Rendering ClimateRendering Climate

Rendering Climate examines how popular music videos take on urgent environmental issues, and discusses local and global imaginaries and visual communication strategies within artistic practice, activism and journalism. With creative director and musician Tom Burke, writer and activist James Westcott (Extinction Rebellion London) and Jarl Schulp (FIBER). The programme starts with a screening of Tom Burke's music film From Here We Go Extreme (2019). The event is a collaboration with FIBER (Cartographies of the Vanishing Now).

Tom Burke is a musician, creative director and curator of live experiences. He activates new models of collaboration between theatrical, musical, film and political philosophy practices. He has curated and produced live experiences for the British Film Institute, XL Recordings, the British Council and the Dutch National Opera. His band Citizens! rose to fame and toured worldwide including live performances at Glastonbury, South by Southwest, the Pompidou Centre and Palais De Tokyo. Tom often collaborates with his wife Chilean architect Carla Aldunate. They practice between London, Santiago and Amsterdam.

James Westcott teaches at the Architectural Association in London (a unit on re-used materials with the Brussels-based collective Rotor), and he taught a seminar on the Anthropocene at TU Delft. He currently develops film and TV projects for a production company in London, and is also editing Countryside: A Report, by Rem Koolhaas and AMO, to be published by Taschen in 2020. Also with Koolhaas and AMO, he was co-editor of Project Japan (Taschen, 2011), and editor-in-chief of the 2,500-page Elements of Architecture (Taschen, 2018). He is the author of When Marina Abramovic Dies: A Biography (MIT Press, 2010) and his writing on art, architecture and culture has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, Aeon, and Salon. He is active with Extinction Rebellion in London.

FIBER (Cartographies of the Vanishing Now) is a new research and development project exploring the potential of sensory art, alternative cartographic methods and audiovisual strategies to remap realities in the age of environmental collapse. It sets out to capture the impact of the growing ecological instability on the way we organise and model our modern world, traces the forces behind environmental change and simultaneous shifts perspectives to move to adaptive futures. COTVN is run by Jarl Schulp, Xandra van der Eijk and Mark IJzerman and a team of researchers.

The event is part of an extended programme in collaboration with FIBER (Cartographies of the Vanishing Now), addressing different modes in which cinema and video culture represent the ongoing ecological crisis. The evening is the first in a series of collective conversations on ecological imaginaries and audiovisual methodologies to diversify perspectives on our changing earth.

The evening will start with a screening of the music film From Here We Go Extreme by Tom Burke. In the age of all extremities, what can we learn from the experience of communities living in extreme environments? How can music and the means of the music industry be used as a medium to interrogate human futures at the end of the world?

From Here We Go Extreme began with a headline from the Guardian newspaper on 5/10/2018: 'Earth's climate monsters could be unleashed as temperatures rise.' In the context of the Anthropocene, a geologic moment in which human activity is actively modifying climate and the environment, Tom Burke is critical of the 'monstering' of climate. The collective mediatized figure of the 'climate monster' represents climate as something that happens far in the extreme environments of deserts, rainforest, and ice caps, and perpetuates a dualistic division between nature and human. Building upon ongoing research developed in collaboration with Tom Burke's wife, Chilean architect Carla Aldunate, into contrasting geographic imaginaries between the global north and south, From Here We Go Extreme investigates climate not only as of the weather but as a set of entangled economic, industrial and cultural relations.

Tickets for this event are valid for the entire evening, including _Matter: Geological Filmmaking_ at 21:00.

This event is part of For the Record, a research project by Het Nieuwe Instituut on contemporary video culture as a public space for consumerism, activism and emancipation. The project seeks to document and reflect upon the technologies, spatial design and forms of representation deployed in video culture and live events, and uses public programs and video production as the main research methodology.