Janine Randerson: Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, art criticism, climate, cosmology, ice, indigenous peoples, maori, media, meteorology, science, sensors, weather, wind
“An exploration of artworks that use weather or atmosphere as the primary medium, creating new coalitions of collective engagement with the climate crisis.
In a time of climate crisis, a growing number of artists use weather or atmosphere as an artistic medium, collaborating with scientists, local communities, and climate activists. Their work mediates scientific modes of knowing and experiential knowledge of weather, probing collective anxieties and raising urgent ecological questions, oscillating between the “big picture systems view” and a ground-based perspective. In this book, Janine Randerson explores a series of meteorological art projects from the 1960s to the present that draw on sources ranging from dynamic, technological, and physical systems to indigenous cosmology.
Randerson finds a precursor to today’s meteorological art in 1960s artworks that were weather-driven and infused with the new sciences of chaos and indeterminacy, and she examines work from this period by artists including Hans Haacke, Fujiko Nakaya, and Aotearoa-New Zealand kinetic sculptor Len Lye. She looks at live experiences of weather in art, in particular Fluxus performance and contemporary art that makes use of meteorological data streams and software. She describes the use of meteorological instruments, including remote satellite sensors, to create affective atmospheres; online projects and participatory performances that create a new form of “social meteorology”; works that respond directly to climate change, many from the Global South; artist-activists who engage with the earth’s diminishing cryosphere; and a speculative art in the form of quasi-scientific experiments. Art’s current eddies of activity around the weather, Randerson writes, perturb the scientific hold on facts and offer questions of value in their place.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2018
Leonardo series
ISBN 9780262038270, 0262038277
xl+233 pages
Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms (2015) [English/Turkish]
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · art, city, contemporary art, form, istanbul, science, theory
Catalogue for the 14th Istanbul Biennial, held 5 September – 1 November 2015 and curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.
“Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms hovers around a material – salt water – and the contrasting image-forms of knots and waves. It looks for where to draw the line, to withdraw, to draw upon, and to draw out. It does so offshore, on the flat surfaces with our fingertips, but also in the depths, underwater, before the enfolded encoding unfolds.
This city-wide exhibition on the Bosphorus considers different frequencies and patterns of waves, the currents and densities of water both visible and invisible that poetically and politically shape and transform the world. With and through art, we mourn, commemorate, denounce, try to heal, and we commit ourselves to the possibility of joy and vitality, of many communities that have co-inhabited these spaces, leaping from form to flourishing life.”
With essays by Emin Özsoy, Aurora Scotti, Jean-Michel Vappereau, Griselda Pollock, Pietro Rigolo, Beatriz Colomina, Boris Groys, Alexander Provan, Andrew Yang, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Elvan Zabunyan, Penelope Deutscher, Adrian Parr, Bracha L. Ettinger, William Irvine, Chus Martínez, Jeffrey Peakall, Orhan Pamuk, and an anthology edited by Ingo Niermann.
Drafted by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Edited by Süreyyya Evren
Publisher Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts and Yapı Kredi Publications, Istanbul, 2015
Open access
ISBN 9786055275259, 6055275252
lxii+540 pages
Marga Bijvoet: Art as Inquiry: Toward New Collaborations Between Art, Science, and Technology (1997) [EN, DE]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, 1970s, art, art and science, art history, art theory, artistic research, ecology, environment, land art, media art, science, site-specific art, systems art, technology, video, video art
“Art as Inquiry is a pioneering yet under-recognized monographic study of art in the 1960s and early 1970s; Despite the subtitle, Bijvoet’s artistic concerns are not exclusively focused on science and technology, but rather with the “‘moving out’ into nature or the environment and the “moving ‘into technology’”: twin tendencies that, in her mind, stand out amidst the pluralism of 1960s art. She claims that these movements not only broke “the boundaries of art and … the commercial art world structure” but more importantly that environmental artists and tech artists both sought out and engaged in collaborations in which the artist “entered into a new relationship with the environment, space, public arena, onto the terrain of other sciences.”” (Edward A. Shanken)
Publisher Peter Lang, 1997
ISBN 0820433829, 9780820433820
x+283 pages
Review: Alan Dorin (2006).
WorldCat (EN)
Art as Inquiry (English, 1997, HTML, at Internet Archive)
Kunst-Forschung (German, n.d., HTML, at Internet Archive)