‘Raising the temperature’: the arts on a warming planet (original) (raw)
Related papers
Elem Sci Anth
Humanity has never lived in a world of global average temperature above two degrees of current levels. Moving towards such High-End Climate Change (HECC) futures presents fundamental challenges to current governance structures and involves the need to confront high uncertainties, non-linear dynamics and multiple irreversibilities in global social-ecological systems. In order to face HECC, imaginative practices able to support multiple ways of learning about and experiencing the future are necessary. In this article we analysed a set of arts-based activities conducted within the five-year EU-funded project IMPRESSIONS aimed at identifying transformative strategies to high-end climate change. The exploratory artistic activities were carried out alongside a science-led participatory integrated assessment process with stakeholders from the Iberian Peninsula. Our arts-based approach combined a range of performative, visual and reflexive practices with the ambition to reach out to more-th...
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.
It’s time for a new age of Enlightenment: why climate change needs 60,000 artists to tell its story
This BLOG post draws upon cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and philosophy, among other fields, to explore the emerging idea that global warming exceeds modern humans’ cognitive and sensory abilities. To overcome this impasse, climate communication needs to engage people at a philosophical, sensory and feeling level. People need to be able to feel and touch the new climate reality; to explore unfamiliar emotional terrain and be helped to conceive their existence differently. How is this to be done? The world must turn to its artists: storytellers, film-makers; musicians; painters and multi-media wizards, to name a few.
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.
Learning about climate change in, with and through art
Climatic Change
Effective strategies to learn about and engage with climate change play an important role in addressing this challenge. There is a growing recognition that education needs to change in order to address climate change, yet the question remains “how?” How does one engage young people with a topic that is perceived as abstract, distant, and complex, and which at the same time is contributing to growing feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and anxiety among them? In this paper, I argue that although the important contributions that the arts and humanities can make to this challenge are widely discussed, they remain an untapped or underutilized potential. I then present a novel framework and demonstrate its use in schools. Findings from a high school in Portugal point to the central place that art can play in climate change education and engagement more general, with avenues for greater depth of learning and transformative potential. The paper provides guidance for involvement in, with, an...
Calling All Artists: Moving Climate Change From My Space to My Place
2009
Each year, the Gallup Poll reports that more Americans claim to understand global climate change better than they did the previous year (Carroll 2007; Saad 2007). Climate-change-communication researchers Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling (2004) have argued that while people understand climate change, they do not yet feel suffi cient urgency to take meaningful action. They and others have suggested the enormous time lags in biophysical and social systems, the fact that developed countries and the power elites within them are relatively insulated from the effects of climate change, and the overshadowing of climate change
The main focus of this research will be on the role that Illustration, Animation and Art might play in raising awareness of Environmental Issues with a particular emphasis on Climate Change and will highlight creative events that took place in December 2015 to coincide with COP 21 in Paris. Through research undertaken using a range of sources including books, films, animations and the Internet, the aim is to identify individuals and collectives involved in creative practice that highlights Connected Communities of practitioners working individually and collectively, globally, towards the common theme of Climate Change. The research will include the work of the organization ' Forever Swarm ' and ' Cape Farewell 'and other Collectives and individuals working towards an exploration of this theme.
2018
For many decades, contrasting opinions regarding the value of collaboration between the arts and sciences have been voiced. Some commentators have argued that the fundamental differences between art and science makes interdisciplinary practice untenable, while others suggest that many potential benefits are achievable through dialogue and mutual work in areas of shared interest. Against this backdrop, this thesis examines the contention that climate change, as well as being the subject of scientific research, can also be examined through art, and that by working collaboratively across art and science, new understanding may be reached. The thesis documents a series of interdisciplinary projects that were established with scientists working in areas of climate change, geomorphology and palaeoanthropology, and critically examines the resultant strategies, practices and artistic outputs. The creative approaches that were employed included working with science teams in field contexts, (re-) interpreting acquired science imagery, and organising exhibitions and symposia. Each approach involved different modes of collaboration, and each raised key discussion points, including the use of science images and material within fine art and the structuring of the collaborative relationship. Findings from earlier interdisciplinary projects provided the conceptual, theoretical and practical framework for a concluding art and science collaboration with an international team of researchers, the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP), who are investigating the relationship between human evolution and climate change. In developing and exhibiting art that emerged from the HSPDP project within the gallery context, the curatorial aspects of hybridised displays of art and science images, objects and contextual documentation are examined. New approaches within the artscience and climate change discourse are identified, including the insights that can be gained by bringing divergent practices together to enable audiences to encounter larger narratives of humanities relationship with a changing climate.