“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, January 30, 2014

Something Is Happening. There's Something in the Air

Dear Rice community,

Is energy just what we use or something we might see and taste?

Ask artist Marina Zurkow, who has made a career of rendering perceptible the way energy haunts and shapes our lives.

You'll find Zurkow's works appearing on campus as part of "Consumption," a year-long project presented by the Arts and Media cluster of CENHS, the Center for the Study of Energy and Environment in the Human Sciences.

With generous support from CENHS, the Humanities Research Center, and Rice's Arts Initiatives Fund, sinkholes will open up on video screens across campus in the animation "Mesocosm (Wink, TX)."

Keep on the lookout for these installations around campus--the RMC, the Rec Center, Jones College, Rice Gallery, Matchbox Gallery, and elsewhere. We invite you to spend some time with "Mesocosm" and post thoughts and responses at mesocosm.blogspot.rice.edu.

"Consumption" culminates on the evening of Thursday March 20th, when Zurkow curates an artist's meal for 50, "Outside the Work: A Tasting of Deep Time." The meal, hosted in Brochstein Pavilion, explores through food the pervasive role of oil in our ecosystem, something residents of the Gulf Coast well understand. And it asks us to think about slow geological processes that impact cultures of consumption, be it of food or of natural resources.

Rice is leading the way in thinking about how the arts impact our understanding of energy, ecology, and consumption. Please join in: watch, taste, and reflect. And forward this to anyone you think might be interested.

                                                                                    Regards, 
                                                                                    The Arts and Media Cluster
                                                                                    CENHS
                                                                             
Joseph Campana

Aynne Kokas
Timothy Morton
Derek Woods

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