William Blake was critical of the rigid, reductive influence of Newton’s ideas, of his insensibility to vision and ethical restraint. Describing Blake’s portrait, Alan Moore remarks that: ‘Newton sits in single-minded concentration, crouched above his calculations and immune to the more fractal charm of blue and orange lichens spattering the rocky backdrop, his chill bench…
Category: Frontiers in Retreat
Writing with Water
As part of my current Frontiers in Retreat residency with HIAP on Suomenlinna island, Finland, I ran a two day workshop on Writing with Water with postgraduate students from University of the Arts, Helsinki from the new Ecology and Contemporary Performance MA and from Performance Studies – Christiana Bissett, Ida Larsen, Elina Minn and Jussi…
M for Mycelium
Zooetics is a five year research project by art collaboration Jutempus*, exploring the possibility of bringing human knowledge, technologies and processes into closer collaboration and understanding with the knowledge, technologies and processes of other life that we are co-existing with on the planet. This month the Zooetics Pavilion is in the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius…
SAÓ Festival in the Catalan Pyrenees
110 people attended the SAÓ Festival on 11 October 2015 organised by the Centre d’Art i Natura in the vicinity of the village of Farrera in the Catalan Pyrenees. In the morning the audience saw Joanès Simon-Perret’s tree caressing machine and his mountain mirrors greeting the midday sun. Next they passed by my writing on water at the…
the little river tributaries number more than your eyelashes
On Sunday 11 October I will make an action in the landscape concerning water for the SAO Festival organised by the Centre d’Art i Natura in Farrera in the Catalan Pyrenees. The other artists presenting work are Joanes Simon-Perret, Quelic Berga, Anna Rubio and Meritxell Romanos and Blai Mesa. [The post title is adapted from a…
navigating islands
Just spent a few days on Uto, the outermost island amongst 50,000 in the Finnish Turku Archipelago. I was there with a group of artists from the Frontiers in Retreat network and students and professors from Aalto University and Helsinki University of the Arts. On the long ferry journey I ran a workshop on ‘Viking…
Posts from an Island 5 of 5: Water
Water is essential to all life and around 67% of the human body is water. Although 71% of the planet’s surface is water, only 2.5% is fresh drinking water. The total amount of water in the planet’s water cycle always stays the same but since water has three states: gas, liquid and solid, changes in…
Posts from an Island 4 of 5: Citizen Science
BioStrike are an international collective of artists and scientists working on citizen science with a hacker ethos. I visited them yesterday at the Biofilia art and science lab at Aalta University where they are currently giving art students a crash course in manipulating genes to create bioluminescent plants, as well as undertaking their own open…
Posts from an Island 3 of 5: The Interspecies Frontier
Last night I saw a large urban hare in Helsinki, bounding across tramlines and main roads to the port, perhaps heading for the ferry to the island where I am staying. An island is a distinct thing, it has parameters, water borders, it has by necessity to be a microcosm. I am writing within a…
Posts from an Island 2 of 5: Utopias and Dystopias
Diagram Trying to figure out what kind of a future world I might be writing about I came up with this diagram via, and adapted from, W.H. Auden, Samuel R. Delany and Gerry Canavan (see Delaney’s interview and Canavan & Robinson’s Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, 2014). I’m not interested in writing dystopic or…
Tracey Warr Writing 