguously in a context of these materially-grounded concerns. This paper offers a rethinking of the role of representation in environmental discourse. It suggests that rather than representation's inability to access the real, the more pressing issue is the relationship between humans and the non-human environment that modes of representation assert. It is ultimately our ontological and epistemological traditions, and the work of representation within these, that determine our distance from or proximity to the elements of a transforming ecology.
Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic, 2022
I’m excited to announce that the introduction to my new book 'Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic' is now available online for free to download from Duke University Press. The ebook will be available in October and the paperback version of the book will be out one month later in mid November 2022. Two of the book’s chapters were written with Elena Glasberg, who is the author of 'Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change.' In 'Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics,' Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom engages feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. As opposed to mainstream media depictions of climate change that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears, artists such as Katja Aglert, Subhankar Banerjee, Joyce Campbell, Judit Hersko, Roni Horn, Isaac Julien, Zacharias Kunuk, Connie Samaras, and activist art collectives take a more complex poetic and political approach. In their films and visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism while challenging the suppression of information about environmental destruction and critiquing Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom’s examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.
Picturing Climate: Steps towards embedding artistic practice within climate change research
Teaching Beyond the Curriculum , 2023
Climate change represents a paramount challenge within the contemporary era, marking a critical juncture in human history. From shifting weather patterns that threaten food systems, to rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. Without drastic action today, adapting to these impacts in the future will be more difficult and costly. However, much of the science that predicts and models climate systems and climate change is not typically seen by publics and therefore remains mystified in popular culture, hidden behind specialist terminologies. This lack of engagement with climate science could be improved by introducing new ways for climate scientists to engage with the public by employing the creativity found within the visual arts. Communication as a multidisciplinary endeavour and its ability to educate and inform the public remains a critical tool as we reach such a crisis. This paper proposes that a potential way to achieve deeper cultural communication of climate science is to establish ways of demystifying and ‘picturing’ the complexities of climate by directly embedding artistic practice into climate change research, employing an interdisciplinary approach to exploring, encouraging and enhancing collaboration between visual artists and climate science communities. This can result in a greater connection between climate science and communities by bridging the gap between specialist knowledge and public understanding of critical issues via a visual language. This paper acknowledges the principle that understanding the anthropogenic cause of climate change is the strongest predictor of climate change risk perceptions. Thus, raising climate literacy through a shared cultural vocabulary is vital to public engagement and support for climate actions. A shift from representing the past effects of climate change through alarming imagery to one more representative of how climates are understood and studied (such as via prediction, modelling and curiosity) can help shift the perception of climate change from ‘unchangeable’ to that of a participatory problem that can be overcome through collaboration.
Beyond polar bears? Re-envisioning climate change
Against an academic and policy backdrop of interest in (and concerns about) the issue, this paper draws on a range of academic writing in various disciplines to explore visual strategies of climate change communication. The geographic scope of the investigation is the United Kingdom, with particular attention to recognizable icons of climate change in UK media and the images used in political campaigns. The paper is in two parts. The first part concentrates on various efforts to put a 'face' on the climate change issue, while part two suggests that weather and renewable energy are the dominant alternative motifs. The paper draws a basic distinction between fear-laden representations of climate change and a variety of visual efforts to use so-called inspirational imagery. All of the images reviewed suggest an affirmative answer to the question in the title, there are multiple efforts underway to move beyond polar bears and represent climate change in more creative and meaningful ways. The bigger question addressed is one raised already by photographers as well as academics, i.e. whether documentary photography (rather than particular types of images) is the more fundamental issue. The answer in the paper is that photographs are no different from other visual images in their capacity to draw attention to messages. The challenge is to use visuals creatively, in ways that prompt positive engagement with climate change without enhancing public disengagement and fatalism.
“Iconographies of climate catastrophe. The representation of climate change in art and film,”
Climate Disaster Preparedness: Reimagining Extreme Events Through Art and Technology , 2024
This chapter reviews visual representations of climate in art and film across the last few decades, exploring shifting artistic, cinematic, televisual and nar rative practices that have more recently shaped the communication of the climate emergency. It explores the iconographies that artists and filmmakers have used in the shift from representing contemporaneous and local environmental challenges to depicting the future consequences of climate warming, including widespread biospheric change. The authors sketch the shifting screen media formulations that imagine climate catastrophes, observing how both documentary film, television and contemporary art draw on popular and professional media practices, including news formats and visual effects.
Between dread and delight: motivational discourses in climate change art
2015
During the last decade (2005-2015), artists from all over the world have taken on climate change as the subject matter of their work. Encouraged by activists (most notably Bill McKibben), artists have appropriated climate change as a social problem and decided that they too, alongside journalists and scientists, could do something to heighten public engagement with this pressing issue. Several major exhibitions, most notably in Boulder (2007), London and Copenhagen (2009), Paris (2012), New York (2013), Boston (2014), and Melbourne (2015), have placed climate change art on the map as a new and timely genre. In this paper, I take a critical look at the stated motivations and experienced outcomes of climate change art, by analyzing the statements of over 20 artists and the comments made by curators, critics and members of the general public. I argue that much progress has been made in defining climate change art as a genuinely artistic, rather than propagandistic or didactic practice. Though caught in the net of many criticisms, climate change art plays a crucial role in allowing the public to rethink the role of human beings’ everyday activities in irrevocably altering the climate system – it makes the Anthropocene a cultural reality. However, a risk in much climate change art is reverting to the aesthetic of the sublime, which has a long-standing tradition but which I argue does nothing to meaningfully engage the public with climate change.
Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene Edited By Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti, 2020
This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the Anthropocene. It explores the challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate change. In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate. This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate’s capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content. Part 1. The Climate of Representation 1. Ecological Postures for a Climate Realism Amanda Boetzkes 2. Anthropocene Arts: Apocalyptic Realism and the Post-Oil Imaginary in the Niger Delta Philip Aghoghovwia 3. Fire, Water, Moon: Supplemental Seasons in a Time without Season Anne-Lise François Part 2. The Subject of Climate 4. Indigenous Realism and Climate Change Kyle Powys Whyte 5. Realism’s Phantom Subjects M. Ty 6. Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time Kathryn Yusoff Part 3. Realism and the Critique of Climate, or Climate and the Critique of Realism 7. The Poetics of Geopower: Climate Change and the Politics of Representation Ingrid Diran and Antoine Traisnel 8. Perplexing Realities: Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene Barbara Herrnstein Smith