AUCKLAND ECOLOGIES is a new research initiative launched by the Faculty of Creative Industries and Business, Unitec Institute of Technology. Finding connections between different disciplines; the visual arts, business, computing, landscape architecture, and architecture, Auckland Ecologies uses Auckland as a site in which to investigate both historical and contemporary urban issues.
Tuesday 23 October 2012
Art and Ecology
Report on findings about the University of New Mexico
(UNM) ‘Art and Ecology’ programme.
Janine Randerson
9th October 2012
While exhibiting and presenting on
my work ‘Neighbourhood Air’ at ISEA:
Machine Wilderness (19-27 September) I also gathered information on the
'Art and Ecology' programme at the UNM. Many of the international artists in ISEA: Machine Wilderness were concerned
with ecopolitical issues and sustainable technologies, future mobilities, or
border politics where art meets product design, architecture and technologies
of communication such as mobile media. The event was hosted by the UNM in
Albuquerque.
The UNM is a world leader in
sustainable technologies and the ‘Art and Ecology’ programme partners with
‘environmental communications’, landscape architecture and sustainability
studies. I suggest that this programme has particular relevance to the
interdisciplinary nature of the ‘Auckland Ecologies’ research cluster at Unitec
within the FCIB. The following notes are based on conversations with ISEA festival director and UNM lecturer
Andrea Polli, and also several undergraduate and Masters students in the
programme.
The UNM ‘Art and Ecology’ programme
has been running for 11 years and has quickly gained an international reputation
for its wide-ranging and imaginative scope. The University is set in the desert
environment of New Mexico, a place of artistic pilgrimage through the twentieth
century and also a site of ecological crisis. Courses are UNM are often
‘team-taught’ and bring in expertise from the sciences and industry and where
relevant.
One of the established courses in
the UNM ‘Art and Ecology’ programme enables students to travel on a semester
long field trip around sites of ‘Land Art’ from the 1960s until today. These
included such places as Walter de Maria’s The
Lightning Field (1967) in Western New Mexico and James Turrell’s Roden Crater (ongoing) in Arizona. The
students are equipped with camping gear. As well as observing these sites the students create their
own environmentally responsive installations. The ‘communion with nature’
approach and the grand gestures of the early ‘Land Art’ movements is now
augmented by a focus in the UNM ‘Art and Ecology’ programme on how social
groups, including indigenous groups can be engaged in public projects.
The ‘live’ educational aspect of
social projects or community interventions is also an emergent focus of the
well-known Glasgow School of Art ‘Environmental Art and Sculpture’ programme. I
also met with one of the lecturers on the Glasgow course, who described how
‘environmental art’ extends to social projects in the urban environment, rather
than desert extremes.[1] There are
student exchange programmes between the Glasgow School of Art and the UNM ‘Art
and Ecology’ programme. I believe that if Unitec could offer an
interdisciplinary ecological programme that we could also set up similar
international exchanges, particularly with the added value of the RiR
residence.
The ISEA conference progressed to Santa Fe where conference activities
were situated at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA): College of Contemporary
Arts. At this site I participated
in an intriguing sound walk through the landscape by Terri Rueb called ‘No Places
with Names: A Critical Acoustic Archaeology”. This project involved indigenous
community participants, anthropologists and sound artists. The IAIA venue also
hosted ‘Kai Hau Kai’ an installation about the sharing of cultural food
practices and communication using online social media by Ngai Tahu artists
Simon Kaan and Ron Bull in collaboration with local indigenous Indian students.
The conference then moved on to the UNM
Department of Architecture for a session in Taos on the Portable/Affordable Building, a mini-symposium and design
competition presented in conjunction with the UNM-Taos Green Technology
programme. Taos is home to the ‘Earth
ships’ and other solar and bio-architecture designs. ISEA artists-in-residence who had been collaborating with
scientists at Los Alamos (such as projects for algae based bio-fuels) and other
technologists also gave seminars at Taos.
To visit the millennium old
World Heritage site of Taos Pueblo was a significant experience for me. This is
the only site of World Heritage that is still occupied and has been occupied
continuously. Taos Pueblo highlights that indigenous cosmologies need to be
central to an ecological approach to the creative industries. When I think
about what kind of field course might take place in or around Auckland or
greater New Zealand I think of historical and contemporary pa sites, as well as
whare whakairo. Visits to artist or designer’s workshops with an emphasis on
sustainable design/art could be another focus of an extended, multi-site field
trip with an interdisciplinary student cohort.
Finally, another appealing feature
of the UNM programme is it’s flexibility and responsiveness to particular
events. For example, in 2012 students worked with Andrea Polli on the ISEA: Machine Wilderness event as an
elective course. New courses each
spring also bring in visiting national or international researchers and artists
who contribute their expertise in addition to a team of teachers. For example a
new UNM course this year is ‘CO-EVOLUTION: Art + Biology in the Museum’,
another is ‘Creating Change’. I think that the ‘Auckland Ecologies’ research
cluster could offer some kind of international symposium and then a permanent research
hub that might offer flexible, team-taught courses as speculation for the
future.
[1] One ‘Art and
Ecology’ student I spoke to at Masters level noted the sometimes ‘forced’
nature of the current trend towards social projects. This highlights the need
for sensitivity and ethical consideration in this approach.
Sunday 7 October 2012
Future Proof
Professor Hugh Bird,
UoA, recently invited AP Dushko Bogunovich and Senior Lecturer Matthew Bradbury
to give a lecture at the University of Auckland School of Architecture and
Planning, Future Proof 2012 seminar series. Dushko and Matthew outlined their
proposition for the future growth of Auckland, an alternative to the compact city model. They presented two recent research design projects, in East Auckland and PR China, that helped to illustrate the implications of their thinking.
http://www.creative.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/future-proof
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