LIFE & ART 1: TransAgriculture
Life & Art is a new program series at V2_ focused around the intertwinement of art and life. Asking whether art can be lived or a life can be art takes on a new meaning in an age of genetic technology, financial crisis and living art.
Image: Evan Douglis; Graphics: Studio Haasbroek
TransAgriculture is a one-day manifestation featuring penetrating introductions to the field, lectures on guerrilla and avant-gardening, and bioart forms.
Banks are falling, the temperature is rising, the food in our supermarkets is expensive and can't even be trusted. We are witnessing the bankruptcy of industrialized agriculture and the notion that we can control nature, culture and society. But think of all the new opportunities this creates for artists! The processes by which we sustain and shape our lives simply can't be controlled from the top down: they work from the bottom up. All modest activities at the micro scale interact and coalesce into the macro systems by which our world is organized. Messy actions downstream lead to solid connections upstream.
This new bottom-up paradigm of interactivity, emergence and complexity is now becoming vitally important in agriculture as well. It strongly informs environmental questions and green thinking. Urban agriculture, homegrown fashion, advanced bioart and guerrilla gardening are some of the themes arising. Other tools for gaining access to the self-organization of life are genetic technology and organic growing. In our research program Life & Art 1: TransAgriculture, we use today's rapidly transforming agriculture as the starter engine - in a technological, artistic, social, cultural, political, economic and gastronomic sense - to challenge artists to harness the full potential of things to come.
Grow your own future!
Moderated by Sebastian Olma with:
Prof. René Boomkens, cultural philosopher (NL)
http://www.rug.nl/staff/r.w.boomkens/index
Bruce Sterling, author (US)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Sterling
Prof. Natalie Jeremijenko, avant-gardening (US)
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign
Richard Reynolds, guerrilla gardener (CDN)
http://www.guerrillagardening.org
Michiko Nitta, Extreme Green Guerrilla (J/UK)
http://myportfolio.me.uk/EGGs.htm
Short videos by Pollan and Braungart are shown throughout, and a TransAgriculture lunch is being designed and prepared by Marije Vogelzang from PROEF.
Event stream:
Also available at http://live.v2.nl/v2/2008/life-and-art/20081219-transagriculture.mov
