Silent Running

Watched this on a friend's recommendation. If I remember correctly, the tone of his recommendation was that this movie came out of the 70's eco-hysteria movement, was worth watching along with a few others, and that were were in a new cycle of eco-hysteria that wasn't wholly based on logic. I believe the term he used for the film genre was actually "eco-disaster flicks".

I'd like to talk to him more about that, but without even analyzing the legitimacy of that position, I think it does point out a definite emotional tone in some eco-art and imagining of an eco-challenged future.

Anxiety.
Despair.
Nostalgia.

"Silent Running" is pretty amazing. The last bits of Earth's forests are taken into outer space in pods attached to a space fleet. At great cost, the fleet is maintained by 3 knuckleheads and 1 crazy treehugger. The U.S. eventually can't afford it anymore so they tell the crew to blow up the pods and head on back home. Treehugger loses his shit, kills the other crew members, and tries to keep the pods going. I won't give away the ending.

Garden City

Catching up with a great article and slideshow about vertical farming and produce-friendly urban planning.

"Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact."

My favorite argument for vertical farming on his website - "We cannot go to the moon, Mars, or beyond without first learning to farm indoors on." The website is also a multi-sourced portal for designs and project submissions from all over the world. Here's one actually conceived for the Gowanus area.

The playing field (story construction)

I found an old article I had bookmarked a good while ago - "A New Breed of Environmental Film" which ends with this paragraph:

"Do not expect a linear narrative in Arid Lands and today's other best environmental films. Indeed, be highly suspicious if someone tries to feed you one, because ecological discourse demands detecting and understanding connections, networks, and implications. The films take you far afield. Enjoy the hike."

The narrative, if any, essentially is still forming. Maybe with enough ingenuity we'll turn things around. Maybe it's too late. But any piece that tried to build an assumption in either direction would be grossly presumptuous.

What I have liked thinking though about in the past few days, and particularly after talking to Kim all afternoon on Saturday (with video camera in hand) is, in fact, going in one direction - assuming we're stuck with the situation we've gotten ourselves into - and seeing what that landscape looks like. Whether it be seeing it artistically or seeing it in terms of highly imaginative social planning or in the loosest sense in terms of any radical response/activity. But even then, even after making a pretty weighty and presumptuous prediction, there's still room and time for hiking. And I think there's something very worthwhile about that kind of speculation. Let's not wait till the house is on fire to figure out where the hose is.

When I saw my friend Jenty a few months ago, she was telling me about the work she is doing at the UN. She's working with a committee that is creating projections of the social crises that will result from global warming and how to deal with them. Drastic scenarios like "Let's imagine there's no water on such-and-such continent in such-and-such number of years: how many people are going to be displaced, where are they going to go, and how will we deal with that hypothetical humanitarian crisis?" I'll have to write to her to get some more details and post about them here if I can.

(1st) shoot

Unless you count Wendy and Mikey in New Mexico, which I'm not sure if I do yet. Finally filmed Kim a little, and it was a lot of fun. The thing that's cool is there's a lot of interactivity possible with her work. She was opening in a group exhibition at Broadway Gallery - “UNNATURAL ACTS and Other Illicit Thoughts About Nature”. I had a few other artists eager to talk to me on camera about their work too, which really helped me get straight in my brain why I'm very particularly interested in her work. It was a bit of a comical, weird scene and I hope I can hear Chris T. give her quick rundown of all the artists' work.

I started taking photos the other day of catalogs and products that feature eco-friendly slogans and branding. A bit of that bandwagon approach seemed to be present at this show. Everyone wants in. Still not sure if that's good or bad.

Oh, the article that started it all!

"Ecotopias Aren't Just for Hippies Anymore - and They're Sprouting Up Worldwide"
By Frank Bures

01.18.08 (Wired)

"In the 1970s, environmental idealists had a vision of Ecotopia: Everyone recycled, there was no pollution, and we all worshipped trees and co-ops. Today's eco-communities are less crunchy and a lot more high tech. In addition to using renewable energy sources, these projects aim to limit their impact on surrounding ecosystems by building with green materials, promoting earth-friendly transportation, and recycling water and waste. The race for the first carbon-neutral, zero-emissions community is on."

I read this and thought, wow, the new Utopias. Communities based on an ecological ideal, instead of a philosophical one. Since utopia as a concept is certainly complex, questionable, and flawed, I felt like I was on to a good film topic.

Here's one of the projects, in China - the Guangtang Chuangye Park:
































"Nature, whose status as a norm of beauty or as an ideal form waned, has since returned as a condition for the sustainability of all built environment. As such, nature plays a role in the twenty-first century that is as central as it ever was in the past. The challenges are enormous and the markets and demands seem boundless."
(Sverker Sörlin in "Nature" from Crucial Words: Conditions for Contemporary Architecture)

Sea Ranch - California, of course

New York Times
December 14, 2008




















"The wind still holds sway at this once-idealistic second-home community, where man and nature are engaged in an intricate dance. Sea Ranch has achieved a sort of a cult status among architecture mavens, who house-gawk rather than bird-watch, bearing a glossy tome by Mr. Lyndon, a spiritual dean of Sea Ranch, as a guide. They come to see a style forged by A-list architects (shed roofs to deflect the wind, windows punched through redwood boards) but perhaps more than that, to pay tribute to a big idea: the then-radical notion, influenced by Mr. Halprin’s experience on a kibbutz, of open land held in common and houses designed in deference to nature."

Principal Architect: Charles Willard Moore
Moore preferred conspicuous design features, including loud color combinations, supergraphics, stylistic collisions, the re-use of esoteric historical-design solutions, and the use of non-traditional materals such as plastic, (aluminized) PET film, platinum tiles, and neon signs, As a result, his work provokes arousal, demands attention, and sometimes tips over into kitsch.

Principal Landscape Designer: Lawrence Halprin
"The work of Mr. Halprin is one of the most celebrated among environmental designers. His projects range from designs for rapid transit systems to university campuses, from new cities to civic redevelopment, from large-scale land developments and inner-city parks to small private gardens. Among them are Sea Ranch on California's central coast, representing the application of town planning principles to an exquisite rural landscape designed with extraordinary sensitivity to the natural environment." (National Parks bio)

Past = Future

I've been reading Jules Verne books to get in the science fiction mood. The Mysterious Island was first, and now Journey to the Center of the Earth. They're both great, although that guy sure had some strange ideas about social structure, which I won't go into here.

While reading "Journey" I was constantly curious whether or not Professor Lidenbrock was right in his theories about the formation of the Earth. So, I started reading a bit about our planet<.

The contemplation of the past looks a lot like contemplation of the future. Palin argues in a vice presidential debate that there's no need to look back, we just have to leap forward and solve these environmental problems and not worry about where they came from - and we all laugh because that is so obviously not true.

To take it a step further, art/fiction about the future resembles in many ways art/fiction about the past.

Verne's work actually goes in both directions. There are a lot of predictions in his work, particularly in The Mysterious Island. Some of which have turned out to be catastropically wrong. Namely he has a theory that coral reefs will be the big push in the creation of new land mass on the planet and that at some time in the remote future, the original continents will have disappeared, with coral reef continents in their place. Right now, we're looking at the possibility of having no more coral reefs or any of the life that relies on them in about 50 years.

So, obviously human beings have this urge to speculate on the past and future nature of this ball of granite, oceans and volcanic upheavals that we live on. I think this ties in to Kim's work a fair amount. Do art and science compete for a better understanding of what's actually happened and going to happen. Do the abstractions of art take us closer or further away to the truth of the matter?


I was trying to find illustrations from "Journey", the book (and not the movie with Brendan Fraser, which overwhelmed Google). Eventually did come across a lot of stuff about Verne's main illustrator Édouard Riou. You can see a lot of his illustrations here, and specifically from "Voyage au Centre de la Terre" here.