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Taking a look at the artwork around COP21, the Paris climate talks, for New Scientist,\u00a0<\/em>11 December 2015<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n In the failing winter light, in full view of Paris\u2019s Cit\u00e9 des Sciences et de L\u2019Industrie, the dead are rising from the Canal de l\u2019Ourcq. Municipal bicycles; shopping trolleys; a filing cabinet. Volunteers have hauled up these unedifying objects and the artist has mounted them just above the water\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n The point, probably, is that in our ever more crowded, ever more connected world, there is no longer any \u201caway\u201d in which to throw anything; we must live with our waste, as surely as we must live with our past. Something like that. In any event\u00a0Breaking the Surface<\/i>\u00a0by Michael Pinsky is, well, recycled: it has been done before (indeed, dates back to the work of artist Marcel Duchamp around 1913-15), and it makes a point that is an unwinning combination of the necessary and the overdone, like a parent always telling you to eat your greens.<\/p>\n I came to Paris to cover what was billed as an unprecedented cultural ferment around COP21, the UN conference on climate change. I expected more than a few mud-encrusted chairs and bikes.<\/p>\n But as the hours went by, and the days, and the kilometres, two painful truths become evident. First, there will be no ferment. The most exciting public events have been cancelled, scaled back, or hurriedly relocated. The recent terror attacks on Paris have seen to that, and the subsequent city-wide ban on demonstrations, not to mention the controversial decision to place local climate activists under house arrest.<\/p>\n Even more painful is the realisation that our current cultural responses to the wicked problem of climate change look as narrow, as blinkered, and as hard to communicate as the scientific ones. Climate change is no longer a purely scientific problem: it is a political and social truth we must handle as best we can. And we aren\u2019t handling it. We can\u2019t handle it. We haven\u2019t got a clue.<\/p>\n So why is there so little in the cultural bank? On the face of it, art and culture have enough of the right kind of lenses to focus on the wicked problem\u2019s wickedness and to prompt new thoughts, forge new understandings and settlements \u2013 maybe even spur new actions.<\/p>\n However, in the absence of any fresh currency, the organisers of\u00a0ArtCOP21<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 the cultural programme surrounding the talks, and running on well after any deal is brokered \u2013 had a duty to see what could be done with art-culture\u2019s existing toolkit.<\/p>\n Take visualisation, making the invisible visible. Like\u00a0Breaking the Surface<\/i>, this is a very old game. But in the right hands it can work well, and arguably, one of the best pieces in Paris is\u00a0EXIT<\/i>\u00a0at the Palais de Tokyo, a full and quite scary updating of an immersive video installation first shown in 2008.<\/p>\n In a dark room, an Earth 2 metres across moves remorselessly around a 360-degree screen. A sound like the chattering of millions accompanies six animated maps as they move round the screen, with their all too respectable data showing how the connection between humans and their environment has fallen off a cliff over the past seven years.<\/p>\n The titles speak volumes: Population Shifts: Cities; Remittances: Sending Money Home; Political Refugees and Forced Migration; Natural Catastrophes; Rising Seas, Sinking Cities; Speechless and Deforestation.<\/p>\n The pixels making up each map represent human experiences, some dots standing in for thousands of people on the move: does attachment to a place now have more to do with moving across it than living on it?<\/p>\n The man who inspired the work, philosopher Paul Virilio, captured its spirit in a separate film: \u201cIt\u2019s almost as though the sky, and the clouds in it and the pollution of it, were making their entry into history.\u201d<\/p>\n EXIT<\/i>\u00a0is a chilling but effective call to action by design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, along with Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, Ben Rubin and a host of others, exposing connections that would otherwise have been missed.<\/p>\n At the other end of the empathy spectrum is the deceptive work of Janet Laurence and Tania Kovats. On the face of things, both artists appear to be concerned more with aesthetic values rather than social and political ones. But in fact their exquisite, precise work is all about raw, tranformative emotion, the stuff that generates change without knowing how it does so.<\/p>\n Laurence\u2019s\u00a0Deep Breathing (Resuscitation for the Reef)<\/i>\u00a0at the Museum National d\u2019Histoire Naturelle looks glacial and cool, with glass containers showing pieces of broken coral, shells and the skeletons of marine animals.<\/p>\n But the glass is meant to represent a resuscitation unit for the Great Barrier Reef, full of bleached-out dead and dying creatures \u2013 including some units that suggest babies in intensive care.<\/p>\n For environmental artist Laurence, the reef is not a tourist object but all about fragility: it invokes our need to heal it, to pity it, to love it. Emotion. What a great gig!<\/p>\n And for Tania Kovats, too.\u00a0Evaporation<\/i>\u00a0is one of ArtCOP21\u2019s highlighted works outside Paris: it premiered during the Manchester Science Festival in October and will show until March next year at Manchester\u2019s Museum of Science and Industry.<\/p>\n As the recipient of a Lovelock Art Commission, which invites an artist to take inspiration from the work of independent scientist James Lovelock, her emotion is for water, for the planet\u2019s seas as barometer of planetary health, for Gaia theory.<\/p>\n Kovats\u2019s installation comprises three large, shallow, metal bowls made from the shapes of the world\u2019s three major oceans: Atlantic, Pacific and Indian. A solution of salt and blue ink placed in each bowl gradually evaporates during the show, leaving crusts of salt crystals in concentric rings.<\/p>\n It is never the same again. It bears witness to the metaphorical movement of oceans, unlike the poem\u00a0Dear Matafele Peinem<\/i><\/a>, which is forced to bear witness to the real movement of water.<\/p>\n Marshall Islander Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner first performed her poem at the 2014 UN climate meeting in New York. And she read it again \u2013 to a flash mob during a \u201ccultural takeover\u201d of London\u2019s St Pancras International Station the day the conference opened.<\/p>\n The promises to her Buddha-fat baby that her generation would not let the waves of the future literally roll over the Marshall Islands should have been embarrassing:<\/p>\n And they\u2019re marching for you, baby but they are more than that, they are terrible. Because no one can make such promises.<\/p>\n You can dream up perfectly legitimate ways to fix the world. Indeed, you jolly well should. The now pudgy little toddler Matafele won\u2019t thank us for not trying. Ultimately, while scientists measure problems, and technologists can build tools to deal with them, what we do and when and how is a political issue. It is up to us.<\/p>\n Alternatiba, the global village of alternatives, was one of those grass-roots, left-leaning outings that are very easy to satirise (there were a lot of polar bear suits about, a lot of singing) but not, ultimately, so very easy to dismiss.<\/p>\n \u201cChange the system, not the climate\u201d, was the festival\u2019s motto, the point being that our entire global civilisation is built on fossil fuels, and we\u2019re unlikely to be able to wean ourselves off them without asking a lot of hard questions about our society.<\/p>\n The problem for Alterniba was that it brought together a whole set of perfectly reasonable local practices, from organic gardening to straw-bale house construction, and \u2013 in a paroxysm of magical thinking \u2013 posited them as global solutions.<\/p>\n \u201cThink global, act local\u201d is one of those phrases whose euphony masks its fatuity. No local solution is globally applicable. The trick is surely for everyone to act local and think local: not to tilt at \u201cthe system\u201d willy-nilly, but \u2013 in the teeth of serious political and legislative opposition \u2013 to operate outside it.<\/p>\n Outside or inside the system, is it worthwhile to simply play with climate change? Tom\u00e1s Saraceno thinks so. An artist obsessed with weightlessness, the sky and the possibilities offered by floating utopias, Saraceno is spearheading a global effort to resettle humanity in the atmosphere inside habitable solar balloons. Or something.<\/p>\n Uncertainties around the scale of project, its aims and the degree of seriousness we should assign to it, are part of Saraceno\u2019s game. He is an artist, after all: questions and speculations are his stock in trade. In launching a handful of balloons made out of plastic bags, Saraceno raises some very good questions: about who owns what in the environment; where our individual physical freedom comes from, and who grants it; about risk, and responsibility, and civics, and community.<\/p>\n His Aerocene movement achieves what Alterniba cannot: it extricates itself from the global agenda set by global agencies and pursues (or at any rate dreams up) a blank canvas \u2013 the air itself! \u2013 for its tiny, winning experiments in featherweight living. Revolutions have sprung from less.<\/p>\n And in a world that has very little space and patience for revolutions, Saraceno\u2019s chutzpah \u2013 and in the proper sense of the word, his naivet\u00e9 \u2013 are much to be commended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Taking a look at the artwork around COP21, the Paris climate talks, for New Scientist,\u00a011 December 2015. In the failing winter light, in full view of Paris\u2019s Cit\u00e9 des Sciences et de L\u2019Industrie, the dead are rising from the Canal … Continue reading <\/div>\nWaves of the future<\/h2>\n
\n<\/i>they\u2019re marching for us
\n<\/i>because we deserve to do more than just
\n<\/i>survive
\n<\/i>we deserve
\n<\/i>to thrive\u2026
\n<\/i>so just close those eyes, baby
\n<\/i>and sleep in peace
\n<\/i>because we won\u2019t let you down
\n<\/i>you\u2019ll see.<\/i><\/p>\n