Heros

Richard Branson is my hero. He is not only cute but he has pledged $3 billion to fight global warming:
http://tinyurl.com/olh3e

This is a creative act even if it isn't ecological art.

Defining a New Reality

I have been writing for months. I am trying to describe in articles, a book, on this blog, in proposals of various kinds, how I see an interface between the virtual and the physical world. On Tuesday, I made another foray, on TalkShoe.com, into these experiments with the first Fall episode of the "Virtual Concerts". I will make another virtual broadcasting foray next Tuesday with Don Krug, from the University of British Columbia. It is all an act of faith in analogs: painting, gardens, installations, text, sound: a universe posited on hope. Every day I read of another assault on the environment, larches dying in the West yesterday. As I proceed, I seem to encounter endless glitches: email goes down, a health crisis occurs. Each Action I take is in defiance of the news and the obstacles.

Porpoise Hunting: The First New Episode of Virtual Concerts

Virtual Concert

Tuesday 10 AM ET 20 minutes:

1. Log onto TalkShoe.com, sign in, make a password. Your pin number will be your phone number.

2. Phone or skype.com in to participate live 724 444 7444 and give the number 1210# to enter the room. Click on TalkLive. You can then gain access to text messaging in the room as well as real timevocal/sound conversation.

3. Enter your bio info if you choose. Aviva will call on you in turn.

"What the world needs is a good housekeeper" 2000 Aviva Rahmani, Ecological Artist
Ghost Nets and the Cities and Oceans of If

Staying Focused on Solutions to Global Warming

Since the last Virtual Concert, I have been thinking ahead to moving ahead. The Virtual Concerts will begin next Tues again. This time, rather than series of 16 hour marathons, they will be created in an episodic format, weekly, breaking down the issues the August events tried to swallow whole, python-like, in two long learning curves, a few days apart. Instead they will expand into a year of careful efforts.

The goals of the Virtual Concert short episodes are the same: address global warming by finding ways to interface virtual and physical sites and effect environmental triage without emitting carbon on flights to each site. The four Summer sites, in India, Korea, Italy and Maine seem to boil down to water, soils and species distribution as impacted by global warming. The questions are, how that global warming impact each of those concerns in relation to human life and what we are doing about it. The "Virtual Concerts" will look at those questions thru the lens of Ecological Art.

The first episode, at 10: AM ET will center on Rob Rosenthal's "Porpoise Hunting" tape from indigenous Maine fishermen. Some of the discussion will be around the vast gap between Indigenous food-gathering and global corporate food harvesting.

Whether by design or coincidence lately, many things on the news seem geared to distract us from the impending environmental crisis. 6000 deaths in Iraq in the last couple months is certainly an example of that, so is the response to lower fuel prices. The consumer's response to the latter is: forget about sustainable options.

However, if coastlines continue to subside and weather patterns continue to disrupt agriculture, we are talking of millions of lost lives in the next decades, let alone the impact on a broad range of other species. Projections vary that sea level rise will be between 2 feet and forty feet in coming decades. That will put much urban life underwater and the cities are where the populations are. At the same time, a variety of cumulative effects are reducing the availability of fresh water and food. World resources are not being mobilized to address that.

As I use this format to address the urgency in a systemmatic and unconventional way, I am constantly reminded that I am looking at the forest not each tree. And yet each tree counts. Each part of the puzzle counts. The relationship between the fisheries and picking berries is as important as demographic distributions.

Arguably, my advantage as an artist is to see the overview, outside the box and then continue to take one small, informed & thoughtful step at a time.

Hope

Today I completed my painting about how the Gulf of Maine is like the Ganges, thanks to the greedy appetites of the cities. That's a lot of theory and invective to put on an image. In the end my intentions may be blowing in the last hurricane winds. I could forget all the intention and just paint mystery, beautifully but that wouldn't be enuf for me.

My old dog is now on prednisone for a pinched nerve. She has been feeling so little pain that she romped off into a ravine that I had to rescue her from. I was thrilled to scramble over the unstable rocks, up short cliffs and under low hanging branches just to see that big doggy grin as she impatiently paced, waiting for me to bring her to safety. The Vet says her vertebrae are fusing, she has spondiosis and severe rheumatoid arthritis-along with the pinched nerve. But with a bit of meds, she is terrific!

I have been reading more & more articles about awareness of global warming. I am far from convinced that we are doing enuf yet but heartened to see some activity. I view it as the same as my dog: a few meds and we feel much better. But the underlying degeneration is still severe and ultimately threatening.

Many people are now writing/ speaking about how the answer to the "terrorism threat" is to act out of thinking and ideals that represent an alternative. After all, as Delaware Senator Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee said in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington recently, 'terrorism is a tool. The problem is the world view it seeks to implement' (paraphrased). That, to me, is the heart of what must be done about global warming as well. We have to keep acting out of informed imagination.

It seems as tho the concious life these days is about courage. Denial is so much more comfortable, like my old dog on meds. Perhaps it always has been about courage in the face of humanities insanities but the global stakes are so high these days on every front.

I am like my grinning dog, thrilled to see signs of environmental rescue. And yet I am quite cynical about the long range forecast. We have done such enormous damage and still are. The lower gas prices just invite complacency. So I simply continue to move forward, painting my obscure images, doing the research, stumbling on the instability beneath me, glad to know that I am not alone in this human adventure. The party is getting larger.

My Old Dog

When I came home today, my dog could not lift herself to stand. And when I lifted her, she kept falling. Finally, I got her outside where the ground gave her traction and she could stand and then walk carefully.

My old dog, once the youngest, now a solitaire and I went berrying then. Her hind legs could not support her very well but in a short time of practice up and down the driveway, she learned to think of them as a sort of stiff double legged tripod rather than the freely moving parts of her two front legs.

She could balance herself just so between the two back posts that were once the graceful limbs of a dog-gazelle, to negotiate walking. She fell several times. Or more accurately, the tripod collapsed and then I had to lift her back up again under her skinny old lady rib cage.

Most of the blueberries are gone now. There was only one runty huckleberry and no raspberries at all. The grapes are nearly all spoiled by the unseasonable rain we had all Summer.

We walked to the studio. In the studio, she lay down for a while on the mat and then went back out to doze in the soft meadow grasses at the edge of the garden. I had nothing to do in the studio because I am waiting for the first layer to dry & to lay down another layer of gilding on my map painting, but after I'd picked a few berries, my dog had clearly indicated she wanted us to go down there. She did that by starting down the hill and turning back to see if I was following. She kept doing that till we got to the studio. So after she had lain down in the garden, I sat on the stoop and watched her pleasure in the green fragrance and gentle bed she had made.

At last, it was getting cool and we came back up the hill. Usually she trots back and forth across the drive but today she stayed close behind my footsteps, as though she believed I could make the path easier, as tho we were walking through deep snow rather than fresh cut grass that has overtaken the gravel laid down years ago. She only fell once or twice and was very clearly proud of that accomplishment.

Inside, I hoisted her onto the couch, where she avidly watched me read the Sunday Times until I turned out the light and went upstairs. Tomorrow, we will go together to the Vet. I hope to find a medication she might take to ease her arthritic elderly bones.

Jihad of Reason

I have just finished reading the Sept 1 edition of The New Yorker, which has several remarkable articles of Islamism. That followed on the heels of reading in Maine Biz, about how Maine is becoming a beehive of activity for alternative energy solutions because we have no oil reserves.

The New Yorker presents two alternate stark visions. In one, fundamentalist Sharia overcomes the world. In the other, after bloody and miserable failure, a secular compromise is reached based on reinventing the Koran, as proposed by Mahmoud Muhammed Taha. In either case, Israel may be the incidental sacrificial lamb and the environment is not even on the radar. Take your bets on other winners & losers.

What is relevant to a discussion of ecological art, is the premise that clear analytic thinking prevails in the end. But in the short term, much may be lost.

It then comes to those of us who have a Vision for Ecological Art and it's relationship to sustainable resources, whether in Maine or anyplace else, to carefully focus on articulating and communicating that Vision, without any expectation of success, perhaps, in our lifetimes.

My own Vision for that is grounded in the examples of Leonardo Da Vinci, Indigenous Peoples world wide and a sprinkling of Western thinkers, as, Paul Hawken on economics. Those examples, in the face of despair, unite disciplines to observe with care what the true options might be.

Today's observation came to me as I was completing my painting of the map of the Gulf of Maine. In that map, water merges with land as ice melts, cities become inchoate swirls of gold and the seas are dizzying. In that, the land ultimately finds its own stable state, with or without us.

As I walked back up the hill from my studio, considering what the map told me, my elderly dog happily hobbling along behind me, I stopped to cut back the spent raspberry branches and pick a few of the last blueberries. There will still be plenty for the birds this Fall. The garden is flush with fruit.

End of Summer

The huckleberries here are smaller when I can find them at all now. A few of the grapes are sweeter. There is still an occasional raspberry and some blueberries are still green. Most of the Summer people have gone.

Today, two months since my oldest dog died, the younger one, who is almost fourteen, came skipping down the hill with me to my studio. The cat zigzagged in front of her to get her attention and they engaged mid-road with my cat on her hind legs ferociously shadowboxing at the doberman's grizzled muzzle, lowered and bared in mock fierceness for a few seconds, the merriest I've seen them both since the oldest passed away.

The oldest was everyone's favorite in the household. My cat always slept curled back to back with her on the bed.

It was foggy here and twilight came early in my studio. I know the world is going to Hades in a handbasket but today was a good day on the island.

What Next? A Regular Series.

10: AM ET Tuesday Sept 26 will likely be the first of a weekly series based on the Virtual Residencies.

I have been thinking about what I want to do next based on my experience with the first Virtual Residency and the Virtual concerts that emerged as part of that experience.

I am still working out the details, but it looks like Sept 26 will be the launch of a regular 2o min program on TalkShoe.com, the evolution of which will be based on what I have learned. Up to 25 participants can log in on line during the live transmission as well as an unlimited audience. It will be downloaded to iTunes after broadcast. As it develops, I will anounce more details here.

Why I Did It

The main reason I did the Virtual Residency was to explore means to address several physical sites simultaneously without jetting all over the world. My goal was to find means to collaborate across geographies and cultures. It was more difficult than I would have thought but that is only because my expectations were unrealistic for the first attempt.

I just came from my studio, where I was working on a painting of the Gulf of Maine. It is an image I have worked with for seven years. It was based on the cumulatuive impression from research about ocean pollution the ten years of Ghost Nets. What I said in an interview about what I was studying, in 2000, was that the Gulf of Maine was as polluted as the Ganges.

So back in 1999, I was already making at least the abstract connections between different sites.

As I worked on this painting, this past month, what emerged was a portrait of land in trouble, caught between acid rain from midwestern coal burning factories driving airborn mercury to our coast and rising sea waters threatening fresh water supplies. These problems are being faced globally. Dotting the landscape of my painting are the cityscapes, foci of more pollution. All the colors are dark except the cities: the rural, agricultural and open land is being poisoned.

Walking back up the hill from my studio this evening, I smelled some delicate pink and orange wilfdflowers and picked some of the last huckleberries.

Those flowers are the ultimate reason I did the residency: to explore a new model to address our ecological problems. The old models won't be enuf. There are two many factors converging simultaneously now. The edge we are all teetering on is too steep.