From Earth Day to Midsummer
Conversations about the role of art and technology in regenerating the earth
As we approach the longest day on Earth, the Midsummer, I reflect in celebration of all that I managed to understand, create, design, and communicate in relation to my part in supporting the Earth. I will be posting a series of reflections this week. Starting with the first reflection and a share below.
On April 22, 2022, 52 years after Rauschenberg’s ecological activism piece, all over University of Arts London, communal spaces were taken over by Climate Emergency Network to create a series of collective experiences in the name of social and environmental justice.
I wanted to bring the discussion of technology into the fold, particularly the decentralized, holocractic, truly democratic structures that could empower the creative community in activist ecological pursuits.
To spark the debate about the potential relationship between creativity, technology, and nature, I chaired a digital panel on this topic, inviting students, staff, and external friends of the university to join.
My guests were:
• Nick Hackworth is a curator, writer, and art advisor. He is the co-director of Paradise Row Projects and Director of Modern Forms a one-year, not-for-profit, curatorial project that showcases outstanding cultural projects that foreground social and environmental impact. The inaugural exhibition took place in the physical realm as well as the metaverse.
• Kalpana Arias is a tech-anthropologist, climate activist, and ecosomatics educator. In 2020 they founded Nowadays On Earth; a platform advocating for contact with nature in the digital age as a response to our global deprivation of green spaces and our need for human-nature relationships for individual and planetary wellbeing.
• Stephen Reid is a teacher and technologist devoted to the flourishing of life on earth who has trained in the fields of complexity science, physics, software development, and political activism. He was the youngest ever board member of Greenpeace UK.
• Rebecca Hallquist is a Community Team Lead at NEAR Foundation, which supports NEAR Protocol, a climate neutral blockchain platform. NEAR Foundation works to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world.
We had a live scribe from Natalka Designs to help us capture the discussion, summarized below:
