Art + Environment Conference
October 2- 4, 2008
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada
Global interest in the intersections of nature and culture has broadened in recent years. In this expanding field, contemporary artists and designers have re-envisioned the concept of environment. To better understand the ideas shaping this dialogue, the Nevada Museum of Art will host creative practitioners whose works explore natural, built, and virtual environments.
Center for Land Use Interpretation
Culver City, California
A research organization involved in exploring, examining, and understanding land and landscape issues. The Center employs a variety of methods to pursue its mission - engaging in research, classification, extrapolation, and exhibition.
Walking as Knowing as Making: a peripatetic investigation of place
Spring 2005
Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
Based in Urbana-Champaign at the University of Illinois, Walking as Knowing as Making is a multifaceted effort that seeks to nurture both a theoretical and applied approach to knowing and interpreting place as we experience and construct it through walking. Using the walk as a guiding metaphor the format of this symposium has been designed to encourage a sustained, rigorous, and layered yet experimental, diffuse, and meandering consideration of walking and its associated activities, systems, and values. Between February and May 2005 we will bring to campus a diverse group of scholars, activists, and pedestrians to present ideas, engage in conversation, generate questions, tell stories, and, of course, walk. Supplementing and also weaving together this series of convergences will be a new interdisciplinary course about walking, an informal film series about place, a reading group, a series of informational and experimental walks and tours, production of a monthly sound collage for broadcast on local community radio stations, a museum exhibition, and a digital and print archive of all the events and activities.
inSite_05: Interventions/Bypass
26 August to 13 November 2005
San Diego/Tijuana
For more than ten years, inSite has focused its energies on the realization of artistic projects in the San Diego-Tijuana region. Twenty-three works by artists from the region and around the world that will intervene at distinct levels of visibility and invisibility in the social fabric of the San Diego-Tijuana corridor have been commissioned for the Interventions component of inSite_05, Bypass.
The projects will attempt to revitalize the 'urban' through minimalist intrusions into the 'social,' inserting themselves into the weakest of flows and the most obvious of obstructions. Bypass will seek to recover the inherent potential of key heuristic strategies to reveal how 'public domain' not only involves urban space but an interactive experience of civic belonging.
The Land
1998 to present
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Initiated in 1998, the land (more direct translation from Thai to English would be, the rice field) was the merging of ideas by different artists to cultivate a place of and for social engagement.
The land is located in proximity to the village of Sanpatong, a twenty minutes drive from the center of the provincial capital Chiang Mai. There will be development and experimentations to use natural renewable resources as sources for electric and gas. The artist group Superflex from Copenhagen has been developing their idea of the Supergas (a system utilizing biomass, such as shit, to produce gas), and they have been engaging in using the land as a lab for the development of their biogas system. The gas produced will initially be used for the stoves in the kitchen, as well as lamps for light. Arthur Meyer, an American artist from Chicago, has also been interested to develop a system for utilizing solar power, as another source of energy to be stored and use. These projects will as well engage interested participation of the local village as well as students from the local schools and Universities. Water is not a problem, however, chemical pesticides and other such products have been introduced into the rice fields, which in turn feeds into the water streams and system. In the center of the land is an isolated pool of ground water, made from natural filtering of the ground content, however, tests will have to be made through out the year for any contaminations. As well various pools and ponds will be used for the farming of fishes, a project to be initiated by a young Thai artist Prachya Phintong. Parallel to the land as lab for self-sustainable environment, architectural ideas for living will be carried out alongside the cultivation of the land.
