main conference abstracts & biographies - University of New South ...

Dunn is President, Co-Founder and Program Director of the Art and Science
Laboratory and President of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, both in Santa Fe, New
Mexico. His compositions and wildlife sound recordings have appeared in
hundreds of international forums, concerts, broadcasts, and exhibitions. Besides
his multiple books, recordings and soundtracks, he has been anthologized in over
50 journals and books. Dunn was the recipient of the prestigious Alpert Award for
Music in 2005.
http://davidddunn.com/~david/
DAY TWO: SATURDAY 20 AUGUST
PLENARY
AMY BALKIN
Public Smog and Other Place-Based Projects
California-based artist Amy Balkin will discuss her work Public Smog, an
atmospheric park, and other spatial projects. These include attempts to
construct counterfactual spaces, and remap existing ones.
Public Smog (2004+) is a series of attempts to open a public clean-air park in the
sky through economic and political activities. These include purchasing and
withholding emission credits in regulated carbon trading schemes, and an
attempt to add the Earth's atmosphere to the UNESCO World Heritage List. In the
context of Australia's upcoming carbon tax and future carbon floor price, Public
Smog is a consideration of the commodified atmosphere and how financial
logic plays out in the sky.
The landscape as property, political participation and disenfranchisement, and
environmental justice, connect Public Smog to her other counter-cartographic
efforts. These include This is the Public Domain, an ongoing attempt to initiate a
permanent global commons in rural Kern County, California; and Invisible-5, a
self-guided critical audio tour of the I-5, California's main transport corridor.
Together, her projects are concerned with how landscape is produced, and the
problems involved with producing other, politically dormant landscapes instead.
They also run up against the discontented relationship between art and activism,
and the stakes over the ongoing commodification of the landscape and just
access to the world's common-pool resources.
BIOGRAPHY
Amy Balkin is an artist whose work involves land and the geopolitical relationships
that frame it. Her projects include This is the Public Domain, an ongoing effort to
create a permanent international commons, free to all in perpetuity, through the
legal transfer of 2.64 acres of land near Tehachapi, California to the global
34