encountering emerging naturecultures
What? When?
Open Fields conference: POSTSENSORIUM
September 23-25, 2021. Riga / Online
Where?
Renewable Futures conference: The Futures of Living Technologies
November 4-6, 2021. Oslo / Online
24/11/2021 at 18:00 EET Online / UPDATE festival
FINAL MEETING
The “Green Revisited: Encountering Emerging Naturecultures” (GREEN) project's main objective is to develop a European platform to shape and popularize an emerging “naturecultures” paradigm via the arts, as well as to strengthen an international network committed to enhancing criticality by investigating the pervasive greenness trope.
To foster new discourses on “naturecultures” capable of overcoming the dualism between the human and nature by ‘ungreening’ the pervasively used notion ‘green’ and reconsidering the current understanding of ‘green’ as synonymous of the ‘natural’.
We are building a new European media art and culture platform for critical discussions, artistic interventions and transcultural dialogue addressing the complexity of our relations with the environment.
By developing GREEN think tank on European level we will create a shared knowledge platform that facilitates the development and testing of new hybrid business models for emerging artists and cultural workers.
Larger scale events will be professional gatherings such as conferences which will be organized with a main purpose to reach new audiences and to explore the new “natureculture” paradigm that suggests to bridge the historically developed gap between “nature” and “culture”.
By an active involvement of all the participants in organizational and exchange activities we want to support creation of new artworks and to maintain the circulation of artworks transnationally that would reach wider public.
A series of dynamic, thematically related yet diverse events like workshops, residencies and public programs will be organized throughout Europe to develop the conceptual framework, to maintain artist mobility, and to support artistic creation, co-productions and workshops.
GREEN Revisited: Encountering Emerging Naturecultures
Series of exhibitions, conferences and worklabs
“GREEN Revisited: Encountering Emerging Naturecultures” (GREEN) project reconsiders pervasively used notion “green” that is symbolically associated with “natural”, claiming that such superficial notions are used to symbolically mask the increasing technical manipulations of nature and environment. The GREEN project aims to build new European media art and culture platform for critical discussions, artistic interventions and transcultural dialogue addressing the complexity of our relations with the environment and fostering new discourses on “naturecultures” capable of overcoming the dualism between the human and nature.
Location: Latvia, Iceland
WORKSHOPS & PRODUCTION RESIDENCIES
Dates (Period): 01/01/2020 – 30/04/2020 (1-week)
01/05/2021 – 31/08/2021 (1-week)
Location: Riga, and RIXC Fields residencies, Latvia, Switzerland, and Iceland
Organizer: RIXC
This residency and workshops will take place in rural settings – in RIXC Fields residency in Latvia. Hosted by artists Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits (Latvia), two residencies will be organized exploring the local ecosystems whereby seeking for the new ways how to communicate, understand and interact with the natural world. The first workshop will be taking place in summer 2020 in Latvia and Switzerland exploring the “intelligence” in nature, and based on building artworks and new communicative ecosystems. The second workshop will be exploring the “sensible ocean”, and it will take place in summer 2021 in Riga and Athens, Greece, the cities next to the two different seas. In a result new artworks will be produced for showing them in the Green exhibitions.
Location: Bourges, France
EXHIBITION & PUBLIC EDUCATION PROGRAM, CONFERENCE & PUBLIC WORKSHOPS
Dates (Period): 18/10/19 – 18/01/2020
Location: Bourges, France
Organizer: Emmetrop
OU\/ERT festival organized by Emmetrop is the first event of the GREEN project, Emmetrop will be also hosting the project’s kick-off partner meeting in Bourges in 2019 with participation of representatives from all project partner organizations. The first implementation activity in the project – OU\/ERT exhibition with about 20 artworks will also take place in Bourges organized by Emmetrop.
Location: Bourges, France
Location: Liepaja, Latvia
“Update 1.0: Green Technologies”
Dates (Period): 04/11/2019 – 08/11/2019
Location: Liepaja / Latvia
Organiser: MPLab – Art Research Lab of Liepaja
During the three year period (2019 – 2021) Art Research Laboratory (MPLab) will be organizing series of WorkLab – art hackathons on Green Technologies, which will be one-week long intense program consisting of workshops, exhibitions, seminars and a public day with participatory workshops for families and children in Liepaja. Exploring the crossover among Ecologies, Art and Technologies, the participants will experiment and engage with the most innovative sensory and immersive technologies of today – from virtual reality to immersive sound environments, point clouds and laser scanned 3D environments, as well as swarm robots and artificial intelligence, reconsidering our relations with the technologies and its impact and relation to nature. The WorkLabs will be organized by MPLab during its annual international gatherings – iWeek (International Week), which every year brings together more than 80 young artists, emerging designers, students, researchers and art educators from at least 10 European countries. The results of the workshops will be presented in public exhibitions, “show and tell” evenings, and closing day with public open workshops for children.
Location: Eindhoven, Netherlands
WORKSHOPS & PRODUCTION RESIDENCIES
Dates (Period): 01/01/2020 – 30/04/2020
Location: Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Organizer: Baltan Laboratories
The Worklab program organized by Baltan organization in Eindhoven, will include residency and symposium that will explore the roles and values of our economic system in the challenge to reconnect with our natural environment. … Our world is at a tipping point. The extraction of our natural resources for profit and goods no longer sustains in the age of the Anthropocene. Economics, as a social technology in its present form, provides no solution to issues of climate change and social inequality. The added value of efficiency and productivity are outweighed by the numerous disadvantages of reducing all values to market value. We need to reshape our economic systems and see how it can be informed with creativity, ethics, environmental issues and other social challenges… Through artistic and practice-based research this Worklab aims to reconsider our thinking about the economy and reconnect it with our natural surroundings. With the title “Homo Economicus”, this WorkLab will face the challenges of creating the visions and models of the economic system which is not based on permanent growth but on abundance.
Location: Ljubljana, Slovenia
WORKLAB – WORKSHOPS & PRODUCTION RESIDENCIES
Dates (Period): 01/05/2020 – 31/09/2021
Location: Ljubljana / Slovenia
Organiser: Zavod Projekt Atol
Projekt Atol will organise and facilitate the Sensing the Invisible [Non-Green] (SING) artist/scientist residency. The selected international team’s task will be to enable, deploy and use a bio/chemical/media lab on wheels with a focus on monitoring “acute events” in biosphere. Projekt Atol will organise a mobile residency for a tight artist-maker-scientist team (2 or 3 members). Their task will be to enable, deploy and use a bio/chemical/media lab on wheels with a focus on monitoring acute or chronic events in biosphere. These could be acts of natural forces (like floods, fires, landslides) or human caused events (like industrial accidents, spills, buildup of toxic emissions) that involve the invisible pollutants, elements in nature that cannot be monitored or detected without the use of technology, events that avoid the human sensory apparatus and are easy to evoke phantasmatic projections, fear; events that often trigger an emotionally charged situation of control lost and cracks at the edges of what can be sensed as real and of what we were taught to be real; events that shape our risk society (Beck); events that invoke in us an inherently reactionary situation, an emotional need to prevent radical changes in our environment, trigger events that might change small portions of the way we operate since we want to protect the way we live. What is sought is a situation in nature, possibly outside of densely populated areas, which is often characterised by sensationalist tone in media reporting, bordering on moral panic, with media teams on “day trip” reporting from the affected area.
The team’s task are two-fold, and should always be considering the nature of the event in question: a) In the most acute situation the team will avoid or work against against overheated media pornification of such events. It would perhaps choose to turn media’s skewed mirror in and use its own biopolitical power against the media; In this case it could monitor the creation of on media panic and moralistic sensationalism, characterised by reporting vans rolling in for some cheap disaster reporting in order to show us “the invisible”, just to escape back home in a matter of hours.
Within the first stage the team will gather data and explore the situation on site in order to be able to prepare for the second stage of their mobile and remote residency. The time between the (media) event start will be used to research and equip the team and the mobile lab with affordable sensors, tests and procedures.
b) In the post-traumatic phase , which will follow within 12 months of the initial (media) event, the team’s task shall be to work against the cold technocratic deployment of experts and scientist that mostly come to collect samples, read the data just to disappear back to their desks and labs in the urban centres. The team will stay within the affected area for a longer period (at least a few weeks) in order to be able to work and engage with affected environments, creating art through and by use their own monitoring of the invisible. They will also facilitate on-site workshop programmes both with local communities and non-locals.
Participants: 3 participants in residency (artists and scientists), 20 people involved in participatory activities
More information at: https://www.projekt-atol.si/
Location: Liepaja, Latvia
Location: Oslo, Norway
Location: Riga, Latvia
In climate change research, the Swiss National Science Institute (WSL) scientists have obtained a unique experience by monitoring and observing several areas in Swiss Alps for almost three decades already. “Ecodata” project is the initiative by the curator Yvonne Volkart and Institute of Aesthetic Practices (Basel), and it involves international team of artists who are working closely together with the forest scientists, creating audiovisual artworks and sonifications.
In addition to Ecodata exhibition which will show the result of long term art-science research, the larger conference on “Naturally Artificial Intelligence” will be organized by RIXC in Riga. “The original vision of artificial intelligence was about automation of cognition, conjuring images of robots and superhuman computers. But today AI plays a crucial role in culture—for instance, in recommending music, videos, and potential “friends” on social media—influencing our behavior and imagination. The integration of AI into the everyday lives of billions raises important questions about the future of culture, aesthetics, and taste.” The conference will be discussing the impact of AI on culture, featuring the Keynote speaker Lev Manovich, professor of computer science at The Graduate Center, New York. The conference topics will cover large spectrum of the topics relevant for this project, and will collect the papers from the speakers for the GREEN publication.
Location: Latvia, Switzerland
Location: Helsinki, Finland
WORKSHOPS & PRODUCTION RESIDENCIES
Dates (Period): 01/01/21 – 30/04/2021
Location: Helsinki / Espoo / Finland
Organiser: Biofilia / Aalto University
Four-week artist-in-residency at Biofilia, the base for art and biology at Aalto university, will be organized with the intent to critically reflect upon technical manipulation and exploitation of living systems, biological beings, other species, and the biosphere at large, whereby creating an artwork in relation to the explored themes. Aalto University has Biofilia, base for biological arts, which is a laboratory for biotechnology-based artistic work. GREEN Worklab 5 consists of a four-week artist-in-residency for a scientist and two artists. The intent is to critically reflect upon technical manipulation and exploitation of living systems, biological beings, other species, and the biosphere at large, whereby creating an artwork(s) in relation to the explored themes. Next to the Biofilia lab there’s a STEAM lab of Aalto University Junior. The University is an actor in the School service project in the city of Espoo: there are three senior high schools and an international comprehensive school at the University campus. During the GREEN residency we shall organise artist and scientist led workshops for youngsters studying in these schools. In the final presentation there will be shown works by artist&scientist collaboration as well as outcomes of STEAM workshops. We’ll organise a symposium to discuss GREEN matters.
Location: Riga, Latvia
Dates (Period): 01/09/21 – 31/12/21
Location: Riga, Latvia
Organizer: RIXC in collaboration with Greenness
Studies Initiative – Jens Hauser.
This activity is also an important evaluation and dissemination activity. Emerging “Naturecultures” perspective have become now one of the key directions in contemporary discourses. This volume in the Acoustic Space series (published by RIXC) will based on Greenness studies by Jens Hauser and it will continue to build a ‘techno-ecological’ perspective in which new artistic practices are discussed that combine ecological, social, scientific and artistic inquiries. The topics covered in this volume will include * green/ungreen – ‘symbolic green, ontological greenness and performative greening’ * post-anthropocentric visions – ‘nature culture’ and eco-critique * biopolitics – beyond the anthropocene, towards multispecies relations and open space research * sensible ‘green’ – beyond the visual: acoustic, olfactive, chemical etc. * ‘green’ intelligence – environment and naturally AI within algorithmic societies * ‘prismatic’ – color theories, light and perception..
Renewable futures / virtualities and realities grāmatu bilde no FB
Location: Riga, Latvia
Location: Oslo, Norway / Online
Renewable Futures 2021 Conference: Futures of Living Technologies
Dates (Period): 04/11/2021 – 06/11/2021
Location: Oslo, Norway / Online
Organizer: FeLT (Futures of Living Technologies)
Renewable Futures is a conference series that originated in the Baltics and the North European region with an aim to invent new trajectories for more sustainable and imaginative future developments. This edition will be online, hosted by FeLT in collaboration with Creative Europe project GREEN. We welcomed paper proposals from researchers and artists of interdisciplinary practices from fields such as contemporary art, artistic research, art theory, media art, design and architecture, applied artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, life sciences, art education and other relevant practices. The conference will feature presentations of artistic and transdisciplinary research projects, as well as examples and discussions of applied projects, and a curated screening program.
The 4th Renewable Futures Conference questions how we experience and express life and the sense of aliveness today. Actualized by our current global pandemic, we invite artistic, academic or applied research perspectives on relations and intersections between human beings, living environments and machines. This might evoke a sense of the uncanny and a fear of domination and surveillance. It might also reveal a world of possibilities of becoming, creation of new forms and behaviors. Could we co-create a more balanced existence? Can we enhance our senses and communication to become beings that are more adapted to co-existence with our environments and other species?
More information at: https://feltproject.no/
RIXC Center for New Media Culture (Latvia)
Lenču iela 2, Rīga, LV-1010, Latvia
Baltan Laboratories (The Netherlands)
info@baltanlaboratories.org
baltanlaboratories.org
Postbus 4042, 5604 EA Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Oslo MET(Norway)
Email
sites.google.com/view/feltproject/home
Clara Holsts hus, Pilestredet 46, 0167 Oslo
Media Lab of Aalto University (Finland)
mlab-arts@aalto.fi
medialab.aalto.fi
P.O.Box 16500, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland