Fish drying rack under salt by Simon IngsReplica (
Image: gunnal hollmstad)
Sitting on a driftwood sculpture in the middle of a large play pool, a man in silver paint and tights-I think he should be a fish-is shouting out his lungs.
He is trying to express the emotion of the sea.
There is a lot of this on the Scandinavian art stage and it is spreading.
Normally it doesn't work, but with the exception of crazy, ugly and very stupid experiments, how will we express it in human terms instead of numbers, climate change, mass extinction and the severity of what we are learning to call the epoch-making depletion of the human world?
The theme of this year's Lofoten International Festival is "art experiments help us express the seriousness of climate change in human terms rather than numbers ". A 24-year-
Old institutions, held every other year on a group of islands in northern Norway
On the west coast above the Arctic Circle.
This year's festival explores several scenarios of disappearance: People leave the countryside to go to cities, and on a global scale, the countryside itself is disappearing in unexpected and disturbing ways.
There is paranoia in this vision, and the impulse of the millennium has nothing to do with science.
However, with the proximity of the UN climate conference in Paris and the discovery of Syrian refugees cycling from Arctic Russia into Norway, some responses will certainly be welcome in addition to blind panic.
At Ars Electronica Music Festival in Linz, Austria, a 36-year-old behemoth in the field of art, science and design, discrete "problems" were found in a clearly outdated way
For example, it features the "future mobile" Expo, where the star is Mercedes-
Luxury Sports self-timer Mercedesdriving car.
F015 aims to illustrate the future "when robots are more intelligent than people in factories, everything is connected intelligently, cars are autonomous, and drones are sending emails ".
Don't let the car styling fool you, this "car" is the size of the truck, filled with exotic materials.
Nearby, the curator sprayed bright red paint by placing a "Fahrradi Farfalla FFX" made of bicycle parts and Garver tape, the ridiculous and exaggerated "sports car of Austrian artist Hannes Langeder
Emotional "Fish Man "(Image: Liaf)
Ars Electronica is filled with such gestures.
This year, it also launched PSX Consulting, an international co-operative company that produces sex toys for plants.
The information board explains the reproductive "problem" of each plant and then proposes a "solution ".
For a sterile plant that can only be bred through a root-like stem-ginger, the weather balloon will take these plants to the same temperature layer, hoping to be there, the increase in solar radiation will bring some changes to its genome.
Alas, this is not true: the ginger-yellow root is not sterile-it is another flowering ginger, and it can be bred through root-like stems in addition to producing seeds.
The intervention used to look clever and then cute, but it's annoying now.
Even if the premise is correct, if what our deteriorating ecology tells us, it is that our approach to solving discrete problems will only generate more problems in the future.
Why don't we focus on what's going on in our world and talk about it as honestly as possible?
This is the idea behind salt, it's a refreshing low salt
The main festival on the island of sandhorney in Norway is just over.
In the next few years, it will surround the northernmost settlement on Earth, from Greenland to the Farrow islands, from Scotland to spiibergen.
It held concerts attended by thousands of people, but most importantly, when a small number of tourists crowded in a hut composed of floating wood and containers to meditate, the Norwegian artist HC Gilje's mobile lighting device evokes a brief passage of life in the landscape. SALT’s co-founder Helga-
On September, when I visited, Mary Norby apologized: The weather was so warm that you could take a bath in the sea and dry in the sun.
"This is not usually the case," she said . ".
Followed by an eloquent silence for a long time.