Image: Still from Chinatown (1974)

Watertown, Stina Peek, 2010 –

“Mine is an audio map. I have extracted the water sounds from the movie Chinatown then paired them with the work of artist Katie Paterson to reference start, use and thinking points.  The Los Angeles area, where the movie Chinatown is set, gets a large portion of water from the Sierra Nevadas. Paterson’s work is more directly related to issues around melting glaciers.  Though the two are not directly related, the matter of global warming is common. Between artistic license and project parameters, these audio tracks come together to map a fictionalized and stylized account of water in the state of California.” – Stina Peek

.

Track 1: Lake at Echo Park [mp3]

Track 2: Ocean & Dried Evidence [mp3]

Track 3: Pacific Beach & Runoff [mp3]

Track 4: Photo water at JJ Gittes Office [mp3]

Track 5: REMIX A&C sound stuffing chinatown K Paterson’s icerecord [mp3]

Track 6: Tidepool at Mulwray Estate [mp3]

Track 7: Water & Drinks at Mrs. Mulwray’s [mp3]

Track 8: Water & Murder at Ida Sessions [mp3]

Track 9: Shower at Gittes [mp3]

.

More on: Chinatown // Katie Paterson

“Before there was Earth Day, there was the Survival Faire, an ecology extravaganza that did not survive for even one year. But its signature action is still remembered by those who were at San Jose State College in early 1970.

That was when a bunch of students bought a brand-new, never-started Ford Maverick, then pushed it from the dealer’s lot into the center of campus, where it was ceremoniously buried in a pit, 12 feet deep.

The elaborate funeral procession was conceived of as an anti-internal combustion, anti-smog statement to cap off the weeklong fair, which itself resulted in one of the first environmental studies departments to be established at any university in the nation. As a publicity stunt, the car burial was brilliant, gleaning way more Bay Area press coverage than the comparatively subdued first Earth Day, which followed it on April 22, 1970.”

Read more:

 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/20/DDG21BST18.DTL

Be prepared to work!

Center For Tactical Magic – Tactical Ice Cream Unit

Feral Trade Cafe

Okay Mountain

Energy Plans- Future Farmers

Marie Harrison’s questions – Send your responses to us, and we’ll forward them to her: 

1) What is needed to engage young folks to get them involved in environmental and social justice?

2) Give me a plan to get information out to the masses, other than door to door. Do news stories hold the attention of young folks?

3) Other than an overt act, suggest three other ways to bring elected and selected officials up to speed on issues that need their attention like right now.

Week 13 will be a workday.  Please bring in everything you will need for working on your project and be prepared to spend the majority of the class on this purpose. We will work together to hone in on te structure of the project and begin development.

Also, bring in your website selections to present to the class.

from Revkin’s Dot Earth Blog:

Art CLues to Trends in Diet, Ice, Quakes

Image: Oh, Snowflake, Abby Zialcita, 2010.

Cover image, One-Day Magazine.

Download the complete One-Day Magazine [PDF] here.

Week 12 – A.M. Field Trip with Marie Harrison

9 am – Meet in front of CCA SF at 9ish. We’ll leave by car at 9:15 a.m. to meet Marie Harrison from Greenaction at the Walgreens in the strip mall at the intersection of 3rd and Evans. From there she’ll take us on a toxic tour by car to some sites to consider in thinking about the connections between environmental and climate justice.

Directions: From CCA, take a left to 16th Street. At 3rd Street, take a right, and follow 3rd to Evans. Just south of Evans Avenue, take a left into the parking lot at 3801 3rd Street.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/walgreens-drug-store-san-francisco-13

For further reading:

“Urban CO2 domes increase deaths”, Stanford Report, March 16, 2010

“Emission Facts: Average Carbon Dioxide Emissions Resulting from Gasoline and Diesel Fuel” [USEPA]

Why do Diesel Trucks Idle? [DOT]

“Truck and rail transport consume about 35 billion gallons of diesel fuel each year, which produces carbon dioxide (CO2), NOx, and PM. Of the nations’ total transportation-related emissions, ground freight contributes 40 percent of NOx and 30 percent of PM. Truck idling consumes almost 1 billion gallons of diesel fuel annually and emits an estimated 11 million tons of CO2, 180,000 tons of NOx, and 5,000 tons of PM.” – US Federal Highway Administration

In the afternoon there will be a short slideshow on Climate, Art, and Activism. 

 The rest of the afternoon will be studio time to brainstorm as a group on the final project – 

Final Group Project. This student-led collaboration/assignment will culminate in a public-facing project (ie online video interview archive, collaboration with outside organization, dialogic public project, etc.). Some questions to consider are – What does it mean to make something public? Why collaborate? Who is this work for?  

After tomorrow, class time through the end of the semester will be devoted to studio time for this project; so please be prepared as a group with the materials you’ll need for concentrated studio work each day.

Assignment:

Part I: Work together to finalize your project proposal to present in class next week.

Part II: CLIMATE WIN/FAIL. Bring in two websites of climate related projects, compare and contrast.

• Bring in two URLs next week of work or climate websites using similar tactics or approaches addressing climate issues, and which are related to your final project research. You’ll present these images to the class next week, comparing their strategies and approaches, and relative merits and weaknesses, in a 5 minute presentation.

Further reading: How much politics can art take?, BAVO Research

Wendell Pierce and J. Kyle Manzay in Paul Chan’s production of Waiting for Godot, New Orleans (2007). Photo: Lee Celano for The New York Times

Links:

This weeks links are about making things public – specifically climate issues, in art and activism, often through collaboration.

Paul Chan_Godot_New Orleans

Paul Chan – Waiting for Godot – New Orleans – Art – New York Times

Race, Poverty & The Env Mag – Introduction: Catalyst or Catastrophe? | Urban Habitat

x design project: environmental health clinic

Camp for Climate Action

Plane Stupid

Mobilization for Climate Justice

Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

Yesmen – Climate

The Climate Rush

AIRPLOT!

Greenaction

WochenKlausur

The People Speak/Talkaoke

Talkaoke

MoMA | Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront

GASLAND

Image: Speech and What Archive, A Constructed World

Tomorrow we’ll have a critique in the morning, and do a collaborative project, a One-Day Magazine, in the afternoon. 

.

For the One Day Magazine, you’ll need to bring in three books in some way related to climate change to use as resources, perhaps read aloud from, and most importantly, to share with the class as collective research material. These should be books that visually or critically inspire, interest, disgust, inform, or engage you about climate change.

.

The project will involve each person creating a 2-page spread from one 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet of paper to contribute to a group magazine. You should bring drawing and/or collage materials, or your computer if you prefer to work on image editing software. You will have the afternoon to complete your contribution to the magazine, which you’ll hand off at the end of the class. We’ll return the completed magazine to the class at a later date as a starting point for a discussion. 

.

This project is informed by the Australian artist group A Constructed World (Geoff Lowe + Jacqueline Riva) –  who do similar projects in their art practice. These projects, sometimes taking the form of collaborative magazines or poster series, become jumping-off points for dialog. Inviting artists to participate and contribute, their projects emphasize working quickly to generate a conversation from ideas that are visualized, similar to drawing exercises, but instead working with ideas, from the starting point of “not-knowing” as a shared space.

.

.

Image: One-Day Library, Amy Franceschini

.

Additionally, the project is informed by Amy Francescini’s One-Day Library, where people brought books to read from at the Garden for the Environment, and to contribute to a temporary library/bookshelf for the day.

.

Please take a look at both these projects online.

.

A list of the books you bring will make up a collective bibliography at the back of the finished magazine.

.

Image: From GOOD Magazine, a watercolor infographic about the Great Pacific Garbage patch.

Monday will be a studio workday, and the 15th is Spring break

Assignment: For March 22nd, read the article Forget Shorter Showers, by Derrick Jensen for Orion Magazine, and the essay The Weather In Mongolia [PDF], by Philip Marsden, from Granta 83, This Overheating World.