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The night sky may never have looked as disturbingly different as it did in Black Shoals Stock Market
Planetarium, 2001/2004, for which the Londonbased artists Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway
projected an array of otherworldly constellations
onto a planetarium-style dome. Each astral body corresponds not to nature but to a publicly traded company, as a computer program translates the real-time
financial activity of the worlds stock exchanges into
glimmering stars. At Tate Britain in 2001, the piece
connected to a Reuters news feed; at the Nikolaj
Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center in 2004, it was
wired to the local stock exchange. Stars flash brightly
whenever their stock is traded, gathering into clusters
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Amy Balkin, Public Smog, 200611, stills from a black-and-white and color video, 16 minutes. From Amy Balkin, Public Smog, 2004.
Above: Representation of the proposed park over Brighton, UK. Below: Representation of the proposed park over Los Angeles.
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they engage. In this sense, the entire endeavor of ecologically minded art presses the age-old question of
art and lifethe union of which long glimmered in
the dreams of the neo-avant-gardeinto literally new
terrain that is not only social but more specifically
biopolitical and eco-financial. Just as nature can no
longer be understood as a pristine and discrete realm
apart from human activity, arts autonomy is all the
more untenable when faced with ecological catastrophe. Or so some artists are now demonstrating,
by going far beyond institutional critique (and the
eco-institutional critique of, say, Greenforts work)
and opting for an explicitly activist and interventionist
practice, one that knows there is no Eden, no virgin
spring to which we may return.
These agentsperhaps there is no better term
often shun institutional enclosure, privileging the
importance of local projects and communities and
blurring the distinctions between art and activism.
A number of figures successfully straddle these
contextsartists and groups such as Fritz Haeg,
Superflex, Marjetica Potrc, Art Not Oil, Allora &
Calzadilla, the Yes Men, and the London-based artist Nils Norman, who has focused on producing
artistic interventions that promote a model of community-driven ecological sustainability. Norman is
best known for his 20012004 Geocruisera refurbished coach running on biodiesel, fitted with solar
panels, and containing a community library and a
greenhouse. His Edible Park, which opened in 2010
in the Binckhorst area of The Hague, serves as a
more ambitious and long-term laboratory for sustainable urban planning. Mapped out in working
drawings that explain the projects mixture of agricultural biodiversity, localism, and experimental collectivism, Edible Park was conceived in part as a
response to a proposal by Rem Koolhaass Office for
Metropolitan Architecture for a new creative hub for
The Hague, which would have included an amusement park and leisure district, a beach, a range of
skyscrapers, and a Formula 1 racetracka highimpact, energy-intensive spontaneous city, the
plans for which were unsurprisingly mothballed following the 2008 financial meltdown. In striking
contrast to OMAs visions of grandeur, Normans
low-tech counter master plan joined organic
agriculture and practices such as rainwater harvesting, forest gardening, and composting to craft his
model of eco-communalism and bioregionalism,
realized in collaboration with a local group of permaculture activists. Norman also worked with
Dutch architect Michel Post to build a central placemaking structure, a roundhouse with passive
solar front windows and straw-bale construction.
The structures shape recalls the fantastical modernism of German architect Bruno Taut, who worked
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NOTES
1. Cefn Hoile, Black Shoals: Evolving Organisms in a World of Financial Data, January 2008, http://cefn.com/
cefn/?BlackShoalsPaper.
2. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France, 19781979, trans. Graham Burchell
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 226; and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
3. In fact, some conservation scientists argue that we are in the midst of a mass extinction event as a result of human
activity. See Juliette Jowit, Humans Driving Extinction Faster Than Species Can Evolve, Say Experts, The Guardian,
March 7, 2010, http://guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/07/extinction-species-evolve.
4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1991), 263.
5. See Neil Smith, Nature as Accumulation Strategy, in Coming to Terms with Nature, Socialist Register 43, ed. Leo
Panitch and Colin Leys, (London: Merlin Press, 2007), http://neil-smith.net/vectors/nature-as-accumulation-strategy.
6. See Amy Balkins website, which includes links to critical literature, including Tamra Gilbertson and Oscar Reyes,
Carbon Trading: How It Works and Why It Fails (Uppsala, Sweden: Dag Hammarskjld Foundation, 2009), http://
publicsmog.org.
7. See Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007) and The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
8. Dipesh Chakrabarty surveys the scientific consensus and points to one historiographic challenge: the imperative to think
the deep history of species history of humans in conjunction with the global histories of capital, in The Climate of
History: Four Theses, Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): esp. 212.
9. This is the title of Vandana Shivas contribution to Documenta 12s 100 Notes100 Thoughts publication project
(Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2011).
10. Among the pertinent examples here are the Bolivian 2011 Law of Mother Earth and the 2010 Ecuadoran lawsuit
against BP following the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
11. See, for instance, Ten Principles for Sustainable Societies, in Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World
Is Possible: A Report of the International Forum on Globalization, ed. John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander (San Francisco:
Berrett-Koehler, 2003), 77104.
12. See Flix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 65.
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