Lea Schick

Lea Schick is the editor and moderator of this debate forum. During the RETHINK exhibition she will facilitate the RETHINK NATURE discussions here on her blog. We will very much encourage you to participate in the debate!

The interface in the sky

“The climate crisis introduces us to the fact that our immediate surroundings are being mediated by complex visualisations, interfaces, statistics and carbon quotas – thus an imaginary computer interface lurks in the blue sky, even deep in the country with no computers in sight!” (Søren Pold)

Climate is being measured and monitored all the time through pervasive computing and satellite systems. We don’t see the interface for climate measurements, but being a part of our climate, we as well get observed and interface/interlace with these ubiquitous technology systems. How does this situation change our perception of our being in the world, our nature and our climate? In his article, Imaginary Interfaces in the Blue Sky Søren Pold describes this situation through a number of climate art works. We have to make interfaces for the climate problem in which the viewers are given the opportunity to understand and influence it.
 

Read also Gabrielle Gramelsbergers article, The Strange World of Climate Models.

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Contributions for RETHINK NATURE

 

ABOUT RETHINK NATURE

Discussions about climate change often seem to be centered around the concept of nature as ‘the Other’ – something that is outside of us. Sometimes lost, sometimes distant, often something we have left behind, and something to which we should perhaps return, in one form or another. But thus nature is also something, which we have been largely able to happily forget over the course of our industrial revolutions, and to omit almost entirely from consideration in conventional human planning and development.

But the reality of climate change – a force of Nature so all-pervasive and profound in the severity of its realized and projected effects that it is compelling us to rethink practically every aspect of life on our planet – makes this romanticization and idealization of ‘Mother Nature’ difficult to maintain, and demonstrates that our perception of any meaningful distance from nature is shockingly illusory. We have not returned to nature; nature is returning to us, forcing us as it did our ancestors to transform our methods of devising and executing every sphere of human existence. When we can (un)intentionally change the weather, when water and air are commodities that we can own, and when the very climate has become a subject of intense political debate at every level, then nature again becomes a complex and ambiguous phenomenon.

How does climate change force us to rethink our notions of nature? And how does our perception of nature affect how we deal with climate change? Through a number of articles approaching different aspects of what we call ‘nature’, we encourage you to share your opinions and thoughts with the writers and with other interested.

 

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Debate the RETHINK NATURE contributions on the blog to the left.