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    • Protest camps and climate activism
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  • Here today: moving images of climate change

Here today: moving images of climate change

Most existing media images of climate change deal with and document its visible impacts to landscapes in ways that can lead people to feel disempowered and disengaged. In this context, this project aimed to find new images for communicating climate change; images which seek to provoke different kinds of engagements and action than those generated by popular media imagery.

Here Today – Moving Images of Climate Change was a Leverhulme Trust funded artist in residence project (2009-2011) through which media studies scholar Julie Doyle and artist David Harradine explored how a creative dialogue between art and media studies could lead to new visualisations of climate change.

A cross-disciplinary project, the residency explored some of the different ways of seeing and ways of making meaning that occur in media and the arts, and examined how art and media representations differently deal with levels of abstraction, how they are affected by context, and how they address the relationships between the visual, the poetic and the political.

Looking specifically at current visualisations of climate change, the project was built around three key themes:

  • Embodiment
  • Time
  • Place, space, and landscape

Through these themes, the residency developed a conceptual and creative framework within which a number of new image-based artworks have been created.

Man-in-polar-bear-suit

Project aims

To create new image-based artworks that make climate change more embodied and linked to the spaces of everyday life, rather than future and distant oriented.

The project asked:

  • How have particular forms of knowledge and representational practices been used by the arts and media to shape our understanding of climate change?
  • How can art and media better communicate climate change as an urgent political and cultural concern?
  • How can climate change be made to feel embodied and a part of the routines, practices, and spaces of everyday life?

Project findings and impact

Drawing upon Doyle’s existing research into the visual and cultural communication of climate change (Mediating Climate Change, 2011), and through conversations with Harradine about the role of the visual, the poetic and the political within arts engagements with climate change, the artist and academic developed a manifesto as a way of capturing early ideas about what the artwork should be about.

The manifesto drew specifically upon the themes of the residency – embodiment, time, and place/space/landscape. Doyle and Harradine found the manifesto format a playful and useful tool to capture ideas without being bound to a specific idea or vision. In the end, the manifesto was a perfect way of distilling what they wanted the artwork to achieve as well as identifying some of the challenges of visualizing climate change in ways that make it more meaningful to people’s everyday lives.

From the beginning of the collaboration, Doyle did not want the image of the polar bear to be used in the artwork, as academic research has shown that this image, whilst emotionally resonant, is disempowering for audiences, presenting climate change as a distant threat to animals not humans. Yet, through the collaborative process, Doyle and Harradine kept coming back to this image. They decided to try to rework this climate icon instead of ignoring it. The idea was to see if they could use the polar bear to actually break down problematic distinctions between nature/culture and human/animal. The idea was to reconnect the polar bear to humans and everyday practices.

The multi-format film, It's the Skin You're Living In, was the culmination of Doyle and Harradine’s collaboration – which involved both public and private discussions, sharing work, sharing academic and art literature, and discussions with others through two public seminars.

The film is shot in a series of locations from the islands of Svalbard in the High Arctic to a kitchen in a house in London – via the beaches and headlands of Barra and Vatersay in the Outer Hebrides, the M11 motorway, a dairy farm in Bedfordshire and the outskirts of Hackney and the Olympic Park. The film suggests that climate change isn’t a matter just concerning distant landscapes and threatened animals, but is an ever present part of everyone’s daily lives.

The film follows a man dressed like a bear; a polar bear. Sometimes he looks like a person dressed like a bear – human, fake – and sometimes he looks like he might actually be a bear – animal, real. ver the course of a fragmented journey from the northern reaches of Europe, through Scotland, to the south of the UK, the bear-skin-costume is dismantled, revealing the man inside the animal.

It’s the Skin You’re Living In is an attempt to make images of climate change that remind us of how profoundly we’re connected to both nature and culture, how we’re all undergoing change, on a journey, searching for home. It’s language is one of broken images, repeated actions and walking, walking, walking; a strange, sad and funny meditation on being human and being animal, lost in a changing world.

Created by Harradine’s performance company, Fevered Sleep, It's the Skin You're Living In is also a mobile app for groups of people to run together. Partly an artwork and partly a film - a film installation for social settings - the app plays synchronised layers of a short film about connectedness, climate, migration and home. In the app version of the film, the content is split across the screens of multiple iPhones. The more phones are linked through the app, the more layers of the film will be revealed. By synchronising the phones and playing the film across them, the app turns an everyday object into a mobile gallery.

The film has been shown in a variety of public and academic spaces:

The Science Museum London, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, Barbican Centre London, The Floating Cinema as part of the opening of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, NIda Art Colony Lithuania, Battersea Arts Centre London, Greenpeace Germany, ONCA Gallery Brighton, University of Colorado Boulder.

Research team

Dr Julie Doyle

David Harradine, Fevered Sleep

Output

Manifesto - Doyle and Harradine’s Manifesto for Producing Artwork on Climate Change is a collaborative outcome of the residency, which also draws upon Doyle’s research into the field of climate change representation and Harradine’s performance work on light, landscape and weather. It plots out 16 coordinates which - according to Doyle and Harradine - all future artworks on climate change should negotiate.

Multi-format film - It’s the Skin You’re Living In is a short film that explores and challenges images of climate change. The film has been screened at:

A mobile app about climate, embodiment, connectedness and home.

A printed visual essay by Doyle, Here Today: Thoughts on Communicating Climate Change accompanies the film.

Partners

Fevered Sleep Performance Company

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