Another blog I read just turned me on to RAF-Reduce Art Flights, a project launched at the Venice Biennial. The project aimed to highlight and promote the reduction of travel in the art world. With all the art fairs there’s been an increase in not just in travel, but an exponential increase in shipping of artwork.

This project hits close to home, especially given a couple of recent experiences. As I would hope, as my career grows, I have more opportunities to travel with/because of my work. On the other hand, I don’t want to create a negative environmental impact with the work. And airline flights (if you didn’t already know) have HUGE carbon emissions. So how to keep the career growing, spread the work and minimize the impact?

Recently I was invited to the Wexner Center to present my work as part of the Art & Environment program. It was a one afternoon engagement. I explained the quandary to the director, and asked if there was a way to broaden my (positive) impact while there, could she work with the school or other organizations to fill up a week? She was happy to oblige. I spent a week working with a local group of extraordinary high school students (more on that later), spent the afternoon at the Wexner, and met with local artists. Believe me the week was packed full.

(I was also reminded - again - of our desperate need for better rail. The only train was a 12 hour trip arriving at 3.30am in a city two hours away, the bus left at 4am. I was totally up for taking on the long trip and early arrival, but as anyone who has ridden any distance knows, the freight trains are given priority and passenger trains are notoriously late. If I missed the 4am bus I would have been awkwardly stranded).

So in the case of Wexner it opened up lots more opportunities for me to meet with and work with people.

The other instance was that I was invited to participate in the EcoAesthetics exhibition at < > TAG platform in The Hague. They were interested in bringing in an artists who would get out into the public space and create interventions or activate public participation. Well, thats me for sure! Unfortunately I *really* couldn’t justify a flight to The Hague for a weekend project*. So instead I suggested that I create a project that could occur in the public realm, but which they could produce, organize and promote all themselves. I would provide the creative idea, the structure and the electronic files, everything else was (mostly) up to them. From that was born the “Insert ____ Here” project which will launch in The Hague this weekend, Brooklyn next weekend and then Miami and the Bronx soon after. I would love to see it happen in neighborhoods around the world, so certainly contact me, or watch the project site (totally in progress- just a theme place holder for the moment) for more information.

In light of this, I have been talking with Michael Mandiberg and Tiffany Holmes (of ecoviz.org) about creating a group of artists who are interested in participating in and promoting an electronic panel. We could be in our homes, in front of a web cam participating in a panel anywhere in the world. If Andy Revkin can do it, so can we.

*It’s not that I don’t want to go to these places - I definitely do, I love travel and I love meeting people around the world, but I am trying to be conscientious about my travel footprint - reducing the flights and if I do fly, packing the time full of opportunities.

Images (from top to bottom): Michael Mandiberg’s Real Cost plugin for Mozilla Firefox, Eve S. Mosher’s “Insert ____ Here” project

Ever since writing this post, I’ve been thinking about my own efforts to reduce my impact on the world. As g-pup says, “don’t we already have a lower impact than most people?” The answer is yes, we certainly do (we buy locally and seasonally, shop at goodwill for things we need - if we shop at all, we use CFL’s, we compost, bring our own canvas bags to the store and recycle, turn off lights, don’t run water, won’t buy drinks in disposable containers), but I responded, “that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more.” So, inspired by the No Impact Man and the book Gone Tomorrow, The Hidden Life of Garbage, we are working to a greater reduction in impact. We are cutting way down on the t.v. that we watch (we don’t watch a whole lot already since we hate regular t.v. but we are reducing our watching by about 75%), reducing (trying to get to 0) the packaged goods that we purchase (I will be doing more and more farmer’s market shopping since that drastically reduces the packaging and helps with the local buying), and deciding not to buy anything this year - and if we *need* to then we will do some environmental volunteer work to offset that purchase.

I am most looking forward to the efforts towards different types of entertainment, I think we might regain some of the time we seem to be so short on. G-pup is looking forward to doing more homebrewing for his beer consumption. We will still have to rely on transit for getting around (we live in Brooklyn, I work in Manhattan and he works in Jersey), but now that spring is on its way, we will be back on our bikes for most of our shopping and weekend commute needs.

It seems like a lot to take on with the ongoing work on the project, but in a way it all kind of makes sense to do it now…

I have been dancing around this thought with Sea Change, finally someone who is good at PR found a way to say what I have been thinking. In an interview with Amanda Griscom Little on Grist.com, Richard Branson has this to say:

” What sets climate change apart from these other crises is that most people can’t see the problem – CO2 gases are invisible. If you could see them and they were colored red, 50 years ago it would have looked like a small brush fire smoldering around the world, and today it would look like a wildfire raging across the globe. We desperately need leaders who can help bring visibility and forge solutions to this imperceptible menace before it’s too late.”

Indeed.