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Newsubstance creates 35-metre-tall See Monster from North Sea gas rig

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An art installation featuring a waterfall, a wild garden and a number of kinetic artworks has opened on a former North Sea offshore gas platform in Weston-super-Mare, England, as part of the Unboxed festival.

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​The Street Stitching movement was devised in 2021 by craftivist artist Suzi Warren founder of The Clothes Hospital and Twisted Twee. Contact suzi@twistedtwee.co.uk if you have any queries

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Textiles; fashion, costume, wearables, masks etc

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Textiles; fashion, costume, wearables, masks etc

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Biodiversity; animals, plants, bacteria etc

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Biodiversity; animals, plants, bacteria etc

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From her studio in Lyon, Mlle Hipolyte scores, crimps, and fringes bits of paper that become sculptural interpretations of endangered species. She undertakes a rigorous research process that's comparable to that of a botanist or zoologist before starting a piece and largely is concerned with the effects of the climate crisis on plants and animals. This realistic approach bases her practice in both preservation and celebration as she conveys the intricacies and natural beauty of coral reefs, flowers, and birds through works that vary in scale, sometimes spanning entire walls and others squeezing into tiny glass tubes.

Mlle Hipolyte tells Colossal that her next undertaking is a large forest inspired by François Hallé's botanical drawings, an ongoing project you can follow on Instagram. To add one of the meticulous, textured sculptures to your collection, check out her shop. (via Cross Connect Magazine)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now!

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Endangered Flora and Fauna Are Recreated in Textured Paper Sculptures by Mlle Hipolyte

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From her studio in Lyon, Mlle Hipolyte scores, crimps, and fringes bits of paper that become sculptural interpretations of endangered species. She undertakes a rigorous research process that's comparable to that of a botanist or zoologist before starting a piece and largely is concerned with the eff

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Writers Rebel’s Paint the Land project was launched with the help of Booker prize-winning writer Ben Okri, artist-activists Ackroyd & Harvey, Capital Choir, Damon Albarn and countless dedicated volunteers. Okri’s message to world governments, “Can’t you hear the future weeping? Our love must save th…

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These Extreme Artworks Embody the Climate Crisis | Art & Object

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Headquartered in Dorset, England, Cape Farewell has been devoted to shifting perceptions about climate change since 2001, with founder and international director David Buckland at the helm. As climate warnings went unheard, Buckland was inspired to reunite the creative fields of science and art to converse with people using a cultural language.

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Chapter 1: Paradise Harbour

An ancient fizz

We set out across the ice-filled Antarctic bay to listen for whales, but first we heard something altogether different: an upside-down sound below the Southern Ocean, something like the sound of climate crisis itself.

Our small motor dinghy was carrying seven passengers - a polar guide, two Greenpeace activists, two journalists, a camera operator and a scientist specialising in marine acoustics. All around us were jagged, brilliant white peaks, piercing blue glaciers and water flecked with such a constellation of ice fragments that you could imagine a sky-sized mirror had shattered on to the surface of the ocean.

The pilot cut the outboard engine to reduce noise while the scientist, Tim Lewis, dropped the hydrophone - essentially a waterproof microphone on a long cable - into the ocean. We sat quietly as the boat bobbed and drifted to within a few metres of an iceberg the size of a church. Dozens of gentoo penguins swished in and out of the water. Further off, we could hear the intermittent rumbles of avalanches as mountain snow warmed and collapsed in the pale southern summer sun.

But it was the underwater soundscape that we had come to hear. After playing out 20 metres of cable, Lewis took off his woolly hat, put on the headphones, closed his eyes and let his ears take him down to the depths. We watched his face for clues as to what he was hearing. First a frown. (Is the equipment working properly?) Then a look of bemusement. Finally a wry smile. "I have never heard anything like it. Not what I expected at all," he said. "It sounds like dripping, like the inside of a gorge."

The earphones were passed from person to person. Everyone listened with a similar expression of concentration and offered their own interpretation of these strange sounds. "Drips in a drain," said one of the activists. "Forest waterfall," said the coxswain. "Rainfall on city streets," said the camera operator.

My turn came, and I, too, was transported. Not, it seemed, below the ocean, but into a vast cavern, where it sounded as if water was cascading from a high ceiling, each drip echoing through the emptiness.

The sound of an iceberg melting

The sound of an iceberg melting

Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2020/04/08/melting-glacier--trimmed.mp3

"That's the sound of the iceberg melting," Lewis informed us. When snow falls, he explained, pockets of air get trapped and then compressed inside glaciers over years, centuries, even millennia. "What you can hear are the pops as they are released," he said.

It was the opposite of what we imagined. Rather than water dripping down through air, we were listening to air escaping up through water. We were so close to the ice that this ancient fizz was surprisingly loud. Though we humans never hear it above the surface, this is the sound the Antarctic makes every summer. And as the planet heats, the sound is getting louder.

Chapter 2: King George Island

Measuring the melt

It was mid-January, the peak of the Antarctic summer, and I had joined a broader 10-month, pole-to-pole expedition by scientists and campaigners on two Greenpeace ships, the Arctic Sunrise and the Esperanza. On this final leg around the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands, nine researchers from British, French and US universities were measuring how human activity is disturbing the region's natural equilibrium.

With the help of 59 crew members - a mix of sailors, engineers and activists - the scientists conducted acoustic monitoring, environmental DNA sampling, testing for plastic microfibres, phytoplankton analysis, as well as surveys of penguin and whale populations. Just as the first explorers once charted coastlines voyage by voyage, the aim was to map Antarctic ecosystems. Many of the waters and islands we were visiting had not been surveyed for decades, if ever.

I caught up with the Sunrise at King George's Island, about 600 miles south of Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America. Home to an airfield, two churches, the research bases of 10 countries and about 500 semi-permanent residents, this international community has often been cast as the last hope of humanity in dystopian novels and films because of its remoteness, collaborative spirit and focus on science. (Today, coincidentally, Antarctica is the only continent that does not have a single case of coronavirus).

But it is all too vulnerable to the other great global crisis - climate change. Veterans of Antarctic exploration had warned me that this location would give me my first taste of how rapidly the region is warming. On the slopes around the bay, there was more bare rock than snow, while the stony beach was so free of ice that it could almost have been Brighton, were it not for the penguins. This was to be expected. Temperatures on the peninsula - the finger of land that points up from Antarctica towards South America - have risen by about 3C in the past 70 years, one of the fastest increases in the world.

What was more surprising was the number of other vessels bobbing in the bay.

"People think Antarctica is isolated. That is a myth," Marcelo Leppe, the director of Chile's National Antarctic Institute, had told me when I visited him the previous day in Punta Arenas, the capital of Chile's southernmost region. "The changes are so great it is hard to put them in words," he said. Since Leppe started studying the region in 2002, he had seen more and more visitors, and less and less snow. "I have seen glaciers retreat by 100 metres, and parts of the land become so green that it almost looks like a golf course," he said.

In December, monitoring equipment at the Chilean research base on King George Island detected something that worried Leppe even more: black carbon in the air, which came from the Australian bushfires more than 6,200 miles away. Even in tiny quantities, this soot darkens the white landscape, reducing its capacity to reflect sunlight and making it melt faster. "At least future geologists will find this black layer helpful to identify the year 2020 in their ice cores," he joked darkly.

There will be other clues for the geologists of the future. On 24 December 2019, the Antarctic probably suffered its worst one-day ice melt since records began, according to analysis by the University of Liège. In February, a mainland record of 18.3C was registered at the Argentinian base on the tip of the peninsula. Days later, a continental high of 20.75C was measured at a monitoring station on Seymour Island. On that day, on that island, the Antarctic was hotter than Cape Town.

Close to 70% of the world's freshwater is locked into Antarctica's snow and ice. If it all melts, sea levels will rise by more than 50 metres. Long before then, most of human civilisation will have been submerged. As scientists scramble to calculate how long that will take, and politicians dither in their response to the crisis, the tourist industry has spotted an opportunity, offering punters the last chance to see the Antarctic before the continent as we know it disappears.

Chapter 3: Trinity Island

Crowds at the end of the world

For the first two days, we sailed south in serene conditions, gazing in wonder at the seascape and wildlife. You can glimpse more species in the average London garden than on this immense continent, which covers an area the size of the US and Mexico combined. But what its residents lack in variety, they make up for in numbers.

That was clear from our first short excursion at Trinity Island, which lies 150 miles southwest of King George Island. There we came across a vast number of chattering penguins, grunting seals and squawking cormorants - along with a startling number of tourists. There, and at our next stop in Paradise Harbour, we saw six giant cruise liners in the space of four days, disgorging groups of whale watchers on dinghies, adventure holidaymakers on kayaks, and red-jacketed trekkers wandering through guano-stained slopes.

This southern hemisphere summer - which was the 200th anniversary of the first sighting of the Antarctic - a record 80,000 tourists were expected in the continent, an almost threefold increase from 2015. Before the coronavirus pandemic, shipbuilders had been seeing strong demand for polar- and ice-class cruise liners. Luxury cruise operators have tried to outdo one another with heated deck "igloos", underwater lounges and extendable viewing platforms. Tourists pay as much as $10,000 (£8,500) or even $20,000 to experience what brochures describe as "the Earth's last great wilderness frontier".

For our hyper-dominant species, part of the attraction of Antarctica is the chance to feel small in the presence of the sublime, to return to a time when nature seemed like an awe-inspiring and nurturing mother rather than the frail and overburdened grandparent it increasingly resembles today. To ensure that tourists feel like they are journeying through a nearly deserted wilderness, tour operators coordinate schedules and instruct captains to use radar to avoid visual sightings of other vessels. (As our polar guide, Tom Foreman, noted, the impre

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The sound of icebergs melting: my journey into the Antarctic

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The long read: Not long after Antarctica recorded some of its highest-ever temperatures, I joined a group of scientists studying how human activity is transforming the continent. It wasn't what we saw that was most astonishing - it was what we heard

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Animals In Between Two Worlds In Realistic Paintings By Lisa Ericson

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Based in Portland, Oregon, Lisa Ericson creates original paintings. They depict very realistic animals, with a surrealist twist. Half submerged, they evolve between two worlds, with an abundant flora. All of her paintings are done in acrylic on wood panels.

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Data: sea level, temperature, citizen science etc

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Data: sea level, temperature, citizen science etc

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Climate change is hard to get your head around. So much data. So much hopelessness. The textile interpretation makes it a little bit easier to take in the enormity of what's at stake.

"I stitched the topographic lines of the areas from the Rim Fire that were severely burned, and the stitch lines are done in white. So you can really see how much of the watershed of the Tuolumne River burned. The medium that I'm using, and the techniques, draw people in to notice things that they may not have noticed otherwise."

Did the work teach Gass something she didn't know when she embarked on the project? "Doing this repetitive stitching really drew me into the landscape and the information," she says. "It really made me think about where topographically and geographically I was within that landscape."

She adds, "A lot of the time that goes into my work is actually the research that I do and whether it's digging up data or images or maps."

That turns out to be gratifying for the scientists whose data she employs. "They appreciate the fact that I'm conveying their concepts through artwork, which may be a very different way for people to receive that information than through technical data or charts or graphs."

Gass has been exploring the liminal space between scientific data and its aesthetic beauty for more than 20 years now, and she can see herself continuing to do it for 20 more. "Oh, yeah. I will never run out of subject matter. Just with water issues alone, and climate change."
And Then This Happened... runs December 19, 2019-May 3, 2020 at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco. For more information, click here.

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Climate Change Told With Needle & Thread | KQED

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Climate change is hard to get your head around. So much data. So much hopelessness. The textile interpretation makes it a little bit easier to take in the enormity of what's at stake. "I stitched the topographic lines of the areas from the Rim Fire that were severely burned, and the stitch lines are done in white.

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Brooklyn Museum Presents a “Hemispheric” Survey of Indigenous Responses to Climate Change - Metropolis

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Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas explores how global warming has affected the visual culture of indigenous communities.

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Collaborative Lamps That Weave Traditional Fibers With PET Plastic Waste — Colossal | Recycled art, Weaving art, Ephemeral art

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Feb 1, 2018 - Colossal | Art, design, and visual culture

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Natural materials; foraging, local, compostable, low impact

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Natural materials; foraging, local, compostable, low impact

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the animals are innocent . Digital exhibit available for Museum websites or video showings.

The folkart boats and paintings in this exhibit may be loaned to Museums but would need a benefactor to facilitate shipping and insurance.
https://henrysheldonmuseum.org/exhibits/the-animals-are-innocent-ceramics-by-dana-simson/
Intricately detailed hand crafted folk art toy boats full of animals and engaging paintings whimsically pull viewers into a world where water has displaced animal habitat. In tippy canoe and migrants to?, several dozen white rabbits are crowded into a lushly carved canoe on wheels.

Another has a fox steering a forest nestled in a boat to safer harbor in parts unknown.

Story text accompanies each boat, explaining the predicament that will be faced by its passengers. The exhibit begins with the following words:

A long story has been written since the first bits of life began here on earth.
This is the chapter where we face ourselves.
"I created this exhibit in hopes of nudging people to look beyond themselves to not only what we will be facing in the future through climate change, but also the impacts we are responsible for affecting earth's other living creatures." -Dana Simson

There are 10 folk art boats on wheels in the exhibit at present, but more will be added. A boat on fire full of Koalas is in the works to decry the current horrible fires ravaging Australia. As habitats change, challenges rise for creatures living there.

I hope to create a video of the exhibit so it can travel worldwide to offer it's message. Some of the paintings in the Animals are innocent are below:

Bare Boat

The Messenger

The exhibit "the animals are innocent" can promote change.

I wrote Come Together . a handbook to retool for the future, to compliment this exhibit. The content offers easy changes to promote a healthier planet through daily choices we can make starting now. It is available through Green Writer's press or on my website:
https://www.danasimson.com/product/come-together-a-climate-change-guide-to-retool-for-the-future/
You can reach me through my website. Thank you for your comments or for sharing this post!

best wishes for a greener 2020,

Dana

I will be posting easy ways to "walk the walk" and my upcoming adventures working for bottom up change for a happy planet.

Like what you see? Please share

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the animals are innocent . an exhibit to lament climate change - Dana Simson Design

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the animals are innocent . Digital exhibit available for Museum websites or video showings. The folkart boats and paintings in this exhibit may be loaned to Museums but would need a benefactor to facilitate shipping and insurance.

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Food for the new seasons of the climate crisis

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Download activity guide

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Part of Wild About Kirkley

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Part of Wild About Kirkley

at Kirkley Pantry Lowestoft
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Part of Wild About Kirkley

A download activity for you to enjoy at home. Find out more

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Download activity guide Part of Wild About Kirkley at Kirkley Pantry Lowestoft Find out more Part of Wild About Kirkley at Kirkley Pantry Lowestoft Find out more Part of Wild About Kirkley A download activity for you to enjoy at home. Find out more

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Concerned with the ongoing climate crisis, Queens-based artist Bea Fremderman imagines an apocalyptic world of the not-so-distant future. Her living sculptures of everyday objects and clothing appear to have been abandoned suddenly, allowing nature to take over as quickly as humans left. "I think of them as relics of the future," she told Cultured in 2019. "With my work, it's not doomsday. It's about starting over, dealing with what we have, and trying to make anew with what we know."

Fremderman plants chia seeds among pant legs, hoodies, and a lone sock that crawl over the apparel and envelop it in a thick carpet. The roving sprouts transform the items and helps question human consumption. "At the core of my work is this issue of new nature- what things are left behind, what will outlive us, how we've changed the landscape," she said. "We used to create things out of rock that would break down, and turn into sand, which comes together and becomes rock again, but now we have things that don't break down."

Find more of Fremderman's germinating sculptures on her site.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now!

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Living Chia Germinates from Clothing Abandoned on a Wash Line by Artist Bea Fremderman

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Concerned with the ongoing climate crisis, Queens-based artist Bea Fremderman imagines an apocalyptic world of the not-so-distant future. Her living sculptures of everyday objects and clothing appear to have been abandoned suddenly, allowing nature to take over as quickly as humans left. "I think of

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In the GROW Observatory (GROW), we are mobilising thousands of people across Europe to collect and make use of data to regenerate soils and improve the accuracy of information on climate events such as floods, droughts and wildfires. GROW is a 'citizens' observatory', a community platform to address urgent environmental challenges through data contributed by the public and the creation of new services. It's one of four citizens' observatories funded by the EC, and is the first attempt to deliver one at a continental scale.

Innovation insight and artistic interest is often in the joins and gaps, the points where not everything runs smoothly

Unusually for a science project of this scale, several of us running it are artists and arts professionals. We are passionate about the ways in which artists can drive innovation and so have introduced artist commissions and a residency to illuminate and reframe the idea of a citizens' observatory.

Artists have created astonishing ways to experience GROW data and imaginative interfaces to the continental-scale sensor network. Through projects like this one, we see how art can inspire people with the potential of global information systems that are otherwise distant, dense and impenetrable. It encourages us to reflect on new ways of seeing the world through data and sensing technologies, and can enrich and widen the conversation around a sustainable future for planet Earth.

Artistic interpretation

By the Code of Soil is a data-driven artwork developed by artist Kasia Molga and sound artist Robin Rimbaud in collaboration with the GROW Observatory. During an artist residency, Kasia and Robin worked over several months with scientists investigating satellites and soils, small-scale food producers and permaculture advocates.

They developed code and algorithms that translated dynamic data from soil sensors, combined with static data on soil texture and season, into different graphical shapes and electronic sounds, creating a new 'language' of tangible forms.

The artwork includes an application for personal computers which creates an audio-visual artistic interpretation of soil data from the cluster of GROW sensors in closest proximity to the participant. The artwork is displayed on computers each time the orbiting European Space Agency's Sentinel-1A satellite passes overhead, which is about once every six days. Soil's dynamic nature is reflected by the piece, the sound and visuals transforming to reflect the way that order appears out of apparent chaos in nature.

Kasia stresses how difficult they found it to "express through cold digital pixels something so amazingly complex and organic and alive with millions of living organisms as soil". To create the visual content for the work, she took as her starting point a pixel - representing a single entity like a grain of soil - from which the whole image is built, using a matrix. It starts in visual 'white noise', with imagery coming to life. Various visual configurations - frequencies, shapes, speed of motion and sizes - reflect the moisture, light, temperature and texture of soil from GROW sensors closest to the participant's computer, based on the IP address.

Audio files are written in such a way that they can respond and reflect values of various data parameters which convey the concept of soil and its changing conditions, creating a periodical portrait of each of the GROW places. The sound maps the tiniest detail of alterations in the data received. The artists created sounds that typically last half a second, and mapped these across hundreds of different possibilities.

Imaginative dimension

Art should not only inform - it should provoke as well. Innovation, insight and artistic interest are often found in the joins and the gaps, the points where not everything runs smoothly. In this case, art helped us address a key barrier to uptake for citizen observatories: trust in citizen-contributed data. In the end, this question of trust was posed by the artwork itself.

Drew Hemment is Project Lead of the GROW Observatory and Chancellor's Fellow at Edinburgh Futures Institutes. Feimatta Conteh is GROW Innovation Team Lead and Programme Manager at FutureEverything.
www.growobservatory.org
Tw @growobservatory
GROW Observatory has received funding from the EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 690199.

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In the GROW Observatory (GROW), we are mobilising thousands of people across Europe to collect and make use of data to regenerate soils and improve the accuracy of information on climate events such as floods, droughts and wildfires.

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Artist Alanna Lynch uses kombucha as an art medium to explore our relationship with the microbiome, which is now in the spotlight of human health.
An ancient drink made of fermented tea, kombucha is now, over 2,000 years later, exploding in popularity. This week, Coca-Cola acquired an Australian kombucha company in an aim to enter this promising market.

Kombucha is believed to have many health benefits. Among them is the fact that it's a probiotic drink, as the drink is fermented using a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast.

In recent years, scientific research has revealed that the human microbiome has a key role in our health, influencing all sort of processes from digestion to the immune response and the brain. Kombucha could help keep it healthy by increasing the diversity of microorganisms that live in our gut.

As an artist and scientist, Alanna Lynch is fascinated by this idea of microorganisms becoming an essential part of our bodies and therefore our identity. Her artwork Gut Feelings takes the form of performative lectures where she invites attendees to drink kombucha with her and get their hands dirty to become familiar with the microorganisms that ferment the drink.

In the process of making kombucha, the bacteria and yeast culture transform sugar into acid compounds and alcohol. The microorganisms also produce films of cellulose, a flexible material with a unique texture and smell. The material is being investigated as a sustainable alternative to textiles - Lynch herself has used it to make cellulose gloves -, and scientists have even proposed it as the ideal material to manufacture on Mars in the future.

In her performances, Lynch explains how the microorganisms in the kombucha attendees are given to drink have been shown to influence the mind. She also explores how, by drinking it, the concept of 'self' becomes blurred given the essential role that the microbes living in our gut play in our health.

Originally from Canada, Alanna Lynch is now based in Berlin, where she has been performing Gut Feelings. Her work offers a unique opportunity for anyone to come closer to microbiology science and the fascinating new concepts that the most recent research in the microbiome field is starting to unveil.
This article was originally published in June 2017 and has since been updated.
Pictures credits: Alanna Lynch, Matthias Reichelt, and Tim Deussen

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Art Made With Kombucha Explores the Science of the Microbiome

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Artist Alanna Lynch uses kombucha as an art medium to explore our relationship with the microbiome, which is now in the spotlight of human health. An ancient drink made of fermented tea, kombucha is now, over 2,000 years later, exploding in popularity. This week, Coca-Cola acquired an Australian kombucha company in an aim to enter this promising market.

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Commonspoly is a non-profit, open-source board game that encourages a culture of cooperation and questions the violent model of neoliberal privatisation. Commonspoly emerged in 2015 as a way to hack and subvert the contemporary version of Monopoly. Just like the original, each space on the board provides goods or other resources, but in Commonspoly these goods can be Private, Public, or Commons. The game's design principles draw on insights from commoning practices and encourage players to pool their resources together and act collectively against 'speculators' - nefarious game characters advocating privatization. Rather than competing to accumulate goods, the challenge is thus to create a society, where working together furthers the common good.

The Commoncpoly project emerged in 2015 as a way to bring back the spirit of the original Monopoly game as designed by its creator, Elizabeth Magie, who wanted to bring the perils of monopolisation to attention. Each space on the Monopoly board shows goods and other resources for purchase, but in Commonspoly these goods can be turned into commons. The first prototype of Commonspoly was created at the 17th ZEMOS98 festival, during a working session facilitated by Guillermo Zapata and with the participation of Vassilis Chryssos, Francisco Jurado, José Laulhé, Carmen Lozano, Rubén Martínez, Peter Matjašič, María G. Perulero, Virginia Benvenuti, Natxo Rodríguez, Igor Stokfisiewski, Menno Weijs, Carla Boserman and Mario Munera. After this, the ZEMOS98 cooperative took over the coordination and started facilitating the Commonspoly project development, making the game available for free and open to peer-editing.

The Commonspoly game is typically played in public sessions at cultural events, engaging diverse local communities, but it can also be purchased or downloaded as print-ready files and played privately. ZEMOS98 also provides editable game files to encourage collaborative game development, enabling anyone to adjust the game to their specific contexts. These new game versions created by players are then distributed under the Peer Production License and their creators are listed as authors, while ZEMOS98 stays listed only as the author of the game versions that they develop themselves.

This peer process creates an open space for the development of a collective, distributed authorship of the game, where the game proliferates by accumulating diverse local and personal knowledges of various stakeholders interested in the topic of commons. Emphasis on collective authorship is a key part of the Commonspoly project: the openness to an ongoing re-negotiation is designed into the game, which becomes a commoning artifact on its own.

To scale out the game distribution and nurture a growing community of practice around the game, ZEMOS98 has recently initiated a network of 'Ambassadors': individuals and small bookstores that manage the sales and distribution of small game stocks locally, acting as Commonspoly advocates as well as gameplays facilitators. Ten bookstores around Spain have been successfully secured and the network has started to expand internationally, for instance into Finland, Greece, Portugal, and Italy.

Through these playing formats and development strategies, Commonspoly has already reached people in 23 countries and was released in five different iterations and four different languages. For instance, a Brazilian teacher adapted the game to the local context for her students; a UK-based Esperanto expert made a game translation. ZEMOS98 themselves have developed four game editions so far, with the latest one known as the Commonspoly Green Edition that has been used in the CreaTures project. Initially, the Commonspoly plan for CreaTures was to produce a series of live gameplays in Seville; however, due to the pandemic, the gameplays have been partially adapted into an online format.

The main goal of the Commponspoly project is to stimulate a collaborative, commons-based approach to the use of public resources as a sustainable alternative to the extractivist model of neoliberal privatization. The game fosters collective dynamics to the detriment of strategic visions based on competition and individualism and helps people imagine and negotiate various commoning strategies applicable in everyday-life contexts.

Along with the globally distributed Ambassadors network, Commonspoly builds a trans-local community network of stakeholders interested in long-term engagements, critical discussion, and education related to the topic of commons and socially sustainable economic models. The game thus works as an educational artifact supporting peer-learning and critical discussion about these topics and co-envisioning of socio-economic systems based on collaboration, mutuality, and solidarity rather than exploitation and extractivism.

Commons, Feminist Economics, Games, Mobilising Local Communities, Open Documentation, Peer-learning, Relational Networks, Thriving beyond Neoliberalism ZEMOS98

ZEMOS98 is a 22 years old non profit organization and its mission is to produce social change through a methodology that supports the ideas of free culture, expanded education and P2P mediation in which digital media plays a crucial role. ZEMOS98's vision is to strive from the fringes to care for a culture of participation and to foster critical citizenry. The slogan of the organization is "mediation for social change". Its main aim is to connect the social and the cultural with the political. ZEMOS98 has been working internationally on contemporary narratives and socially engaged artistic practices in the last 10 years. It collaborates regularly with the European Cultural Foundation and the Carasso Foundation. Right now it's taking part in these EU granted projects: Culture for Solidarity, Mediactivism, NEMESIS and CreaTures

Commonspoly activities are produced in collaboration with:
-Stimmuli for Social Change (Irene Kalemaki)
- 💚Ambassadors:
- Irene Kalemaki (Greece): Irene is a co-founder of the Stimmuli for Social Change organisation specialised in social innovation and education. Irene has more than 10 years of experience both as a researcher and a project manager. She has been involved in numerous Research and Innovation projects funded by the European Commission and has gained experience in various fields including Social Innovation & Civic Participation, Education & Skills development, Global Sustainability and Responsible Entrepreneurship.

- Angela María Osorio Méndez and Maria Francesca de Tullio (Italy):
Angela is an Urban researcher and practitioner with a degree in Architecture and a PhD in Urban Studies. Her fields of research are urban renewal, culture and welfare, and urban migration. She is an activist in l'Asilo (Naples, Italy) and the Italian Network of emerging commons and civic use, where she is part of the working group on the depatriarcalization of politics. She is interested in the development of methodologies that enable the political participation of voices left out of the main public debate sphere.
María Francesca is an activist in urban commons in Naples and PhD in Constitutional law. She authored a monograph concerning Substantial Equality and New Dimensions of Political Participation. Her main research areas are: political representation and participatory democracy, counter-terrorism and legal states of emergency, communication surveillance, competition law on the Internet, the collective dimension of privacy in the era of big data.
- Sandrine Cristomo (Portugal) : Sandrine is a creative producer in arts, culture and education with extensive experience and skills in the areas of cultural management, production and cooperation, fundraising, training, and strategic design in creative projects and networks. She has worked in grass-roots organisations, film festivals and networks, as well as in public institutions in the cultural, educational, and creative industries sector, mainly in Europe and Latin America. Her areas of interest are educational innovation and creativity, art and social transformation, collaborative processes and civic participation in the territories for development and gender issues.
- Andrew Gryf Paterson (Finland): Andrew is an 'artist-organiser', cultural producer, educator and independent researcher, he specialises in exploring connections between art, digital culture, science and cultural activism related to the commons, DIY-Do-It-With-Others, ecological and sustainability movements, along with cultural heritage and collaborative networks. Originally from Scotland, Andrew has an international practice, including activity over the past ~20 years in the Baltic Sea region, based for most of the time in Helsinki, Finland. He works across the fields of media networking, environmental arts and activism, pursuing a participatory practice through workshops, performative events, and storytelling. Paterson is also one of the longest-lasting members of the Pixelache festival, attending for the first time in 2003 and contributing as a cultural organiser for the first time in 2004.
- Rosalía Gutiérrez (Spain): Rosalia is a member of ZEMOS98 permanent team and took the rol of the facilitator as well as the speculator during the gameplays organised in Madrid, Spain.

Online + various cities around Europe

GOAL 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

GOAL 13: Climate Action

GOAL 16: Peace and Justice Strong Institutions

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Commonspoly is a non-profit, open-source board game that encourages a culture of cooperation and questions the violent model of neoliberal privatisation. Commonspoly emerged in 2015 as a way to hack and subvert the contemporary version of Monopoly. Just like the original, each space on the board provides goods or other resources, but in Commonspoly these goods can be Private, Public, or Commons.

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GRID -Gaming Revolution for Inspiring Development

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A game that teaches the causes and consequences of climate change

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GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW

The object of the game is to come up with the most entertaining and thought-provoking descriptions of hypothetical objects from different near-, medium-, and long-term futures. Each round, players collectively generate a creative prompt by playing a card game. This prompt outlines the kind of future that the thing-to-be-imagined comes from, specifies what part of society or culture it belongs to, describes the type of object that it is, and suggests an emotional reaction that it might spark in an observer from the present. Players must then each write a short description of an object that fits the constraints of the prompt. These descriptions are then read aloud (without attribution), and players vote on which description they find the most interesting, provocative, or funny. The winner of each round keeps the cards put into play for that round, and whoever has the most cards when the game ends is declared the overall winner.

MATERIALS

In addition to the deck of 108 game cards, a supply of blank index cards and a pen for each player is required.

NUMBER OF PLAYERS

A single deck of The Thing From The Future cards may be used for play by individuals or by groups of two to six members. For larger gatherings (such as in a classroom or workshop), the game may be played by parallel groups with one deck per group and a central facilitator to orchestrate the timing of each round. Four players is an ideal group size.

THE CARDS

There are four types of cards in The Thing From The Future: Arc, Terrain, Object, and Mood. Each round, players will generate a four-card creative prompt containing one of each kind of card. Based on this prompt, players will imagine a thing from the future.

ARC CARDS

ARC cards broadly describe different kinds of possible futures. These cards contain two kinds of information. The main (top) text of each Arc card specifies one of four generic images of alternative futures for players to imagine: Grow, Collapse, Discipline, or Transform.*

Grow is a kind of future in which everything and everyone keeps climbing: population, production, consumption...

Collapse is a kind of future in which life as we know it has fallen - or is falling - apart.

Discipline is a kind of future in which things are carefully managed by concerted coordination, perhaps top-down or perhaps collaboratively.

Transform is a kind of future in which a profound historical transition has occurred, whether spiritual or technological in nature.

The Arc card does not denote a specific future scenario; rather, it indicates a broad trajectory or category of scenario - a "plot type" rather than a particular narrative. Countless scenarios might be imagined as playing out under each of these generic umbrellas.

The bottom text on each Arc card describes the "time horizon" - the distance into the future that players must project their imaginations. In the standard The Thing From The Future deck, time horizons can be anywhere from seven to 1000 years out.

The deck also includes several ARC WILDCARDS. A player laying down an Arc Wildcard must choose the arc of the future in question (grow, collapse, discipline or transform) and the time horizon. This may be noted on an index card and placed in play with the rest of the prompt.

* This aspect of the game design owes a debt to the work of Professor Jim Dator on "generic images of the future" at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies.

TERRAIN CARDS

TERRAIN cards describe contexts, places, and topic areas. In a completed prompt, the terrain card describes where - physically or conceptually - the thing from the future might be found. Two terrains appear on each card in order to provide richer possibilities for the deck.

OBJECT CARDS

OBJECT cards describe the basic form of the thing from the future.

MOOD CARDS

MOOD cards describe emotions that the thing from the future might evoke in an observer from the present.

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The Thing From The Future is an award-winning imagination game that challenges players to collaboratively and competitively describe objects from a range of alternative futures. We are currently sold out of this edition of The Thing From The Future. Stay tuned for more updates about future releases.

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' cultural knowledge and sophisticated understanding of weather systems is the cornerstone for Big Weather, an exhibition currently showing at NGV Australia's Ian Potter Centre. Climate crisis is never far from the surface, with works from artists like Karla Dickens, Clinton Naina, Treahna Hamm and Nici Cumpston addressing the changing weather patterns and the ongoing effects of colonisation on the land and its processes.
* Big Weather will be showing at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, until 21 October

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Big Weather: Indigenous artists reflect on climate crisis - in pictures

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' cultural knowledge and understanding of weather systems is the cornerstone for the exhibition

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In this era of Big Data, it seems that every action we take can be measured and analyzed for financial or political gain. What websites we visit, how we buy our goods, the music we download, even our vital signs and physical activity can be collected and stored. In 2018, reported that "Over the last two years alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated." Because of this, data visualization has become more prevalent at various news sources, an attempt to make sense of this proliferation of information. Hand in hand with this, we are seeing the rise of artists who use data itself as a medium. Chicago-based artist Alisa Singer utilizes statistics around global warming in her exhibition Environmental Graphiti: The Art of Climate Change, now on view at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.

Singer's work brings to life various charts and graphs made about climate change in vivid color. While the pieces may initially appear abstract, a closer look will show that each one is patterned after real scientific data (each is accompanied by a wall tag with the corresponding chart). Speaking to the artist on the phone, she explains to me that while people are becoming more aware of the threat of climate change, many still don't understand the scope of the problem. She wants to "enhance public awareness of science," and says that "art is uniquely suited to this mission." The juxtaposition of the artwork and the raw data creates a dialogue which helps the viewer better understand the data and underlying science. Singer wants people "to come away with some nuggets of info and a sense of urgency and broad comprehensive impact of the problem." One of her pieces was used as the front cover for the United Nations' report "Global Warming of 1.5°C," released in October 2018.

The exhibit is organized thematically around four specific categories: " Why is our climate changing?", " How is climate change affecting our world?", " Who is at risk?", and " What can we do to address climate change?" In the "Why" section, for example, a bright rainbow-hued piece called " Global Carbon Emissions by Source" uses data from an area chart from the Global Carbon Project. In the "Who" section, one work depicts a yellow line with rising peaks and valleys on a background of magenta. It's based on a line chart showing " Trends in Strengths of Hurricanes" from the US Global Change Research Program. Not all the art is based on graphs and charts. " Vector-Borne Diseases " forms the shape of a mosquito out of names for diseases, such as dengue and malaria, which are transformed into colors and shapes.

Singer explains that her process begins with figuring out a key data point she wants to work with, and then "finding an interesting graph I can use from a credible source." Next she takes the chart or graph in question and deconstructs it to its core elements, and then reconstructs it. She says that her work is not meant to be illustrative of the charts, but reinterpretations of them.

Singer began working in this mode after retiring from a career as a corporate attorney. She always wanted to be an artist, but decided not to pursue it until now. She wanted to "combine art with something worthwhile." Her first project was working with The Chicago Lighthouse to create Braille greeting cards. When she finished that, she decided to focus on this project. Singer emphasizes that she wants people to understand that climate change "isn't a problem for the future. It is clearly happening now. And it can only be solved with people here now."

Environmental Graphiti: The Art of Climate Change is on view at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum (2430 N Cannon Drive, Chicago) through March 2020.

Related

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Transforming Charts and Graphs About Climate Change Into Art

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In this era of Big Data, it seems that every action we take can be measured and analyzed for financial or political gain. What websites we visit, how we buy our goods, the music we download, even our vital signs and physical activity can be collected and stored.

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Written in the wind: visualising air pollution levels – in pictures

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Robin Price’s work visualises the amount of hazardous fine particulate matter (PM2.5) present in the air through experimental photography

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Climate change can be seen when a mountainside's trees turn brown thanks to the burrowing of bark beetles, an insect population that explodes during drought, or when an iconic species is pushed closer to extinction. But some of its effects are obvious only to those who look for them. From decades' worth of data, scientists build narratives about how the oceans are acidifying, the average temperatures are warming and the precipitation is becoming more extreme.

Jill Pelto, a recent graduate from the University of Maine, has made it her mission to communicate these changes. The 22-year-old artist paints vivid watercolors of mountains, glaciers, waves and animals, that on closer inspection, reveal jagged line graphs more commonly seen in the pages of a scientific journal than on a gallery's walls. Pelto incorporates real scientific data into her art. In one piece, the silver bodies of Coho salmon dance over blue, rippled water filling a space under a falling graph line. The line connects data points that document the decline of snow and glacier melt that feed the rivers the fish inhabit. Another combines data that describe the rising of sea levels, the climbing demand for fossil fuels, the decline of glaciers and the soaring average temperatures. All of those line graphs lay one over another to create a landscape telling the story of climate change.

Mauri Pelto, Jill's father, is a glaciologist and professor at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts. When she was 16, Jill joined him in the mountains of Washington for a field season, measuring the depths of crevasses in the glaciers they tracked, recording the extent of snow and ice, and looking for other changes. The experience was life changing. She hiked up the North Cascades for six more field seasons and, in that time, witnessed the slow deaths of the mountains' glaciers. Around the world, once intimidating bodies of ice and snow are ceasing their centuries-old movement and becoming static remnants of their former selves, pocked with melt-water pools and riddled with caves in the summer.

Now that she has earned her undergraduate degree in studio art and earth science, Pelto has plans to pursue a Master's degree in climate science at the University of Maine next fall.

"I think the science evolved more from my love of the outdoors and caring about the environment, but the art was always supposed to be a part of my life," she says. "I've always considered myself an artist first."

I spoke with Pelto about her inspiration, her process and her desire to communicate the threats of climate change in a way that emotionally resonates with people.
Can you describe one of the most memorable experiences you had out in the field?
Everything about this past field season [late summer 2015] was striking. It was nothing like any of the others in many ways, due to climate change, due to the drought out West. Everything was different. There was virtually no snow left on the glacier, which was really odd to see. It was just all ice, which melts a lot faster. All the little ponds up there were really small, the reservoirs were depleted, but there were also more forming under the glaciers. I saw a huge lake forming there for the first time and that was really bizarre. It's weird, and sad.
Do you carry your art materials with you to the glaciers?
I take small stuff. I usually take a little watercolor sketchbook, a set of watercolors, some pencils. Fieldwork is usually in the morning, so in the late afternoon or early evening, I'll have time to do a watercolor and capture the different aspects of the landscape. During the summer, the sun doesn't set until pretty late.

When did you start including the graphs of climate data in your work?
I started doing that after this last trip to Washington, this past September. I've been struggling for a long time how to have an environmental message in my artwork. I've done sketches, but those are more just landscapes and memories for me. So they don't really tell a story.

I realized that people who are interested in science pay attention to graphs. I think they are a really good visual, but other people don't really pay attention to them. That was my first thought when I looked at a graph that my dad made of the decline in glaciers-it is a really good visual of how rapidly the volume of these glaciers has declined. I saw how I could use that as a profile of a glacier, incorporating a graph but giving an artistic quality to it. People can learn from the image because you are seeing actual information, but hopefully they are also emotionally affected by it.
Where do you find the data?
Sometimes I'll be reading something and I'll see a graph that I think will be good for a piece. Often, I'll have a particular topic and I'll want to create something about it, so I'll look for visuals. I'll research different scientific papers, but also different sites like NOAA or NASA, or sites that have climate news-reliable sites where I can find different graphs and decide which one I think represents and best communicates what's going on.
Do you have a favorite piece?
I like the piece on glacier mass balance, which was one of the three in the series I created after this most recent trip to Washington. It's my favorite just because I feel a very personal connection to those glaciers after working on them seven years.
Why is it important to you to use art to help communicate science?
I think that art is something that people universally enjoy and feel an emotional response to. People across so many disciplines and backgrounds look at and appreciate it, and so in that sense art is a good universal language. My target audience is in many ways people who aren't going to be informed about important topics, especially scientific ones.
What do you hope viewers take away from your work?
I hope to have both intellectual and emotional content in my artwork. I also hope to inspire people to make a difference about these topics. I haven't quite figured out how to do that yet. People have been responding to [these pieces], but I think they are more likely people who already think these topics are important. So I want to find some way to challenge people to do something with my art and make it more of an activist endeavor.
What's next?
I have a lot of plans. Right now, I have a piece in progress about caribou populations. Another thing I'm trying to do is collaborate with other scientists. They can tell me what they are working on, what the data is and what it might mean for the future.

Jill Pelto's work can be seen at her website. She also shares works-in-progress and completed pieces on her Instagram account.

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These Watercolor Paintings Actually Include Climate Change Data

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Climate change can be seen when a mountainside's trees turn brown thanks to the burrowing of bark beetles, an insect population that explodes during drought, or when an iconic species is pushed closer to extinction. But some of its effects are obvious only to those who look for them.

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Dense Ecosystems with Flowing Water Sources Packed in Vintage Luggage by Kathleen Vance — Colossal

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New York City-based artist Kathleen Vance creates lush landscapes brimming with green mosses, foliage, and rocky surfaces all stored in an unusual carrier: vintage suitcases. Vance’s ongoing Traveling Landscapes series connects travel and natural resources, inclining her to incorporate active water…

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Boston-based conceptual artist Nathalie Miebach ( previously) weaves colorful, complex sculptures using rope, wood, paper, fibers, and data from weather events. Two of the artist's recent series explore the impact of storm waters on our lives and on marine ecosystems, with variables like wind and temperature (and the harmony of the composition) often informing the rainbow of colors used to translate the data into a three-dimensional structure.

The "Changing Waters" series uses data from The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS) buoys as well as from coastal weather stations to show relationships between weather patterns and changes in marine life. Similarly, the artist uses meteorological data from recent storms including Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Maria, and Hurricane Katrina to inform her "Floods" series, which looks at the events both from scientific and human experience narratives. Cut and woven elements are connected to form geometric shapes and patterns that are as layered and in flux as our understanding of the storms themselves.

Miebach tells Colossal that her exploration of the intersection of science and art began while taking continuing education astronomy courses at Harvard University and basket weaving courses at a nearby school. As a tactile learner, she found it easier to understand the abstract concepts and ideas of the former by using the latter. "I was lucky to have a very open-minded professor who accepted it without any questions. I'm not sure if it hadn't been for his openness to this somewhat unconventional way of learning astronomy, if I would have continued."

See Miebach's work in two solo shows opening this fall, at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Texas and the Cedarhurst Center for the Arts in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. Her work will also be exhibited as a part of group shows at Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts at Florida Institute of Technology, at New Media Gallery in Vancouver, and at Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts. Follow the artist on Instagram to see more of her sculptural work and for more details on upcoming exhibitions.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. You'll connect with a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, read articles and newsletters ad-free, sustain our interview series, get discounts and early access to our limited-edition print releases, and much more. Join now!

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Meteorological Data Visualized as Mixed Media Sculptures by Nathalie Miebach

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Boston-based conceptual artist Nathalie Miebach (previously) weaves colorful, complex sculptures using rope, wood, paper, fibers, and data from weather events. Two of the artist's recent series explore the impact of storm waters on our lives and on marine ecosystems, with variables like wind and tem

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Word art; print, zines, collage, posters, slogans etc

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Word art; print, zines, collage, posters, slogans etc

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The Greats is a free platform for awesome socially engaged visual content, open to anyone to use or adapt non-commercially.

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Creative Costumes of Still-Practiced Pagan Rituals of Europe (19 pics)

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For two years, French photographer Charles Fréger has been travelling throughout 19 European countries and trying to capture the spirit of what he calls tribal Europe in his Wilder Mann series.

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It's amazing what you can get away with in a hi-vis vest.

On Thursday 30 January, pedestrians in some suburbs of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane would have walked straight past activist artists (vandals, some critics might call them) removing advertising from bus shelters and inserting artwork protesting the Morrison government and its handling of Australia's bushfire crisis.

"Bushfire Brandalism", the action is being called.

Sydney-based artist Scott Marsh chuckles about the hi-vis vests: "It's the cloak of invisibility."

Marsh, known internationally for his political murals, contributed a portrait of Scott Morrison with the words "climate denial" emblazoned across his forehead.

A QR code on each poster links people to a bushfire-related charity of the artist's choice. It also gives the collective an idea of how and where people are connecting with the campaign.

Unfortunately, many of the works get taken down as fast as they go up. The collective said on Monday they installed 78 posters last week, describing it as "the nation's largest unsanctioned outdoor art exhibition". But only a few posters remain.

A volunteer for Bushfire Brandalism pulls advertising from a Sydney bus shelter, replacing it with a political poster. Photograph: Adam Scarf

The practice of " brandalism" - also known as "subvertising" or "anti-advertising" - isn't new. In 1979, Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (colloquially known as "Bugger Up") was formed in Sydney and spread to other Australian cities, targeting cigarette and alcohol advertising. British artists the KLF have been associated with the practice since the 90s, and in 2015, more than 80 artists took over 600 Parisian bus shelters during the COP21 UN climate change conference.

You can smell it in the air - now is the time to really push on climate change

Scott Marsh

Forty-one artists are involved in this latest Australian iteration, including Georgia Hill, Tom Gerrard, Sarah McCloskey, Ghostpatrol, Callum Preston and E.L.K, as well as anonymous artists.In one poster, a Caramello Koala has burst and is melting above the words "Save an Aussie icon". In another, Blinky Bill runs from an encroaching wall of flames.

The collective launched three weeks prior to the posters going up, via a group chat of artists on Instagram. They were dismayed at what they saw as biased bushfire coverage and at the misinformation being shared by some media - particularly the Murdoch-owned press.

Three posters installed in bus shelters: How's the Serenity by Thomas Bell; Burnt Blinky by Anonymous; and Listen to Your Home by Callum Preston. Composite: Luke Shirlaw, Adam Scarf, Bushfire Brandalism

"It felt like taking over public space was an appropriate angle to tackle it," says one organiser who doesn't want to be named. "There was a lot of discussion about the divided attitudes and experiences of people living in the city versus the regional areas - but we were limited in time and resources, and also those type of 'adshell' spaces only really exist in the city centre."

Many of the artists involved aren't known for being political in their work. The same can't be said for Marsh, who has for years responded to policies he takes issue with - starting with Sydney's lockout laws, when he was an art student living behind the Coke sign in Kings Cross.

"People were losing their jobs and it didn't make any sense at all - [there was] dodgy stuff when you started looking into it," he says. "I went to the Keep Sydney Open march, and then had the idea of doing a mural of Casino Mike [Baird, the then-NSW premier]."

Then there was his mural of Alan Jones with a ball gag in his mouth; and one lampooning Israel Folau for the crowdfunding campaign he launched after Rugby Australia stripped him of his contract following homophobic social media posts (Folau is depicted begging next to a Lamborghini).

Marsh's murals are frequently defaced or painted over, such as his short-lived "Merry Crisis" Scott Morrison mural that lasted three days (he turned it into a merchandise line and raised $131,424.50 for Australian fire brigades) and a saintly George Michael portrait, which got painted over in black ink before locals reclaimed it with pro-marriage equality messages.

Marsh's depiction of Cardinal George Pell and Tony Abbott - A Happy Ending - was painted over within 24 hours by three men who labelled it "pornography". On one occasion, Marsh even obliterated his own mural - Kanye Loves Kanye - after he reportedly sold a one-off print of it for $100,000.

Scott Marsh's The Happy Ending, featuring Tony Abbott and Cardinal George Pell, was painted over within 24 hours. Photograph: Scott Marsh

"The interactive stuff's more fun than murals," Marsh says. "I did a Fraser Anning Easter egg hunt last year." (Those who found the eggs were encouraged to throw them at the Fraser bunny.) Before last year's federal election, he made posters of Clive Palmer falling asleep during question time "and invited people to draw dicks on him".

Sometimes Marsh really goes the extra mile. Not content with the mural of Cardinal Pell in his prison greens that he put up in Sydney 50 metres away from St Mary's Cathedral, Marsh flew to Rome on his own coin and did the same near the Vatican. When he has to act fast, he has a printed paper version of the mural, pastes it up and finishes the job with paint, but in any case, passersby were surprisingly supportive.

The last of the 78 Bushfire Brandalism posters have now gone up, but for Marsh, tackling the issue of climate change is far from over. He continues to create works relating to the Adani coalmine, not least because of all the family holidays he spent at the Great Barrier Reef.

"It's really hit home for me," he says. "I'm frustrated with the lack of action. I got distracted for a while, but you can smell it in the air that now is the time to really push on climate change. If nothing happens now, it's never going to fucking happen."

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'Australia's largest unsanctioned art show': guerrilla bushfire campaign hijacks bus shelters

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It's amazing what you can get away with in a hi-vis vest. On Thursday 30 January, pedestrians in some suburbs of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane would have walked straight past activist artists (vandals, some critics might call them) removing advertising from bus shelters and inserting artwork protesting the Morrison government and its handling of Australia's bushfire crisis.

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Pleased that several of my artworks featuring the soaring trajectory of climate crisis graphs, are to play their part in SHOUTING INTO THE VOID @NorwichTheatre, Mon Nov 21st, 5pm. Produced by Helen Wells, the piece looks at stories of climate activism in all the ways it happens.

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Pleased that several of my artworks featuring the soaring trajectory of climate crisis graphs, are to play their part in SHOUTING INTO THE VOID @NorwichTheatre, Mon Nov 21st, 5pm. Produced by Helen Wells, the piece looks at stories of climate activism in all the ways it happens. https://t.co/9BwTeh8Q8f

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As #MediterraneanWildfires spread & the UK issues its first ever #redwarning for extreme heat. It seems appropriate to repost my artwork HAMMOCK made in 2021 featuring a NASA #GlobalWarming graph formed from hazard warning tape. @ClimateMuseumUK @EverydayEcocide @ProfMarkMaslin

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As #MediterraneanWildfires spread & the UK issues its first ever #redwarning for extreme heat. It seems appropriate to repost my artwork HAMMOCK made in 2021 featuring a NASA #GlobalWarming graph formed from hazard warning tape. @ClimateMuseumUK @EverydayEcocide @ProfMarkMaslin https://t.co/kDR7Mb4gcQ

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Climate Art is a space for resident groups, artists, and scientists to come together.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Liz McGowan (@lizmcgowanart)

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Earth Eats: Real Food, Green Living - Indiana Public Media

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The climate activists of Just Stop Oil have gained visibility since their Friday demonstration in which protesters threw Heinz tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers painting at London's National Gallery. On Saturday, the pair were joined in court by another Just Stop Oil supporter who had doused a Scotland Yard sign in yellow paint.

Members of the U.K.-based group have previously gained attention for gluing themselves to paintings at art galleries and blocking roads and even racetracks.

The activists say their goal is to "ensure that the government commits to ending all new licenses and consents for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels in the UK."

The U.K. government earlier this month opened a new round of licensing for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea off of England's east coast.

The protest movement says it practices nonviolent civil resistance in the effort to get the government to take action.

Through the spring, Just Stop Oil said its members were arrested more than 1,000 times during a monthslong protest campaign in which people blocked oil terminals.

Most of the money for its operations comes from the Climate Emergency Fund, based in Los Angeles, which began with a foundational grant of $500,000 from Getty Oil heiress Aileen Getty. Filmmaker Adam McKay made a $4 million contribution and joined its board of directors last month.

Since the soup incident on Friday, some critics have pointed out that Just Stop Oil accepts donations in cryptocurrency, which has a reputation for having a devastating impact on the environment

After gluing themselves to the National Gallery wall under the painting on Friday, one of the activists shouted, "What is worth more, art or life? ... Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet?"

The U.K. is facing an energy crisis which is set to cause 13% of an average household's income to go toward home energy and vehicle fuel. This follows the European Union's decision to ban most Russian oil by December.

Fossil fuels are the biggest driver of climate-warming emissions. Since the preindustrial era, the climate has already warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius, leading to more extreme wildfires, hurricanes and heat waves.

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Who is Just Stop Oil, the group that threw soup on Van Gogh's painting?

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The climate activists of Just Stop Oil have gained visibility since their Friday demonstration in which protesters threw Heinz tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers painting at London's National Gallery. On Saturday, the pair were joined in court by another Just Stop Oil supporter who had doused a Scotland Yard sign in yellow paint.

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Work together as a household to reduce your carbon footprint.

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In 2021 we were awarded funding from Smartline (European Regional Development Funding) to develop and test some air pollution sensors (particulate matter and NOx). We were looking at ways to visualise air pollution in situ and in real time, so people can see the pollution levels on their streets. For this project we were joined by Antony Brown who had 6 months funding to further develop the system, thanks to the UKRI Doctoral Career Development Fund.

We worked with Cornwall Council to understand what air pollution monitoring they were already doing and what's missing, and to calibrate our low-cost sensors against the Council's professional-grade monitoring equipment. You can read about the development so far under the Notes links to the right. The sensor and visualisation software are open source, and the data presentation happens on the streets, so everyone has access to what we're doing. Antony is currently working on documentation so people can replicate the technology for their own purposes.

The project builds on the technology we've been developing for the Sonic Kayaks.

We're open to anyone who's interested in using these locally (Cornwall, UK) for policy making, community use or environmental activism - if that's you, get in touch over email or Twitter.

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In 2021 we were awarded funding from Smartline (European Regional Development Funding) to develop and test some air pollution sensors (particulate matter and NOx). We were looking at ways to visualise air pollution in situ and in real time, so people can see the pollution levels on their streets.

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Multiple artists and contributors
Short Film - Worldwide, 21 June 2022

From sunrise to sunset on the solstice of 21 June 2022, artists, writers, filmmakers and their collaborators across the World Weather Network responded to the question: how's the weather?

From sunrise to sunset on the solstice of 21 June 2022, artists, writers, filmmakers and their collaborators responded to the question: how's the weather?

A special report to mark the launch of the World Weather Network, How's the Weather? is a short film co-created with participating artists and community members from across the Network's 28 artist-led weather stations; a window into the diversity of our climate, it challenges us to think, listen, learn and act.

A film by Miles Blacket, created in collaboration with artists and filmmakers across the World Weather Network.
Contributors (in order of appearance):
Layne Waerea
Atul Bhalla
Cristina Iglesias
Norm Foley; filmmaker: Richard Sykes
Akeel Khreef
Vibeke Mascini and Kiek Bangert
Mr Lawal; filmmakers: Femi Johnson and Anthony Dike
Einar Falur Ingólfsson
Abi Palmer
Sherko Abbas
Derek Tumala
Donatella Delpiano
Murad El Zagal; filmmaker: Brent Galotera
Tuomas Mattila
Brenda Folstad; filmmaker: John J Wolbers
Natalia Tsoukala
Luz Maria Bedoya
Merve Unsal
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Zhao Xiaoxiao
Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho
Amy Watson
Special thanks to:
Utrecht University, faculty of veterinary medicine
TXINTXUA FILMS
Marian Fernandez and Asier Altuna
Aitona Julian
Donostia/San Sebastian City Council
Supported by:
British Council supported commissions in India, The Philippines, South Africa, South Korea and the UK.
World Weather Network
World Weather Network is an alliance of 28 arts agencies around the world, formed in response to the climate crisis and biodiversity loss; find out who we are
Your Weather is Our Weather

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Multiple artists and contributors Short Film - Worldwide, 21 June 2022 From sunrise to sunset on the solstice of 21 June 2022, artists, writers, filmmakers and their collaborators across the World Weather Network responded to the question: how's the weather?