Janine Randerson: Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art (2018)

“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

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Timothy Druckrey (ed.): Ars Electronica: Facing the Future: A Survey of Two Decades (1999)

“For the past two decades the Austrian-based Ars Electronica, Festival for Art, Technology, and Society has played a pivotal role in the development of electronic media. Linking artistic practice and critical theory, the annual festival and symposium bring together scientists, philosophers, sociologists, and artists in an ongoing discourse on the effects of digital media on creativity—and on culture itself.

Drawing on the resources of Ars Electronica’s publications and archives, this anthology collects the essential works that form the core of a contemporary art long dismissed as too technical or inaccessible. The book includes a critical introduction, full bibliography, and texts and artworks from the key figures in the field.

Among the many contributors are Robert Adrian, Roy Ascott, Jean Baudrillard, Heidi Grundmann, Donna Haraway, Kathy Huffman, Friedrich Kittler, Knowbotic Research, Myron Kruger, Laurent Migonneau, Sadie Plant, Florian Rötzer, Paul Sermon, Carl Sims, Christa Sommerer, Woody Vasulka, Paul Virilio, Peter Weibel, and Gene Youngblood.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1999
Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice series, 1
ISBN 0262041766, 9780262041768
449 pages
via Ars Electronica

Reviews: Beryl Graham (Convergence, 2000), Rhizome (2000), Stephen Wilson (Leonardo, 2001), Yvonne Spielmann (Leonardo, 2001), Matthew Griffin (PAJ, 2002).

WorldCat

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Glória Ferreira (ed.): Crítica de Arte no Brasil: temáticas contemporâneas (2006) [BR-PT]

A collection of 91 texts by 80 authors that represent a multidisciplinary universe of ideas and opinions regarding the visual arts of Brazil from 1946-2006. The essays are divided into 7 main topics: Constructive Tradition; Avant-Garde / Experimentalism; Art Criticism; Circuits; Return / Permanence of Painting; Images and Media; and Transitive Situations.

The authors include Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Aracy Amaral, Décio Pignatari, Mario Schenberg, Frederico Morais, Paulo Sérgio Duarte, Hélio Oiticica, Reynaldo Roels Junior, Murilo Mendes, Fernando Cocchiarale, Cildo Meireles, Walmir Ayala, Ronaldo Brito, Antonio Dias, Jorge Guinle, Paulo Herkenhoff, Waldemar Cordeiro, Haroldo de Campos, Roberto Pontual, Arlindo Machado, Wilson Coutinho and Joaquim Ferreira dos Santos.

Publisher Funarte, Rio de Janeiro, 2006
Pensamento crítico series
ISBN 8575070797, 9798575070795
575 pages

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