The Interactive Atlas of the San Miguel

By Dan Collins and Gene Cooper

The Interactive Atlas of the San Miguel is a mediated sculptural display that allows users to interact with informational layers (pictures, texts, maps, stream data, etc.) and contribute “stories of place” focused on the San Miguel River Watershed in Southwestern Colorado. The project in its current form is a prototype for a network of interactive stations situated in publically accessible institutions and facilities (libraries, schools, museums, general stores, etc.) along the length of the San Miguel River. … Continue Reading

The Covert Power of Creativity

By Alyce Santoro

Because conceptual art can exist in non-material forms, one could argue that it is not only one of the most sustainable forms of creative practice, but also one of the most radical in its potential to challenge conventional thinking. To a tremendous extent, commercial media—whose primary function is to persuade its audience to consume—influences current prevailing thought. Conceptual art, by contrast, is often non-commodifiable; the value of an idea can supersede conventional methods of quantification, lending it a subtle, subversive, status-quo-defying kind of power. … Continue Reading

The Plant is Present, 2011

Organized by Meghan Moe Beitiks with Sabri Reed and Liliya Lifanova

Sansevieria trifasciata is an epic performer. Commonly known as “snake plant” or “mother in law’s tongue,” the plant is ubiquitous and unique at the same time. Over the course of its career, it has gone for months without water, made fiber from its own body, and collaborated with NASA to remove toxins like benzene and formaldehyde from the very air we breathe. In Sansevieria trifasciata’s seminal work, “The Bedroom Plant,” it converts carbon dioxide into oxygen at night. … Continue Reading

Digital Farm Collective

By Matthew Moore

The Digital Farm Collective is an international initiative to record and share footage, philosophies and scientific data on the growth of produce. Using time-lapse films, interviews with farmers and agricultural data, artist Matthew Moore hopes to contribute to a more sustainable global food system by sharing and preserving the growing practices of produce farmers from all over the world. … Continue Reading

Repurpose the Street: Mission Greenbelt & Related Projects

By Amber Hasselbring

In her first solo exhibition at SF Arts Commission Gallery in 2007, Hasselbring launched the Mission Greenbelt project, an ongoing public artwork inspired by the city’s Sidewalk Landscaping Permit, made available in 2006. The permit process allows residents to replace portions of sidewalk concrete with gardens. The Mission Greenbelt project’s goal was to build contiguous habitat gardens in SF’s Mission District, connecting Dolores Park (19th & Dolores) to Franklin Square Park (16th & Bryant). The interactive SFAC Gallery exhibition featured mixed media artworks (see image: mission greenbelt puzzle), bilingual sidewalk landscaping permit applications, a temporary CA native garden, as well as events including a campaign kick-off celebration, workshops, public school visits, plant sales and tours of the proposed Mission Greenbelt route. … Continue Reading

Worm Share

By Amy Youngs

The Worm Share project encourages symbiotic relationships between humans and worms. Through experimental artworks, participatory designs, workshops and networking technologies, I facilitate the travel and propagation of composting worms into domestic spaces and encourage others to do the same. In exchange, the worm colonies provide valuable ecosystem services. … Continue Reading

Human Chains

By Ameret Vahle

While working with cutouts and stencils of human chains in my paintings, I got the idea to put a call out asking people for cutouts of their own. … Continue Reading

Jalan Jati – “Teak Road”

By The Migrant Ecologies Project (Lucy Davis & Collaborators)

Jalan Jati or “Teak Road” is a visual art, science and ecology project tracing the historic, material and poetic journeys of a 1950’s teak bed, found in a Singapore karang guni junk store, back to a location in Southeast Asia where the original teak tree may have grown. … Continue Reading

Traffic Movement

By Steve Jones and Sally Rodgers

Traffic Movement is an imagined environment which transforms a recognizable street scene into a sonorous tone-poem. In this future soundscape, intelligent traffic lights speak their minds, the hum notes and partials of Electric Vehicles (EVs) ascend and descend, birds can be heard in the distant trees and footsteps echo on the city streets.

… Continue Reading

Exodus

Moving to Atlanta from Detroit in 2006, I was immediately struck by the pace of growth in the area. I knew I had to make work that addressed this issue, but I also wanted to avoid rehashing the architectural imagery of new home construction that often defines urban sprawl. Instead, the images in this series were created using motion sensor cameras placed in two cities lying approximately 20 miles northeast of Atlanta: Suwanee, which has seen its population nearly double from 8,725 to 15,355 in the last ten years (1) and Buford, now home to the largest shopping mall in Georgia and the 14th largest in the United States. It is an area very much on the frontlines of urban sprawl in America (2).

… Continue Reading

Simulsuck and Womble Tumble Slide

My process involves the collection and reassembly of discarded materials. A recurring theme that
unites my work is reassigned (or voided) utility through a new context, and I work in
several media—sculpture, video, drawing and performance. I scavenge large plastic appliances
or electronics lying in the street or in garbage bins. By harnessing discarded materials, I
utilize waste rather than produce it. Amidst the detritus that is continuously
thrown away in a consumerist society, I search for connections and relationships between materials
and concepts.

… Continue Reading

Radishes for Adoption: A Network of Ad-Hoc Food Producers

Motivated to build relationships around local food production and self-sufficiency, “Radishes for Adoption” brought about the playful transition of verandas, rooftops and unused space into tiny, food production areas in Kyoto, Japan.
… Continue Reading

Flying False Colors (The Sixth Day)

Carlo Zanni’s pieces are “data cinema”: he uses live, Internet data to create time-based, social consciousness experiences with games, photos, films and installations that investigate topical issues. … Continue Reading

Parquet: A Social Floor Covering in Berlin-Neukölln

Raw materials for the “social parquet” (2010) come from unofficial refuse dumps on the streets of Berlin-Neukölln and residents’ cellars and attics. For example, this parquet includes Muhammet’s kitchen table, a childhood bed that once belonged to Kerstin, Güler’s wardrobe, and a plank from Bernhard’s ship. These are among the roughly 550 found items and donations which compose the “social floor covering.”

… Continue Reading

Sustainable Cinema

“Sustainable Cinema” is a series of kinetic public sculptures that merge natural power with visual illusions to create a moving image. The artworks combine references to both the optical illusion toys that led to the invention of movies and early energy sources. By referencing the histories of both film and industrialization, these sculptures explore a possible future of environmentally responsible media—looking forward by looking back.

… Continue Reading

Great Divide

2010 – cotton, wire / ~13 x 3 x 3 feet

This work utilizes 100 pounds of raw cotton, grown, sourced and discarded near my former studio on the U.S.-Mexico border. Since the passage of NAFTA, more than a million Mexican farmers have lost their land due to the market saturation of U.S. cotton and other crops, driving prices for these goods below the cost of production. Unable to compete, small farmers have been forced out of business.

… Continue Reading

Youth, Sustainability and Art: The Barrett Summer Scholars Program

Youth involvement in the sustainability movement is absolutely critical, for they will inherit and craft the future of our planet. They have the opportunity to learn to see the world as a system from day one. They can avoid the bad habits and shortsighted thinking that have plagued the generations that precede them.  And they are ready and waiting to learn what needs to be done.

… Continue Reading

The Bus Project

“The Bus Project” focuses on the social impact of the public bus system in Phoenix, a city with a strong car culture. The idea was born out of the frustration that I felt trying to move through the valley without a car, using a system whose dysfunction and idiosyncrasies seem endemic to most urban areas in the American Southwest. This ongoing project attempts to give a face to the urban landscape through dialogue with and portraits of the people who move through it.

… Continue Reading

Photosynthesis Photography

Imagine a photographic world where you don’t need heavy metals and litres of water to make photographs.

Imagine a photographic world where you can discard your unwanted images as well as used and expired materials in your own backyard or compost bin.

Imagine a photographic world where your garden is your photographic supplies store.

Imagine no more.
… Continue Reading

Archives of Horror and Hope

Appalachian Coal serves electric companies 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
PLEASE read this writing with the lights out…..

… Continue Reading

All-Salt

This is one part of a joint Art & Research entry. See the corresponding research piece here.

In the spirit of cure-alls and tonics of a less-regulated medical era, Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt harvests the bounty of a unique yet-unregulated pharmaceutical disposal industry, combining two popular commodities, sea salt and recycled pharmaceuticals, to produce a mock-medicinal salt product: “All-Salt.” There are no laws that require industry or government to test, monitor, or control the levels of pharmaceutical content in water, or understand impacts on humans and the environment.

The Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt project involved rigorous research and synthesis of available environmental water quality and wastewater treatment information, and then humorous presentation of that material so as to engage a general audience on water quality/wastewater issues. It was completed in September, 2010 in San Jose California as a part of the Zer01 San Jose new media arts festival; it involved construction of model salt-evaporation ponds, salt product samples, tours of the San Francisco Bay ‘harvesting waters’ and old industrial salt ponds, and production of a formal report on the drugs found in the South San Francisco Bay.
… Continue Reading

I Am

Up Scenic Point

I thank the rocks

And the plants

And the animals

For being part of me

As I am part of them

–

Not from each other

We are each other

As we human beings

Are all one another

… Continue Reading

The Kerala Model of Development: A Path to Sustainability

The Indian state of Kerala has developed in a unique way over the last century.  A socialist state government promoted education and ecological conservation before these issues were common place among other Indian states.  These policies have resulted in a state where (1) a majority of the citizens are multilingual; (2) where the infant death rate is lower than that of the United States; (3) where the average life expectancy is equal to that of most first world nations; and (4) where ecological conservation is practiced, fostered from an understanding of the interconnectedness between society and the natural world.

… Continue Reading

Material Histories: Rio Salado Habitat Restoration Area, 16th Street [1/4 square mile] Phoenix, Arizona + Brush Creek Road [2 miles] Snowmass Village, Colorado

… Continue Reading

No(where) Now(here)

No(where) Now(here) addresses the issue of wolf recovery in Northern Arizona. The week-long installation took place between October 11^th and October 17^th, 2009.

… Continue Reading

Memory of Water: The Salt River Project

The Salt River Project follows the Salt River from the recreation areas East of Phoenix out to the Gillespie Dam West of Phoenix. It is the story of an urban desert river.

The project begins with the conceptual framework provided by high water marks. Clumps of dirt, plastic bags and plant growth five feet up in trees serve as a reminder that the dry riverbed is not dead, but only dormant. Too often in the desert, water concerns orbit around the idea that we’re using up all our resources and that the dryness is a sign of the dismal future. Though transient communities have made the river channel home, and others use it as a dumping ground, sooner or later the water will rise again. Everything found in the channel is colored with this knowledge. … Continue Reading

Consuming the Land: The Practice of American Traditions I

The attached photograph and menu are documentation of the first performance art in a series entitled Consuming the Land: The Practice of American Traditions.  Aldo Leopold, an esteemed early conservationist, reminds us that land is much more than soil; it includes waters, plants, and animals, all of which we humans consume.  This project is informed by the tradition of consuming the land, as a society and as individuals, and focuses on our local history of land consumption and the consumption of the land as a result of holiday feasts.  In the first phase, the artist’s family Thanksgiving feast is measured in how many miles the food has traveled to get to their mouths.  Future phases will include the Christmas/New Year Holiday and may extend into 2010 for a complete annual cycle of consumption.  In pursuing this project, Ms. Bailey hopes to reach a goal of sustainable feasting that reflects her responsibility to the land and her family.

… Continue Reading

Commingled Sorting Facility + Z Was Here

Commingled Sorting Facility

In Commingled Sorting Facility, a raccoon is found peering into a garbage can. The animal makes several trips in and out of the bin to extract consumable waste. Meanwhile, refuse also collects on its body. … Continue Reading

The Services of a Praying Mantis

The services of a praying mantis

In an effort to make ecological concepts like biodiversity applicable to policy, natural resource accounting (also known as Green GDP) attempts to place an economic value on “ecosystem services” provided by plants, animals and ecological process. The prerequisites of clean air, adequate water supplies, food production, and predictable weather certainly have economic value and should be preserved. However, this view has been accused of not giving adequate weight to more subjective concepts, such as intrinsic value, beauty, and desirability. While the cultural aesthetics attached to flowers will probably prevent them from being evaluated purely on considerations of carbon sequestration and soil erosion—should less charismatic species, such as this praying mantis, be appraised only on their virtues as an environmentally friendly form of pest control?

Contributor’s Biography:

Jeffrey W. Ackley is a National Science Foundation Urban Ecology Fellow at Arizona State University. His doctoral research involves reptiles in disturbed, artificial, and urban habitats. He hopes to identify how animals respond to different types of human activities in order to make existing urban populations more sustainable, and to lessen the ecological consequences of future development.   He is also a rescue diver and an underwater photographer.

An Apocalyptic Warning: Art’s Take on the Environment

By Heather Findling

When you walk into the “Defining Sustainability” exhibition at the Arizona State University Art Museum, you are thrust into a world of warning. The exhibition challenges viewers to step out of their day-to-day bustle, examining events such as industrialization and natural disasters, and to consider that the human existence is based on a limited supply of natural resources.  Artists convey themes of conservation, decay, and survival.

The exhibition starts with older, more historic pieces, gradually bringing the viewer to the present with contemporary art. Some pieces depict land as an untouched utopia, while others challenge the notion of industrial “progress.” Some render apocalyptic messages of environmental abandonment and collapse. The quiet and serene atmosphere of the gallery allows visitors to let their mind wander, with sustainability texts ever-present to bring back ones’ focus.

Oscar Oiwa’s "Black Snow II," Oil on canvas 227 x 444 cm (90"x180"), 2003, Arizona State University Art Museum collection, Tempe, Arizona. Reproduction courtesy of artist Oscar Oiwa and P.P.O.W. Gallery, NY, NY.

As I enter the gallery space, one piece in particular catches my attention: Oscar Oiwa’s multi-paneled Black Snow 2, painted in 2003. The visual attraction does not come from the painting’s size (90” x 180”); instead, it derives from the painting’s mysterious and illusive oranges, yellows, reds, and blacks. There is a peaceful quality to the painting. Yet at the same time, a sense of uneasiness pulls at me.

… Continue Reading

The Urban Foodshed Collaborative

The Urban Foodshed Collaborative provides a space and structure for New Haven youth to connect to the potential of the land around them. The youth grow food as well as their entrepreneurial abilities, and through this process, UFC grows young leaders. We aim to turn conceptions on their head. We create opportunity where others saw vacant lots. All through collaboration.

UFC braids together a number of trends that allow it to succeed: the need for New Haven youth to have valuable, building experiences that pay a deserved wage, the desire of restaurants and markets to source locally-grown, culturally-relevant produce, and the city of New Haven’s aim to turn vacant lots into green, productive space. To watch the video, click below: … Continue Reading