The last wilderness that remains is climate.

Vaclav Cilek captured the relationship between memory and the loss of what we fought with.  As civilizations grew through their fight with nature and shrunk as they fought themselves - we have now reached a stage in which climate holds the magnitude of threat similar to the Pacific Ocean in the 15th Century.  Taking meditative position for most of his talk, Cilek appealed to consider the archaic processes in dealing with climate changes such as fear, awe, conflict....

"We have been oblivious until now to 97% of the content of the world around us" is a provocative thought brought forward by Roger F. Malina in Limit of Cognition: Artists in the Dark Universe.  Through Malina's background as a space scientist and astronomer he aimed to give context to how we can understand this outside world, the artists' role in helping finding metaphors, language and thinking in these realms.  

Malina is currently involved in building the SupaNova Acceleration Probe which will examine both 'dark matter' and the more recent discovery of 'dark energy' said to cover 97% of energy and matter in the Universe.  He sees the role of a new generation of artists (i.e. Liliane Lijn and Joanna Griffin) in having both sufficient traning and able to contribute to sciences in these new environment.  

Inspired by Julius Neubronner military/spy application where pigeons were used to take photos during flight, Pigeonblog uses homing pigeons, equipped with a custom built air pollution sensing device to report air pollution. The data is visualised using Google's mapping environment.   A documentation of the Pigeonblog was shown at Unsafe Distance.

Boo Chapple who also showed documentation of her works in Unsafe Distance exhibition - takes a humorous way of coping with our carbon guilt.

Cognitus: New Cognitive Tools to Assess Environmental Risks in Amazonas - Lucia Santaella & Wagner Garcia

What should art expect from science? What should science expect from art? We were asked to discuss our "perfect" match in our experiences.  Taking part in this debate included Marta de Menezes (Ectopia), Adam Zaretsky, Jennifer Willet (Bioteknica), Louis Graca, Beatriz Da Costa, Miriam van Rijsingen (TAGC), Ulla Taipale (Capsula), ourselves (c-lab) and moderated by Denisa Kera. 

The "cultural producers" on the panel, had a more administrative stance and discussed at length their role in finding artists and scientists and acting as mediators for the collaboration.  My initial issue was the consideration that a genuine collaboration was where scientists were able to visualise their research in alternative ways, is that not considered as "communicating science"? I also am very critical to mediators in this realm and the construction of such collaboration.

It was clear that different types of collaboration were practiced and there many ways of interacting with the sciences.  It would have been interesting to further these discussions to include artworks produced, issues of documentation becoming the artwork and the epistemological issues surrounding these works/collaborations.  

After brielfy meet an ever-inviting Woody Vasulka outside a conference room on the day of arrival he was back – this time helping us hunt for the mayor – who we believe had gone into hiding after the press launched an attack on his dealings with the controversial Octopus.

The mayor had however offered to use his private recidency for opening drinks. It would have been nice to have him there he is said to be an extreme sportsman - somewhat fitting for the conference...