my events

Micro-Ecoforestry 101.

Come and join me at the Means of Production site (corner of East 6th and St. Catherines) adjacent to North China Creek park in Vancouver for a free workshop.

As part of Means of Production's eleventh anniversary celebration, I'll be going over the basics of planting and managing neighbourhood-scale groves of trees and bamboos for the purposes of materials production. I'll cover choosing varieties, planting, propagating and harvesting techniques.

Hope to see you there!

I'm going to Finland!!!

Field_Notes – Deep Time is a week long art&science field laboratory organized by the Finnish Society of Bioart at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Lapland/Finland. Five working groups, hosted by Oron Catts, Antero Kare, Leena Valkeapaa, Tere Vaden, Elisabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, together with a team of five, will develop, test and evaluate specific interdisciplinary approaches in relation to the Deep Time theme.

Field_Notes – Deep Time is in search of artistic and scientific responses to the dichotomy between human time-perception and comprehension, and the time of biological, environmental, and geological processes in which we are embedded. The local sub-Arctic nature, ecology, and geology, as well as the scientific environment and infrastructure of the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station will act as a catalyst for the work carried out.

      Dates and places:

15th – 22nd September 2013 field laboratory at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station

23rd, 24th of September 2013 conference in Helsinki

I will be giving a presentation on the second day of this conference at Emily Carr University, Vancouver BC.

DAY 1:    
8:30 – 4:15pm, Creative Time Summit Live-stream Screening
7pm: Ted Purves Keynote Lecture

Creative Time: Art, Place and Dislocation in the 21st Century
The Creative Time Summit on October 25 and 26, at NYU is the 5th annual conference advancing Creative Time’s critical efforts to provide meaningful opportunities for social and community engaged artists to explore new ideas, expand their practice, and play a role in shaping a more just world. CTS is the only regularly scheduled conference devoted to exploring the intersection of art-making and social justice.

Tapping into an international debate, this year’s Summit provides a platform for consideration of the artistic practices, campaigns, and theories, as well as the practicalities, that accompany the increasingly widespread belief that culture, for good or bad, is an ingredient in the making and re-making of cities. Indeed, from monumental sculpture, to arts districts, to battles over housing, art has for decades been a critical element of changes to the world’s urban fabric.

The Summit will bring together artists, architects, planners, politicians, activists, and theorists from Colombia, Lebanon, Netherlands, the United States, Zimbabwe, and many other places to present their work on this topic, exploring the ways in which cultural production might address issues like gentrification, racialized urbanism, withstanding environmental catastrophe, and poverty, and addressing such topics as bottom-up urban planning.

8:30 AM
Introduction & Opening Remarks
Anne Pasternak
Nato Thompson
 
8:45 AM
Performance
Mario Ybarra Jr.
 
9 AM
Keynote Presentation
Neil Brenner
 
9:50 AM
Making a Place
Moderated by Gregory Sholette
The term place-making has swept grant- making organizations as well as city governments hoping to use the arts to make cities more “vibrant.” What are productive models to consider when thinking about the making of place through culture? What are its limitations?
Jenenne Whitfield, Heidelberg Project
John Fetterman?
Anne Gadwa Nicodemus
Lize Mogel?
Robert Bedoya
 
10:55 AM - BREAK
 
11:05 PM
In Conversation: Rick Lowe and Nato Thompson
 
11:35 PM:
Regional Report: Turkey: Fulya Erdemci
 
C + C JOINS CREATIVE TIME LIVE

11:40 am
My Brooklyn
Moderated by Risë Wilson
In the contentious debate on development in NYC, no borough is featured more prominently in the stories of gentrification than Brooklyn. This section uses the borough as a case study to consider the specifics of resistance, place-making and overall use of culture in the transformation of a place many call home.
Kelly Anderson
Michael Premo
Steve Powers
Rylee Eterginoso & Elissa Blount-Moorhead, on Weeksville Heritage Center
 
12:45 PM
Short film
 
12:50 PM
Regional Report: South Africa: Marcus Neustetter, The Trinity Session
 
1:10 PM
BREAK
 
1:25 PM
Built from the Ground Up
Moderated by Joshua Decter
Urban development is not always “top down”—it can also occur from the grassroots. This section features alternative forms of economy and social action that come out of local planning and movements.
Kenneth Bailey, DS4SI
Christoph Shaefer
Chido Govera
Alfredo Brillembourg, Urban Think Tank
 
 
2:20 PM: short film
 
2:30 PM
Flaneurs
Moderated by Mary Jane Jacob
Beyond its physical realities, the city is often a muse to its citizens. Flaneurs do not necessarily resist or build, but instead take inspiration from the evolving social conditions and innate tensions of the built environment.
Tony Chakar
Vito Acconci
Althea Thauberger
The Amanda Weil Lecture Open Call Winner
 
3:25 PM
Day one closing remarks
Anne Pasternak

3:30
Vancouver discussion: Thoughts on the Day

4:15pm wrap

7:00PM
Ted Purves: Keynote

 
Day 2:     Vancouver: Social Practice and the City
St. Francis Xavier School
428 Great Northern Way, Vancouver

8:30    Doors open for registration

9:30    Welcome

9:45    Larry Grant: Welcome and Context for site

10:15    Justin Langlois Panel – Allison Collins, Shaun Dacey, Brian McBay/Michelle Fu

11:30    Lunch – FOOD CARTS

12:00    artists projects on GNW

2pm    Welcome back and Introductions

2:15    Kamala Todd and Oliver Kellhammer

3:00    Moderated open discussion

3:45    Ted Purves, closing ‘witness’ comments

I'm giving a talk at Kathy HIgh's Science Fictions class which meets on 

Thursday  March 6 4-6pm, RPI, West Hall, Rm 211 - open to all!!!

Here is the RPI link for the event:

http://www.arts.rpi.edu/pl/iear-events/?objectID=100003795

I returned to Berlin after 30 years absence to research ruderal ecologies as well as to contextualize my complex relationship to all things German. 

BLOG POSTING on some of my observations there.

'BROWNFIELDLANDIA'

As part of an ongoing collaboration, artists Kathy High and Oliver Kellhammer will embark on an investigation of Troy New York's former industrial lands - areas often referred to as brownfields or ruderal ecologies (from the Latin ‘rudus’ meaning ‘ruin’.)

Far from being abject places defined only by their abandonment, these zones are sites of novel ecological processes and vibrant new assemblages, adaptations and agencies, where nature is rapidly evolving to colonize the debris and disturbance our species has left behind.

Using methodologies of field research and the bio-lab, industrial archeology, documentary filmmaking and permaculture, the artists will delve into the fascinating world of ruderal Troy, observing and cataloging as well as developing locally appropriate strategies for its decontamination and reintegration into the human life of the city.

(Some Details)

We will tour 'emergent forests' where native and exotic trees co-mingle as they break up pavement and concrete, observe birds and insects for whom ruined factories and overgrown parking lots stand in for cliffs and savannah habitats and go bio-prospecting for 'hyperaccumulators' - plants and other organisms that absorb toxins such as heavy metals and hydrocarbons from their environment. Back at the 'L' lot, our plan is to uncover and record layers of deposition and disturbance to further our understanding of the history of the land as well as experiment with cover crops and mycelial mulches as potential strategies for detoxifying polluted soil.

This work is made possible by the NatureLab initiative of the Sanctuary for Independent Media in North Troy, New York. Stay tuned for more detailed information on dates for public workshops and guided field explorations.

More info HERE

BLOG POSTING on this and my subsequent excursions to the brownfield habitats along Portland's Williamette River.

Marina Zurkow and I are hosting a reading/exhibition/discussion of a selection of texts from our 'Dear Climate' project, done in collaboration with our dear pals Fritz Ertl and Una Chaudhuri.

This should be an amazing and fun event and we so look forward to hanging out with our friend Kathy High and the rest of the gang from the Sanctuary for Independent Media.

Here is a link to the event:

http://www.mediasanctuary.org/DearClimateUndergroundGalleryOpening

Another stint in old Berlin to research landscape design using ruderal ecologies and to catch up on some writing projects.

I am very excited to be in this group show and have submitted a piece 'Nos habebit humus', in collaboration with my dear friend Kathy High.

Our work is a video meditation on how we will all one day likely be subsumed by plants, which will gradually consume our bodies and our architectural and technological legacies. 

This exhibition was organized by the amazing people at Abandon Normal Devices. 

Seeing the Forest through the Trees link.

Here is the curator, Monika Baake's introduction to the show:

The lifestyles of plants are a source of inspiration for this unconventional exhibition at Grizedale Forest.

Seeing the Forest through the Trees comes at a critical time when we are struggling evermore to devise fair ways of living alongside other ‘nonhumans’  (animals and plants). This exhibition will focus on plants and their relationship to other species by featuring works by artists who examine plants’ complexity through experiments, performances, design and action.

Plants are no less sophisticated than animals and over the course of evolution they have developed their own peculiar body shapes, lifestyles, and modes of reproduction. They are active and autonomous beings perceiving the world in ways both alien and familiar to us.  The art works, featured in the exhibition reveal ways in which artists are contributing to our efforts to understand plants. Celebrating plants lives and stressing the necessity to deal with them in their own terms and for their own sake. The artists invite the audience to inquire into the plant behaviours, their cognitive abilities, their strategies to avoid and attract others and to fantasize and to dream.

Our future is tightly connected with plants there is so much we can learn as they harvest solar energy and minerals, produce oxygen and food for animals and their bodies are organized as systems and networks which are decentralized, modular, and able to feed on light.

We hope this exhibition will create the space to give plants sufficient recognition for what they are hence, as a philosopher Michael Marder claims, “an encounter with plants awaits us!”

Featuring world class artists Brandon Ballengee, Karl Heinz Jeron, Chiara Esposito, Spela Petric, Dimitris Stamatis and Jasmina Weiss, Pei- Ying Lin, Allison Kudla, Kathy High and Oliver Kellhammer.

Curated by Monika Bakke.