Posts

Posted on

Land Arts of the American West

I went to a talk at Parsons today on Land Art, presented by Incubo (Chile) and  Land Arts of the American West (Texas).
The 2 groups worked on this, Earthworks Lab.

Land Arts of the American West is “an interdisciplinary field program expanding the definition of land art through direct experience with the full range of human interventions in the landscape, from the inscriptions of pictographs and petrogylphs to the construction of roads, dwellings, and monuments, as well as traces of those actions. Land art includes gestures both small and grand, directing our attention from potsherd, cigarette butt, and mark in the sand to human settlements, monumental artworks, and military/industrial projects such as hydroelectric dams and decommissioned airfields.”

Smithson, Spiral Jetty
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty

Add an ImageCarissa Leos, If Lost Relax, Cebolla Canyon, New Mexico, 2004.
Carissa Leos, If Lost Relax, Cebolla Canyon, New Mexico, 2004.

One of Incubo’s projects is Nomade, taking a 4wd bus out into remote landscapes. First foray for artists and designers went to the Atacama Desert, engaging in  fog-catching, speculative interventions, and inquiring into recent post-industrial landscapes.

(Tapping fog or fog harvesting has  successful in many  localized instances.)

Fog water collectors on El Tofo mountain, Chile. Water from the fog condenses on these large nets.
Posted on

The Anthropocene Era (1)

New geological ages are characterized by changes in global environmental conditions and large scale shifts in types of species. Recently Earth has entered into a new geological age: The Anthropocene, from anthropo / man and cene / new [geological age]. Humans are now changing the world on a global scale and ushering in the new era in geologic time.
– Oceanography in the 21st Century

It has no precise start date, but may be considered to start in the late 18th century when the activities of humans first began to have a significant global impact on the Earth’s climate and ecosystems. This date coincides with James Watt‘s invention of the steam engine in 1784. The term was coined in 2000 by the Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, (who unpacked the process of atmospheric ozone depletion) who regards the influence of human behavior on the Earth in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological era.
– Wikipedia

Geologists from the University of Leicester propose that humankind has so altered the Earth that it has brought about an end to one epoch of Earth’s history and marked the start of a new epoch – the Anthropocene.
They have identified human impact through phenomena such as:

• Transformed patterns of sediment erosion and deposition worldwide
• Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature
• Wholesale changes to the world’s plants and animals
• Ocean acidification

The scientists analysed a proposal made by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen in 2002. He suggested the Earth had left the Holocene and started the Anthropocene era because of the global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development.

The researchers argue that the dominance of humans has so physically changed Earth that there is increasingly less justification for linking pre- and post-industrialized Earth within the same epoch – the Holocene.
– from Paleoblog

Posted on

15th century woodcuts of plants and other monsters

This, from a great collection in the Science and Society Picture Library:

science__society_10438573
Woodcut from ‘Hortus Sanitatis’, (‘Garden of Health’), printed by Johann Pruss in Strasbourg in 1497

and this, too:

science__society_10438567
Hortus Sanitatis was the most popular and influential herbal of its time, and served as an encyclopaedia of all knowledge and folklore on plants, animals, and minerals. It combines elements of natural history with subjects traditionally found in herbals, and includes many mythical creatures. Many of the woodblock engravings were taken from the German ‘Herbarius’ (1485), itself derived from earlier herbals, repeating many of their errors.
Posted on

Lindisfarne

Farne Island is home to the Lindisfarne Priory ruins, whose monks in the 7th century created the Gospels, an unusual and exquisite Celtic Christian illuminated manuscript. Birds are rife in the manuscript as well as a cat on the front page, quite unusual in the iconography, according to Aly Wolff-Mills, a student at ITP who did a project expanding the cat into a full-fledged heretic deity.

Here’s some contextualizing drama:

Lindisfarne Abbey
Lindisfarne Castle
Posted on

St Cuthbert, first animal rights advocate?

Here is an account of the life of St. Cuthbert as told by The Venerable Bede. Cuthbert is a 6th century proto St. Francis figure, famed in his time as a miracle worker. Cuthbert was born in Northumberland circa 634. .. at various times in his life, Cuthbert was a monk, a hermit, and – briefly – a bishop. He lived in the  Lindisfarne Abbey, and died there in 687.
(“The Venerable Bede” was born in 673, in Northumberland, considered a prominent intellect and one of the most prolific writers in this early Christian era).

The Farne Islands are an important locus for sea bird populations (including Pale-bellied Brent Goose, Wigeon, Teal, Pintail, Merlin, Dunlin, Bar-tailed Godwit). While resident there, St Cuthbert instituted special laws to protect the eider ducks and other seabirds nesting there, creating what may have been the first bird protection laws anywhere in the world. Consequently, eider ducks have long been known as ‘cuddy ducks’ (Cuthbert’s ducks) in the Pitmatic dialect as spoken in Northumberland.

Eider or Cuddy Duck
Eider or Cuddy Duck

“Many times birds and animals obeyed him. Once, fasting on a Friday till the late afternoon, as he was wont, a horse found him half a loaf of bread in the thatch of a house. He gave half of the bread to the horse and took the rest for himself. Another time, after he had prayed all night long in the sea, two sea-otters came to warm his feet and dry him with their fur; they received his blessing. Again, after fasting, a large fish was brought to him by an eagle. The fish was cut in two, half for the eagle, half for a family and himself. ‘Learn to have constant faith and hope in the Lord. He who serves God shall never die of hunger’, said Cuthbert. Another time, when he ordered birds who had come to eat barley he had sown to depart, they obeyed him. Ravens were reproved by him and then later brought him lard as a sign of their repentance. ‘What care should men not take to learn obedience and humility’, he said, ‘when even birds hasten to wash away their faults’.”

Ernest-Ange Duez, Saint Cuthbert 1879 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
Ernest-Ange Duez, Saint Cuthbert 1879 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)