Ecocriticism, art & environment

Recent years have seen an exponential increase in the number of composers and sound artists directly responding to global environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change, through their creative practice. The philosophical concerns and practical methodologies of these composers and sound artists build on the established field of acoustic ecology, and the related genre of soundscape composition, but also venture well beyond them, setting them apart as a distinct new movement in music and sound art. However, as yet no new terminology has been found to define and describe this movement, either as an academic field of study or as an artistic genre.

Two composers who are at the forefront of this movement, David Monacchi and Matthew Burtner, have each independently adopted the term “ecoacoustic” in reference to their work: a term which this paper will propose as the most suitable to describe this contemporary movement of environmentally-concerned music and sound art. Although some significant differences exist between the artistic philosophies and creative practices of the two composers – which also, therefore, inevitably carry through into differences between their uses of the term – it will be argued that the similarities between them are significant enough for these differences to be regarded as variations upon a core set of principles and methodologies.

Through an investigation into what the term “ecoacoustic” means in the context of the work of Monacchi and Burtner, this paper will identify these core principles and methodologies, employing them as the basis for an initial “definition- in-progress” of ecoacoustic music and sound art. Finally, a selection of other composers and sound artists will be proposed whose work embodies the fundamental characteristics of this new field of “ecoacoustics”.

The sounds of the natural world have served as a key source of musical inspiration for composers throughout history; and for the last century, recording technology has enabled the utilisation of the sounds themselves as compositional material. The use of recorded environmental sound in musical works has become common practice for composers working in a plethora of different styles and genres, employing a wide variety of techniques; however, a comprehensive analysis and comparison of these different approaches has yet to been undertaken.

Aside from technical and stylistic considerations, the other vitally important question for such an analysis regards what this use of natural environmental sound as compositional material means, both to composers and listeners. In today’s society it is the increasingly significant socio-political issue of global climate change which dominantes contemporary thought regarding humankind’s relationship to the environment; and it is therefore inevitable that the resonances of this will be felt in any work which takes the sounds of the natural environment as its subject. The task of achieving a properly contemporary musicological analysis of such works therefore demands that they be considered from an ecomusicological perspective, which focuses on their socio-cultural significance in the light of contemporary environmental concerns.

In undertaking this ecomusicological analysis, stylistic traits become less important than the specific ways in which the environmental sound is used, the role that it plays within the composition, and the meanings that it generates. This paper will therefore propose a new critical framework for works which use natural environmental sound as compositional material, addressing a significant gap in ecomusicological scholarship and facilitating a new understanding of a common compositional practice which takes into account its new meaning to the ecologically-focussed society of the 21st century.

Resumen La ecocrítica es aún una escuela de crítica reciente y poco extendida entre los estudios literarios de América Latina y España. Dentro de su alcance, las investigaciones sobre la ecopoesía hispánica contemporánea apenas suman 55 fuentes hasta mayo de 2017. El 88,55% de estas ha tomado como objeto de estudio producciones de poetas latinoamericanos. Aun así el desarrollo de tales investigaciones es asimétrico, pues se ha concentrado en prácticas ecopoéticas procedentes de Chile (32,82%) y Perú (18,32%). Asimismo, se observa una tendencia a la redundancia, ya que autores como Steven White, Roberto Forns-Broggi y Niall Binns, y sus estudios, se han convertido en referencias capitales e indispensables, lo cual lleva a que otros ecocríticos (re)visiten producciones en específico y repitan algunos presupuestos, observaciones y apreciaciones. De ahí que sobresalgan los análisis sobre las producciones de Nicanor Parra, Ernesto Cardenal, Gioconda Belli, Homero Aridjis y Pablo Antonio Cuadra. No todas las prácticas de los poetas mencionados por los investigadores han sido abordadas con la misma profundidad y detenimiento metodológico: algunas se quedan en el nivel de la cita o referencia del poeta, un poema o un poemario, o bien del comentario general. Como temáticas analizadas predominan las relativas a los dones de la hospitalidad (16,50%), la celebración (14,56%) y el reparo (12,14%), así como a la devastación ecológica (12,14%). A modo de recomendaciones, se precisan seis opciones metodológicas que pueden llevar a los investigadores a efectuar un análisis poético desde la ecocrítica. Abstract The ecocriticism is a recent and not yet widespread critic school in literary studies in Latin America and Spain. Within their scopes, the research on Contemporary Hispanic poetry barely adds 55 sources until May 2017. 88,55% of these has productions of Latin American poets as subject of study. The development of such research is asymmetrical. It has concentrated on ecopoetic practices coming from Chile (32,82%) and Peru (18,32%). Also, a trend towards redundancy is observed, because authors like Steven White, Roberto Forns-Broggi and Niall Binns, and their studies, have become cardinal and essential references. This lead to other ecocritics (re)visit specific productions and repeat some assumptions, observations, and appreciations. Thus, analysis of the productions of Nicanor Parra, Ernesto Cardenal, Gioconda Belli, Homero Aridjis and Pablo Antonio Cuadra overload within geo-poetic map irregularity. Not all the practices of poets mentioned by researchers have been analyzed in the same detail or methodological deliberation: a plenty of them remains at level of a quote or reference of the poet, a poem or a poetry-book, either a general comment. The prevailing analyzed topics are those relating to the gifts of hospitality (16,50%), celebration (14,56%) and repair (12,14%), as well as the ecological devastation (12,14%). In the form of recommendations, six methodological options, which may lead to conduct researchers to a poetic analysis from the ecocriticism, are specified.

The presentation traces the recent establishment and development of the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES). Having arisen initially out of the kindred, though largely distinct, scholarly discourses of ecocriticism and environmental history, the network soon developed a model of cross-cutting research cooperation spanning a wider and more heterogeneous constellation of subject areas, scholarly discourses and scientific domains. Responding to a widely perceived need for a more fully interdisciplinary field of environmental studies in the humanities, NIES has also become a meaningful vehicle for the organization of the environmental humanities in Northern Europe (the Nordic countries in particular). The network offers one noteworthy model for the further development of this emergent field in its emphasis on project-driven and increasingly team-organized collaborative research, as well as in its ambitions to promote the equitable engagement of scholars from the arts and humanities together with scientists from the social sciences and the natural sciences in the production of new knowledge pertaining to environment and society.  NIES’s distinctly integrative form of engagement in new initiatives of research, education and public outreach has been described, perhaps most aptly, as a _post-disciplinary_ approach to environmental studies.

Après une brève comparaison entre l'écocritique américaine (Glotfelty et Fromm, Buell) et l'écocritique française (Stéphanie Posthumus, Alain Suberchicot), cette communication a pour but d'explorer les plus récents travaux sur le paysage en philosophie et en géographie (Alain Roger, Augustin Berque) et de questionner la notion d' « artialisation » (Roger) avec celles d' « écoumène » et de « médiance ».

En explorant brièvement les travaux de Michel Collot sur le paysage littéraire, la dernière partie de cette communication vise à questionner les méthodes et enjeux d'une lecture écocritique des paysages littéraires.

This paper addresses the ‘problem of style’ that curator William Jenkins declared at the beginning of his catalogue essay on the New Topographics was ‘at the center of the exhibition’. It argues that rather than being ‘anthropologically’ detached, the New Topographics’ emotional reserve was a style. Its approach was consistent with contemporaneous New York painting and sculpture’s rejection of 1950s’ Abstract Expressionism’s emotional drama and allusive non-objectivity. Fusing 1960s’ Pop Art’s attention to mundane commodities and Minimalism’s reductive cubes, the New Topographics focused on geometric form and high contrast clarity applied to generic modernist suburban buildings. Yet their rejection of pictorial conventions of landscape in favour of environments strongly constructed by humans disrupted the ideal of nature as respite. Their banal urban and suburban landscapes featuring arrays of blocky factories and industrially manufactured residences present an early, implicit evocation of the Anthropocene. That work can then be recognized as a precedent to a prominent subject matter among current photographers of more overtly displaying our geological era’s disproportionate impact by humans on natural ecologies in images emphasizing the scale and extent of extraction, construction, consumption and waste.

In the framework of contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paolo Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee focuses on the conflictual relationship of proximity and differentiation at stake in the human-animal distinction in a post-Darwinian context dominated by the rise of experimental sciences. A discussion of vivisection and animal taming prompted by anthropocentric works as Mantegazza's _Fisiologia del dolore_ and _Upilio Faimali_ in tension with pro-animal essays by Ouida and Vernon Lee shows how the animal, caught between pure inert materiality and idealization, emerges as an intrinsic lack that the human fills with contending rational, utilitarian, moral, and affective motivations.

This article deals with the issue of environmental terrorism in Peter Wuteh Vakunta’s Green Rape: Poetry for the Environment. Vakunta uses his poetic practice to engage with the interdisciplinary issues related to the intersection of poetry, culture, environmental studies and poetics, and environmental activism. The article begins with tracing the ramifications of the terminology of terrorism related to the environment. Then it shows how Vakunta views environmental terrorism from a somewhat different perspective. He devotes many poems in this collection to this issue and shows how it is not limited to the acts of direct violence but pervades numerous activities when we get in contact with the environment or go on with our daily routines. This terrorism ranges from war and oil spills to littering and over-consumption.

Published in Guatemala in 1938, Romelia Alarcón de Folgar’s poetry collection, Llamaradas, features a poetic voice who takes the form of a tree, ostensibly the ceiba, or Maya World Tree.  Marrying images both from Maya tradition and Western modernity, this speaker-tree embodies the utopian aspects of mestizaje in that it privileges both indigenous and European cultures at the expense of neither.  Moreover, insofar as the only “characters” in the collection are elements of nature, the collection also communicates an early environmentalist ethic that found resonance in the traditional Maya world view.  Llamaradas is thus a significant text that showcases a woman’s contributions to conservationism and mestizaje, two cultural discourses that distinguish Central American intellectual circles of the 1930s.  This article, which provides a cultural history of Central American conservationism, can serve as a platform for future scholarship on Central America’s conservationist history and women’s participation in Latin American environmental movements.

The contention of the following pages is that the urban has become “natural”: first, that this is a symptom of the dissolution of the city in contradistinction to Nature or the world — urbi et orbi are no longer distinguishable nor can they be split into such a straightforward binary; and second, that this becoming-natural of the city is a symptom of what has been identified as the ‘End of the World’ or the ‘End of Nature’. Via theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour, and Jane Bennett, and with a detour via Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo, I will argue that in the way that Pier Paolo Pasolini speaks of Rome, and the way that cities are portrayed in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, this conception of the city as natural had already started to take place, albeit unconsciously.

"Soundscape in  San Francisco Rivers' expedition

Abstract
Our paper is about the project contemplated in the Program “Mais Cultura”, whitch Support the Micro Region of San Francisco River and is conducted by the National Foundation of Arts - FUNARTE, and the Ministry of Culture - MinC. Our objective is the realization of artistic interventions and educational practices, such as the possibility of contribute to the revitalization of the San Francisco River region by the appreciation of spatial memory in the city of Propriá, in Sergipe State.
Our project includes the discussion of the various sciences, a collaborative process between researchers of art, technology, geography, history, designer, that underlie the understanding of the local landscape and its social, cultural, physiological and environmental. These relationships redefine the space and its contents, by transdisciplinary relations. There Will be developed artistic actions involving: the workshops, the creation of social networking platform for mobile devices and the realization of artistic interventions in the physical space of the region by geotagging sound and picture on augmented reality. Thus, we are interested in developing theoretical reflections about the virtual data inserted at the landscape, aiming the collective building of affective cartographies, emphasizing local memory and culture.
keywords: mixed landscape, art and technology, environmental art, augmented reality
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In a special 2014 issue of the Latin American Research Review, scholars Jeffrey W. Rubin (history), David Smilde (human relations), and Benjamin Junge (anthropology) develop the idea of “zones of crisis,” or “spaces of material deprivation, exclusion, violence, and environmental destruction” (8) in which “struggles for rights, recognition, and survival are enacted” (7). Zones of crisis appear frequently in environmental literature, and their literary representation figures in more general imaginaries of crisis, apocalypse, and dystopia, as well as occasional representations of resilience and resurgence, that recur in contemporary written texts, films, and digital media. In my presentation, I explore how the scholarly exploration of imaginaries of crisis (which are often portrayed as the product of conflicting worldviews), as well as those of escape and resilience (many of which involve retreats from Western, capitalist worldviews), might benefit from methodologies that incorporate an understanding of epistemic location into discussions of “place” and crisis. I advocate for ecocritical methodologies for a pluriversal world, and in particular, ask how the integration into the study of literature and the environment of the work of proponents of decolonizing knowledge, such as Linda Martín Alcoff, Enrique Dussel, and Walter Mignolo, might serve to advance environmentally-oriented scholarship and teaching. Methods for a pluriversal ecocritical practice, I argue, facilitate a sort of “Google-Earth style reasoning that permits us to zoom in and zoom out on issues” (Bennett, et.al. 37) in ways that reveal interconnections among imaginaries, worldviews, geopolitical configurations, and their underlying epistemologies. They orient practitioners toward a consideration of processes, relationships, and interplays of discourse, as well as the exploration of competing, overlapping, and intersecting epistemologies at work in cultural products that circulate in scholarly research, classrooms, and society at large.

Caves are explored in three different perspectives: recreation, biology, and meaning. In 2007 the European introduced White-Nose Syndrome started it's rampage on hibernating bat species in North America. In 2009 John Jones tragically dies while recreating in Nutty Putty cave. The piece uses my own caving experience with a man who was involved with the failed rescue attempt at Nutty Putty in 2007 to elucidate the connections that these two events have. The piece asks questions about meaning. What do caves mean ecologically? What do Bats mean ecologically? What do caves mean for us both ecologically and culturally? Finally it examines what options we have when faced with death in the dark places of our world, and what that means for the surface.