Erica Kermani’s artwork seeks to answer a central question: if rivers were seeing an equal, living entity, would humans take issues like climate change threatening them more seriously? In his year-long art exhibition in 2017, Kermani, in collaboration with Diana Salcedo & Jeana Chesnik, created a new forum of interaction between humans and rivers to explore this question. Participants would enter a conference room like the space in the Occupy Earth exhibit at the University of Aalto in Helsinki, Finland, with monitors representing the Seine River in Paris and the East River in New York City, given a voice and equal agency as would any other party in the room. The goal of the exhibit is to shift both the conversations we have about pressing issues facing the environment and the popular Western perception that rivers and other such natural entities exist as resources that can be extracted, rather than living entities with rights similar to those of humans. The Rights of Nature doctrine in Ecuador that granted rights to nature and the personhood granted to New Zealand’s Whanganui River both show a shift in legal and popular consciousness about entities once thought inanimate and ripe for extraction, and this work capitalizes on that shift. The exhibit only lasted a year, but the artist appears to still be active and pursuing other artworks that explore this concept.
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Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Lifestyle, Monitoring, Pollution, Visual Technologies
Air Pollution Robot
The dangers of air pollution to human health are well documented, though the traditional methodology of collecting and reporting on sample lags behind the need to keep abreast and regulate air pollution in a meaningful amount of time. The use of drones and robots have been identified by researchers as resources that can be tweaked […]
Artificial Life, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Industry/Natural Commodities, Lifestyle, Monitoring
Co-occupied Boundaries
Art is easily found in nature but rarely is what considered art today inherently natural. The concept of co-occupied mediums that serve to be both functional for nature and aesthetically pleasing to people is being actively explored by Asya Ilgun and Phil Ayres, from the CITAstudio at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In […]
Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Lifestyle, Monitoring, Pollution, Visual Technologies
Silk Pavilion Project
Creating art is human nature: like language and cooking, art is embedded in human identity. However, other beings on earth create art in the structures they create to survive, such as the webbing pattern of spider webs and the hexagonal pattern of beehives. In late June 2020, Neri Oxman’s Mediated Matter Group started the Silk […]
Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Lifestyle, Monitoring, Pollution, Visual Technologies