Two Perspectives on Ecological Art

In the paper “Two perspectives on ecological art”, we will compare two perspectives on sustainability and the practicality of an ecological artwork. One perspective is from Latvian media artist Maija Demitere, researching slow media art, deep sustainability, and food production. Demitere uses micro-gardening prototypes as an instrument to inform the public on the problems of food production (local food, biodiversity, pesticides, herbicides, pollution caused by agriculture). Demitere uses gardening in combination with DIY (Do it Yourself) technologies to talk about slow living, ecology of the mind, and mindfulness. The second perspective is offered by Jan Glöckner. Glöckner is a German artist and researcher. His research interests are collaborations between fungi and Hominidae. Glöckner reaches out with diplomatic gestures towards fungi to re-localise humans within the larger domain of living entities. He is working on an ethical framework that draws from deep ecology and Tibetian Buddhism to ensure the rights of microorganisms and macroorganisms in artistic, industrial, and research setups. The first part of the paper will focus on recycling, waste management, waste produced by households, and the artists’ perspective on the problem. The second part will focus on a specific case of the exhibition “Life” by Olafur Eliasson at the Foundation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland. The second part will also look at the idea of “artistic greenwashing”. The last part of the article will attempt to conclude what can be considered an actual sustainable artwork and propose possible key points that describe a (deep) ecological artwork. The paper uses such methods as case studies, literature analysis, and autoethnography.

Rethinking Environmentalism and Apocalypse: Anamorphosis in The Book of Enoch and Climate Fiction

Biblical apocalypse has long been a source of contention in environmental criticism. Typically, ecocritical readings of Biblical apocalypse rely on a definition of the genre focused on eschatological themes related to species annihilation precipitated by the judgement of the world and the end of time. In this article, we offer an alternative engagement with Biblical apocalypse by drawing on Christopher Rowland and Jolyon Pruszinski’s argument that apocalypse is not necessarily concerned with temporality. Our case study is The Book of Enoch. We compare natural history in Enoch to Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological analysis of Biblical apocalypse as a way of seeing the world that worries human assumptions about the nature of things and thereby instigates an “anamorphosis” of perception. Following Timothy Morton’s adaptation of Marion’s idea of anamorphosis as an example of the ecological art of attention, we show how apocalypse achieves “anamorphic attention” by encouraging the cultivation of specific modes of perception—principally, openness and receptivity—that are also critical to political theology. In turn, this analysis of anamorphic attention will inform our rethinking of the relationship between environmentalism and apocalyptic themes in climate fiction today, with special reference to Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From.

The Grass is Greener: Władysław Hasior in an Ecocritical Perspective

The text offers an analysis of selected works by Władysław Hasior from an ecocritical perspective. The focus is placed on Hasior’s best-known work, The Organ, as well as on several parts of his Photo Notebook. The analysis seeks to demonstrate that an application of an ecocritical perspective to the reading of Hasior’s work may help fill in the blanks in the environmental history of art in Poland. Several recent publications and exhibitions that concern the relationship between art and nature focus on uncovering the “prehistory” of ecological art in Poland or the local tradition of Land Art. The text is meant as a preliminary study of possible research perspectives that the proposed reading may open up, as well as a consideration of whether ecocriticism could serve as an opportunity to bring the tenets of horizontal art history into the practice of rereading the work of Polish artists and their relationship with the landscape.

Report on the International scientific and practical online conference “Ecological art therapy: International and cultural prospects”

The article reports on the first international scientific and practical conference on ecological art therapy. The conference has an interdisciplinary character and reflects active development of the ecological direction in art therapy in its close connection with the ecology movement, ecotherapy, ecopsychology, environmental education (education for sustainable development) and “green” art. The report reflects the current state and development objectives of this innovative approach, which has significant potential for preserving health of the population, developing ecological culture and ecological awareness in close connection with the problem of preserving well-being of the environment.

Deep Integration of Chinese Modern Natural Painting Color and Film Ecological Art

The influence of beautiful color and composition on the film is very important. The colorful and hearty pictures not only make people have an amazing visual impact, but also enrich people's emotions. The perfect and full composition not only contains a lot of information and meaning, but also is the necessary means of plot and thinking. This paper focuses on the color and composition of the film screen. This paper analyzes and summarizes the representative typical elements to explore the beauty of the film screen. This paper puts forward that a good film should be good at using the color and composition of art to express the atmosphere and artistic conception of the film and convey the ideological connotation of the creator. This paper expounds that it is one of the inherent laws of film to interpret film with the beauty of picture. Whether it is gorgeous beauty, traditional beauty, true beauty or unsophisticated beauty, they are all different artistic expressions of beauty. The pursuit of materialization and transmission of beauty with film pictures is the essence of film art full of vitality. The experimental study shows that the viewpoint put forward in this paper is consistent with "art aesthetics takes the aesthetic phenomena, activities, laws and values in art as the research objects".

Modern Western Ecological Aesthetics from the Perspective of Aesthetics

Aesthetics is the study of people's perception and experience of heaven, earth and man and all things. Environment and landscape are the most important perceptual manifestation of ecosystem. How this perceptual manifestation affects human mind needs to be answered by aesthetics. It is not only possible but also necessary to study ecosystem from the perspective of aesthetics. Taking the ecological aesthetics of the English world as the main research object, this paper studies the three main approaches to the construction of western ecological aesthetics, which are philosophical speculation, ecological art theory and environmental practice. This study shows that: the interaction between ecological aesthetics and ecological art makes ecological aesthetics become the universal aesthetics of all aesthetic objects (including environment and Art), so as to distinguish it from environmental aesthetics more clearly. Strengthening the interaction between aesthetics and ecological aesthetic experience can make the connotation of ecological aesthetics more profound and clear. The results of this study have a certain reference value for the study of modern western ecological aesthetics from the perspective of aesthetics.

Transductive Wind Music: Sharing the Danish Landscape with Wind Turbines

In this article the authors present their sound art project Nephew vs. Overheard as an exploration of a messy, fragile and incoherent local approach to public ecological art, an approach that aims at creating links of affectivity with technological creatures, such as large wind turbines, with which we share our landscape. Supplementing, as well as challenging, the dominant global strategy of ecological art, the authors argue that it is essential to experiment with transductive chains of local environmental data, creating sensibilities that we can relate to in our everyday environments.

Eco art: Art is life and life is embedded in nature

Nature may be considered as the world of living organisms and their environment; in a larger sense, the shape of nature can also be understood to include particular extents of space and time. The visual perspectives of nature form a particular course that begins with the earliest historical depictions and might be currently expressed by a variety of cross-disciplinary contributions. The diverse perspectives form eclectic threads that today are frequently manifested within the eco-activist art movement. Several of the contemporary ecological art projects are grounded in explicit experiences and connections to specific spaces relevant to where the work is created. The local or international ecological labs, experimental urban gardens, projects on the migration of plants and the creation of new species included here are all new models contributing to a speculative future culture.