M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

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There is nothing new about good intentions based on solid evidence driving changes that (Oops!) produced toxic consequences. We need to be both quick and provisional about our solutions. The difficulty is not technical but social. Technical approaches are needed, but as we crowd together on shrinking islands, we especially, increasingly will need empathy, an ethic of curiosity. Beauty is a powerful force, directed toward stilling, openness and ambiguity. These qualities also describe a relationship to nature at its most essential: wonder, awe, an unsettling, diffident attraction, a feeling that the things in the world exceed our capacity for understanding, knowledge and cognition. Such beauty is able to contain contradictions, to delicately hold together contrarieties without resolution. Beauty is a method that both art and nature wield. It is a generative transformer. Image, symbol, can change minds but not determine them. Both species and art traffic in thick images, specific physical constellations which both reveal and stand apart from the world. Andre Leroi-Ghoran spoke of the un-worked geometric rocks, fossils and crystals collected by prehistoric humans as “congealed reflections of thought in nature” (11). It is this particular kind of formimage, both unique and quotidian, which may charm us into curiosity and encourage a widening experience. Buses, now as social affirmations, also sustain the interactions of animals as much in danger as we are. Notes 1. http://www.sfmta.com/cms/mtep/tepover.htm 2. Project support has been partially provided by: Adobe Foundation, Potrero Nuevo Fund of the Tides Foundation, San Francisco Art Commission, San Francisco Foundation, and the Zellerbach Family Foundation. For information on Community Initiatives see www.communityin.org 3. Watts, Alan W., The Joyous Cosmology. p.29, Pantheon Books, New York, 1962 4. Habermas, Jurgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989. (Trans, Thomas Burger) 5. For a discussion of infrastructure investment in the US see Todorovich, Petra, “An Infrastructure and Economic Recovery Plan for the United States” in Land Lines, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The report may be downloaded at http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/PubDetail.aspx?pubid=1558 6. San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, Muni’s Million Dollar Problem, accessed at http://www.spur.org/documents/20060228- MunisBillionDollarProblem.pdf 7. For relationships between transportation, climate change and urban form see Ewing, Reid et al, Growing Cooler, Urban Land Institute, Washington DC, 2008. For environmental impacts of transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area, see http://www.mtc.ca.gov/planning/2035_plan/ 8. Thanks to Caroline Chen, researcher at University of California at Berkeley, for the park/transit metaphor. 9. See, for example, Gunderson, Lance H. and Hollis, C.S., Panarchy, Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, Island Press, Washington DC 2002. 10. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, 1854. 11. Duchamp, beaten to the Readymade by thirty-thousand years. See Leroi- Gourhan, André, Gesture and Speech, p.369, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993 (Trans. Anna Bostock Berger) 42 9. See, for example, Gunderson, Lance H. and Hollis, C.S., Panarchy, Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, Island Press, Washington DC 2002. 10. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, 1854. 11. Duchamp, beaten to the Readymade by thirty-thousand years. See Leroi- Gourhan, André, Gesture and Speech, p.369, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993 (Trans. Anna Bostock Berger) Todd Gilens works as a visual artist, curator, and landscape architect. Since the late 1970’s his projects have been seen in abandoned factories, in storefronts and on people’s refrigerators, in rock crevices and in condominium courtyards, among other places. In 1995 he co-curated “Prison Sentences,” an exhibition of site-specific artworks in an abandoned Philadelphia prison. Now on the National Register of Historic Buildings and a popular tourist destination, artworks have remained part of the penitentiary’s interpretive program. Todd received funding in 2001 from Harvard University to research redesigned industrial land in Mexico, Netherlands, UK, Germany and the United States. His research was presented at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design as the exhibition “Brown Fields and Grey Waters.” He is currently working on spatial design with urban kids, a bicycle stand, and several collaborative sculpture projects in the San Francisco area. For more of his work, see www.follywog.com
MAINTAINING A GREEN NEWS AGENDA This paper discusses the professional motivations that have privileged environmental issues a place in the media’s agenda; it describes how a relationship between the news audience and news issues that is common among news professionals and evolving with time, is emphasised within production in a similar way to that found within the manufacture of the regional news programme. Text by Julian Mathews R eporting on findings from a production study of the BBC children’s news programme Newsround. (1) A suggestion emerges from this overview of programme production that the programme’s unique news culture plays an important role in shaping the coverage in contrast to other explanations of elite agenda setting and of production based constraints. This paper exploring this closely, describes how a relationship between the news audience and news issues that is common among news professionals and evolving with time, is emphasised within production in a similar way to that found within the manufacture of the regional news programme (see Cottle 1993a). This understanding, in specific terms, informs the news selection process and shapes the character of the programmes’ reporting in a way which the following suggests offers a limited resource to understand the factors creating and shaping environmental issues. Before we discuss evidence for these claims, however, it would be advantageous to first explore the role of form in shaping environmental news representations. News and environmental issues: Various academic arguments have been put forward to explain the presence of environmental issues in mainstream news agendas (Anderson 2009). Some that focus on fluctuations in coverage, for example, put forward the agenda setting activities of prominent social institutions and interest groups as seminal (Anderson 1997; Hannigan 1995; Hansen 1993) as these make such ‘problems’ appear as legitimate political issues and as irresistible for the politically focused agendas of news journalists (Parlour & Schatzow 1978; Love 1990; Gaber 2000). Commenting on the ebbs and flows of coverage such studies capture an aspect of the process that should not be overlooked. This model of the source and journalist relationship, however, on close examination 43 appears to offer the news journalist too passive a role in the news process. As those who study the production process have commented, these individuals actively select and shape the news agenda rather than serve as secondary definers of issues as explained above, a view to which this paper is sympathetic. Therefore, we learn from later work how standardised news cultures, news practices and the production process contribute to the visibility of these issues. As a significant aspect of the process, the judgements that select news, it is urged, remain the focus of a number of wider concerns such as general established culturally inscribed understandings of the environment (Daley and O'Neill 1991; Linne and Hansen 1990; Gamson and Modigliani 1989), demands of news style and broadcast time among others (Friedman 1986; Dunwoody and Griffin 1993; Harrabin 2000). The 'unexpected' and visually attractive rather the slow evolving environmental issue (Lowe and Morrison 1984; Singer & Endreny 1993; Anderson 1997), for instance, is considered specifically newsworthy along with those with potential 'dramatic' character, ‘apolitical nature’ and 'emotional' appeal (Lowe and Morrison 1984). Other features and considerations beside these often ensure their failure within the news production process (Hansen 1990; Lacey and Longman 1993), and taken together such insights widen a view of influences that secure selection beyond the activities of elite actors and institutions. But again, this view of the standardised pressures at play within production does not produce a complete explanation of the visibility of issues as unobserved here is the importance of the differences in news programmes’ presentation, or news differentiation, as an additional factor. So, it is important to recognise that the features that make news programmes distinct should also be considered important in maintaining, conditioning and shaping environmental news
Page 1 and 2: Antennae Issue 10 - Summer 2009 ISS
Page 3 and 4: T his issue of Antennae is fully de
Page 5 and 6: ‘Y ou don’t need a Ph.D. in lin
Page 7 and 8: Simon Starling Kakteenhaus, 2002, V
Page 9 and 10: BEYOND CLASSIC FIELD BIOLOGY: BATRA
Page 11 and 12: Brandon Ballengée DFA 83, Karkinos
Page 13 and 14: empathy in viewers. The intention i
Page 15 and 16: Brandon Ballengée The Ever Changin
Page 17 and 18: investigations; for example, explor
Page 19 and 20: F ood production, energy consumptio
Page 21 and 22: W hat is a Translocal Curator? We u
Page 23 and 24: The feminist challenge to patriarch
Page 25 and 26: O ver the last several decades, the
Page 27 and 28: Julian Montague The Stray Shopping
Page 29 and 30: Julian Montague The Stray Shopping
Page 31 and 32: L ondon Fieldworks’ latest projec
Page 33 and 34: London Fieldworks Stalin Animal Sho
Page 35 and 36: and violence; keeping urban reality
Page 37 and 38: E ndangered Species began as a resp
Page 39 and 40: Todd Gilens Top images: Waiting at
Page 41: Todd Gilens Foldable Pelican Bus
Page 45 and 46: coverage shaped in this way appeare
Page 47 and 48: CAPE FAREWELL: THE ULTIMATE JOURNEY
Page 49 and 50: David Hinton Director David Hinton
Page 51 and 52: Nathan Gallagher Ryuichi Sakamoto o
Page 53 and 54: Patrick Huse Bølgende landskap, wa
Page 55 and 56: Which brings me back to what origin
Page 57 and 58: nature. The affirmation is one that
Page 59 and 60: Max Eastley Max Eastley recording s
Page 61 and 62: and leave land behind. This region
Page 63 and 64: Max Eastley Exposición CAPE FAREWE
Page 65 and 66: I t can be argued that culturally a
Page 67 and 68: Ana Mendieta Untitled, from the ser
Page 69 and 70: Ackroyd & Harvey FlyTower 2007, Nat
Page 71 and 72: Ackroyd & Harvey Green brick, green
Page 73 and 74: Ken Yonetani The Dead Sea, 2008, ce
Page 75 and 76: Mark Wilson and Bryndís Snæbjörn
Page 77 and 78: Georgina Reid For the Baby, In Ligh
Page 79 and 80: Art Orienté Objet have been creati
Page 81 and 82: Art Orienté Objet Bwiti Turning, 2
Page 83 and 84: and his environment emerges from th
Page 85 and 86: Art Orienté Objet The Happy Hen, 2
Page 87 and 88: M INE is a documentary film by Gera
Page 89 and 90: Geralyn Pezanoski Mine: Taken By Ka
Page 91 and 92: 91 MAUSOLEUM The extraordinary bota
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Gregory Pryor Herbarium, Naturhisto
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Gregory Pryor Top Image: Black Sola
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Brandon Ballengée DFA 2, Héphaist
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