Inhabiting the office

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my "office"

This will be my new officey home for the next couple of months. I figured that the next phase of my Environmental Audit might benefit if I could be a bit more ’embedded’ in the MCA itself. Two days ago I made this suggestion to Glenn the curator, who put Isabel onto the job, and presto, here I am, with my own Dilbert-style cubicle. I think of it as my ‘artist in residence within the office’. (A great precedent for this sort of thing is the 1960s-70s Artist Placement Group).

Everyone has been very accomodating and welcoming so far. Margaret from the Library popped over to say hello and offer her help with anything I need. I had a great chat with Gaby and with Krista from the marketing department, who are interested in cross-over publicity action with my project. And everywhere I go in the halls, there are little jokes and jollities – Seb, for example, keeps loudly accusing his fellow staff of incinerating tonnes of shredded photocopy paper out in the carpark (in spite of the fact that I’m ill-equipped to “bust” anybody for their un-ecological ways)

Here’s Pete down in the gallery, deconstructing a wall, “Reclaiming”, as he says, “every last screw”. (What about those bent ones, Pete?)

Deinstalling the biennale

Jokes aside, it does seem like there’s “something in the air”. The fact that I’m here on site working on the project seems to have shifted the “office atmosphere” (I do believe there is such a thing).

I’m hoping that inhabiting the office will be a less formal way to get under the skin of the organisation. Chance meetings in the kitchen, waiting for the lift (many hours are passed in this endeavour) and en route to the photocopy machine: if you’re working in the office, here on Level 5, by all means bail me up and let me know what you reckon.

What does the MCA do well? What can it do better? Lowly serf or lofty overlord, I’m interested to hear from you. Maybe we can draw a few diagrams together…

Worlds Within Worlds

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art: 99%futile, 1% effective

Last week I attended the Hothouse Symposium at the Sydney Opera House.

One highlight for me included a talk by Bruce Taper from Kinesis. In a rather mythbusting presentation, Bruce told the story of advising City of Sydney for their 2030 sustainability campaign. Actually, I’d like to get hold of his slideshow, because it was quite powerful in its demonstration that the goal announced by various governments of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by “whatever percent by whatever date” is often – in a word – impossible.

He also criticised the BASIX building sustainability index, which gives a green rating to buildings and appliances in NSW. In many cases, Bruce said, new buildings with a five-star rating still end up with a much greater environmental footprint than older buildings which were constructed before the rating system even existed. We have to be wary of these external accreditation systems which end up being hollow gestures: commerce-friendly badges and ‘eco-bling‘ trophies.

[UPDATE: see Bruce’s clarification about my not entirely accurate comments on BASIX and the star rating systems…]

I was also struck by Tony Fry‘s keynote talk. What strikes me as interesting in Tony’s approach is that, as a design educator, he’s not getting his students to make ‘green friendly’ products. Rather, he’s been training them up to be ‘disaster ready’ – planning for the reality of the future world to come (a rather grim world it seems) where millions of climate change refugees (especially, in the early stages, from low-lying Bangladesh) are “unsettled” from their homelands, consequently unsettling the comfortable lives of wealthy westerners. How ready are we to adapt ourselves to a new way of living?
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To The Food Forest!

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Artist as Family Plant-in Day

A few weeks back I packed up a bunch of seedlings, strapped ’em to the back of my bike with an old rubber tube, and headed down to Surry Hills for the Artist as Family’s “Food Forest Plant-In-Day”.

As far as I understand it, the idea of a “Food Forest” is this: unlike your standard garden, it has an integrated system of layers: from large trees, to smaller trees, to an “understorey” and finally ground covers. All these elements work in tandem to support and nurture each other. The Food Forest, at its best, moves towards the state of a natural forest. In other words, it becomes stable and self-sustaining. Theoretically, it will require much less human intervention once it’s properly established.
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The Plastiki has arrived

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plastiki

Environmentally auditable events keep flooding in! I don’t know whether it’s because I’m paying more attention, or as my friend Bec C. says, all this stuff is “so hot” right now in late 2010…

But anyway, I’ve just heard that “Plastiki”, the sailing boat made from 12,500 plastic PET bottles has arrived in Sydney.

Tonight, there’s a gala event where you can go hear all about it:

An evening with David de Rothschild: The Plastiki Expedition
Presented by the Sydney Institute of Marine Science

When: Wednesday 28 July 7pm – 9pm
Where: At the Sergeants Mess, Chowder Bay, Mosman (click here for Google Maps)
Tickets: $50 (Concessions $25) including drinks & canapes

Hear David de Rothschild, adventurer and environmentalist, talk about his momentous voyage across the Pacific on the 18 metre catamaran Plastiki made from 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles.

I can’t make it myself, as I am already busy this evening, but if anyone gets down there, I’d love to hear your reports…

I quite like the Plastiki diagrams, where they outline all the ins and outs of the boat and its processes:

plastiki stats

Grounded

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strangler fig roots

Lizzie and I have just completed a whole week not working on our computers. For an umbilically cabled-in fellow like myself, this in itself is something of an achievement. But we had the added bonus of spending our unplugged time wandering through the Daintree tropical rainforest in Far North Queensland.

Now back in Sydney, sitting at my laptop with a million ‘things to do’ buzzing around my skull, it’s hard to reconnect myself to where we just were. All this busy–town stuff seems to not matter at all, when you’re standing in the middle of a forest dripping with humidity and ferns and vines and fungi and cassawaries and strangler figs. The rainforest and its inhabitants seem like a throwback to pre-historic times. The sense of disconnection I feel right now between the modern city and the rainforest is so dramatic.
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Auditable Events: Hot House

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hothouse image

Tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll be across the Quay from the MCA, attending the Hothouse think-tank symposium thingy about, well, um, y’know, art and eco stuff.

I’m particularly looking forward to meeting and chatting with a few of the presenters, like Bruce Taper, who is described as a “Life Cycle Analyst”, from a Sydney-based company called Kinesis:

Our purpose is to develop new strategies and mechanisms to increase our clients capacity to tackle climate change, understand and manage their emissions portfolios, and promote sustainability.

The fact that Kinesis can support a dozen employees in this venture is a strong indication that “managing an emissions portfolio” (!!) is fast becoming an integral part of corporate business strategy.

However, it seems to be getting harder to come up with terms that don’t disappear into fashionable meaninglessness (like “sustainability”). Tony Fry, a bit of a legend and one of the keynote speakers at the symposium, has come up with his own term, “sustainment”, in a bid to sidestep the linguistic sludge of “sustainability”… I’ve yet to hear him speak, and will be interested to see how this new word works…

In the Balance artists Karl and Tessa from Makeshift will also be speaking… And Carbon Arts looks interesting too…

Maybe see you down there?

Bona Fide Credentials?

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audited stamp

Yesterday I was in at the museum, picking the brains of Amy and Flora about their Great Photocopy Audit (more on that soon). We were sitting at a table in the middle of the large admin area of the MCA offices. It can be hard to concentrate on the task at hand when everyone wants to say a friendly hello as they walk past on their way to the photocopier or the tea room. During one of these drive-by salutations, Chief Operating Officer Euan bailed me up:

“You’re gonna have to get yourself some ESD Credentials soon!” he declared. “You can’t just log on every day and spend your entire blog postings pondering over your own incompetence!”

I grinned and nodded agreement as Euan strode off down the corridor. Then I turned to Amy and Flora and whispered, “What does ‘ESD’ mean?”
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Eco Bling

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owen and fern poster
[Poster by Owen Griffiths and Fern Thomas, Imagination as a Source of Renewable Energy, O&F Poster Series, no.1, 2008]

Here’s a provocative essay by British artist and curator Lucy Gibson, entitled “Eco-bling: why the arts sector needs to lead on climate action”.

Gibson uses the term “eco bling” to describe “gestural actions that are only skin deep”. One obstacle in the quest to reduce the environmental footprint of art is its insatiable desire for attention and visibility, which demands a great amount of travel and freight in order to distribute artworks which might, paradoxically, have as their message “Down With Climate Change” or “Act Local”.

She writes:

One of the biggest changes in the visual arts world, and the rest of the arts sector, would be to cut back on travel. With the emphasis on being ‘seen’, having an international reputation, living and working in more than one country, and for ‘international’ often being used as a by word for quality, we have a long way to go in the visual arts to counter the accusation of eco-bling.

And here’s another provocative article, by artist Paul Matosic, called “Is Art Green”. Matosic discusses the concept of “art miles”, (adapting the term from the more widely discussed “food miles“).

Thanks to Melanie, the MCA’s Conservator, for sending through the links which led to these links… keep ’em coming!

Lauren’s call for Trash

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mca rubbish

We’re into the final month of our collection for two Lauren Berkowitz installations and we still need more!

We need:
-1500 white plastic bags
-50 sliced cheese containers
-80 large plastic bottles or containers – as big as you can find – 3L coke bottles, huge juice bottles and big Harris Farm yoghurt/dip pots!

Please remember to keep bringing in items from home, and don’t throw away our milk bottles from the kitchen – just pop them in the box in the lunchroom.

Pushing forward that great aesthetic tradition in which garbage is transformed into art, the MCA (on behalf of artist Lauren Berkowitz) has issued the above callout.

Thus far, I believe that the request for plastic containers and bags has been directed mainly at the staff of the MCA itself, who are urged to bring in stuff from home as part of their ordinary routine of coming to work. This, I suppose, also taps into the folksy tradition of the workplace fundraising drive – common in schools and offices.
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Auditing “Me”

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router power adapter

In my thus-far ad-hoc survey of what an audit could be, I’m still yet to find a definition I’m completely happy with.

Take, for example, this one:

Audit: An independent review and examination of records and activities to assess the adequacy of system controls, to ensure compliance with established policies and operational procedures, and to recommend necessary changes in controls, policies, or procedures.

It’s a bit dry isn’t it?

One of the key nuggets within that statement is this bit:

“to ensure compliance with established policies and operational procedures”.

(Let’s leave aside the bit about recommending changes for the moment…)

Now, I expect that an organisation like the MCA does have an existing set of “established policies and operational procedures” with regard to its environmental footprint. So that’s some homework for me – to get my hands on it…
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