Serpents, Tsunami Boulders and Lightning: The more-than-human in the work of Len Lye, Takamasa Yoshizaka and Fuminori Nousaku, Motoyuki Shitamichi and Taro Yasuno

More-than-human cosmologies, as expressed in contemporary art practice, present a plane for sensing and feeling the extent of the ecological strain on our planet. The relationship between geos, biota and Anthropos is untenable; we are divided by forced climate displacements for humans and the rapid mass extinction for a plethora of flora and fauna. From the intensifying tropical cyclones in Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean in 2019–2020, to the swathes of violently destructive wildfires in Australia and California sparked on occasion by dry lightning and fanned by strong winds, we no longer need scientific projections to hear and feel the shattering signs of climate change. Even the bastions of contemporary art can’t escape the convergence of weather gone awry as art objects and more-than-human waters meet. Venice, where I visited the Japanese Pavilion described in this paper, was later swamped by a deluge of lagoon water during the 58th Art Biennale in 2019. To radically shift our dealings with “others” is an urgent demand from the biota to weather systems, displaced humans and the more-than-human, at a planetary, as well as a situated scale. Keywords: more-than-human cosmologies, contemporary art, tsunami, experimental film, Len Lye, Venice Biennale, Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa, weather, planetary energies, Gayatri Spiva

Kāpia: Fossils and remedies: more-than-human survivors

Not long after I was absorbed in the latent energies in the Tsunami boulders and Len Lye’s kinetic systems, I returned to more-than-human geologies in my art practice. The catalyst for my recent video work Kāpia: fossils and remedies was a story of kāpia, a relic of an ancient forest commonly called Kauri gum by the settler-colonists, uncovered in a sand dune in the Hokianga harbour in the ‘far north’ of Aotearoa New Zealand. In long-ago climates, the ancestors of Kauri trees, Agathis australis, grew throughout the country and their traces can be found in the leaf fossil records and in amber, their resin, and the solidified pre-fossil resin, kāpia. Today, only a few stands of original Kauri forest remain in Te Tai Tokerau, Northland, and their future survival is uncertain. The gigantism of the Kauri tree evidences their deep prehistory when they dwelled with huge creatures on the continent of Gondwana in proto-Australia, the Pacific islands, India and Antarctica. Kauri are believed, controversially, to have survived the complete submergence of Aotearoa in the Miocene era, but now they must withstand a new pathogen. Phytophthora agathidicida, commonly called Kauri die-back, surfaced in the Anthropocene, just like COVID-19.  We humans are asked by many iwi, tribes, to socially distance from these living ancestor-trees for their own survival, under conditions of rahui, or temporary prohibition. How might we protect bodies of trees, people and other more-than-human companions

Cloud Music : a cloud system

This paper suggests that artworks such as Yoko Ono’s Sky TV (1966), Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963-65), and David Behrman, Robert Watts and Bob Diamond’s Cloud Music (1974-79) are ancestors to a significant strand of contemporary art practice that binds weather, emergent technologies and the observer-participant. Such projects freed technical instrumentation (meteorological devices, cameras, video analysers and circuitry) from their conventional usage in communication or science. It will be argued that the highly variable patterns of weather provide a live, improvised score, yet are still subject to restraints, where hierarchies between artist or composer and audience, as well as human and machine, became unsettled

Meteorological art: weather as media

© 2012 Dr. Janine Dorothy RandersonMeteorological art enlists weather or atmosphere as primary medium. The weather became integral to certain kinetic, process and performance-based art practices in the 1960s. In contemporary art, a growing number of artists are mediating between the atmospheric sciences, digital processes, online networks and ‘live’ weather itself. This thesis evaluates the critical potential of case studies in both 1960s and contemporary meteorological art as release mechanisms from the regulated informatic techniques of meteorological science or catalysts for cross-disciplinary collaboration. These capacities are tested in my media art practice that involves sustained collaboration with climate scientists, satellite meteorologists, urban meteorologists and invested social groups. The art projects also seek to produce and reveal the creative-social patterns that exist within scientific activities themselves. Contemporary art about weather is implicated in both situated micro-politics of place and the present global condition of a changing climate at the macro level. The capacity to ‘toggle’ between the ‘big picture’ view, as represented in climate modelling, and the micrological perspective from the surface is a key quality of twenty-first century meteorological art (Malina, 2006:16). For many artists climate politics at the level of conscious-raising is no longer adequate, in part because the scale of the phenomena involved is no longer that of ordinary human experience. We are no longer dealing with information scarcity about the atmosphere, but with articulating social hopes, polemics, anxieties and antagonisms that emerge from a crisis that is almost unrepresentable. A high degree of specialization and understanding of numerical data is often needed to understand scientific communications but the phenomenological or affective processes of art can mobilize passions more directly. Both the complementarity between art and science, and the contestation of science, through indigenous cosmologies, creative practices, activist networks, or online interest groups has initiated new coalitions of collective engagement. The specificity of a thesis on meteorological art opens the possibility for multi-directional flows between art and science, technology and nature

ADA Mesh Cities: Network, Space and Memory in the Transitional City

In the aftermath of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes, Christchurch, New Zealand is framed as a ‘transi- tional’ city, moving from its demolished past to a speculative future. The ADA Mesh Cities project asks what role media art and networks may play in the transitional city, and the practices of remembering, and reimagining space