Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
worlds and relationships to place, memory and imagination. For example, Cardiff's
Her Long Black Hair
is a 35-minute soundscape journey beginning in Central Park
South, which turns a simple walk in the park into an engrossing psycho-geographical
experience. Listeners are guided on a twisting journey through nineteenth-century
pathways which follows the footsteps of a mysterious dark-haired woman, producing
a complex exploration of location, time, sound and physicality through stream-of-
consciousness observations that merge fact, fiction, local history, opera, gospel music
and other cultural elements. In an image-soaked universe, Cardiff's audio excursions
and other works, including films and installations, are simultaneously liberating and
disconcerting (Egoyan, 2002). Gallery exhibitions often have an afterlife online. The
Permaculture exhibition at the NeuroTitan Gallery in Berlin in 2011 featured seven
international artists. If science measures, then art disturbs. Natalie Holmes reported
for
New Scientist
magazine (2011),
A video installation by the European art collective Neozoon drew some laughs
from the crowd as it showed an earlier project at the Münster Zoo. The artists
had made mechanical animals from old fur coats and filmed visitors' reactions
to this 'new species'. The puzzlement and incredulity of the visitors, children
and adults alike, was both funny and thought-provoking - particularly when
one person asked, 'Don't they make fur coats from these animals?'
Other art projects may be more closely associated with specific campaigns, protests
or issues. The group Platform London has combined art, activism, education and
communication for thirty years promoting social justice and environmental sustain-
ability in the city. The 10th Annual Environmental Art Show at the North Water
Street Gallery in Kent, Ohio, took environmental destruction as its theme, featuring
Vince Packard's 'Fukishima Anniversary'. The artist also set up an online anti-
nuclear art show,
Earth Art/Fukishima 3/11
on Facebook to commemorate the near
meltdowns in the former Soviet Union and Japan. The open group has 338 members
sharing artwork, comments, ideas and news. Murals may protest against ethnic
inequality or environmental injustice as well as asserting cultural heritage and identity.
Indigenous and aboriginal art forms frequently express the interconnected relationship
of human beings to all aspects of the living landscape - rock, trees, birds, plants,
rivers and the infinite cosmos - and within this living landscape are encapsulated
the great myths of creation known as 'the Dreamtime' (Morphy, 1998). This has
inspired artists, writers and filmmakers throughout the world to creatively articulate
a sense of place and belonging, and may be seen clearly in the experimental, meditative
and mesmerizing video art of Bill Viola's
Hatsu-Yume
(Viola, 1981). Art may inhabit
public spaces as well as elite art galleries and can continue its life in the virtual
world of the Internet. Community murals, poster and graffiti art, guerrilla theatre
and performance may form a constellation of personal and community expression,
social empowerment, ideological critique and political action. Many NGOs - for
instance, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth - frequently use street theatre and/or
performance stunts to gain media and public attention. One of the most infamous
street performers and culture jammers with an explicit eco-political message is the
Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, whose act, including preaching to shoppers
outside major stores against the evils of consumerism, has often gained considerable
publicity and the occasional spell in jail for disorderly conduct or obstruction. The
