Environment 2.0 is a project initiated in 2006 by FutureEverything and ImaginationLancaster, conceived by Drew Hemment. It explores contributions to the sustainability of the way we live our lives, and involves participatory art and design projects that collaboratively produce and make sense of information about natural, built and social environments. Environment 2.0 looks at how locative art can develop “new senses” and share discoveries with neighbors and people around the globe to become a part of a worldwide network of “one billion eyes.”
Environment 2.0 has taken me on a journey, comprising encounters with climatologists, climate hackers, DNA barcoders, urban gardeners, peak oil activists, butterfly enthusiasts and all points between. Staging events in Manchester, Singapore, Lancaster, Amsterdam and Berlin, I began in the role of curator and artist, and along the way found myself in discussions with the U.K.’s Ministry of Transport on how art methods can ignite innovation on sustainable transport, working as a weather forecaster with the Met Office in a series of mass participation projects, and adding an engagement with the environment to the FutureEverything festival’s now-perennial themes of society, technology and the city.
The starting point for Environment 2.0 was the idea that innovative forms of observation, mapping and participation found in locative and social media may offer useful tools for the social transformations needed to address global climate change. Luckily there are a lot of bright sparks out there, a thousand points of light, wanting to multiply, link up and create a path.
In urban environments in particular, we are separated from the consequences of our actions as surely as the tarmac of the road cuts us off from the earth beneath. This physical boundary encourages a phenomenological separation. Innovative approaches to participatory observation and mapping can overcome this separation when combined with the way the Internet and digital media have enabled individuals to produce and share information globally and instantly. Cracks in the pavement can be widened by creative intervention or social innovation—artworks, social entrepreneurship, scientific intervention or innovations that harness everyday creativity.
Society’s relationship with the environment is increasingly mediated by digital tools. Industrial societies have viewed the environment as a resource to be exploited and tamed. Now a new relationship to environment is beginning to emerge. Mapped, tagged and digitized, the world ceases to be inert raw material (or standing reserve) and becomes instead digitally navigable, computable, manipulable, understandable and experience-able in new ways.
Pervasive and locative arts enable people collectively to participate in sampling their lives, cities and environments, producing new datasets and visualizations in an active engagement with the mediated environment. These forms enable monitoring of digital traces in the environments: footprints in a navigable world. This makes possible an interface between our digital footprint, our environmental footprint, the resources we use and the burden we place on the environment.
Glocal, lobal connections are critical here. One of the Internet’s most powerful impacts, in fact, is at a local level. Social technologies can be a catalyst for local social interactions; witness the success of schemes such as Freecycle and craigslist. These global technologies can also enable people to experience and monitor the changing climate and the effects of what they do, locally and globally.
Increasingly, people are routinely generating data about their environment simply by using media devices connected to the Internet. There are possibilities for environmental sensing that leverage social networks at a very large scale, and for community sensing involving social media and pervasive networks. Envisioning millions of users, each a broadcaster, presents challenges of the intelligibility of a million different data sources, as well as issues of accountability.
As the heat rises, more and more people are engaging with the environment and the challenge of climate change in creative and often unexpected ways. Environment 2.0 investigates the potential for participatory mass observation and builds in a capacity to collect, interpret and develop a critical mass of ideas, experiences and motivations into solutions that can transform our engagement in the environment.
CHRONOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT OF ENVIRONMENT 2.0
Environment 2.0 culminated in the Environment 2.0 Mass Participation projects, conference events and art exhibition at Futuresonic 2009. These events are the culmination of three years of activity, dating back to 2006.
Pilot Carbon Audit (2006-7)
The project commenced with an investigation of the sustainability of Futuresonic itself, and of arts and cultural events generally. In 2006-7 FutureEverything collaborated with Tyndall Centre Manchester and Creative Concern on a Pilot Carbon Audit which has been acclaimed as best practice by the industry (Julie’s Bicycle 2008) and which resulted in a set of tools available to other event organisers, designed to help Futuresonic begin its work on measuring, managing and mitigating the Futuresonic festival’s contribution to climate change. An Emissions Calculator, Events Guide and Report are available for other event organisers to adapt and use, available via http://www.futuresonic.com/07/eco2.html.
Environment 2.0 Special Call, Leonardo (2007-ongoing)
Alongside this activity is the Environment 2.0 call for papers of the journal Leonardo, which seeks new cross-disciplinary thinking on sustainability in urban environments, with a focus on creative intervention, social change and non-Western perspectives. This is the second call for papers of the Leonardo special project Lovely Weather: Artists and Scientists on the Cultural Context of Climate Change. For the Environment 2.0 call for papers, Leonardo is soliciting texts that document the works of artists, researchers, and scholars involved in the exploration of sustainability in urban environments. Themes and issues may include: Sustainability in urban environments; Ubiquitous, pervasive, locative and mobile communication technology; Growing community; and Sowing seeds of social change. The Environment 2.0 call for papers has no deadline and is open to submissions. For further details visit imagination.lancaster.ac.uk/cracksinthepavement/Leonardo.
Environment 2.0, Futuresonic 2007 (2007)
The first public Environment 2.0 event was a conference panel discussion and a commissioned artwork from LoVid at the Futuresonic 2007 festival in May 2007. The conference event involved a cross section of speakers on the sustainability of future arts and technologies, connecting Futuresonic’s interest in mobile and social technologies with the new urgency surrounding climate change. Eric Paulos from Urban Atmospheres at Intel Research introduced Participatory Urbanism, which provides mobile phones with “super-senses” so that everyday citizens can join together to monitor environmental change. Stef van Dongen presented an electricity-generating dancefloor, whereby the more people dance, the more energy they produce. Shaun Fensom, Chair of Manchester Digital and founder of Poptel, was asked to explore “how green is the internet,” in response to an email circulating about the carbon footprint of avatars in the Second Life virtual world. The artwork was NEAR=FAR (So Near and Yet So Far Away). The artists LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) sent cardboard cut out avatars of themselves to the festival instead of flying from New York. In an installation in Manchester, UK, flat 2D abstract video is viewed through a lo-fi binocular tube constructed from cardboard, while LoVid’s Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus are themselves represented by life-size cardboard cut-outs covered in printed colour scans of the artists dressed in VideoWear.
Environment 2.0 Workshop, Lancaster (2007)
The second event was the Environment 2.0 Workshop at Lancaster University in October 2007, featuring the person spearheading the campaign for the congestion charge in Manchester, the Head of Innovation Culture at BBC, sociologists exploring ‘post-car futures’, a community organiser from Manchester, plus many others drawn from very different backgrounds, including environmental science and advocacy, the arts, social sciences and science and technology. They included Adrian Woolard, Alan Dix, Bron Szerszynski, Christian Nold, Drew Hemment, Gabriella Giannachi, Jessica Symons, John Urry, Kingsley Dennis, Maja Kuzmanovic, Mikel Maron, Monika Buscher, Paul Coulton, Paul Upham, Simon Lock, Steve Benford and Steve Connor.
Urban Climate Camp, Singapore (2008)
The third event was the Urban Climate Camp in July 2008, which explored new thinking on environmental sustainability and innovative approaches to grass roots and creative intervention on the environment. It asked what changes in social and material practice are required in order to enhance environmental sustainability, how they can be realised, and what are the local, national and global impacts. It consisted in a series of quick fire presentations by artists, scientists, activists and commentators, and was followed by open discussion, as well as a Luminous Green seminar organised by FoAM featuring moderated discussion on the same theme, plus a workshop the following day. Participants in Urban Climate Camp included Achmad Krisgatha, Andrea Polli, Bello Benischauer, Shiho Fukuhara, Isrizal & Seelan, Jaromil (Denis Roio), Marko Peljhan, Nigel Helyer, Prayas Abhinav, Sabine Himmelsbach, Sapto, Stephanie Rothenberg, Tristan Thielmmann, Vladimir Todorovic, Bahtiar Dwi Susanto, Rustam Vania and Drew Hemment.
Digital Economies Workshop (2008)
The programme has also helped inform and shape other events, for example a workshop organised by Lancaster University in October 2008 looking at how researchers, artists and technologists can help rethink and reshape transport in order to enhance sustainability within an emerging digital economy. It involved representatives from the Ministry of Transport and various companies involved in digital transport systems including the founder of JourneyPlan.
Environment 2.0, Transmediale09 (2009)
In January 2009, Environment 2.0 was announced as the annual theme of Futuresonic and FutureEverything at an invited conference event at Transmediale09 in Berlin, featuring Usman Haque, Andrea Polli and Drew Hemment.
Environment 2.0, Futuresonic 2009 (2009)
At Futuresonic 2009, Environment 2.0 consists in the main theme of the Art Programme, a strand of the Social Technologies Summmit, a number of major participation projects with the Met Office and the Natural History Museum, and a one day Environment 2.0 Open Lab unconference event. The activities have all fed into the Environment 2.0 projects at Futuresonic 2009, thanks to all the people who have participated along the way.
Further events and activity is planned in 2009 and beyond with partners such as Fing and Waag, and at events such as PICNIC. Read about the ongoing impact of the Environment 2.0 project here.
Further details on all Environment 2.0 projects and events on the Environment 2.0 lab website.
Drew Hemment
10 May 2009
Tags: art, Environment, FutureEverything, Futuresonic, Participation, Social Change, Sustainability