Energy!
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
Join The New School’s stellar faculty for another edition of “A New School Moment” as they unravel some of the complexities of a particularly pressing political, cultural or social issue. On March 5, the focus is energy.
Energy comes to us from the earth’s deepest crevices to the furthest reaches of the solar system – often through substantial technological advances, sometimes at equally substantial costs to humans. This increasingly complex system of human agency and infrastructures is the topic of this exchange, organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In brief, succinct presentations, the speakers examine the potential consequences if energy were to be considered a “partner” in the endeavor of producing and consuming energy. Reflecting recent developments in philosophy, sometimes grouped under the heading of “speculative materialism,” the panelists propose that energy is not dead matter but an active agent that needs to be recognized as such in order to make human life sustainable on this planet.
Faculty members from across The New School analyze various notions of energy, drawing from their expertise in the political and sciences, media studies, environmentalism and design, as well as art. Each will speak for seven minutes and analyze energy from his or her particular professional domain. Jamie Kruse, whose artwork Thingness of Energy is currently on view the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, opens the forum.
Moderator
Edward Keller, designer, musician, Associate Dean of Distributed Learning and Technology, Associate Professor, School of Design Strategies, Parsons The New School for Design
Participants
Jonathan Bach, Associate Professor, International Affairs, New School for Public Engagement
Liz Barry, Director, Urban Environment, The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, part-time faculty, Parsons The New School for Design (SCE, SDS)
Jacalyn Brookner, artist, Fine Arts Program, Parsons The New School for Design
Georgina Drew, anthropologist, Post-Doctorate Fellow, India China Institute, The New School
Jamie Kruse, artist and independent scholar
Alan H. McGowan, Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Science, Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Eugene Lang College
Arthur Ou, artist, Director, BFA Photography, and Assistant Professor, School of Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design
David White, Assistant Professor, Environmental Technology & Material Sciences, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School of Design
Rafi Youatt, Assistant Professor, Politics, The New School for Social Research
* Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in conjunction with the 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness,” and with the support of the Office of Sustainability and The Green Fund.
Posted on February 21, 2012
Jamie Kruse: Thingness of Energy
Parsons The New School for Design
2 West 13th Street (off Fifth Avenue)
Exhibition hours: Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday, 12 to 6 p.m.
Thingness of Energy is a mixed media art installation by Jamie Kruse, presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in the lobby of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, a glass-enclosed gallery opening onto Fifth Avenue. It serves as the physical and virtual hub for long-term discussions as well as temporary interactions, events and happenings on The New School’s energy use and its economic, environmental, ethical, urban and artistic implications.
With unprecedented access to the university’s infrastructure and support staff, Kruse has spent six months investigating the flow of energy through various New School buildings. The outcome of her research is a complex, intricate and fragile assemblage of the physical components of energy. The installation is made up of the material conduits of energy – the pipes, wires, switch boxes and tubes through which it flows – as well as samples of some of the energy sources themselves (fossil fuels and coal) in addition to maps and photographs. Mounted on the building’s membrane, i.e. its windows, the installation is visible from both the street and the building’s interior underscoring the correlation between producer of energy – the outside – to consumer of energy – the people in the building.
Energy materials and flows are often hidden in basements or invisibly channeled through pipes and wires. Thingness of Energy is a provocation to consider and directly experience the material realities of energy. Taking The New School’s Climate Action Plan as its point of departure, the project reveals the deep geologic nature and effects of the materials we use to generate and transmit energy. And it underscores the power of deep time – both past and future – as a generator of energy forms and effects.
At its core, Thingness of Energy poses the question: what if “anticipating geologic scales of force, change, and effect” became a common design specification for energy production and distribution, policy-making, and infrastructure design?
The presentation is accompanied by several public programs, among them an installation walkthrough and facilities tour on Thursday, February 23, 12:30 p.m. (RSVP required: vlc@newschool.edu) and an energy-driven exchange among New School faculty members from different programs, on Monday, March 5, 6:30 p.m.
The opening reception coincides with other openings at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Where Do We Migrate To?, curated by Niels Van Tomme.
For further information, visit
www.veralistcenter.org/kruse
http://smudgestudio.org/smudge/Thingness.html
For inquiries regarding artist-led tours or public classes, please contact vlc@newschool.edu.
* * *
Jamie Kruse is an artist, designer and independent scholar. In 2006 she co-founded (with Elizabeth Ellsworth) smudge studio, based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Recent projects include Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York. Exhibitions have been presented at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Incident Report, Hudson, New York. She has been granted residencies with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT; Sundance Preserve; the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art; and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Kruse is the author of the Friends of the Pleistocene blog.
* * *
Thingness of Energy is an art project by Jamie Kruse, developed and produced in collaboration with The New School’s Office for Sustainability, the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The project is supported, in part, by The New School’s Green Fund and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”
Posted on January 18, 2012
Art and Science Transdisciplinary Lectures: Kim Knowlton, Senior Scientist and Director, Global Warming and Health Project, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)
2 West 13th Street at 5th Avenue
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A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.
Kim Knowlton discusses how climate change impacts public health and how energy production alters landscapes and lives. She explores the story of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to shed light on the far-ranging impacts of energy choices we make today on near-term and future environmental and health consequences.
This lecture is paired with a talk by artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle on October 12, 2010, who will talk of his recent works on natural and constructed phenomena, including climate change.
* * *
Kim Knowlton, PhD, is senior scientist with the Health and Environment Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), where she leads the Global Warming and Health Project. She is also Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and chair of the Global Climate Change and Health Committee of the Environment Section at the American Public Health Association. She was among the scientists who participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. She works at NRDC on communicating the health impacts of global warming, and on advocating for public health strategies to prepare for and prevent these impacts. Her published research has looked at heat- and ozone-related mortality and illnesses, as well as climate change’s effects on pollen, allergies and asthma, and infectious illnesses. She attended Cornell University and Hunter College/CUNY, and received a doctorate in public health from Columbia University. She was a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia, and a Mellon Foundation Teaching Fellow in Barnard College’s Department of Environmental Sciences before joining NRDC.
Posted on September 29, 2010
