No abstract

Peat bogs play a special role in Finnish cultural history, climate policy, economic life, and art. This article examines the performative meaning-making of peat and aims to rewrite with and through art and cultural heritage the human-centered endeavors of peatland and to create parallel ways of being with the materiality of peat. The article consists of three partly intertwined discourses: 1) the mythical pre-modern bog scene found, 2) this scene transformed in modern times into a site of control and profit, and 3) human-centered peat work is challenged by the demands of climate actions, the Anthropocene, and the posthuman landscape.

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020, art teachers put remote teaching in Finnish comprehensive schools into operation in varying ways. One popular implementation was classical art memes, an assignment that art teachers shared through professional networks in social media. This phenomenon brought out the question: what kind of meanings did art history-related memes construct during the pandemic in Finland? The authors collected and analysed empirical data that consisted of a questionnaire for art teachers (N = 14), students’ meme works (N = 45) sent to the authors by the teachers, and assignments that were given. The research approach was critical inquiry. The main components of the theoretical framework were meme theories and crisis pedagogy, with which the authors confronted the national curriculum. Although Finland has not been among the most afflicted countries by the pandemic, the sudden flip to remote teaching created anxiety and a sense of crisis among teachers, who tried to find a balance between their own workload, students’ confusion with the new learning situation and the demands of the curriculum. The analysis concentrated on four themes: the COVID-19 crisis in meme manifestations, teaching art history, art education through making and art education as copying and repeating. The authors concluded that it is crucial to highlight the conceptualizing and contextualizing of art beside actual art-making. From this emerges an essential challenge for in-service training: critical knowledge production and discourse practices.

Art & Science Education is topical. The concept of "multi literacy" is highlighted in the new curriculum for the Finnish schools. Multi literacy means an ability to understand basis and discourses of different subjects. In contemporary multitasking society wide knowledge base is appreciated, sometimes to the detriment of specialization and deeper analysis.However, to combine art and science does not necessarily mean a fashionable shallowness. Working in collaboration as experts on their own fields artists and scientists can find new perspectives that haven't been thought about before within these areas of knowledge. Or, artists and scientists can together play with crazy ideas such as growing an edible steak from one tiny cell.Scientific experiments are often means for confirming or invalidating hypotheses and concepts already developed in advance by a researcher. But typical to artistic thinking, experimentation in bioart is associatible and as a mode: "what will happen if I do this?" As art in general bioart develops experiments in order to raise new questions.Biotechnologies are situated withing a field that is made up of relationships between inorganic matter and living beings, as well as human social institutions and relations. If perception and making something with hands (humanism) are still held to be authentic, we are reluctant to realise that technologies can produce something not possible to make by human hand. And this something can even be a living or at least semi-living organism. In contemporary art bioart and many other combinations of art and technology try to consider why it disturbs and even frightens us.Questions about nature and humanity preoccupy both artists and scientists, but often from different grounds and emphasis. In Aalto University art and science meet in an interesting ethical chiasma for example in the Department of Art and also in the study program of art education where some students work with theses dealing with problems of biological art and education.In 2012 was launched in Aalto ARTS Department of Art a biological art unit, Biofilia -Base for Biological Arts."It offers a platform and infrastructure for trans-disciplinary research and education that aim at creating cultural discussion and innovation around the topics related to the manipulation of life and biological processes at a practical and theoretical level, including philosophical and ethical dimensions." (http://biofilia.aalto.fi/en/about/)

Artikkelissa käsittellään ihmisen ja ei-inhimillisen luonnon – erityisesti kasvikunnan – yhteenkietoutumista ja suhteen muuttumista taiteen historiassa varhaisen kirkkotaiteen vihreistä miehistä biologisen nykytaiteen pirstoutuneeseen kehollisuuteen, missä ”ihmisellinen” sekoitetaan ei-inhimilliseen luontoon.   In this article I am discussing the intertwining of human being and non-human nature, especially plantae, and the alteration of their relationship in art history from the green men of early sacred art into the shattered embodiness of the contemporary art in which the ”humanness” is mixed with non-human nature