I have a piece appearing in the Photography and DART Area Show tonight at 7pm in the SOFA Gallery at IU-Bloomington. It’s the first time I’ve had anything in a proper art show.
The piece I have is called Discount Electronics. It’s a satire of consumer electronics websites. As one interacts with the site, it starts to degenerate until it becomes an unusable mess, revealing the mess consumerism produces.
Categories: academic · art · environmentalism
The Garden of Eden is an interesting project that uses lettuce planted in air-tight capsules with the pollution levels of the G8 capitals simulated inside. It think it’s an interesting attempt on data visualization in that it uses the Internet to gather the data and reflect it with the lettuce in a literally organic way.
[ via VVork ]
Categories: art · crticism · design · environmentalism · politics
[ I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while. I had some great conversations this past weekend, which almost inspired me to create it last night. Today, however, I ran across Mountain Dew's Green Lable Art and it pushed me over the edge into bloglandia. ]
I like that the word green is used to describe environmentally-friendly products and services. It links environmentally sustainable economic and design practices with a strong, efficient economy. Plus it’s much more friendly and less hippy-fied than “environmentally-friendly”, “Earth conscious”, etc. But what I don’t like is that is can so easily be used to greenwash items – or at least imply that something is more green than it really is.
Mountain Dew’s Green Label Art advertising campaign – while making no claim to being environmentally conscious in any way – is just another case of co-opting environmentalism to push obsolete products like high-fructose corn syrup-saturated fizzy water. There is nothing wrong with soda (especially if it made with natural sugars and you recycle the can), but there is definitely something wrong with calling a campaign directed towards less-than-contentious teenagers green. It can be no coincidence that they choose that name and base this campaign around urban artists (who generally fall towards the true green crowd).
On the plus side of the situation, it is nice to see a campaign by a soft drink company sponsor creative expression, though I’m sure no dissension will be tolerated. It’s just unfortunate Mountain Dew didn’t link this with release of a healthier version of its product.
Categories: art · crticism · environmentalism
