climate change Archives

Anthroposcenes: life in the Age of Humans

Pau Waelder

Centre d’Art Lo Pati in Amposta opens a new season of screenings in the art center’s building façade. Following an art program curated by Irma Vilà, I have been invited by the director of Lo Pati, Aida Boix, to curate a new selection of artworks for 2024. Titled Anthroposcenes: narratives about life in the Anthropocene, it features the work of Diane Drubay, Claudia Larcher, Kelly Richardson, Theresa Schubert, Yuge Zhou, and Marina Zurkow. In the following text, I introduce the concept behind this curatorial project and the work of the artists.

Artwork by Marina Zurkow displayed on the screen at the façade of Lo Pati.

The term “Anthropocene” was proposed in 2000 by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and the Nobel laureate in chemistry Paul Crutzen to indicate the decisive influence of human activity on our planet. It carries the danger of accepting that our actions are irreparable, but at the same time it gives us a sense of responsibility in our relationship with the environment. Understanding the consequences of our consumption habits and our daily activities in an ecosystem pushed to the limit by the abuse of natural resources, the production of waste and pollution is both a necessity and a duty.

The notion of the Anthropocene can lead us to think that the effects of human activity on the planet are just a consequence of the evolution of our species.

Philosopher and biologist Donna Haraway indicates that the danger of talking about the Anthropocene is that it leads us to consider that the effects of human activity on the planet are inevitable, and that this is just a consequence of the evolution of our species. For this reason, she proposes the term “Capitalocene,” pointing out that it is the capitalist exploitation of the Earth’s resources, including human beings, that leads to the destruction of the environment. The philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour also indicates that it is practically impossible to study a phenomenon such as the Anthropocene from a purely scientific, distant and objective perspective, because we find ourselves embedded in the very phenomena we are trying to study .

We therefore find that the notion of the Anthropocene is both very obvious but also in a certain way invisible, as it points to something as commonplace as our daily activity. As humans, we need to exploit natural resources to obtain food, warmth, and shelter, but we also extract resources to fulfill the numerous needs created by a consumer society taken to the greatest excesses by the very functioning of a globalized capitalist system. The Anthropocene is often linked to climate change and the danger of mass extinction, but even if we manage to avoid a planetary disaster, our way of life leads us to create an environment in which it will be increasingly difficult to live.

In this aspect, we must also remember, as the geographer Erle C. Ellis points out, that there are “better and worse lower case «anthropocenes»”depending on how the changes that occur in the environment affect us. In the most industrialized countries, we still do not suffer many effects from the extraction of minerals, the massive use of plastics, the production of waste from the fashion or technology industries, among others, because we divert them to poor countries. That is why it is essential to understand this phenomenon as something in which we participate daily, and to become aware of it we not only need a big poster telling us to recycle more and consume less, but also a narrative, or a series of narratives that make us think about life in the Anthropocene and can lead us to adopt a different mentality, born of conviction and not of guilt or a regulation.

We need narratives that make us think about life in the Anthropocene and can lead us to adopt a different mentality, born of conviction and not of guilt or a regulation.

The facade of Centre d’Art Lo Pati incorporates a screen that brings art to the street and is therefore an ideal space to show these narratives: six audiovisual works created by artists from the international scene that offer us, from different perspectives, narratives about life in the Anthropocene, particularly in those environments and systems that we ignore but that play a determining role in life on Earth. From the ocean floor to the mines from which we extract the materials that facilitate our digital life, from glaciers to atmospheric phenomena, from forest fires to crowded cities, these works invite us to reflect on our planet, the world in which we want to live and what we will leave to the next generations.

Marina Zurkow. OOzy #3: Just because you can’t swim in it doesn’t mean it isn’t there, 2022.

The ocean, a “capitalist Pangea”

The artist Marina Zurkow (New York, USA, 1962) opens this cycle with a work that takes us to the bottom of the ocean. A good part of her work focuses on this natural environment of which she points out that it is “a surface and a volume. The surface, which is what we humans mainly experience, is a space in which we play and a surface through which we transport goods, this is what turns the ocean into a capitalist Pangea.” Zurkow points out that, while we look to the sea or the ocean as a space in which to relax and dream, we use it as a dumping ground and exploit its resources without considering its sustainability. In the artwork OOzy #3: Just because you can’t swim in it doesn’t mean it isn’t there (2022), she imagines life 6,000 meters under the sea, in an environment where humans could not live. She represents this underwater landscape in vivid colors, in a playful way, because she believes that it is through humor and apparent innocence that a message can be communicated in a way that is not paternalistic or authoritarian. The work invites us to enjoy a fanciful vision that can entertain us, but over time it will also lead us to think about how the elements that appear in it (underwater probes and other devices created by humans) are alien and invasive.

Claudia Larcher. Noise above our heads, 2016.

What lies beneath the iceberg

Zurkow refers to the “iceberg model” proposed by researcher Donella Meadows to point out that we often focus on the effects (the visible part of the iceberg) and not on the structures, systems and mental models that lead to these effects, and which are usually hidden or ignored. In Noise above our heads (2016) the artist Claudia Larcher (Bregenz, Austria, 1979) takes us deep into the earth’s surface to explore a different landscape, the crust of rock that supports the weight of humanity and provides the resources that have shaped our consumer society, dependent on fossil fuels and dominated by information technologies. Deeply interested in the way in which architecture conditions our environment, Larcher introduces between the rocks fragments of architectural constructions, masses of cement that refer to the physical infrastructure of cities, and also data processing centers, hidden in cavernous spaces. “As for architecture,” says the artist, “I am drawn to its power to create, change and destroy our environment.”

The Earth’s crust supports the weight of humanity and provides the resources that have shaped our consumer society, dependent on fossil fuels and dominated by information technologies.

Diane Drubay. Ignis II, 2021.

Stories of possible futures

While Larcher’s video takes us underground, the work of artist Diane Drubay (Paris, France) invites us to look up to the sky. We see a captivating landscape with brightly colored clouds, which slowly turn reddish and increasingly dark. Ignis II (2021) is an animation of only 14 seconds, representing the fourteen years that, in 2021, remained until the so-called “point of no return” in climate change: the year 2035. According to the most recent reports, already in 2029 it will be impossible to limit the global rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees. Instead of showing a countdown or a graph with an upward curve, Drubay creates an alluring, almost abstract landscape that tells a story solely by transforming the colors in the image. The effect is hypnotic, and if we think about what it represents, quite terrifying. The artist emphasizes the cyclical nature of the work and its leisurely rhythm: “my art requires slowness, but above all, sustainability. The notion of time and cycle is present in my work to position it in an infinite space of time that can be easily assimilated to that of nature.” Drubay’s piece, under its ephemeral beauty, leads us to reflect on slow but inexorable processes, and our ability to react to them.

Kelly Richardson. HALO I, 2021.

Memories of a lost past

In the work HALO I (2021), the artist Kelly Richardson (Ontario, Canada, 1972) takes up the theme of Camp, a video filmed in 1998. The vision of the moon during a summer night under a campfire evokes in the artist fond memories of childhood and adolescence. In this work, it acquires a new meaning as we see our satellite subjected to increasing heat. Today, bonfires have been banned in British Columbia (where the artist lives) due to the risk of forest fires. Richardson consciously evokes a scene that has emotional connotations (the tranquility of a summer night, leisure time with friends and family) and adds to it a situation of imminent danger. She wants to establish a connection that leads the viewer to react. “Beauty invites viewers to pay attention to a subject that may be difficult for them. The tragedy lies in showing the truth about what we have created, the conditions we find ourselves in, and the call we collectively face.” Unlike Drubay, who presents us with a possible future, Richardson evokes a lost past to incite us to reflection and action.

“Beauty invites viewers to pay attention to a subject that may be difficult for them. The tragedy lies in showing the truth about what we have created”

Yuge Zhou. Interlinked II, 2022

Sisyphus routines

Paradoxically, our society is very active, but it is mostly immersed in an incessant activity marked by capitalist production and consumption systems. This is made obvious in the artwork Interlinked II (2022) by Yuge Zhou (Beijing, China, 1985), an artist who resides in Chicago and in her work often observes interpersonal dynamics in American society. Zhou works with video collage to break the singularity of the moving image and tell multiple stories at the same time, turning a scene into a narrative space rich in different scenes. These scenes are often protagonized by people going about their daily or recreational activities. In this piece we see a multiplicity of sequences filmed in the New York subway in which travelers walk along platforms and corridors without a specific destination. The composition leads to thinking about what the artist calls “Sisyphus routines,” which ultimately lead nowhere and expose the absurdity of everyday life in big cities. Referring to the flâneur, or the flâneuse in this case, Zhou describes how she stands outside the flow of activity she wants to portray, indicating that this is the way to observe and reflect on what we take for granted and consider permanent.

Theresa Schubert. A synthetic archive (AI glaciers), 2023.

Nothing is permanent

The last work in the series, created by the artist Theresa Schubert (Berlin, Germany, 1983) using artificial intelligence systems, explores the gradual disappearance of glaciers, a powerful image of climate change that reminds us that nothing is permanent. A synthetic archive (AI glaciers) (2023) creates a visual poem using images generated by machine learning algorithms and a sound composition that combines music, choral singing, and the voices of various narrators. The artist studied the fluvial systems in the Piemont region in Italy and collected data that was then fed to three generative adversarial networks. The fluid way in which the mountain landscapes generated by these computer programs are transformed speaks to us of a nature that, far from being static, is subject to constant transformations, which are now accelerating due to human action. Artificial intelligence, a profoundly human creation that also brings with it a particular threat of extinction, is the most appropriate tool to visualize the idea that the world is slipping under our feet.

What is the role of art museums in the Anthropocene?

Pau Waelder with Karin Vicente and Diane Drubay

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Stanislav Stepashko.

Is there a need for art during an ecological crisis? This provocative question is the starting point of the exhibition Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, currently on view at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn (Estonia). The exhibition explores Estonian art history from an ecocritical perspective, addressing how nature, but also the industry and the impact of human activity on the environment, have been depicted in painting, sculpture, photography, and other media, including video art and performance. Such an approach is particularly interesting in itself both for bringing new perspectives to Estonian art history, and for suggesting a reflection on our relationship with the environment from the vantage point of a selection of artworks spanning more than a century. However, what makes this exhibition even more relevant to our present time is that it is the outcome of a three-year-long project debating the role of the museum in the Anthropocene and particularly during a climate emergency.

What should an art museum do at a time when sustainability is no longer a choice, but a need? What should be the institution’s role in raising awareness about the way human activity fuels the current climate crisis? How can art museums become hubs for reflection, and possibly action, to face a growing environmental disaster? These are hard questions to answer, and we cannot expect a single project or institution to be able to answer them. In fact, this has been an ongoing debate for many years among museums experts, in forums such as the Museums Facing Extinction programme carried out since 2019 by We Are Museums in collaboration with the EIT Climate-KIC agency. However, the exhibition at Kumu offers a good example of how sustainable exhibition principles can be put into practice, and furthermore communicated to the visitors.

This is actually the aspect in which this exhibition stands out, questioning its own museography and drawing attention to experimental solutions for a more sustainable exhibition design with highly visible informative signs. Before entering the exhibition, visitors encounter an unusual sight: instead of using vinyl lettering, the exhibition title has been spray painted on the wall, while the curatorial text is displayed on two large sheets of paper. Next to them, a thin red pole stands on a concrete brick, holding a cardboard label with additional information. These freestanding labels are scattered across the rooms, providing an additional reading of the exhibition in terms of the sustainable practices applied to this particular curatorial and museological project.

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Pau Waelder.

Thanks to them, we learn for instance that clay paint has been used to create the wall texts and labels, and that the labels are UV-printed on leftover cardboard, thus avoiding the use of plastics. Different wall paint solutions have been tested, considering their ecological footprint, price, amount of work required, and efficacy. We also learn that the posters in the exhibition are displayed in frames that have been used multiple times during the last eleven years, or that a painting that has been in storage in the museum’s collection for 78 years is now on display for the first time. Sustainability therefore goes beyond the choice of materials used and involves larger decisions about the management of the museum’s collection or the carbon footprint of an exhibition that includes artworks brought from remote locations. Art in the Age of the Anthropocene does not pretend to solve all of these questions but rather to raise awareness about the challenges that museums face on their path to sustainability. The freestanding red poles and experimental solutions give the appearance of a construction site and seem to convey the idea that it is all in the works. This is actually an honest way to address the issue, and also to involve the visitor, who is encouraged to consider how to contribute to a sustainable museum experience.

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Stanislav Stepashko.

An expert’s view on sustainability in museums

To better understand the ideas and the work behind Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, I had a brief exchange with Karin Vicente, the head of the sustainable work group at the Art Museum of Estonia.

Karin Vicente is an art historian based in Tallinn, Estonia. She works as a programme manager and curator at the Adamson-Eric Museum. She is the head of the sustainable work group at the Art Museum of Estonia. Currently she is working on the project A Model for a Sustainable Exhibition.

The exhibition Art in the Age of the Anthropocene has had a long gestation period of over three years. Can you highlight the main tasks and processes that have taken place during this time?

The preparation of the exhibition is a part of a research project. It helped us analyze our collections (as well as collections of other museums) from an ecocritical perspective. Beyond the content, the exhibition has also initiated discussions about the green transition in the museum. How can an art museum minimize its ecological footprint? We organized a few seminars and discussions in the museum, involving participating artists and designers.

“We wanted to raise questions among the audience, such as the price of being part of a global art network.”

The exhibition is characterized by a double educational approach, on the one hand selecting artworks that speak about the representation and appropriation of the environment in Estonia, and on the other hand pointing out the sustainable exhibition practices carried out in its mounting. How have you combined these approaches?

The “red flags” indeed reflect the issues we discussed with curators and the exhibition team during the process. However, the selection of artworks was made by curators, following the narrative of the exhibition. We didn’t plan to create a zero-waste exhibition. For example, we invited international artists to contribute to the exhibition and designed a special exhibition layout considering eco-design aspects. We wanted to raise questions among the audience, such as the price of being part of a global art network. The pollution generated by air travel casts a shadow over bringing international art to Tallinn, yet it makes more sense than visitors traveling to the country of origin of each piece to see it. We want to be part of a global arts network, but how do we balance the pros and cons?

The sustainable exhibition practices have involved collaborations with third parties, such as the Tallinn Book Printers, to obtain leftover material. Can this lead to continuous collaborations? Is it possible for a museum to fully transition into using donated materials for purposes such as wall labels or brochures?

We collaborate with many companies, and there is a growing demand and consciousness concerning “green solutions” in the field. In some cases, it might be reasonable to create an exhibition using only reused/recycled/donated materials, but we also need to consider other aspects, like the security and well-being (climate conditions) of our collections. Handmade silkscreen texts and labels on waste paper were playful experiments, but they demanded a lot of human resources. Therefore, I’m afraid we won’t be able to do it every time.

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Stanislav Stepashko.

Reusing elements purchased by the museum from previous exhibitions is a good practice both environmentally and economically, and currently most museums have a certain amount of reusable stock. How can this practice be even more effective and sustainable, balancing the specific needs of artists and curators with those of the museum?

The only restriction to reusing more materials is the limited storage space we have. We have discussed with other museums and institutions the idea of a platform that would facilitate the exchange of different showcases and materials between different institutions, but it still needs to be developed.

Wall painting is a major element of exhibition design, as it conditions the visual perception of the artworks. How do you see the solutions you have tested in Art in the Age of the Anthropocene being applied to other exhibitions?

The experimental design decision our team made involved testing different wall paint solutions. We were looking for the most economical and sensible solution, so we have analyzed the properties of clay, casein, linseed oil emulsion, and acrylic paints: their ecological footprints, prices, covering capacities, drying times, scratch resistance and ease of removal, and the required amount of work. The result was visually effective as we also tested different painting styles (using less paint). I think it’s a matter of taste; different wall paint solutions can be used when exhibiting artworks from different periods. There are obviously other methods to use wall paint in a more sustainable way. I think the trick is to find a good balance between the desired outcome (how it looks) and how we achieve it.

“Handmade silkscreen texts and labels on waste paper were playful experiments, but they demanded a lot of human resources. Therefore, I’m afraid we won’t be able to do it every time.”

Video and digital art are increasingly present in contemporary art exhibitions, which demands that museums have screens, projectors, computers, and other equipment that is also commonly used in educational activities. How does incorporating digital art into the museum align with sustainability goals? How would you compare it with traditional formats (painting, sculpture) in terms of shipping, maintenance, and storage, and the need to participate in the global art scene?

Indeed, both digital and traditional art forms have their ecological footprints. Traditional artworks need to be kept in a controlled climate that consumes a lot of energy. Digital artworks require computers, etc., and they have a digital footprint. However, we need both, and I think it doesn’t make sense to compare them.

Climate control is necessary inside the museum, not only to make visitors comfortable, but also to preserve the artworks. How can it be made more sustainable? What are the challenges for a museum in Estonia, where the difference between summer and winter temperatures can be extremely high?

We are updating our HVAC systems at Kumu in 2023; this requires a significant investment. This year, we also initiated a discussion in the museum to form our opinion about the Bizot protocol and weakening the climate standards. These are not easy decisions to make, but we are working on them.

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Stanislav Stepashko.

Is there a need for art during an ecological crisis?

Considering the issues raised by the Kumu exhibition in a wider scope, I asked Diane Drubay, artist and founder of We Are Museums, about her views on the sustainability of art museums and a possible answer to the role of art in our current climate emergency.

Diane Drubay is an artist whose work focuses on better futures and nature-awareness and a researcher working towards the transformation of museums and art through various communities, events and programs, internationally since 2007. Founder of We Are Museums and WAC-Lab. Member of Museums For Future.

What is your opinion about the interplay of artworks and information in Art in the Age of the Anthropocene?

In my opinion, the greatest challenge to overcome when we want to adopt sustainable exhibition practices is taking the first step. There are endless lists of practical sustainable actions, but they are often repetitive and tailored to a global audience rather than a local or personal one. Over the years, I’ve learned that it’s by sharing our personal stories that our actions can resonate with others. So I don’t hesitate to talk about what I do or don’t do any more, and to explain how I do it and what impact it has on my daily life.

In the “Art in the Age of the Anthropocene” exhibition, we find this very personal way of talking about what has been done and why, but also a very practical one. All the details provided give visitors the chance to draw inspiration from them and apply this mindset to their everyday lives, or even their professions. I would love to see all these practical insights shared online in a global “ressourcerie” for museums on their climate journey!

Also, while museums tend to have the reputation of being large, secretive or inaccessible institutions, showing such openness and sincerity highlights the human beings who work in this museum and who, like everyone else, have moments of questioning and try to do their best to reduce their carbon footprint. Such honest behavior addresses the human being before the visitor. Leaving questions open invites dialogue and shows great humility, while sharing insights can be inspiring.

Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, Kumu Art Museum. Exhibition view. Photo by Pau Waelder.

In a recent article on Art Review, Marv Recinto states that art exhibitions about ecology “often feel futile in the face of real environmental devastation” and calls for “a more concerted effort towards action.” As an artist addressing this subject, how would you respond to this? Is the effort carried out at KUMU a step in this direction?

As there are many different types of disaster, there are many different ways of approaching an environmental emergency. Some people need to feel emotionally involved in order to act, others need figures and scientific facts to speak to their rationality, and still others need to be on the ground, collaborating with others, and so on. What I see is that many artists have several points of action, and the creation of stories or emotions complements local community action or changes in behavior. If we want to make a lasting impact and see behavior change profoundly, the approach must be multiple and complementary. As in nature, it is the diversity of species that makes a land fertile.

“If we want to make a lasting impact and see behavior change profoundly, the approach must be multiple and complementary. As in nature, it is the diversity of species that makes a land fertile.”

Karin Vicente states that both traditional art formats (painting, sculpture) and digital art have their carbon footprint, and that we need both, so it makes no sense to compare them. What is your opinion about digital art and sustainability in museums?

Exhibiting digital art and, above all, preserving it are key priorities for museum professionals today. So now is the perfect time to experiment with sustainable practices in my opinion. Many museums and associations are already well advanced in their search for a sustainable digital strategy.

Like KUMU did beautifully, low-tech cultural mediation within the museum is a very good way of offsetting the carbon footprint of hosting servers and other carbon costs. But museums can also seek to reduce their carbon footprint by implementing actions in favor of biodiversity, reducing their water consumption, maintaining or creating forested or natural areas around the museum, thinking in terms of slowing down, circularity and renunciation, or supporting the local before thinking global.

“A digital work of art can reach more people in a global and inclusive way.”

And I agree with Karin Vicente that comparing the different media and their carbon footprints makes no sense, because we would also have to add a measure of the impact in terms of raising awareness, encouraging people to act and changing behavior, but also in terms of the number of visitors reached. A digital work of art can reach more people in a global and inclusive way.

Fabula, tales of possible futures by Diane Drubay

Pau Waelder

In her latest series Fabula. Micro Stories from Tomorrow’s World, artist Diane Drubay continues her exploration of a narrative that raises awareness about the effects of climate change, while keeping with the clean, balanced visual composition that has become a defining element of her work. Consisting of six 1-minute videos (at the time of this writing) distributed as NFTs on the Tezos blockchain, Fabula plays with our imagination by suggesting possible futures in which the environment would be radically altered due to the effects of human activity on the planet, particularly the violent and massive pollution produced by a handful of powerful companies.

Diane Drubay, Fabula 4 – Micro Stories From Tomorrow’s World, 2023

Each story starts with a question that the artist aptly depicts as a query in a search engine, evoking how nowadays we seek immediate answers online, when we fail to understand what is happening around us. The imagined future appears in a circle at the center of the image, initially as an anomaly, its hues sharply contrasting the real image of the sky, a desert, a lake, or the sea. Slowly, the whole image changes its color to match the tones inside the circle, which finally blends into it and disappears. The circle becomes a metaphor for the possible futures described by scientific research: while they might seem outlandish at first, they can become real, at a slow but relentless pace that makes denial so much easier.

A selection of works from Fabula is now available as an artcast on Niio. On the occasion of its launch, I asked Diane three questions about her current practice and the NFT scene, as a follow-up on a previous interview published in Niio Editorial.

Explore a selection of works from Fabula on Niio

Open artcast

Diane Drubay, Fabula 6 – Micro Stories From Tomorrow’s World, 2023

After the protests in different art museums, it seems that climate change has been out of the news cycle. How do you see creating art about climate change in the current situation?

Changing the discourse and actions around climate change and the future of our planet must be done in depth. The change must be individual as well as systemic. Of course, news has its cycles, but climate change is always a hot topic. Activist groups or unions of museum professionals have been active for years, and will be for some time to come (unfortunately) considering the current state of our societies. I particularly remember 2018 / 2019 when the COP21 had raised the crowds and inspired the creation of activist communities that demand climate action.

Just as these activists continue to gather and denounce unsustainable behaviors, the creation of art with an activist vocation for the environment must continue. It is by maintaining the same clear, coherent and strong message for years, that it can begin to be heard, understood and shared. My art calls for slowness, but above all, for sustainability. The notion of time and cycles always comes back in my works in order to position them within an infinite space of time that can easily be assimilated to that of nature.

“Just as environmental activists continue to gather and denounce unsustainable behaviors, the creation of art with an activist vocation for the environment must continue.”

How was your experience at the recent NFT Paris event? How do you see the NFT scene evolving at present?

I traveled to NFT Paris to meet my friends, those people I have evolved with, and I felt shaken and fulfilled since March 2021. Artists, collectors, developers, curators, galleries, and many others have come together (almost) exactly two years after the birth of our beloved community around hic et nunc. What is enchanting about this group is their desire to focus on what makes sense, their desire to do things together and to make things happen, in a global and collective way.

This aside, NFT Paris has become a major event of the NFT scene with 18K visitors in two days in the most iconic venue in Paris: Le Grand Palais Éphémère. In the aisles, one could feel the growing entrepreneurship of this new generation of founders and creatives.

“In the NFT scene, I see a lot of respect and exchange, knowledge being shared and collaborations being born.”

To be honest, I’m in a bubble within this community of Tezos artists and it’s very difficult to have an objective look at the rest of the NFT scene. On our side, we see players consolidating, new platforms, curators, and galleries trying out new things while trying to understand and respect the culture already established. I see a lot of respect and exchange, knowledge being shared and collaborations being born.

Diane Drubay, Fabula 6 – Micro Stories From Tomorrow’s World, 2023

You are donating the sales of one of the artworks from Fabula to support the victims of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria in February 2023. The NFT scene has been quite active in supporting humanitarian and environmental causes, do you think this will be a permanent aspect of this sector of the digital art market?

The act of creating and donating art for social and environmental charities is part of the DNA of the creative community using the Tezos blockchain. It started early on, back in March 2021, when DiverseNFT launched the OBJKT4OBJKT weekend to call for more diversity within the NFT art market. Then, this habit took hold and it became part of the culture: call for community support via NFT art donations and support the NGOs who need it most.

In February 2023, the Tezos art community joined forces to support the victims of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria under the initiative #TezQuakeAid. Since then, more than 110K xtz (around $109,000) have been raised through the donation of +720 artworks.

“The Tezos art community has raised around $109,000 to support the victims of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria under the initiative #TezQuakeAid.”

Find out more about Diane Drubay’s work in a longer interview published in 2022.

Read interview

Tamiko Thiel: when art augments reality

Pau Waelder

Tamiko Thiel is a pioneering visual artist exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity in works encompassing an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer, objects, installations, digital prints in 2D and 3D, videos, interactive 3d virtual worlds (VR), augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence art. In this conversation, that took place on the occasion of the launch of her solo artcast Invisible Nature curated by DAM Projects, she discusses the evolution of technology over the last three decades, her early AR artworks and her commitment to create art that invites reflection.

Your work is characterized by the use of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies, with pioneering artistic projects. Which technical challenges have you met over the last decades in the creation of these projects?

My first exposure to real time computer graphics was at MIT when I was a graduate student in 1982. At that point, writing everything from scratch, you had to program for a semester in order to get a cube that would rotate in three dimensions. Coming from an artistic and design background, I felt that this is not really where I want to create art right now, I’ll have to wait. And then about 10 years later, in 1992, Silicon Graphics came out with OpenGL, an open standard that made it possible to do real time interactive computer graphics on PCs. Then in 1994, I started to work with a company called Worlds Incorporated, which was taking this new potential for doing interactive 3D computer graphics on PCs connected to the Internet. At that time I worked with Steven Spielberg on the Starbright World Project, the first 3d online Metaverse for ill children, a virtual world where they could momentarily escape the space of the hospital. This first Metaverse was running on high end PCs, with fast connections provided by various high tech companies, but it was still unaffordable for people at home. The project ran from 1994 to 1997, and at that time the technology was still unstable.

“It takes maybe 10 to 15 or 20 years to get there instead of the five years that all the evangelists predict.”

So you must jump from that to 10 years later, when Second Life came about and this time people had more powerful graphic cards and ADSL connections at home. Second Life was able to create a much more developed virtual world, which seemed like the next phase of the Internet and all the corporations wanted to move there. Then around 2007-2008, probably due to the financial crisis, but also the rise of Facebook, which allowed people to share photographs on a common platform, the excitement around Second Life fizzled. And then if we jump another 15 years more, we find ourselves with still bigger processing power and faster connections. Now it is much easier to create virtual worlds than it was 25 years ago, partly because it is easier to create 3D objects, or you can buy them online, and also because of the advancements in hardware and software.

So, as you can see, big steps come on later than you think. It takes maybe 10 to 15 or 20 years to get there instead of the five years that all the evangelists predict. People talked about virtual reality at that time in the 90s as being a failure, just as they talked about AI being a failure in the 80s and 90s. And what they don’t realize is that technological change takes longer than you’d want it to. So it’s wrong to call it a failure. It’s more like: “Okay, we have to keep on working on this.” And if you wait long enough, 20 years or so, then you’ll get it.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Rewilding the Smithsonian, 2021. Created with the ReWildAR AR app (2021, with /p). Commissioned by curator Ashley Molese for the 175th anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution, in the Arts and Industries Building.

Interactive 3D and VR artworks such as Beyond Manzanar and Virtuelle Mauer have a strong narrative component as they explore historic and political issues. What is the role of the user in constructing these narratives?

Basically, what I tend to do is look for key moments that I think can be expressed and experienced and communicated better in virtual reality than in other media. In Beyond Manzanar, for me that was the moment where you’re sitting in a beautiful Paradise Garden, and you see the mountains covered in snow around you. This is an image from the book Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston: the author tells that when she was an eight-year-old and she was imprisoned in the camp, she would pick a viewpoint where she couldn’t see any guard towers, any barracks, nor barbed wire fence. And she tried not to move for the longest time, because as long as she didn’t move, she could preserve the illusion she was in paradise of her own free will. As soon as she moved, she saw that she was indeed in prison, she fell out of paradise back into prison. And so this moment occurs in Beyond Manzanar, where you enter a garden which is framed by the beautiful mountains. But if you go too deeply into the garden, then boom! – the garden disappears, and you’re back in the prison camp.

Beyond Manzanar (2000). An interactive virtual reality large projection installation by Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand.

My second piece, The Travels of Mariko Horo, has a much more complicated structure with several heavens imagined by a time traveling 12th century Japanese female artist inventing the West in her imagination. In this work there is this moment when you enter the different churches, which are in fact liminal spaces between the prosaic everyday life and the world of the supernatural. When you cross that threshold, Mariko Horo takes you to heaven or takes you to hell. But it is always by your own free will, you’re always making the decision and making the motions that all of a sudden present you with the consequences of your decisions.

The Travels of Mariko Horo (2006). An interactive 3D virtual reality installation
By Tamiko Thiel, with original music by Ping Jin.

Finally, in Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall, I introduced some characters that take you in a time travel through the history of the Berlin Wall. But if you cross over the invisible boundaries of the former Death Strip,, then you fall back into the 80s, the wall appears behind you. So in all three pieces, it’s really about letting you feel like you have the freedom to go anywhere you want and do anything you want to do. But then you must face the consequences of these actions, which might take you to Paradise or they might take you to prison. But you always feel like it was your decision to go there, or to examine this, and therefore you’re sort of complicit with whatever happens to you.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Atmos Sphaerae, 2022. Created with the Atmos Sphaerae VR artwork, 2021.

Creating artworks in Augmented Reality offers the possibility of intervening in institutional art spaces uninvited, as you did at MoMA, the Venice Biennale, or TATE Modern, or within a curated exhibition, as is the case with Unexpected Growth, which was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Can you tell us about the creative process in both cases and your experience with “guerrilla” interventions versus curated exhibitions using the same technology?

Let’s start with We AR in MoMA, an augmented reality project created by Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek that took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on October 9th, 2010. The iPhone had been around since 2007, as well as other smartphone models, and in the course of 2009 both Mark and Sander had been playing around with the technology and developing AR artworks on mobiles in public spaces. And then they realized they could also geolocate the artworks to have them appear in certain spaces, so they came up with this idea of doing the spectacular intervention at MoMA. I knew Mark from the art circles before we had both shown in the 2009 Boston CyberArts Festival, so he dropped me and many of his artist friends an email saying: “Hey, we’re able to do this now. Send me some content and I’ll put it up and we’ll do a flashmob at MoMA.” They were not asking permission from MoMA. They didn’t know about it, and they couldn’t stop us. At that time, people didn’t realize that location based AR could be used anywhere. But then it turned out that they did find out about it beforehand, because Mark and Sander were doing the intervention as part of a citywide public art festival of psychogeography, so it was publicly announced by the festival all on Twitter. MoMA actually posted a link to the festival and said: “Hey, looks like we’re going to be invaded by AR,” which was very forward thinking and embracing this new development in technology. So, that was incredibly good publicity. It was a really exciting moment, when we realized that there were these possibilities that the new technology was bringing about. I would say this was a path breaking exhibit in the history of media.

After this intervention at MoMA, the artists who took part in it created the group Manifest.AR. We were thinking about where to do the next incursion, and since I live in Munich, which is a six and a half hour beautiful train ride to Venice, I suggested we go to the Venice Biennale in 2011. It was a group of about eight of us. We created virtual pavilions that were located inside the Giardini and at Piazza San Marco, so that people who didn’t want to spend money to enter the Giardini could also experience the artworks in a public space, because the Giardini, with its walls around it is a classically closed curatorial space. The point was that having your work shown at the MoMA or the Biennale is a sign of achievement, of having been able to enter these closed curatorial spaces, but now with AR interventions that was not true anymore, anybody can place their artwork wherever they want. But then people’s reaction was: “Oh, wow, you’re showing in the Venice Bienniale, you’ve made it!” Then we told them we hadn’t been curated and that we were doing this of our own accord, but people would respond: “Oh, that’s even better.” So we thought we were doing this sort of Duchampian breakdown of all sorts of structures that define prominence in the art world. Duchamp exhibited his famous urinal not to say that an artwork becomes an artwork when an artist says it’s an artwork and places it in an art context, but to state that this whole thing is ridiculous.

“The point of putting our artworks at the MoMA or the Venice Biennale was that with Augmented Reality anybody can place their artwork wherever they want.”

These interventions gave us a feeling of exhilaration that we could hold our own exhibits anywhere, even though no one in the art world was interested in media art at that moment. And we could also play off site. Because AR is a site-specific medium, you’re always dealing with the site. And that opened up whole new possibilities. Interestingly, shortly after that, George Fifield, the Boston Cyberarts director, arranged our first invitational show at the ICA Boston. This was in April of 2011. The ICA curators didn’t understand how the technology works. They said: “Okay, you can do it on the first floor, but not on the second floor. You can do it in the lobby and outside, but you can’t do it inside of the galleries.” And we had to tell them it doesn’t work that way. The artworks are triggered by a GPS location which has a radius of a mile or so.

As for showing Unexpected Growth at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, it was thanks to Christiane Paul, the adjunct curator of media art at the museum. I have known her for quite a while, I think since about 2002, and she has curated me into many of her shows over the years in different venues, but this was the first time at the Whitney. She had of course done the visionary work of creating Artport, a space for net art supported by the museum, but she still hadn’t placed an AR artwork inside the museum. Then in 2014 she commissioned an AR intervention by Will Pappenheimer, Proxy, 5-WM2A, at the Whitney’s final closing gala for the old Breuer Building. So when she contacted me in 2018 to create an artwork to show at the Whitney, she had already gone through the process of introducing this technology in the museum. She invited me to create an artwork for the terrace, which is 20 by 10 meters in size. Since this was a big show, I needed to make sure that the piece would work properly, so I contacted the people at Layar, the AR app we had used in all our previous interventions, but by then they told me they would shut down their servers, so I had to find a solution. My husband Peter Graf, who is a software developer, told me he could write an app for me. We worked side by side on this project, so I realized he should co-author it with me and he came up with the artist name /p, so now the artwork is in the Whitney collection credited to myself and /p in collaboration. Now the artwork is not officially on view at the museum, but if you download our app and go to the terrace you can still experience it.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Unexpected Growth (Whitney Museum Walk1), 2018. Created with the Unexpected Growth AR app (2018, with /p), commissioned by and in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

There is also the fact that the artworks are invisible, so how did you communicate their existence and solve the technical problems associated with having the proper device, software, and connectivity?

At the Venice Biennale intervention, Sander got in touch with Simona Lodi, director of the Share Festival Turin , and the artist group Les Liens Invisibles, who were together mounting another AR intervention The Invisible Pavilion. We created a common postcard with QR codes to download the app. We also invited people to come to Piazza San Marco and the Giardini on certain days and times and help them experience the artworks. Collaborating with the team from the Share Festival was a huge help, because those of us from outside of Italy had terrible connection issues, and also it was the first Venice Biennale when hordes of people were walking around with their cellphones, overloading the networks. The Vodafone network actually broke down in the Venice area. Gionatan Quintini of Les Liens Invisible loaned me his smartphone to show my work, and this is an example of the kind of collaborative atmosphere that you get in the media art world and that is not that easy to find in the contemporary art world. By connecting our networks with those of Share, we got a lot of publicity for both the interventions in MoMA and in the Venice Biennial, and that put AR in this early time into the media art history books, and therefore into the art canon.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Sponge Space Trash Takeover (Walk1), 2020. Created with the VR space “Sponge Space Trash Takeover” courtesy of Cyan Planet and xR Hub Bavaria.

The artworks in your latest artcast titled Tamiko Thiel: Invisible Nature all deal with different aspects of our intervention of the natural environment. What has been your experience addressing this subject in terms of the balance between the artistic expression and the message you want to convey?

Perhaps because I started out as a product designer, with the Connection Machine being what I consider my first artwork, I am always thinking of my audience and how to communicate with them. When I approach political or social issues, such as climate related problems, I know that the really shocking photographs (for instance, a dead bird whose stomach is full of plastic) give you an immediate emotional jolt, and make you realize that this is a serious problem. But I personally cannot look at those images day after day, time and time again. So, balancing my work as an artist with my desire to communicate, sometimes I think that I should be a journalist, so I could write articles that can go into the details in much more depth. But how often do you reread the same article? So I think that what is truly the value of an artist making work about a subject such as these is that the art work can be exhibited time and time again, in different places around the world. And people might see it again, they may be willing to look at it time and time again, but not if it is something horrible and shocking. I’m traumatized enough by what’s happening in the world, so I’d rather create something that is not traumatizing for people, but at the same time it makes you think.

“What is truly the value of an artist making work about a subject such as these is that the art work can be exhibited time and time again, in different places around the world.”

For instance, Unexpected Growth shows a very colorful, bright coral reef on the terrace of the Whitney. And when you look at it more closely, you realize this beautiful coral reef is made out of virtual plastic garbage. So people are confronted with something that is really beautiful, but after a while they realize that they are surrounded by garbage. So my strategy is to seduce people with a strong visual composition that is captivating. And then, when I’ve got their attention, I let them figure out that there is actually something else going on here, if you actually spend the time to look at it.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Evolution of Fish – Anthropocene Daze #1, 2019. Created with the AR app Evolution of Fish (2019, with /p).

The Role of Art in a Climate Emergency

Pau Waelder

On 13th October 2022, two climate activists from the environmental group Just Stop Oil, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, threw two cans of tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers (1888), on display at the National Gallery in London. They glued one hand to the wall under the painting and sat on the floor. Phoebe Plummer then said:

“What is worth more, art or life? Is it worth more than food, worth more than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people? The cost of living crisis is part of the cost of the oil crisis. Fuel is unaffordable to millions of cold, hungry families. They can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup. Meanwhile, crops are failing, millions of people are dying in monsoons, wildfires, and severe droughts. We cannot afford new oil and gas, it’s going to take everything we know and love.”

The young woman’s passionate statement was cut short by a security guard who proceeded to remove them from the premises. The activists were brought to a district court and charged with criminal damage. Van Gogh’s painting, protected by a glass, was not harmed, although the frame suffered minimal damage, according to the museum.

The protest has sparked widespread outrage at what can be seen as an act of vandalism. Attacks on artworks at museums have been perpetrated many times by individuals for a variety of reasons, sometimes political, sometimes to draw attention to personal issues. Often, the perpetrators have been described as insane. It is therefore unsurprising that the act carried out by the two young activists has been perceived as criminal, deranged, and appalling, or simply dismissed as stupid. This type of protest is not new, it has been taking place over the summer by Just Stop Oil and then by climate activists in Italy, in actions that mainly consisted of gluing their hands to the protective glass or the frame of a famous painting depicting nature. The activists have taken precautions not to harm the artworks, and therefore cannot be considered to vandalize them, although they have at times caused damages to the gallery walls or the frames. However, no other protest has caused such strong reactions as the one carried out by Plummer and Holland, probably due to the aggressiveness of throwing liquid over a painting (which would normally cause irreparable damage), and maybe also due to who carried out this action. Two young queer women, Plummer and Holland have increasingly become the target of critics who have questioned their sanity and intelligence, and ridiculed everything in them, from their names to the color of Plummer’s hair and her accent.

An artist’s response

Among the few in the art world who have expressed support for the protest is artist Joanie Lemercier, whose work is often inspired by nature and the representation of the natural world, leading him to address climate change and environmental degradation in artworks and performances that document and support the work of climate activists. In a video posted on social media, Lemercier states:

“Paintings are often the representation and celebration of landscapes, nature, and life. But we don’t actually give much value to these subjects or to their protection. So we are in the process of losing the conditions of habitability of the planet, yet a lot of people are outraged about a symbolic action that didn’t even damage the painting.”

My reaction to the #VanGoghSunflowers action, from an artist perspective.

1/2 pic.twitter.com/s6jcsFTrPr
— ᴊᴏᴀɴɪᴇ ʟᴇᴍᴇʀᴄɪᴇʀ (@JoanieLemercier) October 17, 2022

Addressing the subject matter of the painting, Lemercier points out that the sunflower fields that inspired Van Gogh in Verarges have recently reached the highest temperature ever recorded in France. “We are irreversibly losing these landscapes that Van Gogh loved painting so much,” states Lemercier. The artist suggests that, instead of focusing on the apparent attack on the painting, the public should pay attention to the message that the activists are trying to communicate. He concludes:

“How do we protect, not just the representation of a landscape on a canvas, but the very landscape that is being annihilated? If we listen to the activists, the message is very clear: we need to stop oil, gas, and fossil fuel extraction.”

My reaction to the #VanGoghSunflowers action, from an artist perspective.

1/2 pic.twitter.com/s6jcsFTrPr
— ᴊᴏᴀɴɪᴇ ʟᴇᴍᴇʀᴄɪᴇʀ (@JoanieLemercier) October 17, 2022

Joanie Lemercier makes a good point by presenting a documented, reasonable take on the protest and its meaning, that is arguably more convincing than the protest itself. He does not approve the attack on an artwork, but rather emphasizes the fact that this is a desperate measure to get a message across, and makes it clear that the painting was not harmed. However, it is hard to support the idea that good can be done by attacking cultural heritage, and it is dangerous to simply expect activists around the world to diligently inform themselves of the ways in which an artwork can be exposed to liquids, glues, or other substances without causing permanent damage.

We care more about representations of nature than about nature itself. We have made cities and virtual spaces our habitat, while using natural environments as sites of leisure, or even just as an image to be displayed on the computer’s desktop.

Personally, as a curator with a background in art history, I feel a natural aversion to any form of attack to a work of art (including the practice of burning prints and paintings to sell them as unique NFTs), but I understand the urgency expressed by the activists and the fact that collectively, we care more about representations of nature than about nature itself. We have made cities and virtual spaces our habitat, while using natural environments as sites of leisure, or even just as an image to be displayed on the computer’s desktop.

What is the role of art in our present climate emergency, then? Maybe something more than becoming the backdrop of climate activists’ demands. The controversy around the soup thrown at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers has focused on the act of attacking a famous, and very expensive, painting, as well as in the activists themselves, but no attention has been paid to the connection between the life and work of the artist and the land that he loved, except in the reading presented by Lemercier. Living artists are now responding to climate change with artworks that speak to our present and address those same issues laid out by the activists, so it would be wise to listen to them too.

Marina Zurkow, OOzy#2: Like Oil and Water, 2022

Art in a climate emergency

Artists addressing climate change in their work face the challenge of creating art that is engaging in itself, that responds to aesthetic considerations, but also manages to get its message across. This is not easy to achieve, particularly at a time when people consume large amounts of visual material and read the messages that get to them quickly and superficially, as the Just Stop Oil protest and its reactions clearly show.

Transdisciplinary artist Marina Zurkow points to the need to look beneath the surface by taking as a reference a diagram created by Donella Meadows in the 1970s, which uses the image of an iceberg as a metaphor of how difficult it is to change the mental models (the hidden part of the iceberg) that shape the visible actions and their consequences. She applies this concept to our understanding of climate change:

“Honestly, I feel like if we can’t have an emotional relationship to the material of our planet that is at great risk, we can’t change the way we think about the world. And so anything like «don’t take a plastic bag,» or «get an electric car,» all the moral imperatives that are put on us, if they don’t come from the heart, they’re not going to stick, they’ll just be gone in the next election cycle –at least, in the United States. And so what I am committed to do with my work is to create emotional connections to this material and the ocean.”

Tamiko Thiel, Unexpected Growth, 2018

The pollution of the oceans is an aspect of the impact of human activity on the planet that relates to the climate emergency, as well as with our contradictory relationship with nature as an idealized image and a neglected wasteland. In an interview with Helmuts Caune published in Arterritory, artist Tamiko Thiel recalls her experience with the reality of plastic pollution:

“When my husband and I would vacation in Greece, Indonesia or Malaysia over the past number of years, at some point we started to realise that the sort of pristine beaches that are everyone’s dream of a tropical vacation is an artefact of beach-side resorts. They send out their staff in the early morning hours, before everyone wakes up, to collect all of the plastic that’s accumulated.”

She created the artwork Unexpected Growth (2018), commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, that addresses this issue by placing the viewer in an immersive scenario in which the 6th floor of the museum is under water, populated by plants and creatures formed of plastic debris. The experience can lead a visitor to think about this reality, but at the same time, the piece is quite beautiful, its aesthetic qualities possibly causing more delight than awe.

Balancing environmental concerns and aesthetics is particularly difficult. Marina Zurkow points out that addressing a subject in a manner that is too shocking can lead to rejection:

“The brain wants to categorize what it receives and put in boxes and dismiss those ideas that seem dangerous, depressing or disturbingly radical. Presenting an audience with an impactful idea will attract their attention, but it may also lead them to reject the idea because it is too disturbing and just move on. Our brains want to take a nap, and have a difficult time dealing with uncertainty.”

Kelly Richardson, HALO I, 2021

Artist Kelly Richardson deals with climate change in her work by creating imaginary futures that prompt a reflection on our present. In this way, the message is placed at a certain distance in time that does not produce anxiety and allows a space for action:

“Until this point, on this precipice, we’ve allowed terrifying futures to be ushered in despite the predictions of so many. Perhaps we have allowed this in part because we couldn’t visualize or understand these futures from an experiential point of view. I try to offer this window of understanding through my work. I create potential futures for people to experience, to encourage reflection on current priorities and where those are leading us as a species.”

In HALO (2021), Richardson depicts a red moon distorted by heat rising from a campfire, a scene from her summer evenings in British Columbia that now takes a different meaning as the rising temperatures have led to banning campfires due to the risk of wildfire. “Summers now bring a mix of joy for its promised, remaining riches and genuine fear associated with what else they will bring,” states Richardson, “I now look out my windows towards a tree-covered mountain and think, «that’s a lot of fuel».”

Diane Drubay, Ignis II, 2021

The scene in Richardson’s video is relatable and in this manner makes its message stronger. This approach to what is familiar and close is also mentioned by artist Diane Drubay when addressing climate change through her work:

“We need to reconnect with what surrounds us on a daily basis in order to better understand and respect it. Having grown up in the middle of nature but having lived in the city for the last 20 years, the only element that has allowed me to feel connected to the grandeur and sublime of nature is the sun. I, therefore, assumed that if everyone could reconnect with the sun in a subconscious and transcendental way, a new relationship between humans and nature could be sparked.”

Her work Ignis II (2021) shows a beautiful summer sky that turns into a menacing red storm in just 14 seconds, which refers to the 14 years left until, according to several scientists, the Earth would reach a point of no return in global warming. Again, the image can be easily connected with a personal experience and suggests a reflection on a future that is not immediate, but is close enough to require immediate action.

Alexandra Crouwers, The Plot: a day/night sequence, 2021

Personal experiences can have powerful narratives, particularly when they bring a more intimate perspective to climate change than the global views offered by scientific reports. Artist Alexandra Crouwers focuses her work in the creation of virtual environments that reflect on our relationship with nature, landscape, and architecture. She speaks of feeling eco anxiety for more than 20 years, which has brought her to consider the climate emergency from a more personal point of view.

“There is a kind of innate longing for landscapes that are not there. This is connected to the idea of escapism; to escape from where you are at. The word nature has become very problematic: what we refer to as nature is quickly deteriorating in all kinds of senses. To me, simulating this idea of wilderness is like a twisted sense of digital nature, of purpose preservation. It is a way to deal with the idea of loss.”

In Diorama. The Plot: a day/night sequence (2021), she depicts what is left of a small family forest that was cleared due to a climate change induced fatal spruce bark beetle infestation. The 3D rendering of the real space becomes a sort of memorial and a tool for the artist to investigate how to deal with eco anxiety and ecological grief.

Katie Torn, Dream Flower I, 2022

Depicting remnants, ruins, or debris is also a powerful way to create awareness about the ongoing destruction of our natural environment. Taking this idea to a different context, artist Katie Torn has addressed the possibility that we as humans have become incapable of understanding nature without our intervention, and can only envision a hybrid world in which natural and artificial merge into one. The classical concept of beauty plays a pivotal role here, as it confronts us to our distancing from nature:

“Destruction and decay are frightening but it can also be beautiful on a purely aesthetic level. Like watching a forest fire from your computer screen. It is awful and heart breaking but can be watched slightly removed like an explosion in an action film. My work stems from the ironies we see in industrial disasters in nature like the most beautiful pink sunset that is caused by pollution or being awestruck by the colorful beauty in an oil spill.”

While works such as Dream Flower I (2022), cannot be said to address climate change, they do point out our relationship with nature in a wider sense, the mental models to which Marina Zurkow has referred, and that form a society interested in its own comfort, regardless of the consequences to our planet.

Marina Zurkow: aiming at the bottom of the iceberg

Roxanne Vardi and Pau Waelder

Marina Zurkow’s work explores the relationship between nature, culture, and society, focusing on what she describes as “wicked problems,” those issues that reveal our abusive interactions with the natural environment and our difficulty to understand it beyond our human-centric, capitalist-driven views of the world around us.

A transdisciplinary artist, she works with experts from different fields to create a wide range of artistic practices that includes video art, installations, and public participatory projects. Currently, she is working on the tensions between maritime ecology and the ocean’s primary human use as a capitalist Pangea.

Her work has been exhibited at numerous international art museums, as well as galleries, including Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, bitforms gallery, NY, FACT, Liverpool, SF MoMA, Walker Art Center; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Wave Hill, NY, and the National Museum for Women in the Arts. Zurkow is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is represented by bitforms gallery, and a fellow for Fall 2022 at Princeton University.

Following the release of two new artworks commissioned by Niio, we spoke with the artist about her latest work and her commitment to raise environmental concerns through her art.

Marina Zurkow, OOzy#2: Like Oil and Water, 2022

Many of your artworks, including OOzy2 and OOzy3, specifically allude to water as the main protagonist, and particularly the sea, which you have described as a “capitalist Pangea”. Sea life is both fascinating and mostly unknown to us urbanites. How do you use representations of the sea and sea creatures to address concerns about environmental issues?

First of all, I would say that one can think of the ocean in two ways: as a surface, and as a volume. The surface, which is what we mostly encounter as humans, has two functions: on the one hand, it is a surface on which we play; and on the other, it is a surface on which we transport goods, and this is what turns the ocean into a capitalist Pangea.

This is a diagram of the ocean shipping routes. When I first saw this, it became extremely clear to me that this surface is actually a very solid plane of transaction, namely capitalist transaction. So that’s where the phrase “Capitalist Pangea” came from. Billions of years ago, in the Mesozoic era, there was one sea, called Panthalassa, and the land was a single landmass called Pangea.

The other slide I wanted to share, which relates to the idea of the “Capitalist Pangea” is one I made for a talk on oceans, showing all the ways in which we see the ocean. We are capable of holding all of these buckets in our minds at once, and they remain in their silos to a great extent. The differences between thinking of the ocean as a site of plastic pollution, our fantasies of adventure, and 10 hour recordings of ocean waves you can find on YouTube to relax— those are all simultaneous identities that we assign to the ocean.

This is my last slide to share: it is an image created by Donella Meadows, the systems thinker who devoted her life to ecology and is one of the authors of the report The Limits to Growth that nobody wanted to pay attention to in the 1970s and 80s, and that clearly showed that the planet can’t take unlimited growth, which is the fundamental tenet of capitalism. She was interested in using systems thinking to look beneath the surface, and offered this iceberg model in order to talk about change-making. As you can see, what is visible (and therefore above the surface is tiny. The hardest thing to change is at the very bottom, the mental models. That’s the hardest place to get to. And honestly, I feel like if we can’t have an emotional relationship to the material of our planet that is at great risk, we can’t change the way we think about the world. And so anything like “don’t take a plastic bag,” or “get an electric car,” all the moral imperatives that are put on us, if they don’t come from the heart, they’re not going to stick, they’ll just be gone in the next election cycle –at least, in the United States.

And so what I am committed to do with my work is to create emotional connections to this material and the ocean. Why the ocean in particular? Because it is so important! It covers 80% of this planet. And just the fact that we’ve named this planet “Earth” tells you something about human self-centeredness. Really, we are a planet of water. And even if it is such a cliche, it is true that we are made of almost the exact same composition as the ocean itself.

“There are many roles that artists occupy in terms of addressing environmental atrocities. I don’t feel like any one tactic is any better than any other. It’s all crucial.”

How would you describe the role of the artist in raising important concerns about climate change and environmental atrocities? Do you see a difficulty in balancing severe global concerns and aesthetics?

I would like to unpack this and say, there are many roles that artists occupy in terms of addressing environmental atrocities, ecocide, grief, climate change, and environmental connection-making. These roles range from explicit activism—getting people charged up to make change, to the subtler concerns that I was talking about: changing affect, changing the way we feel, changing the paradigm and the values in which we live. So for instance, it may sound oblique, but thinking about kinship across species is such a radical paradigm shift for most people. And that, to me, is one of the fundamental motivators for caring for the earth. So there’s room for everyone at this table, to participate in connecting people to the world in which we are interwoven. And I don’t feel like any one tactic is any better than any other. It’s all crucial.

Regarding the second part of that question, yes I see a tremendous difficulty in balancing severe global concerns and aesthetics. Because the same things that make visuality potent, also make visuality impotent. The brain wants to categorize what it receives and put in boxes and dismiss those ideas that seem dangerous, depressing or disturbingly radical. Presenting an audience with an impactful idea will attract their attention, but it may also lead them to reject the idea because it is too disturbing and just move on. Our brains want to take a nap, and have a difficult time dealing with uncertainty. Yet, what we have at present is the tremendous force of geoplanetary uncertainty that, in many ways, we have produced. In this context, is visual art the right tool? I think there’s a lot of room at the table for these experiments. And you would have to be out of your mind to think that you, as a single individual, can change anything. We all have to contribute to making incremental changes. And this is very hard, because artists, myself included, have a big ego and want to feel like “yes, I am a changemaker.” But instead, I have to say, I am committed to change making, and I want to participate in that in whatever little ways I can.

“I see a tremendous difficulty in balancing severe global concerns and aesthetics. Because the same things that make visuality potent, also make visuality impotent.”

I have been working in audio more, I just finished collaborating on a 30 minute immersive audio piece about the ocean, that is a radically different kind of experience. The audio sneaks into your psyche. And because nowadays we are used to audio guides, I can use this technique to pretty great effect. This has been an instructive piece for me to think about other ways to invite people into these complex, difficult conversations and to go places where the human body can’t go, like deep into the ocean, or doing things that are impossible for us, such as dissolving into little bits and getting eaten by a whale.

As an artist working in many different mediums from new media art to performance to collage, how do you see the role of video artworks differing from other artistic practices?

I would add that I also work with food, for instance, that asks you to put things in your body as a way of experiencing the world. Each encounter between public and material can be thought of as “ways of knowing” (or epistemologies), and my job as a collaborator, thinker, and maker is to work with people who understand their own media like technology or cooking in such ways that we can do the most we can with those media to connect people to concepts and experiences.

Marina Zurkow, Making the Best of It: Jellyfish (2016)

As for video art works, the way to connect with the audience is obviously through the visual (and aural) quality of the piece, its scale and its context. The images produce all kinds of relations that your brain is trying to make sense of. Some images remind you of others, or spark certain feelings. All of this process is happening neurologically, and because we’re such visual creatures and pattern recognizers, the invitation of looking is built in and seductive. In that sense I am particularly interested in the humorous, the quirky, because it disarms the viewer. The viewer leaves their defenses behind when they see something really enchanting, or funny. So in my animated films I often use elements that are somewhat funny or seem naïve, but they point to issues that are not funny at all.

“I am particularly interested in the humorous, the quirky, because it disarms the viewer.”

Another aspect that is important for me in connecting with people happens when the artwork lives in people’s homes. I like work that people live with, and get to spend long times with. Some of my works are really long, they go on for hundreds of hours, sometimes unfolding over the course of a year, so that when someone has the artwork at home they can spend a lot of time with them and see how they change. Even if the work is not very long, about three minutes, I think about the density and add many layers, so that the story is told in depth and not in length.

Marina Zurkow, OOzy #3, 2022

Do you think that people react better to something they’re more actively involved in, or can they also have a profound experience of a visual artwork that they see at a certain distance?

These experiences are really different, and can be memorable for an audience in different ways. The food projects can suffer from exactly the same problems as the visual projects, which is the production of spectacle. I have only really been able to do one very successful public food project that was not elitist in costliness: a jellyfish jerky pop up shack on the UCLA campus that attracted 300 people to eat and talk. We provided a night market stall atmosphere, where people could sit and eat, and we interviewed many eaters in what was a really rich, two way exchange. For us as artists— my collaborators Henry Fisher, Anna Rose Hopkins and myself— this was a chance to have a real-time exchange and to create an offering that condensed into a snack some of the components of the tremendous risk of sea level rise. The video work does not have the same kind of immediacy: I don’t know what is happening with the work in terms of people’s reception. It’s a much more distanced experience for me. And at this point, I hesitate to understand what is so compelling about the work, or if the work really does move the mind at all. I really don’t know.

Your extensive career, among many other things includes your teachings as faculty member of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Could you elaborate on your views of the artist as educator?

I don’t think you have to educate inside of academic institutions, I think you can educate in many ways, which goes back to my statement about “ways of knowing.” Art is always political, and it is also always educational. What I mean is that art will be teaching you something whether it intends to or not: it might be teaching you that art is decorative, it might be teaching you that art has cultural vitality, it might be teaching you that the oceans are polluted. Art is always engaged in communication, and communication is, essentially, the transfer of information. This information accumulates and sometimes opens up a new way people can think about things. And that itself is a form of pedagogy. I teach that way. I was lucky to teach in a program that was very “anti-lecture,” very participatory and dialogic. This methodology pushes you to think about ways in which you teach and how to facilitate hands-on, engaged learning.

“Art is always political, and it is also always educational”

Your commissioned works show a tension in the relationship between the natural world and humanity with a specific focus on consumer culture and technological advancements. Do your works also suggest a solution for this probing question?

I don’t have any solutions. The first thing you learn in systems thinking is, there’s no such thing as a solution, because the solution will only beget further problems. When you think you’ve solved something you go to sleep, you don’t worry about that anymore. So I’d rather have the opposite: opening up new ways of thinking about these difficult entanglements and producing more questions rather than answers. Questions persist in your brain, they haunt you a little bit. And then maybe they drive your inquiries into the everyday. So what if making people conscious is the most I can do? What happens then? I have been going through tremendous doubt of the efficacy of artmaking in the last couple of years, and I am not on the other side of that yet, but I’ve been thinking a lot more about modest offerings of what change looks like and ways in which we can open up the world. A world of more inclusive ethics that would drive us to make better ecological and interpersonal decisions.

“I can only claim to do a small bit and then it is up to everyone to change their mindsets and act.”

Still, as an environmental artist, you are expected to solve things. There’s a group of artists and scientists who say, “If we don’t make work that addresses really tangible ways of changing things, we are useless. How do you measure that? We don’t want to talk about metaphors. We don’t want to talk about mindsets, we want to make change, we’re in a crisis.” But I would also say, sometimes you have to slow down to move fast. Interestingly, the Rising Seas Jellyfish Jerky Snack Shack showed me the contradictions in this way of thinking about solutions. People who participated and thought of themselves as environmentally active students, who were doing environmental studies, still went downstairs to the vending machine and bought single serve plastic wrap snacks. It was like the snacks were a blind spot in their whole system of thinking about the world. So I can only claim to do a small bit and then it is up to everyone to change their mindsets and act.

Tag Archives: climate change

Anthroposcenes: life in the Age of Humans

Marina Zurkow. OOzy #3: Just because you can’t swim in it doesn’t mean it isn’t there, 2022.

The ocean, a “capitalist Pangea”

Claudia Larcher. Noise above our heads, 2016.

What lies beneath the iceberg

Diane Drubay. Ignis II, 2021.

Stories of possible futures

Kelly Richardson. HALO I, 2021.

Memories of a lost past

Yuge Zhou. Interlinked II, 2022

Sisyphus routines

Theresa Schubert. A synthetic archive (AI glaciers), 2023.

Nothing is permanent

What is the role of art museums in the Anthropocene?

An expert’s view on sustainability in museums

Is there a need for art during an ecological crisis?

Fabula, tales of possible futures by Diane Drubay

Diane Drubay, Fabula 4 – Micro Stories From Tomorrow’s World, 2023

Diane Drubay, Fabula 6 – Micro Stories From Tomorrow’s World, 2023

Diane Drubay, Fabula 6 – Micro Stories From Tomorrow’s World, 2023

Tamiko Thiel: when art augments reality

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Rewilding the Smithsonian, 2021. Created with the ReWildAR AR app (2021, with /p). Commissioned by curator Ashley Molese for the 175th anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution, in the Arts and Industries Building.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Atmos Sphaerae, 2022. Created with the Atmos Sphaerae VR artwork, 2021.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Unexpected Growth (Whitney Museum Walk1), 2018. Created with the Unexpected Growth AR app (2018, with /p), commissioned by and in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Sponge Space Trash Takeover (Walk1), 2020. Created with the VR space “Sponge Space Trash Takeover” courtesy of Cyan Planet and xR Hub Bavaria.

Video by Tamiko Thiel, Evolution of Fish – Anthropocene Daze #1, 2019. Created with the AR app Evolution of Fish (2019, with /p).

The Role of Art in a Climate Emergency

An artist’s response

Marina Zurkow, OOzy#2: Like Oil and Water, 2022

Art in a climate emergency

Kelly Richardson, HALO I, 2021

Diane Drubay, Ignis II, 2021

Alexandra Crouwers, The Plot: a day/night sequence, 2021

Marina Zurkow: aiming at the bottom of the iceberg

Marina Zurkow, OOzy#2: Like Oil and Water, 2022

Marina Zurkow, OOzy #3, 2022

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