CoolClimate: Addressing Climate Change Through Art

From polar bears to pop art, or how canvases connect disconnects.

Today, thanks to prolific media coverage and the work of hundreds of dedicated nonprofits, most rational people are fully aware of the severity with which climate change threatens humanity and the planet. There is, however, often a disconnect between that rational awareness and our emotional engagement with the issue. This disconnect is precisely what the 2010 CoolClimate Art Contest aims to address through the power of art.

The international competition calls for artists to create iconic images that challenge how we relate to global warming, spanning the entire spectrum of climate change hotpoints — from clean energy to air pollution to honeybee extinction.

Plastic Iceberg Year 3010

Artist: M. L. Dauray

Man Vs. Bees: or Bees as the Canary in the Coal Mine

Artist: Jeff Faerber

Climate Is Changing

Artist: h4nd

From an abstract representation of how global warming impacts a swimming polar bear in oil on canvas to a pop-artish reflection on environmental deterioration, the submissions so far encompass nearly every art genre and medium.

Subconscious

Artist: Pansa Sunavee

Poison Harms All Sea Creatures

Artist: bymarty

Global Warming

Artist: lyndaelyzoo

The competition is judged by an eclectic yet uniformly impressive jury featuring acclaimed comedian-turned-environmental-activist Chevy Chase, Philippe Cousteau, son of legendary marine explorer and activist Jacques Cousteau, and museum world heavy-hitter David Ross.

Step

Artist: PansaSunavee

Submission is open through September 6, so get in on the (climate) action or rally your artist friends to. Meanwhile, browse entries from the U.S. and elsewhere around the world.

via ChangeObserver

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What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets

From Bangladesh to Brazil, or what photojournalism can reveal about food and cultural context.

In case you ever wondered, the most popular Brain Pickings post to date is our review of photographers Peter Menzel and Faith D’Alusio’s Hungry Planet — a grounding portrait of what the world eats, from the $376.45 an Australian family spends on food per week to the $1.23 weekly budget of a same-sized family in Chad’s poorest refugee camp. This week, Menzel and D’Alusio are back with their much-anticipated new book, What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets (public library) — a fascinating project telling the global story of our relationship to food through portraits of 80 people from 30 countries and the food they eat in one day.

I want people to understand their own diets better — and their own chemistry and their own biology. And make better decisions for themselves.” ~ Peter Menzel on NPR

38-year-old Maasai herder, 5 feet 5 inches tall, 103 lbs, typical daily caloric intake: 800 calories. Food staples: Maize meal and milk.

Image copyright Peter Menzel, menzelphoto.com

40-year-old Egyptian camel broker, 5 feet 8 inches tall, 165 lbs, typical daily caloric intake: 3,200 calories. Some food staples: Eggs with butter, fava beans, country bread, potato chips, feta cheese, soup, rice, black tea.

Image copyright Peter Menzel, menzelphoto.com

From a Japanese sumo wrestler to an American competitive eater to a Massai herdswoman, the book offers an exploration of demography through photography, contextualized by compelling essays from some of today’s leading food activists and thinkers, including indispensible voices on the issue like Brain Pickings favorite Michael Pollan.

20-year-old US Army soldier, 6 feet 5 inches tall, 195 lbs, typical daily caloric intake: 4,000 calories. Food staples: Mostly instant ready-to-eat meals.

Image copyright Peter Menzel, menzelphoto.com

36-year-old Latvian vocal teacher and composer, 6 feet tall, 183 lbs, typical daily caloric intake: 3,900 calories. Some food staples: Egg, rye bread with ham, cheese and butter, chicken, potato with mayonnaise, cookies.

Image copyright Peter Menzel, menzelphoto.com

Alongside each of Menzel’s photographs, text by D’Alusio outlines the specifics of the daily diet depicted and places it in a cultural context that explains why, for instance, a Brazilian fisherman of average build can consume 5,200 calories per day and an American truck driver who consumes a comparable amount is clinically obese. Ultimately, the project aims to illuminate the relationship between food and where we are, in life and in the world.

16-year-old Chinese acrobat, 5 feet 2 inches tall, 99 lbs, typical daily caloric intake: 1,700 calories. Some food staples: Yogurt, pork ribs, noodles, eggs, broth, green tea.

Image copyright Peter Menzel, menzelphoto.com

45-year-old Tibetan head monk, 5 feet 5 inches tall, 158 lbs, typical daily caloric intake: 4,900 calories. Some food staples: Butter tea, dried cheese curds, barley flour cake, noodle soup with potato.

Image copyright Peter Menzel, menzelphoto.com

Part Food, Inc., part FridgeWatcher, the project is a potent antidote to Neil Burgess’s recent rant about the death of photojournalism — What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets is a bundle of storytelling and humanity that unravels itself before your eyes, leaving you hungry to better understand the correlation between food, environment and quality of life.

via NPR

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Robin Moore’s String Math Portraits

String theory for the rest of us, or what vintage photography has to do with gaming for good.

In the early 1980s, James R. Murphy began teaching mathematics using string figures in an effort to engage students who didn’t “like” math. Kids found the activity enormously fun and, almost without realizing it, learned to the kind of focus and dedication necessary for solving a problem by completing a series of complex steps — a fundamental skill in math and science. Essentially, it was an early successful experiment in using gaming for education — something on the minds of many of today’s social-good innovators.

One day, Murphy asked Robin Moore, a student of his and a budding photographer, to take some pictures of the string figures, initially intended purely as a visual record. But Moore produced a series of remarkable black-and-white portraits of these kids and their strings.

Taken in La Guardia, often against the backdrop of bathroom walls and decaying hallways, these portraits exude the palpable pride the kids take in their string creations, at once delighted with and enthralled by these logic-driven tangles.

More about the project, including papers about Murphy’s original methodology for teaching via string figures, can be found in Murphy’s String Figures: Teaching Math With String Figures.

And what became of Robin Moore? We, after enlisting the help of Sergey and Larry, couldn’t answer. To be filed in our would-love-to-do-a-story-one-day box: A Portrait of Robin Moore.

via Coudal

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Dark Night of the Soul

Cultural treasure-hunting, or what priceless music has to do with expensive photography.

David Lynch and Danger Mouse are two of creative culture’s most radical movers-and-shakers. This month, they’ve come together in a too-good-to-be-true-(but-it-is-true) project: Dark Night of the Soul — a priceless multimedia collaboration featuring all-star vocalists like The Flaming Lips, Iggy Pop, Suzanne Vega, Broken Bells, and even Lynch himself singing on two of the tracks.

From psychedelic electronica to fluid folk-rock to gritty blues, the compilation spans a remarkable spectrum of genres and talent.

To add to the cultural treasure status of the project, the album was co-masterminded by legendary producer Mark Linkous a.k.a. Sparklehouse, who tragically took his own life earlier this year. While the album was set to release in 2009, a number of licensing bureaucracies led to seemingly indefinite delays. Finally, albeit posthumously for Linkous, Dark Night of the Soul is seeing light of day – and what a light it is.

The project features an interesting interactive website and an absolutely stunning collector’s edition companion book of haunting photographs by David Lynch. (Which, if you’re in New York, you can see at the Morrison Hotel Gallery.) For a closer look at the collaboration, KCRW’s Jason Bentley has an excellent interview with Lynch and Danger Mouse.

I joked and I said ‘I thought you were coming up here because you wanted me to sing on this thing’ and he said ‘No no no, I do’, but he was like being real polite. And so one thing led to another, and not only did a get to do the photographs, but I got to sing on two tracks.” ~ David Lynch

You can grab an mp3 copy of the album on Amazon or iTunes, but we highly recommend going for the deluxe box set — collaborations like this come by once every few decades, and this one is worth celebrating with the full bells and whistles: Four discs, including an instrumental CD, a poster, 48-page minibook, and original photographs by David Lynch.

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