Dale Cox and Jodi Newcombe explain the origins and aims of producing coinage from clay for exclusive use within the town of Castlemaine - as published in Garland Magazine, Dec 2021

Imagine that we could eat to literally shape the environment around us, to deliver a different landscape, a new (and ancient) ecology. Imagine that it’s delicious and adventurous, that it brings new meaning and connection to our lives. This is the seed of an indigenous food system for Australia. It’s a provocation to all of those involved in the creative endeavour of bringing food to our plates.

The great energy transition underway this century, towards a 100% renewable world, has the potential to transform the character of our rural and urban landscapes. In 2017 two exciting announcements were made by the Victorian Government, setting high expectations for energy generation and cutting edge design: the ambitious Renewable Energy Action Plan would aim for net-zero carbon by 2025, and the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI), one of the world’s most popular sustainable design competitions, would come to Melbourne in 2018.

Experimental design has a unique capacity to construct glimpses of possible futures. When these are not over-specified, they work as rich dialogic opportunities for iterative conversations about where we’re headed and how it could be different.

Art, like air pollution, is an inherently fuzzy, ambient, imprecise, and inefficient form of communication. Those same qualities also make it special and powerful; it speaks more directly to different kinds of people through the common bonds of human experience the senses.

Spanning industry-funded public art that lauds technological progress, to activist performances questioning the status quo, the work in the Perceptive Power exhibition seeks to shift our perspective, enhance our powers of perception and catalyse action.

Over four days in September at GASP, Swimmable! Reading the River Arts Lab provided a creative platform for thinking about the impact of science on our changing relationship with water and the role of artists in navigating this terrain.

The City of Sydney gets together with Carbon Arts to run the City Data Slam, essentially an artist directed hackathon, which takes the data the City uses to try to meet its sustainability goals and makes it interesting.

Founder and director of Carbon Arts, Jodi Newcombe, is on a mission to make sustainability cool.

On removing the khaki pants image from native Australian food, and where you can get your muntrie fix

Data about grass, trees and flowers will never be more important than grass, trees and flowers.

The power of analysis and argument itself is not enough, actual participation and public experiments and the willingness of people to suspend disbelief and to change is really what creates a social force.

With the advent of pervasive data and new sensing technologies artists have quite literally become barometers, seizing upon new materials and techniques to create instruments to measure and translate the natural environment.

Globally, there is an emerging trend of artists working closely with councils and the providers of green infrastructure to bring the functioning of our built environment and our relationship with nature to the fore of the public consciousness.