Ecological Art

My MLitt dissertation is concerned with how connections between human and nonhuman objects, hyperobjects and temporality are represented in contemporary anthropocene literature, namely Ben Lerner's novel 10:04 and Tom McCarthy's Satin Island. Through an ethical and aesthetic framework, I ask: how can the novel explore the ecological thought and how is narrative form uniquely capable of synthesising other artistic and textual practices in a way that conveys and embodies the feedback loops of irony, aesthetic causality and ‘deep time’ characteristic of hyperobjects, ecological disaster and object encounters within the anthropocene?

Print version of PhD Thesis.

This practice-based project investigates modalities of performing eco-aesthetic assemblages across the modern nature―culture divide. Assemblages are here understood as non-hierarchical associations between bodies that are different amongst themselves. I argue that eco-aesthetic practices that work towards naturalcultural assemblages contribute to the wider field of ecological thought and cultural understanding of the nonhuman environment or nature.

The research uses a transversal practico-theoretical approach that, following posthumanist and neomaterialist elaborations of ontology and epistemology, creates a ‘material-discursive entanglement’ (Barad, 2007) of bodies and concepts. In this posthuman continuum of practice, I argue that eco-aesthetics is an ethico-political disposition of fostering relations of accountability and responsibility with the bodies implicated in performance, especially the nonhumans understood to be minorities in the current politico-economic organisation.

The research is situated within the landscape of modern biopolitics, which is understood as a set of conceptual and material strategies of appropriation of life through the ‘logic of colonisation’ (Plumwood, 1993). Situated naturalcultural performances enact a different modality of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2007) with the world, by creating and maintaining fields in which life is seen as a force of generative difference.

The dissertation is divided in three parts which correspond to three entangled modes of performing research. The first part is a critical ontology which individuates operative modalities of modern boundary-making techniques. This part also outlines an alternative landscape of art and philosophy which go beyond binary thinking. The second part, through a posthumanist reconfiguration of the concept of assemblage from Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, and apparatus, in the work of Michel Foucault and Karen Barad, shapes an analytics for locating possibilities of material-discursive reconfiguration of the existing power relations. The third part follows the narrative of my artistic projects that sought to create naturalcultural performances with plants, trees, molecules of carbon-dioxide, sheep, and earth. This material-discursive entanglement of critique, analytics and performance as artistic practice together shapes a posthuman ecological praxis that is oriented towards naturalcultural justice.

AVAILABLE ONLINE:
http://minoritarianecologi.es/

In this interview, I pursue with Chin the idea of his work as a
“posthumanist” form of art, not only in terms of its thematic
occupation with the natural environmental, ecological welfare,
and technological development, but also in terms of its process-oriented
methodology.

Drifting Bodies / Fluent Spaces, international meeting/conference and exhibition on walking arts, in collaboration between Lab2PT / UMinho - Made of Walking (VII) and the City of Guimarães - Portugal.
Below you can read the announcement of the open call for walking arts papers, posters, art projects, walkshops and walks, and for art works to be included in our meeting/conference and exhibition in Guimarães - Portugal, during July 2020.
We look forward to your participation.

Drifting Bodies / Fluent Spaces, encontro/conferência internacional e exposição sobre artes de caminhar, numa colaboração entre o Lab2PT / UMinho - Made of Walking (VII) e a Câmara Municipal de Guimarães - Portugal.
Abaixo, poderão encontrar o anúncio da abertura de chamada para artigos, posteres, projetos de arte, walkshops /caminhadas e obras de arte, sobre artes de caminhar, a serem incluídos no nosso encontro/conferência e exposição em Guimarães - Portugal, durante o mês de julho de 2020.
Aguardamos a vossa participação.

Az Inconnu csoport esetében a környezetvédelem így szorosan összekapcsolódott az államszocialista rendszer kritikájával, és elsősorban abból a szempontból vált fontossá, hogy olyan ügy volt, amin keresztül sikeresen, sokakat megmozgatva lehetett támadni a rezsimet.

Author, poet and art historian John K. Grande is one of Canada's most widely published art critics. His essays have appeared in various art periodicals and gallery publications and are often concerned with postmodern attitudes toward nature, global health and well-being, and the environment. In Art Nature Dialogues Grande provides a forum for environmental artists from Europe and North America to discuss their work in a casual yet polemical style.

Since the beginning of its history, Environmental photography has been exploited for the sake of politics purpose in the United States. This “fair use” is part of the DNA of this photography, a genre that mixes landscape and nature aesthetics with environmental awareness. How can one deal with the aura of the words “environment” “nature”, which “green” the content of any publication or exhibition? This paper intends to explore a subtler greening made of the genuine intention of the spectator.‪

Depuis les prémices de son histoire, la photographie environnementale a été instrumentalisée à des fins politiciennes aux États-Unis. Cet « usage loyal » fait partie de l’ADN de cette photographie qui allie l’esthétique paysagère et naturaliste à une conscience environnementale. Comment gérer l’effet de mots-clefs comme « environnement » ou « nature », qui suscitent l’éco-blanchiment du contenu d’expositions ou de publications ? Cet article entend explorer un verdissement plus subtil, celui opéré par la bonne conscience du public.

The artwork of Brandon Ballengée can be analysed as a re-materialized form of post-digital Media Art, taking into account historical accounts of media as milieu stemming from the natural sciences, and using frogs as living measuring devices.  Ballengée’s holistic practice includes eco-actions and participatory survey field trips in the spirit of amateur science, the collecting and conservation of amphibians or other wetland species with deformities and malformations – or promoting the growth of such anomalies in controlled laboratory simulations.  His selective breeding and micro-surgery projects to intervene in natural developmental processes, the presentation of these animals either alive, or cleared and stained in a highly aestheticized fashion, or the colourful, oversized and abstract, yet seemingly alive scanner photographs of the specimens’ physiologies, encompass an expansive range of transdisciplinary practices.

Published in: Tiere und / als Medien
ed. by Jessica Ullrich & Stefan Rieger, Tierstudien 18, 2020.

https://neofelis-verlag.de/verlagsprogramm/zeitschriften/tierstudien/1014/tiere-und/als-medien

ISBN(Print): 978-3-95808-315-8
ISBN(PDF): 978-3-95808-366-0

Ecologies of Landscape gathers work by nine highly accomplished artists from Canada and abroad to re-imagine our perceptual, aesthetic, and ethical relationships with our home planet. In diverse media and from a variety of cultural and geographical perspectives, these artists ponder what our connections to the Earth might be in this time of widespread concern about climate change. Especially in Canada, landscape painting has been the dominant way to approach and appreciate what we construe as ‘nature’ as well as our own identities. With increasing urgency since the 1960s, however, artists worldwide have grappled with the inadequacies of the landscape genre amidst concerns over land stewardship and the environmental degradation of our shared planet. Works in this exhibition reconceive land and landscape as presented and experienced in art.

How can we reconcile with the publicly demonised material Plastic, to engage with a new ecological aesthetic that thinks beyond the archaic eco-artistic language of green environmentalism? This essay intends to look at how contemporary art has the ability to transform the way we view ecology to pave ways for alternative modes of thinking in light of the impending eco-catastrophe. I look to two artist/collectives, Vivan Sundaram, who uses the material as social critique, and Pakui Hardware, for whom transgressing preconceived notions of the ‘natural’ is a means of navigating the hypervisible and precarious position Plastic occupies in contemporary psyche.

Esthétique environnementale, art écologique, les expressions ne manquent pas pour circonscrire un champ de recherche relativement nouveau en France, mais en formation depuis longtemps outre-Atlantique. Il y est question d’esthétisation de l’espace public, ou bien de nouvelles formes de relations entre les arts, la recherche et l’éthique, ou bien encore de la place de l’esthétique dans les mobilisations associatives. Cet article s’inscrit plutôt dans le second courant en tentant un rapprochement entre la biologie de la conservation et les manifestations plurielles d’un art se réclamant de l’engagement écologique. NSS a traité cette question émergente à plusieurs reprises, notamment dans un éditorial intitulé « Artistes et scientifiques : soupçons et espoirs d’interdisciplinarité » (NSS, 16, 3 [2008]), puis à travers d’autres publications, qu’il s’agisse d’études de cas, d’articles de synthèse ou de comptes rendus (NSS, 16, 2 [2008], 122-130 ; NSS, 16, 3 [2008], 279-281 ; NSS, 17, 3 [2009], 285-292). La tentative des auteurs de proposer une catégorisation des créations qui se revendiquent de l’« art écologique » trouvera-t-elle un écho dans le milieu artistique ?

Finished article can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/glob.12278

Based on fieldwork in Japan and Hong Kong, this paper asks how methodological cosmopolitan-ism, as formulated by Ulrich Beck, may afford new and highly needed modes for grappling with climatically concerned art and aesthetic practices across geographical regions. I will argue that methodological cosmopolitanism serve as an important framework for approaching such art practices , and suggest that two overall intertwined strands regarding aesthetic practices engaged in global issues of climate change, emerge from this: cosmopolitization of aesthetics and, reversely, aesthetics of cosmopolitization. On the one hand, I will argue that art practices are 'cosmopolitized' by the awareness of global risks, manifested in anticipations of comprehensive climatic changes affecting (in)discriminately across nations and regions. At the same time, and importantly, art practices are actively attending to this 'risky' cosmopolitization, giving aesthetic voice, form and 'visu-ality' to unfolding climatic issues and concerns and hereby practicing what I will call an 'aesthetics of cosmopolitization'.

'Out of Order: The Collages of Louise Nevelson' is the first comprehensive study dedicated exclusively to Louise Nevelson’s work in collage. The book, published as a collaboration between Fondazione Marconi and Mousse Publishing, takes as its point of departure a close material and technical examination of this body of work, before setting out to position the role of collage in the artist’s practice more broadly. The book consists of two main essays: the first by curator and art historian Yuval Etgar, who divides Nevelson’s output in collage into six main categories, linking these to parallel tendencies in collage during the 1950s and 1960s as well as to earlier examples in the history of this practice. The second essay, by technical art historian Pia Gottschaller, delves into Nevelson’s complex process of selecting object materials for her collages, and analyses her methods of working and treating these materials. The book includes more than 250 colour plates of collages by Nevelson from various collections worldwide.

The exhibition mentioned in the title of my essay was on display in Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, between 2005 and 2006. It was conceived as a travelling exhibition; therefore it was shown in various institutions of United States till the end of 2007. In this context, the curator, Stephanie Smith, faced a difficult and complex problem: how to simultaneously present art that brings up the issues of ecology and diversity, and to organise the exposition that fulfils the principles of sustainability.
In my paper I will discuss each particular statement of the exhibition and I will feature projects executed especially for this show, which, in effect, go far beyond the definition of art, balancing on the edge between design and social activism. Giving the background of the uniqueness of Stephanie Smith’s endeavour, I will also reflect on the subject of whether contemporary art can be sustainable without being, at the same time, marginalised and treated with certain distance – as disconnected from the (institutional) mainstream.

[ES] El proyecto artístico `Monumento a la Permacultura' es una investigación sobre el arte ecológico y el arte colaborativo como técnica para maximizar la empatía con los problemas del cambio climático en la cooperación al desarrollo. Este Trabajo Fin de Grado se centrará en desarrollar esta capacidad a través de Permacultura para crear situaciones de máxima apreciación de los problemas ecológicos y sociales en el pueblo indígena Chewa, Mbwindi, Malaui, enfatizando los objetivos de desarrollo sostenible 2030; 2. Hambre Cero y 15. Vida en la Tierra (ODS, ONU).

Partiendo del análisis de estas cuatro temáticas, el proyecto artístico presentado es una intervención en el espacio público para crear y otorgar significado a través de la acción, el juego y la voluntad. Es un proyecto no invasivo con impacto reducido, que pertenece a un movimiento de lo pequeño, lo local, el equilibrio, construyendo empatía con otras personas y con otras especies y que busca la autenticidad, la relevancia, la transparencia y la construcción de una Comunidad. Se esfuerza por superar los mensajes negativos de la crisis ecológica con un enfoque hacia lo que se puede conseguir siguiendo la ética ecológica.


[EN] The artistic project 'Monument to Permaculture' is an investigation on ecological art and collaborative art as techniques to maximise empathy with the problems of climate change in development cooperation. This Final Degree Project will focus on developing this capacity through Permaculture to create situations of maximum appreciation of ecological and social problems in the Chewa indigenous people in Mbwindi, Malawi, emphasizing the 2030 sustainable development goals; 2. Zero Hunger and 15. Life on Earth (SDG, UN).

Starting from the analysis of these four themes, the artistic project presented is an intervention in the public space to create and give meaning through action, play and will. It is a non-invasive project with reduced impact, which belongs to a movement of the small, the local, the balance, building empathy with other people and with other species and that seeks authenticity, relevance, transparency and the construction of a Community. It strives to overcome the negative messages of the ecological crisis with a focus on what can be gained by following ecology ethics.

Public art, unlike works of art created for galleries and museums, is often cast by well-meaning artists and curators into situations that make it vulnerable to the vicissitudes and vagaries of urban planners and civic administrators. Without clearly documented roles of ownership and responsibility, public artworks are unshielded from inevitable changes in taste, personnel and municipal priorities. Public art commissioned by biennales is especially prone to neglect, as its artist and curator "parents" unsurprisingly move on to make way for the next biennale's exhibition team. The Joseph Beuys tree commissioned for the 1984 Biennale of Sydney is a case in point.

A review article about Irish-based New Zealander Cathy Fitzgerald's doctoral creative practice research into an expanded ecological art practice, which she refers to as 'eco-social art practice'. This draws from review of pioneering ecological art practices and her own practice that explores new-to-Ireland continuous cover forestry. Cathy explains such practices as expanded, ethical social enquiries. She clarifies the critical position of creative activities in these practices and how such expanded durational practices are best collated and shared with audiences using blogging. Eco-social art practices are foremost open-ended question-based processes, inviting communities to explore their relationship to their places in the ecological emergency. Cathy concludes that eco-social art practices are memes for the Symbiocene - the new sustainable era that succeeds the Anthropocene. They contribute to The Great Turning on how to live well with the Earth and all its inhabitants.

This article appeared in Minding Nature, Vol. 12. No. 3 (Fall 2019), a publication of the Center for Humans and Nature (www.humansandnature.org).

The term “climate change” suggests a departure from the long-established
planetary norms of the Holocene into today’s accelerating changes in the atmosphere, land, and oceans. Climate
scientists agree that the accumulating carbon-producing activities of some human beings and their technologies have
occurred over centuries but have become increasingly rapid and detrimental since the so-called “Great Acceleration,” which
began c. 1945 with the testing and use of atomic weapons and a stupefying increase in many other impactful metrics. Second,
artists, curators, and art historians have focused increasingly in recent years on changing phenomena in the environment
and responses to them, creating noticeably more artworks, exhibitions, and scholarly analyses of the much-discussed crisis
of global climate disruption and its increasingly tragic ramifications. How might we bring climate issues into the ambit of
art and Art History? Both “ecological art” and “eco art history” embrace a range of practices — contemporary and historical
— that investigate the environmental, aesthetic, social, and political relationships between human and nonhuman animals
as well as inanimate materials.

The Extinct Birds Project started in 2015 after I saw a drawer full of extinct
birds at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History. On the clean white paper were the bodies of seven extinct birds and around a dozen other threatened species. A tremendous veil of sadness laced every one of the specimens and countless questions immediately ran through my mind: How did the institution get these extinct birds? Why did they go extinct? Should they have been collected if they were in danger or going extinct? Where were these birds collected? Have the bodies been gutted and filled with cotton? How is that done? Who collected these and how was this done? What were the collectors’ lives like?

This book, with its accompanying exhibition and website extinctbirdsproject.com, tries to answer these questions and several others about seventeen extinct birds species. The publication examines at least one individual specimen and the ornithologist who collected it from each of these species. The essays and illustrations present complicated global environmental and societal issues in an accessible and intriguing manner.

For more information on this project, go to:
https://www.extinctbirdsproject.com.

For more information on Alberto's other projects, go to: www.albertorey.com

Stare into the Caffenol to Reveal your Future is a blueprint for an ecological future for photography, inspired by London Alt Photo Collective's sustainable darkroom residencies. Featuring interviews from analogue photographers, the paper proposes an alternative vision for photography to be tried and tested worldwide.

Nature (ziran) has been a key concept in Chinese art, yet the ‘nature’ celebrated in Chinese shanshui paintings and gardens are already abstract inventions, bearing only tenuous connections with the physical world beyond human habitation and control. This article studies several contemporary ‘landscapes’ that are devoid of conventionally defined nature, including Yang Yongliang and Yao Lu’s deceptively
traditional shanshui that are in fact collages of scenes of urban congestion and pollution, Zhan Wang and Zhang Jianjun’s use of industrial materials to manufacture objects that signify ‘nature’ in domestic settings, as well as Miao Xiaochun’s seemingly straightforward portrayals of modern life that employ the compositional principles of shanshui to create sensations of the surreal. Those works have been
interpreted as critiques of urbanization and commodification, but the ecological sensibilities they embody, I argue, are meant to undo the binary between nature and culture. Through seductive yet subversive appropriation of the conventional representations of nature, they remove the concept from a ‘transcendental, unified, independent category’ and reveal it as diverse, malleable and intimate, at once subject to and elusive from human interventions. Showing that the physical world become visible only through the mediation of metaphors and imagery, this article also stresses the role aesthetics plays in our interactions with the environment.

The sounds of the natural world have served as a key source of musical inspiration for composers throughout history; and for the last century, recording technology has enabled the utilisation of the sounds themselves as compositional material. The use of recorded environmental sound in musical works has become common practice for composers working in a plethora of different styles and genres, employing a wide variety of techniques; however, a comprehensive analysis and comparison of these different approaches has yet to been undertaken.

Aside from technical and stylistic considerations, the other vitally important question for such an analysis regards what this use of natural environmental sound as compositional material means, both to composers and listeners. In today’s society it is the increasingly significant socio-political issue of global climate change which dominantes contemporary thought regarding humankind’s relationship to the environment; and it is therefore inevitable that the resonances of this will be felt in any work which takes the sounds of the natural environment as its subject. The task of achieving a properly contemporary musicological analysis of such works therefore demands that they be considered from an ecomusicological perspective, which focuses on their socio-cultural significance in the light of contemporary environmental concerns.

In undertaking this ecomusicological analysis, stylistic traits become less important than the specific ways in which the environmental sound is used, the role that it plays within the composition, and the meanings that it generates. This paper will therefore propose a new critical framework for works which use natural environmental sound as compositional material, addressing a significant gap in ecomusicological scholarship and facilitating a new understanding of a common compositional practice which takes into account its new meaning to the ecologically-focussed society of the 21st century.

For decades, artists have been caught up with the still growing call for more ecologically viable ways of living, with practices often referred to as ‘eco-art’ as the generic term. However, this is mostly a history written from the world academic centers of Euro-America and with little outlook towards the diversity of arts committed to other ways of seeing, sensing and living in ecologically fraught times. Given the distributed, uneven, and highly situated effects of the overall phenomena of climate change and, more recently, the Anthropocene, arts attending to it in the vernacular are necessarily as diverse. As an interdisciplinary and multi-sited study set between eco-art history and more-than-human anthropology, this thesis follows in the footsteps of a few artists in Hong Kong and Japan who are committed to arts and ecologies at the margins of world-center discussions of climate and art. How does eco-art practices come to matter in the countryside of Japan and Hong Kong? How do they articulate and give aesthetic shape to experiences and concerns from everyday and quite ordinary nature-culture entanglements? Learning from these eco-arts I ask what it means to diversify and follow eco-arts as practices that translate between globalized phenomena and situated ecologies, in ways that matter intensely in local settings? Even when this does not translate smoothly to neither general concept of climate, nor mainstream eco-art history.
This unfolds as a methodological enquiry departing in multi-sited fieldwork in both Hong Kong and Japan: across the city and the countryside of Hong Kong, and starting from the rural Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale in Niigata, in Japan. At and between, both places, climate and environmental concern gains traction more forcefully when they are articulated actively in relation to local ecologies: their histories of aesthetics, notions of nature, and not least, socio-material politics. Here, artists will often not talk about climate change or the Anthropocene when they, in fact, talk about the effects of climatic changes, their anthropogenic origins, and the myriad issues that follow. Instead, and across both places, my fieldwork trajectory leads me to believe that plants make for a particularly salient guiding material through contemporary East Asian eco-arts, capable of connecting ecological sensibilities across places, in a way too general and too localized concepts are not well equipped to do.
This leads me to analyze and re-theorize eco-arts in and from the ‘margins’, taking this term from local theory cultures and relating to equivocal senses of arts, aesthetics, nature(s), and politics, as these come to be co-articulated in a set of notable artistic plant practices tying together specific spaces of shared ecological concern, experience, and imagination in East Asia (and beyond). By drawing the sub-fields of eco-art history and more-than-human anthropology closer together, I hope to make an intervention that suggests the relevance and importance of these imaginative marginal art practices in both directions: to our sense of ‘art’ and ‘everyday ecologies’ in equal measure. This intersection, I argue, constitutes a terrain where shared eco-aesthetic sensibilities may be cultivated, carrying great importance to any intellectual and practical attempt at navigating the contemporary situation of planetary ecological distress.

Recent years have seen an exponential increase in the number of composers and sound artists directly responding to global environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change, through their creative practice. The philosophical concerns and practical methodologies of these composers and sound artists build on the established field of acoustic ecology, and the related genre of soundscape composition, but also venture well beyond them, setting them apart as a distinct new movement in music and sound art. However, as yet no new terminology has been found to define and describe this movement, either as an academic field of study or as an artistic genre.

Two composers who are at the forefront of this movement, David Monacchi and Matthew Burtner, have each independently adopted the term “ecoacoustic” in reference to their work: a term which this paper will propose as the most suitable to describe this contemporary movement of environmentally-concerned music and sound art. Although some significant differences exist between the artistic philosophies and creative practices of the two composers – which also, therefore, inevitably carry through into differences between their uses of the term – it will be argued that the similarities between them are significant enough for these differences to be regarded as variations upon a core set of principles and methodologies.

Through an investigation into what the term “ecoacoustic” means in the context of the work of Monacchi and Burtner, this paper will identify these core principles and methodologies, employing them as the basis for an initial “definition- in-progress” of ecoacoustic music and sound art. Finally, a selection of other composers and sound artists will be proposed whose work embodies the fundamental characteristics of this new field of “ecoacoustics”.

In relation to literary ecocriticism, ecocritical analysis of visual art is in a nascent stage. Despite, or perhaps due to, the centrality of idealized representations of nature in the history of art, and also because of the dominance of the gallery mercantile system as the chief means of display and dissemination of works of art, researched and documentary projects on ecosystems and vulnerable cultures and biotic matter, public art performing sustainability, and photographs as critical landscapes, have ben slow to gain attention. A genealogy of significant group exhibitions in museums is followed by focus on current approaches.  Visual art is often called upon to effect political change; reified categories of political engagement and aesthetic autonomy are dissolving in more nuanced conceptions of art’s social position and contributions. Issues of agency and materiality are becoming central, as well as environmental justice. The work of critical art historians Malcolm Miles, T.J. Demos, and Emily Eliza Scott are featured.

Different forms of selfhood enacted in the TV and filmic endings of the anime Evangelion can be revealed by building on Donald Crafton’s typology of performance of/in animation of “embodied acting” and “figurative acting.” Embodied acting is “introverted,” and tends towards the production of modernistic, anthropomorphic individuals that appear to provide a sense of depth in their enactment of emotion through their individualized movement. Figurative acting, which repeats similar codes in varying combinations for different characters, is “extroverted,” as the codes appear shared between various characters, forcing a recognition of the surface location of the code for that emotion, on not in the character. As such, the interrelation and tension between these forms of performing selfhood play out in Evangelion: objects of human creation, the Eva-units, boldly display their agency as they exhibit shocking performances of embodied acting, the Eva-units appearing with the same autonomy as human individuals; on the other hand, humans are broken into parts, their psyche examined in pieces as they delve into their minds to find only more pieces of other characters, an interrogation of the constitutive codes of figurative acting—the examination of a potentially more ecologically oriented objecthood seen in the TV ending. However, the filmic ending departs from the optimistic embrace of objecthood and presents the harrowing vision of environmental catastrophe as it explores different individualisms, taking them to their world-ending climax.

"As a life-giving but also potentially destructive substance, water occupies a prominent place in the imagination. At the same time, water issues are among the most troubling ecological and social concerns of our time.

Water is often studied only as a "resource," a quantifiable and instrumentalized substance. Thinking with Water instead invites readers to consider how water - with its potent symbolic power, its familiarity, and its unique physical and chemical properties - is a lively collaborator in our ways of knowing and acting. What emerges is both a rich opportunity to encourage more thoughtful environmental engagement and a challenge to common oppositions between nature and culture.

Drawing from a pool of contributors with diverse backgrounds, Thinking with Water presents the work of critics, scholars, artists, and poets in an invitation to pay more attention to the aqueous aspects of our lives.


Contributors include: Ælab (Gisèle Trudel, UQÀM and Stéphane Claude, Oboro), Stacy Alaimo (University of Texas at Arlington), Andrew Biro (Acadia University), Mielle Chandler (York University), Cecilia Chen (Concordia University), Dorothy Christian (University of British Columbia), Adam Dickinson (poet, Brock University), Max Haiven (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), Janine MacLeod (York University), Daphne Marlatt (poet, British Columbia), Don McKay (poet, Newfoundland), Emily Rose Michaud (Artist, Wakefield, Qc.), Astrida Neimanis (Linköping University), Sarah Renshaw (artist, Rhode Island), Shirley Roburn (Concordia University), Melanie Siebert (poet, University of Victoria), Jennifer B. Spiegel (Concordia University), Veronica Strang (Durham, UK), Rae Staseson (Concordia University), Rita Wong (Emily Carr University of Art and Design), and Peter C. van Wyck (Concordia University).

Available for pre-order on amazon.ca and at
http://www.mqup.ca/thinking-with-water-products-9780773541795.php?page_id=73&
"

We propose a model which argues that aesthetics is based on biosemiotic processes and introduces the non-anthropomorphic aesthetics. In parallel with habit-taking, which is responsible for generating semiotic regularities, there is another process, the semiotic fitting, which is responsible for generating aesthetic relations. Habit by itself is not good or bad, it is good or bad because of semiotic fitting. Defining the beautiful as the perfect semiotic fitting corresponds to the common conceptualisation of the aesthetic as well as extends it over all umwelten. Perfection is not omnipotence, it only means the omnirelational semiotic fitting in the umwelt, or harmony with context. The process that presents something to be perceived as beautiful is of the same kind as the semiotic process that builds something to become beautiful. The argument is based on the observation that learning has a tendency towards perfection, until it is grounded (non-symbolically-based on imprinting, conditioning, or imitation). Semiosis is usually biased towards semiotic fitting, which stepwise leads towards perfection, and thus towards beauty. Such a general semiotic model implies that beauty is species-specific; that it is not limited to the sphere of emotions; that the reduction of the evolution of aesthetic features to sexual selection is false; and that humans should learn the aesthetics of other beings in order to avoid destroying valuable biocoenoses.