Carbon Arts

Proposal by Pierre Proske

Carbon Arts is working in partnership with artist, Pierre Proske, to develop .Blush – a public media arts work on a large scale that responds to the energy performance of the built environment. The project, supported by an Australia Council for the Arts ‘Creative Australia’ grant, re-imagines a sustainable building with a skin that ‘blushes’ and changes hue based on the energy usage, with ‘freckles’ consisting of thermochomic and electrically activated discs. We will be working in partnership with the City of Melbourne, Synergetics, FMSA Architects and Jason Bond of the Environment Shop to research the location, scale, interpretation and technological design for this project. Our vision is to realise the .Blush buildings in the City of Melbourne by the end of 2013, so that with innovative visualisation of energy saving/consumption we can better preserve our resources and environment.

The Green Transfer, detail from ARUP proposal

The 1200 Buildings Commission is a pilot public art project responding to the energy and sustainability performance of a commercial building within the City of Melbourne – the Green Spaces at 490 Spencer Street in West Melbourne. The Green Spaces building is an early entrant in the City’s 1200 Buildings scheme, which aims to facilitate the energy retrofit of 1200 buildings within the municipality, making a significant contribution towards meeting the City of Melbourne’s target of carbon neutrality by 2020.

Carbon Arts is working closely with the City of Melbourne, Guy Wilson of Fort Knox Self Storage and Dave Collins of The Green Spaces to deliver a $30,000 commission by the end of 2011. Eleven artists, designers and architects have been selected to provide proposals for the space and share in the development of a new public arts program. The public arts program aims to leverage the efforts of signatories to the 1200 Buildings scheme by making these largely invisible efforts visible to the public and engaging all Melbournians in the Eco-City vision.

Links:

http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/1200buildings/Pages/1200BuildingsPublicArtCommission.aspx

Presented by the Australian Network of Art & Technology (ANAT) and Carbon Arts, ECHOLOGY: making sense of data is a three year project that will culminate in the production of a new public work of art utilising real-time data. The project is comprised of a number of integrated activities, with each to be supported by a mix of government and private sector partnership. Seminars will be held in three state capitals to introduce Australian artists to the rapidly developing field of data-driven arts practice. The seminars will be led by six local and international artistic innovators, who will present and discuss their work. Property partners will identify sites for potential works, which will become the focus of multi-disciplinary mixer workshops, leading to commissioning of successful works in 2013. One public artwork developed during the Lab will be produced and launched at ISEA2013.

Carbon Arts is partnering with UNSW’s National Institute of Experimental Arts [NIEA], City of Sydney and Object Gallery—to advance a cutting-edge arts-driven approach to ecological urbanism, in which “curators” move beyond designated cultural spaces such as galleries and museums to “curate” (literally “care for”) the city as whole, developing eco-sustainable public art to transform both public space and patterns of water, energy and food consumption.

For this project, we’ll be evaluating case studies of eco-sustainable public art projects in the US, Europe, Japan and Australia, with a view to providing a database available to the cities, developers and researchers. The project will also deliver a dynamic range of outcomes including exhibitions, workshops, public programs and major publications.

The project is supported by a Cooperative Research Council Grant and will run from 2011-2014.

Links:
http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au/projects/curating-cities

Carbon Arts is advising the City of Melbourne on how the arts can play a greater role in achieving the sustainability goals of the city as laid out in the Eco-City Melbourne vision. The strategy paper will provide case studies on urban art and sustainability that draw on and evaluates existing analysis and provide recommendations for program elements essential to facilitate art programs that engage the community in sustainability challenges and opportunities.

Carbon Arts is pleased to be collaborating with Splendid this year to introduce an environmental theme to the Splendid Arts Lab. Splendid is a partnership between the Splendour in the Grass festival and leading art agencies looking to develop talent and offer festival audiences new creative experiences.

Through Carbon Arts provocation and workshop during the Arts Lab, Splendid artists will be exploring both their own ecological footprints and that of their work, but more importantly will be encouraged to consider the development of works that take on sustainability as a theme on-site or beyond. Questions include ‘how can public art assist in changing behaviour, such as further incentivising purchase of carbon offsets, waste recycling or environmental remediation, through playful, rewarding and engaging strategies?’ and ‘how can artists assist us in reimaging the future, challenging us to participate in building a resilient and sustainable society?’

Festivals are like cities and societies in miniature and thereby offer great opportunities for artists to engage and experiment with some big challenges, such as sustainability, in ways that could be scaled and reproduced in larger contexts. Matt Morris, Splendour’s environmental manager, will be working closely with us to open up the possibilities for artists to engage with the environmental strategies on site and offer the festival as a testing ground for the role of artists in catalysing meaningful social and environmental change.

Link:

• http://www.splendid.org.au/

In December 2010, Carbon Arts invited adventurous Melburnians to the Australian debut of the Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, a unique lifestyle experiment charting the Bermuda triangle of art, food and sustainability. At once an art performance, science lecture and cocktail party, this one-night-only event treated guests to three delicious, edible cocktails that each stylishly and humorously explored our gastronomic, economic and material interdependency on other creatures.

The Cross(x)Species Adventure Club is the brainchild of US-based environmental artist, Natalie Jeremijenko, and molecular gastronomist, Mihir Desai, who have been running the eco-inspired ‘supper club’ in New York and Bostson since August 2010. The project supports the research of Jeremijenko’s Environmental Health Clinic (xclinic) at New York University, an interdisciplinary arts lab aimed at remediating environmental systems.

Video link:

• http://inframe.tv/filmProject.aspx?id=31

Carbon Arts partnered with the City of Melbourne to invite leading Melbournian arts and sustainability practitioners to a discussion exploring the possibilities for public art projects to engage the public on climate change. An international guest speaker, Michaela Crimmin begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting, was invited to catalyse the discussion, by providing insights from her experience with the UK Royal Society of the Arts’ Arts and Ecology Program.

Following the Round table, Carbon Arts was invited to draft a discussion paper pointing to opportunities for the City of Melbourne and its active arts community test new models of collaboration. This basic premise for the paper is that the arts have a valuable and diverse set of roles to play in bringing about the societal transformation needed to address climate change challenges specifically, and sustainability more broadly. This sees the artist as an essential participant in multi-disciplinary problem solving, the artist as an agent for change, as provocateur, visionary and profound communicator.

The paper also presents an ambitious project concept ‘Future Melbourne Now Expo’, which offers a network of public art and demonstration sites throughout the city that each offer an innovative platform for engaging pedestrians on urban sustainability themes.