The arts of energy : between hoping for the stars and despairing in the detritus

Fossil fueled energy production and consumption are the basis of global industrialised societies, with the deleterious biophysical effects of such production and consumption also forming the basis of the advent of Anthropocene. In the context of science and environmental policy, hope denotes rapid decarbonisation across the globe. Meanwhile, in art and the humanities, the study of such energy and decarbonisation remains nascent and nebulous. To account for these discrepancies, this article outlines the scale of the biophysical challenges by first establishing the relationship between outspoken climate scientists and international organisations determining climate and energy policy. This relationship—between marginalised and mainstream—is used to frame the analogous challenges for two cultural fields that have recently emerged in direct response: energy humanities and the arts of energy. The discussion centers on the challenge common to all fields—between the outspoken marginal and the orthodox mainstream—to speculate on how the arts of energy may recalibrate a context-contingent hope for energy futures, drawing on case studies of ISEA Bright Future and Facing Futures Free From Fear, two installations simultaneously staged by the author in 2013 about the relationship between energy and climate change

Popular music & depopulated species : probing life at the limits in song and science

In the opening lyrics and refrain of The Beatles song Strawberry Fields Forever, John Lennon invites the listener to join a journey down to a place called Strawberry Fields. Each of these four invitations are to an otherworldly realm: reminiscence in a halcyon time of childhood wonder. This essay draws on the ethos and milieu of Lennon’s song, to turn his invitation toward another otherworldly realm: the submarine. In turning our attention downward, this article extends his invitation over the half century between now and the song’s release. Taking up this invitation will lead us from the zeitgeist of nascent artistic and scientific ideas of underwater life when Forever was released, to two descendants of The Beatles – Radiohead and Beirut. Their music presents telling popular cultural engagement with two other otherworldly realms: that which is more-than human and post-human. By probing the limits of life through song (selfhood, nostalgia, sensation, and wonder) and science (evolutionary biology, climatology, and Earth System Science) I explore what environmental sensitivity pop music of our time can attune us to. As marine species disappear en masse under the advent of The Sixth Extinction, this article speculates on what extinction and evolution may come to be, when future sea shores engulf cities founded in the littoral zones of the early modern period

Intended Consequences Statement in Conservation Science and Practice

As the biodiversity crisis accelerates, the stakes are higher for threatened plants and animals. Rebuilding the health of our planet will require addressing underlying threats at many scales, including habitat loss and climate change. Conservation interventions such as habitat protection, management, restoration, predator control, trans location, genetic rescue, and biological control have the potential to help threatened or endangered species avert extinction. These existing, well-tested methods can be complemented and augmented by more frequent and faster adoption of new technologies, such as powerful new genetic tools. In addition, synthetic biology might offer solutions to currently intractable conservation problems. We believe that conservation needs to be bold and clear-eyed in this moment of great urgency

(Human-inflected) evolution in an age of (human-induced) extinction : synthetic biology meets the Anthropocene

At the advent of the Anthropocene, life is being pushed to its limits the world over; we are currently living through the Sixth Mass Extinction to occur since multicellular life first emerged on the planet 570 million years ago. Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson sums up this push in the opening gambit of his book The Future of Life: “the race is now on between the techno-scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it”. Contra Wilson, this paper addresses the paradox arising from proposals to harness “techno-scientific forces . . . to save” the “living environment” while other forces continue to destroy it. By framing human-inflected evolution in an age of human-induced extinction, this article asks what could or should conservation become, if ‘conserving’ imperiled species might now require genetic interventions of the synthetic kind. Drawing upon recent key markers of “the race”, this paper presents a notional conservation for the Anthropocene—namely, that such a conservation proposes active intervention not only into ecosystems but into evolution itself. And yet, such interventions can only be considered in the context of the planetary scale that is the Anthropocene-writ-large, as per the desertification of the Amazon or the collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, the spatial scale of the microbial world, and on the temporal scale of evolution. Viewed within such a context, this paper presents techno-scientific conservation as paradoxically being both vital and futile, as well as timely and too late

Scientific diversity, scientific uncertainty and risk mitigation policy and planning: scenario exercise literature review

The Scientific Diversity, Scientific Uncertainty and Risk Mitigation Policy and Planning (RMPP) project aims to investigate the diversity and uncertainty of bushfire and flood science, and its contribution to risk mitigation policy and planning. Summary This research report outlines how scenario exercises may be used for understanding risk mitigation decision-making, as scenario exercises will inform a core component of the RMPP project. The report outlines what scenario exercise are, why they are used, and how they can used to achieve the aims of the RMPP project. The focus is on environmental scenarios: that is, scenarios about environmental challenges. Literature about scenarios for other purposes, such as business and strategy, are included where appropriate

Interrogating Interactive Interfaces: On balance in the evocation of environmental responsibility in the creation of Responsive Environments

This Practice Based Research PhD concerns how Responsive Environments may be created to evoke environmental responsibility. As a diverse constellation of practices within Interactive Art, participation, interactivity and responsivity form the poles of Artist-Artwork-Audience relations in Responsive Environments. Within these artforms, responsibility may be evoked to the physical environment of the artwork itself and/or in the social responsibility arising from the interaction between artist, artwork and audience. This study is conducted in two interrelated domains: a dissertation and my solo and collaborative creation of a suite of artworks. Dissertation and artworks form a combined exploratory journey through questions arising from and refined by practice. Both explore context- and content-appropriate approaches for evoking environmental responsibility according to the relationship between an artworks’ responsivity and the responsibility thus created for audiences. The iteratively designed artworks produced for this PhD include a series of sight-specific plastic art installations, a non-linear single channel electronic artwork, a multi-channel semi-immersive performative-installation and a full scale multi-channel immersive installation. They were staged in exhibitions, performances and installations in Australia between 2004-2009. The dissertation contextualises my strategies amongst the broader challenges to creating Responsive Environments according to relevant practitioner-theorists. Both exegesis and dissertation highlight balance as the pivot point for all such strategies, wherein artists negotiate trade-offs between the seemingly mutually exclusive properties of authority-control, determinacy-indeterminacy, simplicity-complexity and narrativity-interactivity. The dissertation discusses three principle ‘ingredients’ that determine the balancing act between these properties: content, form and Interaction Design. How these ‘ingredients’ may be combined with one another to evoke environmental responsibility is explored over the career trajectories of three solo (Garth Paine, Jon McCormack and David Rokeby), and two Interactive Art collectives (Transmute Collective and FoAM). Combining these case studies with the account of my own practice contributes to understanding the challenges intrinsic to evoking environmental responsibility in Responsive Environments. Together, the suite of artworks and dissertation contributes to the small, but growing, interest in bridging gulfs between art, science and technology; analogue and digital art; and environmentalism and Interactive Art

When water meets oil : rupturing rhetoric and reality in energy policy and climate science

To explore physical and symbolic ruptures emanating from oil, I trace the journey of this spectral substance from its unearthing in the Gulf of México, back to the dawn of the Space Program, into outer space, to crash back into the sea as military-industrial detritus that is then used to form Artificial Reefs. This spatial trajectory is mapped to the temporal trajectory of climate science and energy policy over Obama’s presidential tenure, given the stark policy contrast between his first and second terms. Through recourse to key speeches, events, campaigns, and policy documents about climate change, climate science, and energy policy, I examine how ruptures challenge energy policy that simultaneously facilitates and decimates the existence of marine ecosystems in the Gulf

Environmental art as remedial action : from meditating on to mediating in Earth's energy imbalance

Since 1992 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has met every year in an attempt to implement a global mechanism for averting runaway climate change. Over these 25 years the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone from 352 Parts Per Million (PPM) to 408 PPM in 2017. Even at the time the UNFCCC was conceived, the CO2 concentration was already above 350 PPM, the conservative notional maximum concentration that would not precipitate runaway climate change. Concentrations of greenhouse gases have resulted in Earth having a net energy imbalance since 1971, whereby more energy is retained in the atmosphere and hydrosphere than emitted back into space. In addition, the roughly four decade inertia of the climate system is such that the climate currently being experienced is due to emissions from around the time the Earth went into positive energy balance in 1971. Given the volume of emissions since then, a substantial increase in climate is already committed even if all releases ceased today. In light of how global mitigation attempts have manifestly failed to decrease Earth’s Energy Imbalance, the last decade has seen a substantial increase in scientific research and proposals for an altogether different response: intervention through climate engineering. The consequences of inaction (mitigation as intentional influence) or action (climate engineering as intentional intervention) have planetary scale consequences. In response, this article explores an emerging body of art practice that has shifted from meditating on the manifestations and consequences of climate change, to mediating in Earth’s Energy Imbalance. The article explores this shift in practice of environmental art as remedial action from invoking forms of climate engineering to intentionally intervene in the causation of climate change. The discussion of this emerging body of practice speculates on how art that mediates in Earth’s Energy Imbalance offers a portent of the Anthropocene as the re-making of the world-as-artifact

Siren and silent song : evolution and extinction in the submarine

In the opening lyrics and refrain of The Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” John Lennon invites the listener to join a journey down to a place called Strawberry Fields. Each of these four invitations is to an otherworldly realm: reminiscence in a halcyon time of childhood wonder. This essay riffs on the ethos and milieu of Lennon’s song, to take up his invitation to turn such reminiscence toward another otherworldly realm: the submarine. And, in turning our attention downward, this essay extends his invitation over the half century between now and the song’s release. Taking up this invitation will take us through profound biophysical and cultural changes between the 1967 of Lennon’s song and the world of today. We will explore the submarine/outer-space zeitgeist of now and its coming of age in the environmentalism contemporaneous with The Beatles. We will turn to the contemporary bands Radiohead and Beirut, to prefigure submarine sensibility in pop music today. Their music will be considered in terms of how it defines contemporary ideas of more-than-human and posthuman submarine realms. As marine species disappear en masse under the advent of The Sixth Extinction, this essay speculates on what evolution and extinction may come to be, when future sea shores engulf cities founded in the littoral zones of the early modern period

Artificial coral reef

Two gentlemen sit facing each other in the Oval Office. It is May 8, 2015, a date undistinguished except that it is the eighty-ninth birthday of the more elderly of the two gentleman: Sir David Attenborough. He is meeting President Barack Obama for the first time. The world’s most powerful person is hosting the world’s most influential naturalist for a wide-ranging discussion about “the future of the planet, their passion for nature and what can be done to protect it.