Cultural ecology and sustainable urban environments

National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA)
National Institute for Experimental Arts presents HotHouse

Cultural ecology and sustainable urban environments

Symposium
27th-28th July, 2010

Sydney Opera House
Utzon Room

www.niea.unsw.edu.au


Symposium 27th-28th July, 2010, Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House (with drinks and project launch: 27th July, 6pm, Opera House Marquee)

Bookings through Sydney Opera House www.sydneyoperahouse.com.

Updates and blogs: www.niea.unsw.edu.au. Pre and post HotHouse events can be followed on a dedicated HotHouse website to be launched in July 2010.

HotHouse brings together a diverse group of creative thinkers, each with visionary ideas for transforming urban environments. It seeks to cultivate a new cultural ecology in which the arts play a key role, working with the planners and users of city spaces to address urgent environmental problems.

HotHouse advances the proposal that we no longer curate art but curate space. Taking the city as a venue it replaces the traditional idea of ‘exhibiting’ art with a practical vision of art as a catalyst for social and environmental change.

The guiding principle of HotHouse is that of micro-change and universal, networked participation. Micro-change does not mean small change but networked or interconnected change with vast potential for expansion. The HotHousing process is designed to stimulate new projects, connections and local/transnational community collaboration.

Participants in HotHouse include design thinkers such as Bruce Mau who has spearheaded community-driven projects for large-scale sustainable change in both North and South America, Tony Fry, Director of Team D/E/S and founder of the EcoDesign Foundation, and Adrian Parr (University of Cincinnati); artists/designers Janet Laurence, Dan Hill, Allan Giddy, Mathieu Gallois, David Trubridge, Carbon Arts, Makeshift and Digital Eskimo; new media writers such as Mark Pesce, one of the early pioneers in Virtual Reality and co-inventor of VRML; and international curators such as Hou Hanru (San Francisco Art Institute), pioneer of exhibitions that operate in everyday city spaces, and Michaela Crimmin (former director of the UK RSA, Art & Ecology Centre) leading international environmental art curator.

HotHouse is an initiative of the National Institute for Experimental Arts [NIEA] at UNSW (Director, Jill Bennett; Chief Curator, Felicity Fenner) in association with Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design and the City of Sydney.

By Sacha Kagan

Research Associate at the ISCO - Institute of Sociology and Cultural Organization (ISKO - Institut für Soziologie und Kulturorganisation), Leuphana University Lueneburg, Sacha Kagan founded the International level of Cultura21, Network for Cultures of Sustainability, as well as the International Summer School of Arts and Sciences for Sustainability in Social Transformation (ASSiST). The focus of his research and cultural work lies in the trans-disciplinary field of arts and (un-)sustainability. Doctor in Philosophy (Leuphana University Lueneburg) with a thesis on the subject of culture, the arts and sustainability under the perspective of complexity ; M.A. in Cultural Economics (Erasmus University Rotterdam) ; and Graduate of Sciences Po Bordeaux (political sciences). For Cultura21, Sacha is also coordinating the eBooks series, the regular updates on our multi-lingual website, the English section of our webmagazine and the work of our Lueneburg-based interns.