PHOTO: xCLINIC

Yesterday I attended a very inspiring talk on art and resilience with Natalie Jeremijenko and Sverker Sörlin. The talk began with a presentation of Natalie’s new project: The Environmental Health Clinic, and ended with a discussion between Sverker and Natalie.

The Environmental Health Clinic is a response to the issue of resilience and an attempt to patch natural systems that have crashed in urban environments. The clinic recognizes that in the process of making environmental work newsworthy issues have not been made local enough. Consequentially people are left wondering why nothing is happening in their neighborhood and what the hell they should do.

To address the situation people, wittingly called impatients, can come to the environmental health clinic with their concerns. The clinic analyzes the problem and issues a prescription that helps the impatients cure their concerns.

One such prescription is noPark.

“NoPark returns “no parking zones” … to low growth mosses and grasses … These microparks continue to provide emergency parking space for fire trucks and exasperated Fresh-direct delivery persons. But the other 99.9% of the time they now do something more … For all the same rationales that apply to green roofs, greening the no-standing zones is a good thing”.
- noPark

A decade ago a project like noPark would probably be done as an underground action, but according to Natalie the era of guerilla interventions is over. Artists (like Steve Kurz) now face getting arrested on terrorist charges for their actions and few are willing to take such risks. Instead the environmental health clinic seek to achieve results in a collaborative and orderly fashion. For example impatients get to buy shares in the noPark lots. The shares pay for legal installation of the lots but they also provide a sense of ownership that secures their long term survival.

Other projects that Natalie presented included birds, frogs, bats, and urban space stations. All very interesting but I’m going to fast forward to the discussion between Natalie and Sverker that followed her presentation.

Natalie and Sverker frequently returned to the conflict between traditional environmentalism and new forms of social-ecological interaction. While traditional environmentalist believe in “do not touch, do not interfere”. Natalie believes that the best way for us to cohabit with non humans in urban contexts is by actively interacting with nature. Sverker is on the same track. According to him we are starting to realize that “using is not equal to loosing”. Urban ecological diversity is not preserved by stepping aside but by intervening and we should use new technology to build new ecosystem services. Parks are excellent examples of this, they exist because they are used by people. According to Sverker there is a park in Stockholm (I forgot which) where there are sixty organizations who depend on the park for their activities. Their various interests provide for the parks diversity.

After many turns the discussion eventually drifted over to whether or not basing art on science is important. According to Natalie science with its high standard and structures of accountability is a social representation that we trust. The problem with science is that the public can’t to participate in discussions with scientists on equal terms. Cultural workers on the other hand are wide open for criticism from anyone and art can therefore function as a communicative device for science. In other words science gives art credibility and art communicates science.

After about one and a half hour Sverker rounded of by asking Natalie how far we can go in our efforts to redesign social and ecological interaction.

S: Can we have bears on Manhattan?

N: Bears are interesting in the way they challenge domesticity. There are Black Bears in New Jersey. Can we design technologies that enable urban bears? - Yes.

The talk was arranged by Mejan Labs as part of Changing Matters - The Resilience Art Exhibition at The Swedish Museum of Natural History. The exhibition closes September 7th 2008.

Science is like art. It’s like the thing that wakes you up and shows you a different perspective on important things. - Alan Kay (Squeakers, 2002)

Space Camping by Ebba Matz, Physical Interaction Lab and Philippe Boix-Vives is a geodesic dome whose inside surface alternates between kaleidoscopic reflections and back-projected animations. The dome is partially inspired by the Pepsi Pavilion created by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) for the Expo ‘70 in Osaka, and Buckmister Füller who developed the geodesic dome. E.A.T and Buckminister Füller are two great sources of inspiration to me and I find it beautiful how much from them that can be related to in this work and the context it was created in.

Geodesic domes are the only man made structures that become stronger the larger they are, in fact it is theoretically possible to construct geodesic domes large enough to cover cities, planets and stars. This is achieved by tensegrity, “when push and pull have a win-win relationship with each other”. Tensegrity is not only an interesting concept, it is also an interesting example of how the pursuit of art can create synergy effects* that contribute to the sciences. The term was coined by Buckmister Füller for artist Kennet Snelson who successfully explored and demonstrated the concept in his sculptures. Füller later used tensegrity to develop the geodesic dome and today tensegrity has found applications in a wide variety of ares from architecture to robotics.

I was not involved much in the construction of the dome but I participated in the brainstorming sessions around Man Machine 2, the exhibition which it was created for. A lot of ideas that were discussed didn’t make it into the finished pieces, which isn’t strange considering that the exhibition was conceived and constructed in two and a half months. One such idea was to create an open interface for the dome and let visitors program it with their own content. Interestingly I just discovered that Billy Klüver, co-founder of E.A.T, had similar ideas for the Pepsi Pavilion. Some 27 years earlier he wanted the pavilion to be a “laboratory environment, encouraging ‹live programming› that offered opportunity for experimentation, rather than resort to fixed or ‹dead programming›” (Media Art Net).

Space Camping is part of the Man Machine 2 exhibition which is on display at The National Museum of Science & Technology in Stockholm, Sweden from December 8th 2007 to April 27th 2008.

* Synergy is another term popularized by Bückmister Fuller.