Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture -- MAKING NATURE

Endangered Species: Artists on the Front Line of Biodiversity, 2018

This exhibition catalog features 80 works in all media that span three centuries by 60 artists from around the world who convey the wonder and fragility of life on earth. It highlights the collaborative relationship between artists and natural scientists and how this partnership makes a vital contribution to the legacy of nature conservation. Through the artworks, readers can visualize the human actions that threaten biodiversity via E.O. Wilson's acronym HIPPO- habitat loss, invasive species, population growth, pollution, and overharvesting (all exacerbated by climate change). The book also provides an uplifting and inspiring component by featuring pioneering artists who revitalize habitats and reconnect people to the natural world.

First Reader: Nature's Wild [Duets], 2022

Exhibition primer for Andil Gosine's exhibition, 'Nature's Wild [Duets],' at the Niagara Artists Centre of Fall 2022. This exhibition catalog essay combines art historical research with artistic practice, considering curatorial methods through a spatial lens, and invites queer theory and commentary to investigate and consider the works of Nous Atelier, Angie Quick, Sur Rodney (Sur), Kelly Sinnapah Mary, Aitak Sorahitalab, Joshua Vettivelu, and Andil Gosine. In this catalog entry, I invite the reader to consider Gosine's second installation in his 'Nature's Wild' exhibition series as a queer space towards an understanding of "something else."

Pulse, 2022

This collection of essays aims to investigate how acoustic ecology and soundscape studies can contribute to current discourses on the climate crisis and Anthropocene living. This is done by reflecting on the legacy of R. Muray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project (WSP), a project formed in the 1960s at Simon Fraser University to research sound in the environment and communities, as well as by providing incisive contemporary research from the fields of sound art, noise abatement practices, media-theory, ethnography and other disciplines. Structured in three sections-the first being a critical reflection on acoustic ecology's foundations, the second discussing sound in community formation and the environment, and the last giving focus to sound in media and society-this book contains contributions mainly from sound researchers, ethnographers, communication and media scholars, and artistic researchers; overwhelmingly at Canadian institutions, but also reflecting an international community. Evident across this book is the influence Schafer and the WSP have had on thinking about sound in the environment-be it rural or urban-and 1 Dr Colin Frank is a percussionist, field recordist, installation artist, improviser, and multimedia composer. His works range from investigating found objects, machine noises, theatrical absurdity to site-specific performance, audience interactivity and DIY electronics. The PhD dissertation he completed at the University of Huddersfield considers how unconventional instruments and objects influence his creative process. In his duo project Brutalust he has released works on Verz, Accidental Records, and Crow Verses Crow, and he has worked notably with the Noisebringers, TAK Ensemble, AndPlay, Gods Entertainment, and the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble. His installations have appeared at Salem Art Works, Dai Hall, and Analix Forever. He teaches improvisation and experimental music.

Leigh T.I. Penman, Stephan Michelspacher Cabala Spiegel der Kunst und Natur (2015) [Front Matter], 2015

This is the front matter from the book Penman, Stephan or Stefan Michelspacher's Cabala (2015). It consists of a scholarly essay concerning Michelspacher's book, its sources, and its contexts. It also analyses some aspects of the text of Michelspacher's Cabala Spiegel der Kunst und Natur, providing a bibliographical survey of the extant editions.

To draw attention to a production method of image and sound, a number of viewpoints are proposed in this paper to do with cinematic traditions. This brings forth a privilege of contemplating images, within the sounds of electroacoustic music, images of a film, and language-based images in poetry. Engaging with the practice of recording the natural environment, traces of sound, image, and language may point to environments of distance.

Jefferson Journal of Science and Culture, 2019

Throughout recorded human history, experiences and observations of the natural world have inspired the arts. Within the sonic arts, evocations of nature permeate a wide variety of acoustic and electronic composition strategies. These strategies artistically investigate diverse attributes of nature: tranquility, turbulence, abundance, scarcity, complexity, and purity, to name but a few. Within the 20th century, new technologies to understand these attributes, including media recording and scientific analysis, were developed. These technologies allow music composition strategies to go beyond mere evocation and to allow for the construction of musical works that engage explicit models of nature (what has been called ‘biologically inspired music’). This paper explores two such deployments of these ‘natural sound models’ within music and music generation systems created by the authors: an electroacoustic composition using data derived from multi-channel recordings of forest insects (Luna-Mega) and an electronic music generation system that extracts musical events from the different layers of natural soundscapes, in particular oyster reef soundscapes (Stine). Together these works engage a diverse array of extra-musical disciplines: environmental science, acoustic ecology, entomology, and computer science. The works are contextualized with a brief history of natural sound models from pre- antiquity to the present in addition to reflections on the uses of technology within these projects and the potential experiences of audiences listening to these works.

From a talk given at the Maison Française Photoliterature Seminar, Oxford, 22 November 2017.

Pulse, 2020

In the essay "Hybrid Ecology-To See the Forest for the Trees" Laura Beloff writes that hybrid ecology is a growing concept within bioarts that braids together aesthetic investigations and processes with environmental or biological questions. This concept is central to the ideas explored in Art as We Don't Know It (2020) but could also be read as the organizing system of the book-a network of knowledges built between the interconnected thinkers found within its pages. A mix of hard science, philosophical inquiries into human relationship to nature, and artistic experiments with the biological and chemical world, this volume merges silos of knowledge that have traditionally been separated. The book was published to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Bioart Society, an association that supports international artist residencies, programs, and exhibitions that bring together art and science in Finland. It is broken up into four thematic sections: Life as we Don't Know It, Convergences; Learning/Unlearning; and Redraw and Refigure. Within each section, essays, interviews, and art project descriptions mingle together, informing each other as well as pointing to the ideas that slide outward towards other fields. For example, the first section places an essay by scientists Markus Schmidt and Nediljko Budisa on the contemporary xenobiology field alongside an essay by artist Adriana Knouf. Knouf argues that hormone treatments are a vital practice for hybridizing humanity-making gender binaries (the male/female categories 1 Tori Bush is a writer, teacher, and PhD Candidate at Louisiana State University. She is the co-editor of the anthology, The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing 1900-today, forthcoming from University of Florida Press in February 2021.

In our screen-mediated and technology-saturated lives, images on Google Earth and Discovery seem, at times, to bring us closest to nature. Our contact with the natural world is increasingly taking place through the screen and the image. For inhabitants of the modern metropolis, nature is the human Other and its simulation, a satisfying alternative for the 'real' thing. The self, now aligned with technology, is seen not as an extension of the natural but in opposition to it. This might arouse fears about a time when humankind will know nature only through its representation, but such apocalyptic notions can be resisted and we can begin to think about how technology mediates our perception of nature. This exhibition, titled 'Nature as Image' (2011), presents five artists from India and its diaspora who engage with the natural world. Their works in photography, video and film speak in different voices—from observational to contemplative—and in muted tones. Some eschew the restrictive boundaries of sentiment and environmentalism. Others reflect on Nature's unnoticed details and incontestable power. The screen becomes the channel through which these artists gaze at nature, subvert realistic representations of it, and envision new relations between the natural and post-industrial worlds. At its most elemental, this exhibition asks how artists dialogue with nature using technology.