ECO-VISIONARIES: ART, ARCHITECTURE AND NEW MEDIA AFTER THE ANTHROPOCENE

Boldly re-imagining responses to our global environmental crises, this exceptional new companion volume to the collaborative 2018 exhibition hosted by MAAT, Bildmuseet, HeK and LABoral shows how art, architecture and new media go beyond the idea of sustainability, through video and sound works, paintings and installations.

Beginning with a series of short, thoughtful introductory essays, the seven-main-chapter book comprises 176 pages and 170 illustrations. Each chapter connects the views that have emerged – from ecological art to architects’ investigations and interactive designers’ imagined adaptations – and shows media artists’ critical perspectives on big data.

Addressing architecture, Amale Andraos’ essay, ‘The Timeliness of Architecture’s Eco-Visionary Practices’, examines how the discipline can re-think how we communicate around climate change, using examples from contemporary practitioners Ant Farm and Sculpture in the environment (SITE). “If architecture embodies the clichéd meeting ground between art and science – recasting problems to offer more than engineered solutions, reframing the sites and scales of interventions, and moving beyond either/or conditions to design ways of holding things together – then now is the time for architecture to bridge…” she writes.

This is a must-read for architects, designers and all creative thinkers who demand more of themselves, their disciplines and the world.