Ecological Affect

Notes from a session held at the Luminous Green Retreat, 29th of April 2007

Tapio Makela

• affective relationship with ecological catastrophies or strong signals
  • cyanobacteria, blue green algae
  • how it is seen as a sign of pollution but felt through its impact as a nuissance to swimming, pets, edible fish, aesthetics of beaches, and yet how it could be a major energy source as a producer of hydrogen through photosynthesis.
• Is this kind of domestication a necessary tactic for engagement on every day life level? Domestication as an affective relationship with a symptom of an ecolocial phenomenon, which itself may be much more complex and even contradictory with that aspect of it which is felt?
• Very personal tactics of engaging with situations (Heath; stopping a car by standing in front of it) and constructing ownership and sustainable relations between individuals and their environment. - Alternative economical models - Amy - how individuals may invest in nearby organic farm, a continuing relationship, participating to work.
• Power of marketing and news, and possibility to work on that level, alternative ways, using branding and marketing strategies
• We react to images, power of visual communication
• Affective relationship with crisis or catastrophy; often utilized by governments, rarely enabling artists or activists in their goals. Catastrophies as a temporal events dominate news and may conceal ongoing processes which in fact are the catastrophy more while what we see as a catastrophy are intense symptoms.
• Heath: cheapest product will always win. counter argument: luxury and branding work at the moment; how to operate with green branding, or “black branding” as to demarcate ecologically or ethically otherwise questionable products?
• Is this a position that only Western economies not only can afford, but must undertake to protect their economies which are surpassed already by China for example?
• how to enable people to make life interesting without status symbols by investing to social networks, family…?
• Art and science collaborations, to be seen as producing new experiences, scientific or other knowledge, as “making invisible processes visible”, or working from a point of view of constructing “third cultures”, where both differences and shared points can coexist….?
• Is there a point in reproducing ecological innovations in the context of art; if so, what is the added component so that one is not simply constructing one's kudos within the contemporary art world? Sustainable relationships and proccesses in every day lives rather than only working on the level of representation and communication… though the skills of working precisely on that level, like The Yes Men sometimes have succeeded (Union Carbide, Bhopal apology) can be very powerful.