Teaching Practice 5

15.04.2014

17:00-20.30

The theme of today was art and sustainability. We visited an event with a series of talks by various artists and a professor Tere Vaden with his lecture on The Modern Taste of Fossil Fuels.

The most interesting for me was Pixelache : transdisciplinary platform for experimental art, design, research and activism - See more at: http://www.pixelache.ac// For example, In the context of the Map me if you will programme of Pixelache Helsinki 2011, Christian Nold (UK) was invited to realise a new artwork in Helsinki during 2011-2012. He led a mapping workshop where people drew their island experiences onto special paper maps which were then scanned and composited together to form collective maps. The idea here being that visualisation of data should not be solely in the power of corporations and governments but it can empower individuals and the community as a collective.

The sustainability related project Nuppu http://mesenaatti.me/en/nuppu/ is a wonderful idea by an art collective that has designed a sculpture that preserves seeds from plants as a public artwork :You can participate in the project on multiple levels: receiving the seeds and planting them together, finding and spreading knowledge about biodiversity, helping to build and maintain a network to understand international seeds circulation policies.

My mentor Egle is also part of this art collective and has been encouraging students to think of projects that are related to biodiversity and technology.

After the talks we discussed the presentations with the students and the way some of the ideas could be used as part of an art project. For example one of the artists has used the freshwater fish that is wild and not farmed as an example of artwork. This fish is usually caught by the fisherman but it does not sell as well as other farmed fish so it does raise the issue of waste and the ethics of fish farming. 

The most important idea of such projects is the collective nature of art how it can 'trigger collective imagination'