Arts, Sciences and Climate Change: Practices and Politics at the Threshold

Abstract

Within climate change debates, writers and scholars have called for expanded methods for producing science, for proposing strategies for mitigation and adaptation, and for engaging with publics. Arts -sciences discourses are one area in which increasing numbers of practitioners and researchers are exploring ways in which interdisciplinarity may provide a space for reconsidering the role of cultural and creative responses to environmental change. Yet what new perspectives does the artsscience intersection offer for rethinking climate change? Which historic conjunctions of arts -sciences are most useful to consider in relation to present-day practices, or in what ways do these previous alignments significantly shift in response to climate change? The uncertainty, contingency, and experimentation necessarily characteristic of climate change may generate emergent forms of practice that require new approaches-not just to arts and sciences, but also at the new thresholds, or 'meetings and mutations' that these practices cross. Thresholds-narrated here through the figure of 'zero degrees'-offer a way to bring together sites of encounter, transformations, uncertainties, future scenarios, material conditions and political practices in relation to climate change. Such shifting thresholds and relations lead not to fundamental redefinitions or demarcations of arts and sciences, arguably, but rather to shared encounters with politics. Drawing on philosophies of aesthetics and sciences elaborated by Jacques Rancière and Isabelle Stengers, we point to the ways in which political possibility is entangled with aesthetic-material conditions and practices, and how recognition of these interrelations might enable 'collective experimentation' within both creative practices and climate sciences.

Aesthetics and Affect: Engaging Energy Communities

“…In some ways, this is surprising given existing traditions in art-science intersections and collaborations (e.g. Century 1999, Born and Barry 2010, Gabrys and Yusoff 2012, Ginsberg et al 2014. In other ways, this is less surprising given that art-science projects have often been duly concerned with the nature and political import of interdisciplinary collaboration and intersection, rather than the complex interweaving of aesthetic experience and participation.…”

Practices and politics of collaborative urban infrastructuring: Traffic Light Box Artworks in Dublin Streets

“…The spatiotemporal scaling of the experiments aims to be inclusive of diverse societal and ethical viewpoints and practices. The relocation of sites of design, innovation and experimentation into urban environments provide materials means for wider participation in prototyping futures (Gabrys and Yusoff, 2012;Marres, 2012). But the scaling also develops complex and sometimes contradictory practices that complicate the social and organisational arrangements aimed at supporting these and civic collaborations open up potentials for a more transparent government.…”

“…The analysis of the paper develops from the increasing literature on material participation and politics that unpacks how heterogeneous sets of 'tools', from paper and policy documents to arts and technological prototypes, constitute or contest in the processes of making parliaments, politics and futures (Asdal and Hobaek, 2016;Barry, 2013;Gabrys and Yusoff, 2012;Law and Singleton, 2014). Further articulating concerns that arise in the context of collaborating with the public to reshape the city, I also drawn on participatory approaches to design, especially on information infrastructure, to pay particular attention towards how material and technological arrangements of prototypes, trials or workshops can cause concerns to the social and ethical potentials that these collaborative experiments set out to achieve (Björgvinsson et al, 2010;Karasti and Baker, 2008;Liegl et al, 2016).…”

The Geoengine: Geoengineering and the Geopolitics of Planetary Modification

“…However, as political decision making takes on materialist dimensions through the development and testing of these technologies, new geopolitical approaches may be required that depart from classical or critical geopolitics foci on mostly 'flat earth' political relations to conceptualise the interactions and thresholds of earth systems (Gabrys and Yusoff, 2012), biochemical flows, and the forces of deep-time processes, in concert with political decision making. This would require the conceptualisation of a geopolitics that considers inhuman forces (anthropogenic and otherwise) alongside more traditional political actors in the making of geopolitical worlds.…”