Future Atmospheres Now: Thinking Critical Climate Futures.

Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene Edited By Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti, 2020

This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the Anthropocene. It explores the challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate change. In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate. This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate’s capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content. Part 1. The Climate of Representation 1. Ecological Postures for a Climate Realism Amanda Boetzkes 2. Anthropocene Arts: Apocalyptic Realism and the Post-Oil Imaginary in the Niger Delta Philip Aghoghovwia 3. Fire, Water, Moon: Supplemental Seasons in a Time without Season Anne-Lise François Part 2. The Subject of Climate 4. Indigenous Realism and Climate Change Kyle Powys Whyte 5. Realism’s Phantom Subjects M. Ty 6. Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time Kathryn Yusoff Part 3. Realism and the Critique of Climate, or Climate and the Critique of Realism 7. The Poetics of Geopower: Climate Change and the Politics of Representation Ingrid Diran and Antoine Traisnel 8. Perplexing Realities: Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Also in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City with Lars Müller Publishers, 2016): http://www.arch.columbia.edu/books/catalog/138-climates-architecture-and-the-planetary-imaginary , 2016

A dizzyingly convoluted phenomenon, climate change entails many (often correlated and at times seemingly contradictory) things happening in multiple places at once, at varying rates and scales, and with myriad types and degrees of consequence. In addition to certain unprecedented material-environmental conditions, it thus poses profound representational dilemmas. From what vantage point might we engage this multi-scalar/-temporal/-dimensional/-disciplinary “shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure,” to borrow Rachel Carson’s analogy for pesticide contamination from 1962? The existing visual culture of climate change—brimming with depictions of polar bears atop waning ice, apocalyptic landscapes, and satellite views from above—adheres largely to an illustrative mode, despite the incongruousness and even muteness of such a manner in the face of newly complex entanglements between the human and nonhuman, not to mention the kind of attritional, “slow violence” associated with climate change. Using the artist Amy Balkin’s ongoing A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting (2011-) as a counter-model, this essay considers forms of representation that dwell in the “sticky materiality of practical encounters” (Anna Tsing), moving across scales and registers in order to forge not seamless perspectives, but rather, ones that are adequately fractured and muddy.

2015

During the last decade (2005-2015), artists from all over the world have taken on climate change as the subject matter of their work. Encouraged by activists (most notably Bill McKibben), artists have appropriated climate change as a social problem and decided that they too, alongside journalists and scientists, could do something to heighten public engagement with this pressing issue. Several major exhibitions, most notably in Boulder (2007), London and Copenhagen (2009), Paris (2012), New York (2013), Boston (2014), and Melbourne (2015), have placed climate change art on the map as a new and timely genre. In this paper, I take a critical look at the stated motivations and experienced outcomes of climate change art, by analyzing the statements of over 20 artists and the comments made by curators, critics and members of the general public. I argue that much progress has been made in defining climate change art as a genuinely artistic, rather than propagandistic or didactic practice. Though caught in the net of many criticisms, climate change art plays a crucial role in allowing the public to rethink the role of human beings’ everyday activities in irrevocably altering the climate system – it makes the Anthropocene a cultural reality. However, a risk in much climate change art is reverting to the aesthetic of the sublime, which has a long-standing tradition but which I argue does nothing to meaningfully engage the public with climate change.

Teaching Beyond the Curriculum , 2023

Climate change represents a paramount challenge within the contemporary era, marking a critical juncture in human history. From shifting weather patterns that threaten food systems, to rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. Without drastic action today, adapting to these impacts in the future will be more difficult and costly. However, much of the science that predicts and models climate systems and climate change is not typically seen by publics and therefore remains mystified in popular culture, hidden behind specialist terminologies. This lack of engagement with climate science could be improved by introducing new ways for climate scientists to engage with the public by employing the creativity found within the visual arts. Communication as a multidisciplinary endeavour and its ability to educate and inform the public remains a critical tool as we reach such a crisis. This paper proposes that a potential way to achieve deeper cultural communication of climate science is to establish ways of demystifying and ‘picturing’ the complexities of climate by directly embedding artistic practice into climate change research, employing an interdisciplinary approach to exploring, encouraging and enhancing collaboration between visual artists and climate science communities. This can result in a greater connection between climate science and communities by bridging the gap between specialist knowledge and public understanding of critical issues via a visual language. This paper acknowledges the principle that understanding the anthropogenic cause of climate change is the strongest predictor of climate change risk perceptions. Thus, raising climate literacy through a shared cultural vocabulary is vital to public engagement and support for climate actions. A shift from representing the past effects of climate change through alarming imagery to one more representative of how climates are understood and studied (such as via prediction, modelling and curiosity) can help shift the perception of climate change from ‘unchangeable’ to that of a participatory problem that can be overcome through collaboration.

2021

(Eds. TJ Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, Subhankar Banerjee) International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.

[From introduction]What contribution can public art make to public understandings of climate change? Posing such a question opens the door to well-traversed debates regarding the social role and political aesthetics of art, and specifically, art’s capacity to engage the public in pressing local and global crisis. But the concern here is not whether public art can generate any tangible outcomes or social benefits in relation to Anthropogenic crisis as has been the purview of some recent research in the field of socially engaged eco-art (Mar, Lally, Ang and Kelly). But rather how, within the context of current and immanent ecological crisis, art may catalyse critical, affective conceptions of climate change on the level of the imagination. To this end the imagination is not to be treated as something that mediates the interior of the mind and the exterior of the world but rather, as an affective force that underpins our relations with the world and the discourses through which we make meaning of our everyday lives (Yusoff and Gabrys). Adopting such an approach is critical to understanding what can be described as the futurist orientation of climate change, because, as Yusoff and Gabrys argue, ‘the imagination not only shapes the perception of climate change but co-fabricates it in ways that effect the possibilities to act upon it’ (520). In this light, this essay is specifically concerned with the ways in which public art is in dialogue with political rhetoric and media imagery to shape imaginings of climate change. Thus, it takes into consideration the wider field of discourses that shape public perceptions, and proceeds from the premise that art does not have a monopoly on aesthetics, but is rather competing with forms of knowledge production and transmission in the public arena that also have aesthetic capacities. This means that it seeks to interrogate how anthropogenic crisis and its dominant narrative of climate change are given cultural meaning and communicated in the public arena, drawing upon both sociological and art theoretical understandings of the relationship between aesthetics and social change. It focuses on one specific public artwork, Activate 2750 (2009) [Figure 1], by the Australian artist Ash Keating, and one specific aspect of climate change politics that is central to this work: catastrophe and apocalypse. Ultimately it argues that through Keating’s fictionalisation of apocalypse, Activate 2750 offers the public an opportunity to engage with the figure of catastrophe in a manner that, however dystopian, is not constrained by the moral binaries which frequently circumscribe public discussions around the future implications of climate change.

Elem Sci Anth

Humanity has never lived in a world of global average temperature above two degrees of current levels. Moving towards such High-End Climate Change (HECC) futures presents fundamental challenges to current governance structures and involves the need to confront high uncertainties, non-linear dynamics and multiple irreversibilities in global social-ecological systems. In order to face HECC, imaginative practices able to support multiple ways of learning about and experiencing the future are necessary. In this article we analysed a set of arts-based activities conducted within the five-year EU-funded project IMPRESSIONS aimed at identifying transformative strategies to high-end climate change. The exploratory artistic activities were carried out alongside a science-led participatory integrated assessment process with stakeholders from the Iberian Peninsula. Our arts-based approach combined a range of performative, visual and reflexive practices with the ambition to reach out to more-th...

Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 2024

This article reviews Western perspectives—in a fruitful dialogue with nonWestern perspectives—on the climate emergency and artistic experiences amid the ongoing debate about futures currently at stake in the climate crisis or climate emergency. Moving beyond the various ways of naming this crisis, we focus on how art can communicate, envision, and activate ways of inhabiting this problem, opening communities to an other-than-human coexistence and reconfiguring matters as we understand them in a geological, natural, or material sense. The analyses indicate that, instead of aiming at a singular solution, multiple exercises and imaginative and speculative avenues of narratives can tell different stories and envision alternative futures. If the climate crisis ignited in the Anthropocene is a shared crisis—both political and aesthetic—then art, inseparable from life and hence nature, holds a crucial role in nurturing care and the potency of imagining other possible worlds.

Zygon®, 2018

Abstract. This essay examines various contemporary artistic responses to climate change. These responses encompass multiple media and diverse philosophical and emotional forms, from grief and resignation to resistance, hope, and poignant celebration of spiritual value and natural beauty. Rejecting much of the terminology of current theory, the author considers the artworks in relation to interrelated and arguably unjustly discredited aesthetic and theological categories, namely the sublime and the beautiful as well as the via negativa, the latter adapted from Thomas Aquinas by theologian Matthew Fox. Art’s power is seen largely as the ability to “humanize” the science by rendering it emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually relatable to individuals. The broken relationship between humanity and nature seems related to the need for a renewed religious sense of integration with, and belonging to, the cosmos, something in the bringing about of which art might play a pivotal role. Key Words: Anthropocene, art, beauty, climate change, nature, oceanic feeling, religion, science, spirituality, the sublime, technology, truth.

2019