Realising Potentials: Arts-based sustainability science

Realising Potentials: Arts-based sustainability science is a two-day workshop conceived as an experiential site for exploration and dialogue around arts-based sustainability science.

Two main motivations guide the workshop:

1. To open up an experiential space where artists and scientists can share, connect and expand different experiences, projects and discussions in the field of arts-based sustainability research. A space to experience others’ approaches, to play, to be surprised… A space to explore together, pushing our boundaries, acting/thinking out of the box.
2. To catalyse a network of Arts-based Sustainability Science as a community of learning, practice and mutual support. A network expanding in time the sharing of the workshop and connecting different actors working in the field, so as to allow us to critically approach and expand different practices, collaborate together, and face different challenges as they emerge.

When and where?

The workshop will be held in Barcelona (Spain), in November 3rd-4th, 2016 at the Institute of Catalan Studies (Institut d’Estudis Catalans, IEC).

How?

During the workshop, participants will engage in different experiential laboratories and discussions to share, collectively explore and critically inquire different experiences of arts-science hybridation -both from artists and researchers, methodological boundaries and challenges as sustainability researchers and practitioners, and the potentials of bringing together the arts and the aesthetics and sustainability science.

Who?

This workshop is coordinated by a group of sustainability scientists and practitioners who have experimented with a variety of arts-based approaches and it is open to both artists and researchers interested in this intersection.

Participants are invited to share art and research projects directly developed within collaborations among artists and scientists, dealing with one of the thematic areas in question. Understanding the four pillars of sustainability – environmental, social, cultural and economic - proposals should embed the interactions between social and natural sciences and the arts as insightful ways to generate new understandings and relationships, make people aware of the importance of a balanced relationship between human beings and the environment, in its diverse levels, and trying to encourage people to realize potentials as agents of social-ecological transformations.

More details.

CFP: Ecology and Society

From Susan Jacobson:

Editors-in-Chief Carl Folke and Lance Gunderson are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 20, Issue 4 of Ecology and Society. 

The Reconciling Art and Science for Sustainability special feature edited by Frances Westley, Marten Scheffer, and Carl Folke will remain open to submissions until July 2016. This feature invites papers on the topic of how art and science may be integrated for transformative understanding, increased motivation and new insights.

"Why is science  perceived as entirely different from art? Both attempt to capture the essence of the world around us in novel and eye-opening ways. Still, the approaches are strikingly complementary. This suggests the potential for synergy. What can we learn from each other when it comes to the process of creative inquiry? Could we cooperate to fathom the unknown unknowns, finding important new questions that we had never thought of? This special feature invites papers on the topic of how art and science may be integrated for transformative understanding, increased motivation and new insights into how to build social ecological resilience."

Note: page charges may apply.

Report on University Artist-in-Residence Programs

Stephen Tonsor at the Carnegie Natural History Museum directed us to this 2013 document produced by The Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.

It's a set of recommendations for artist in residence programs at universities, based on a survey of 14 universities, and paying special attention to the IP issues. The recommendations could also be very helpful to FSML art programs, as well.

The Confluence Projects, Todd Gilens

Artist Todd Gilens works with Sagehen Creek Field Station outside of Truckee, CA and Reno, NV, and the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Lab (SNARL) near Mammoth Lakes, CA. His work there includes:

"...literature reviews, interviews and field work with researchers to understand the language, methods and motivations of stream science, as well as how streams are responding to climate changes."

Gilens has been working in the field and lab with invertebrate biologists David Herbst, Bruce Medhurst and Ian Bell, "considering how to bring aspects of their work to the average urban citizen".

A recent post from the artist's project newsletter illuminates some of the work emerging from that relationship.

From Gilen's crowd-funding website:

In my artworks, I borrow lecture halls, public transit vehicles, nursery propagation houses and other existing structures, adding images that make their meanings more legible. This new project emerged from visits to ecological field stations, where I compared my methods to those of field scientists’ and considered how both could inform our understanding of critical urban systems.  

“Confluence” will use the tops of urban curbs as a space to communicate with pedestrians about flowing water, stream science and the urbanization of landscapes. Using script fonts derived from local historical people’s handwriting, texts will be cut from bright yellow reflective traffic-marking tape and laid down along a mile of curbs, zigzagging from block to block on routes that follow the street grid overlay of former stream channels.