71 items found for ""
- AIF Spotlight: Adam Huggins | Confluence Lab
AIF crew 2024 Adam Huggins Galiano Island, BC, Canada Adam Huggins is an artist, podcaster, practitioner of ecological restoration, teacher, and naturalist living in the Salish Sea of southwestern British Columbia, on Galiano Island - the unceded lands and waters of Hul’qumi’num speaking people. As an environmental professional, he implements watershed-scale ecological restoration projects for the Galiano Conservancy Association and teaches a class in the Restoration of Natural Systems program at the University of Victoria. As a storyteller and musician, he produces and co-hosts the Future Ecologies podcast, which is currently wrapping up a 5th season of long-form audio pieces at the intersection of the human and more-than-human worlds. TREX involvement More on his story in Fall 2024... but until then, Adam notes he is looking forward to this opportunity because "ecologists have hypothesized that pyrodiversity begets biodiversity. I am especially interested in the human diversity of the prescribed fire movement, and so I am most looking forward to meeting the other attendees at the TREX and learning more about who they are, where they are from, and what they hope to accomplish when they return home. " Also give the podcast he produces and co-hosts a listen! Chat back to AIF residency Chat
- Ground Truths Spotlight: Siri Stensberg | Confluence Lab
featured artist Siri Stensberg Milwaukee, WI Siri Stensberg grew up in Appleton, WI and received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Born into a musical family, Siri pursued dual paths in classical music and visual art. While in Eau Claire she balanced orchestra and chamber music performances while developing a language in abstract painting. Siri completed her MFA at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Her practice is increasingly experimental; her interest in the intersection of images, sound, and time led her to video work and installation. featured artwork From the Smoke, For the Birds , video and audio. 2020 responding to Ground Truths From the Smoke, For the Birds was filmed on September 7, 2020 from my car during a dust and smoke storm that tore through Eastern Washington. The audio came two weeks later; my grandma left a voicemail after hearing that birds fleeing the fires had died from smoke inhalation. In the video, perching birds are absent from the swaying telephone lines, and within the layered, lyrical vocals, space is created for the viewer to mourn the wildlife and ecosystems lost in forest fires of the Pacific Northwest. more from Siri's perspective ... Siri's studio space and a work in progress: Her practice moves between video, sound, painting, and installation. Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where Siri now resides since July 2022. She works right by the lakefront, watching the surface of the water change each day depending on the weather. A summer sunset in the Inland Pacific Northwest. While living there, Siri particularly enjoyed floating in the Snake River during heat waves. On the date of this photo in 2021, it was particularly hazy from the heat and residual wildfire smoke. Siri leading a workshop exploring color in found materials at Spokane Falls Community College in Spokane, WA in January 2023. Chat back to exhibition Chat
- Sightlines Spotlight: Sonia Sobrino Ralston | Confluence Lab
featured artist Sonia Sobrino Ralston Somerville, MA Sonia Sobrino Ralston is a designer and researcher from Vancouver, Canada. She is currently the Research and Teaching Fellow in Art + Design at the Northeastern College of Media, Art, and Design. She is interested in the intersections between landscape, architecture, and the history of technology, and her current design and writing projects center on the potential of plants to be understood as sensors, the organization and datafication of living collections, and the biopolitical history of bioindicators. Sonia recently graduated with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with a Master of Landscape Architecture where she was awarded the Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize and the Digital Design Prize for her thesis, “Uncommon Knowledge.” She also holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University where she received a certificate in Media + Modernity. She was the assistant curator for the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale on the theme “Edible: Or, the Architecture of Metabolism,” and recently assisted with the design and organization of a symposium on landscape pedagogy at the Harvard GSD and supported a science communication project at the metaLAB at Harvard. Her writing has been published in the Avery Review and Cartha Magazine, she co-authored a chapter in Urban Transformations, and her collaborative work has been exhibited in Tallinn, Cambridge, and Sao Paulo. featured artwork Forests as Data Governance digital animation, digital Collage, 1920x1080px, various digital collage sizes, 2023 responding to SIGHTLINES Forests as Data Governance is a fragment of a larger work focused on the design of a speculative future for environmental data governance. We don't usually think of the landscape itself--its plants, trees, and soils--as a form of data or informational tool, and yet they operate as a form of responsive wetware that responds to the site and environmental cycles. This speculative vision for a physical database for information, a forest made of binary code grafted to the genetic code of plants, imagines a future where plants are understood as a critical data infrastructure to be collectively stewarded. In the summer of 2022, a wildfire burned across the Columbia River valley, 200 meters away from Google’s first hyperscale data center in The Dalles, Oregon, near Taylor Lake. While fire-resistant plants such as Oregon oaks and Ponderosa pines survived, the fragility of information infrastructure became urgent. Systems to protect critical infrastructure along the river involve high-fidelity LIDAR scans of the area to simulate systems of flood protection and damage. But in a future where plants become critical infrastructure, a form of long-term information storage, the fluctuations of the environment become embedded in its management. The future envisions a nursery and genetic laboratory where environmental information is grafted into the genetic information of ponderosa pines, Oregon oaks, and incense cedars. Through the collective management of the landscape, the future of a fire-prone site relies on the sensitive management and care for the land, rather than the black boxes of water-hungry data centers. Rendering plants alongside the pointclouds of a LIDAR dataset of the site, plants are elevated to the level of infrastructure through high-fidelity botanical models in the submitted animations. As plants live and grow on the site, over time, they too become integrated into the abstracted pointcloud as a form of landscape data. more on Data Governance Sonia's thesis Uncommon Knowledge: Practices and Protocols for Environmental Information responding to the contemporary environmental information economy at the site of Google's first hyperscale data center in water stressed The Dalles, Oregon on display at Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2023. Data visualization of various sites including the site featured in SIGHTLINES where on view. Read and view more about her work HERE . A video introduction to her research is also below. more from Sonia's perspective Since moving to Boston as part of my landscape architecture education, I spent many summer afternoons walking in the Arnold Arboretum. Here, pictured with a smoke bush (Cotinus coggygria), I became fascinated with the way that botanical collections organize and collect plants as part of an informational system. I grew up in a suburb of Vancouver, BC, where I was used to situating myself by looking at the mountains. Since my childhood, however, wildfires have been creeping closer and closer, and increasingly over the summer the city is enveloped in a blanket of smoke. As areas all over the west coast become increasingly known as centres for technology and information services, this spurred questions for me about how the city’s technological infrastructure is entangled with ecological assemblages. In recent years, the landscapes close to home are increasingly affected by the growing number of fires. Taken on a lake just an hour away, the mountains and trees disappear into the smoke. Faced with these scenes, I wondered how I might rethink my own relationship with the landscapes around me; how might they be considered critical infrastructures to protect? This image, taken in a glacier lake not far from the smokey scene above a few days earlier, is important to me as a landscape designer who considers fire in this work. Landscapes here are full of plants, sensitively adapted to harsh environments and rich in information, ready to adapt under the existential threat of fire. How might we learn from, and pay attention to, the intelligence of plants and natural systems? Chat back to exhibition Chat
- Wilderness Suite | the confluence lab
Wilderness Suite Music, Video, and Rephotography Ruby Fulton w/ Teresa Cavazos Cohn, Benjamin James & icarus Quartet Spring 2020 - present video clip of Wilderness Quartet courtesy of icarus Quartet Composition Professor Ruby Fulton (Composition and Music Theory) is currently midway through the research and creation process of “Wilderness Suite,” an evening-length multi-movement piece of music for the celebrated two-pianist, two-percussionist chamber ensemble the icarus Quartet and pre-recorded electronics, in collaboration with U of I filmmaker Benjamin James (English). Their project is an art counterpart to the rephotography project in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, led by geographer Teresa Cavazos Cohn . The project brought the icarus Quartet for a three-day residency at the Lionel Hampton School of Music in February, 2020, when they rehearsed the music in open workshops and presented on their work with music about science. The quartet returned to the Lionel Hampton School of Music in April, 2022 to perform the new music together with film created by Benjamin James, using old and new photographs gathered in Cohn’s scientific study. “Wilderness Suite” uses music and video to examine the impact of humans on the environment, and emphasizes the importance of community in research at every level. This interdisciplinary collaboration between science and the arts will engage both rational and emotional processing systems, maximizing meaning-making and allowing for real communication on the challenging yet pressing question of the impact of human-environmental relationships. The story of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness is more than the science, more than the river, more than the people. Our understanding of wilderness and need for wild spaces differs for each of us. Members of the Confluence Lab — Teresa Cohn, Ruby Fulton, Ben James, and the icarus Quartet — are dedicated to helping people explore their relationship with wilderness including their views of the Frank. listen to more from: Next
- Nature and Nuance | the confluence lab
The Nature and Nuance of Climate Change Perceptions Kristin Haltinner, Dilshani Sarathchandra, Jennifer Ladino, Tom Ptak, Steve Radil, & Michelle Weist funded by the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences, University of Idaho 2019-present This project, led by Drs. Kristin Haltinner and Dilshani Sarathchandra (Associate Professors of Sociology, University of Idaho) aims to develop a deeper understanding of climate change perceptions, with a focus on segments of the American public who remain skeptical about the phenomenon. Based on interviews and survey data collected from Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, this work has shown that climate change skepticism is a core identity shaped by personal experience, trust in institutions (e.g., science, media), and religious beliefs. While it is difficult to change identity dynamics, the researchers have uncovered several areas of common interest among skeptics and believers – a shared concern for air and water pollution, habitat destruction, species extinction, and an interest in investing in renewable energy – which can be capitalized on to develop public policy that is likely to garner wider support. Findings from this project have been disseminated via a series of peer-reviewed publications from 2018 to 2022. Drs. Haltinner and Sarathchandra are also authors of the upcoming book, “Inside the World of Climate Change Skeptics,” to be published in Spring ’23 by the University of Washington Press. As a continuation of this project, Drs. Haltinner and Sarathchandra’s new work examines the factors that lead to changing skeptical views about climate change. Their preliminary findings suggest that personal experience with climate or weather disasters, conversation with trusted people, and integration into more open minded religious faiths or social groups can make people more willing to consider and engage with climate science. In the immediate future, the project leads and their collaborators will explore how real or simulated experiences with climate disasters impact the beliefs and decision-making processes of climate change skeptics, using tools such as narrative fiction, documentaries, fictional films, virtual reality, and natural exposure to extreme weather. WATCH: Researchers Dilshani Sarathchandra and Kristin Haltinner interviewedabout climate change skeptics across the Northwest to find out more about their beliefs. KTVB Idaho Channel 7, July 29, 2022 Team Members: Kristin Haltinner (Sociology, University of Idaho); Dilshani Sarathchandra (Sociology, University of Idaho); Jennifer Ladino (English, University of Idaho), Matthew Grindal (Criminology, University of Idaho), Steve Radil (Geosciences, US Air Force Academy); Tom Ptak (Geography, Texas State University). Next
- AIF Spotlight: Laura Ahola-Young | Confluence Lab
AIF crew 2024 Laura Ahola-Young Pocatello, ID Laura Ahola-Young received her MFA from San Jose State University and her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She currently resides in Pocatello, Idaho where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Idaho State University. Originally from the Iron Range and Boundary Waters Canoe Area of Northern Minnesota, Laura is influenced by landscape, winters, ice and resilience. She is currently developing work that incorporates scientific research, plant physiology, critical plant studies, geology and personal narrative. TREX involvement More on her story in Fall 2024... but for now, Laura is thrilled to work with the Confluence Lab and other selected artists and writers. She excited for the training as she can already see that she will be able to learn the importance of training, organization and policy when it comes to fire, a very different way of approach fire than that of an artist. Chat back to AIF residency Chat
- Ground Truths Spotlight: Oregon Episcopal & Sophia Hatzikos | Confluence Lab
featured artists Sophia Hatzikos Portland, OR Oregon Episcopal School Portland, OR Sophia Hatzikos is a site-specific artist who looks towards our past to evaluate our future. She is concerned with impending environmental collapse and gains insights from experts whose deep knowledge of natural systems comes from their working relationship with the land. Sophia is interested in interdependence and the contrasting fragilities of the natural world and capitalistic demand; she investigates these themes through a scientific lens. Through exploration and observation, she throws light on the ways in which structures and environments have been built over time, giving special attention to the imprints and inerasable marks left by those who wield power. featured artwork "Lift, Coil, Zip" retired wildfire hoses, steel, ties, 2022 responding to Ground Truths This project was a collaboration with students from Oregon Episcopal School who were enrolled in I.M.P.A.C.T (innovate / make / act / collaborate / tinker), a course that encourages experimental thinking about the impact of public art. Discarded fire hoses from the Redmond Fire Cache acted as a throughline to different projects, questions, and themes that were explored by the class. If the fire hoses, used in wildfire suppression during 2020 and 2021, had not become part of the project, they would have gone to a landfill. Using an upcycled material allowed for an expansive creative environment: mistakes could be made and our budget could be spent on other materials to expand the scope of their projects. The students designed individual work around their research into wildfires, climate change, material processes, and the industry of wildfire-fighting, and all thirteen students were involved in the final collaborative effort. Lift, Coil, Zip was shaped through site visits to the Lake Oswego Gallery without Walls , where it has been on display since the fall of 2022. The students were excited by the tall trees around the platform and its location right next to the firehouse. Seeing the environment where their work would live helped finalize the design and the students embraced the process of strategizing and refining ideas for their public art installation. The work will be looking for a new home come August 2023; hopefully, it will stay in the region to continue to tell the story these students crafted! more from their experience Chat back to exhibition Chat
- Sightlines Spotlight: Allison McClay | Confluence Lab
featured artist Allison McClay Portland, OR Allison McClay is a painter, illustrator and mural artist from Portland, Oregon. Her paintings examine historical figures and landscapes through a magical realism filter, creating rich, detailed images that tell a fragment of a story and invite a close look. featured artwork "Olallie Burns" Acrylic on Wood, 20"x16" 2022 "Sucia Saves Us" Acrylic on Wood, 20"x16" 2022 responding to SIGHTLINES These two pieces are part of a new series I am working on that explores the experiences children have with life in a world that is inundated with crisis and climate disaster. In these pieces, the subjects are aware of the fiery landscapes, and though their reactions are not clear, they are definitely not alarmed. I am interested in how they navigate being children within this and what a healthy relationship to destruction and to existential doom could look like. Both of these paintings are inspired by real places that have been affected by fires: Olallie Lake is in Oregon near Mount Jefferson and those burned forests are very real; Sucia Island is in the San Juan Islands in Washington and the fire in the distance is an interpretation of real wildfires that have become more and more common in the area. more from Allison's perspective View of Oneonta Gorge in the Columbia River Gorge area, where there was a massive fire in 2017. Allison's been hiking there her entire life, though many trails are still closed due to damage. View of Olallie Butte, part of the Warm Springs Reservation, in the Jefferson Wilderness. Allison isn't sure when this burn happened, as there seem to be fires in the area often. Row boating in Olallie Lake. My family has been camping around here for the past decade or so, since our previous favorite spot near Mt. Adams was destroyed by fire. View toward the crater of Mt. St. Helens. 43 years after the eruption, signs of life are everywhere. Mountain goat fur caught on a bush blows in the wind. Chat back to exhibition Chat
- projects | the confluence lab
LAB projects Artists-In-Fire residency Stories of Fire Online Exhibition Series Where there is Smoke... Wilderness Suite: Music, Video, & Rephotography Change in Frank Church Wilderness: Collaborative Rephotography Nature and Nuance of Climate Change Perceptions Fire Lines: A Sto ries of Fire project Stories of Fire: Pacifi c Northwest Cli mate Atlas Stories of Fire: Integrative STEM Learning through Participatory Narratives Storying Extinction: Responding to the Loss of North Idaho’s Mountain Caribou Our Changing Climate: Finding Common Ground through Climate Fiction
- Ground Truths Spotlight: David Paul Bayles & Frederick J Swanson | Confluence Lab
featured artists David Paul Bayles Philomath, OR Frederick J Swanson Philomath, OR David Paul Bayles currently lives and photographs in western Oregon, where highly efficient industrialized tree farms supplanted the massive old growth forests many decades ago. He is currently working on a long term project with disturbance ecologist Frederick J Swanson, documenting the forest recovery after the massive 2020 Holiday Farm Fire in the McKenzie River watershed. His photographs have been published in numerous magazines including Orion, Nature, Terrain, Audubon, Harpers, Outside, The L.A. Times Sunday Magazine and others. Public collections include The Portland Art Museum, Santa Barbara Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, The Baldwin Collection MTSU, The Harry Ransom Center, Wildling Museum and others. His first monograph Urban Forest, Images of Trees in the Human Landscape was published in 2003. His next book, Sap In Their Veins , will be published in fall 2023. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley created the David Paul Bayles Photographic Archive in 2016 as a permanent home for his entire life’s work. Frederick J Swanson is a retired Research Geologist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the US Forest Service; a Senior Fellow with the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word; and the lead scientist in the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program. This Spring Creek-Andrews Forest collaboration facilitates engagement of writers and artists with the ancient forest of Andrews Forest and the volcanic eruption landscape of Mount St. Helens. Included among these activities have been 110+ writer and artist residencies at Andrews Forest since 2004. Trained as a geologist and specializing in the study of disturbance agents in forest ecosystems, watersheds (fire, flood, landslide, volcanic eruptions, clearcutting, forest roads), and society, it has been natural to connect with human disturbance agents, such as poets and artists. Relevant publications include Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest (2016, Brodie et al., U Washington Press) and In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens (2008, Goodrich et al., Oregon State U Press). featured artwork Triptych from Typologies: Charred Abstractions series Triptych from Typologies: Canopy series from Typologies: Charred Abstractions series from the Chronosequences Series: left: Photopoint FFR 2 , right: Photopoint FFR 17 . For this project, Bayles & Swanson selected 42 distinct photopoints that represent different forest conditions. During the first two years they photographed each photopoint twelve times in order to record the changing landscape following the fire. responding to Ground Truths Seeking truth involves boots on the ground while looking for clues in the clouds. That’s what trees do. When Fred and I stood in the charred skeletal forest after the fire, our hearts and minds were full of ideas, questions and curiosity. After two and a half years of climbing over burned trees and falling into stump ghosts, we’re asking better questions. And we’re still curious. Truth may be lodged in the tread of our boots. Learn more about their Following Fire project. more from their perspective Frederick J Swanson at work Photopoint FRR 2 Notebook. Review more HERE. In the mid-seventies David Paul Bayles worked as a logger to earn tuition for photography school. His current studio/gallery was built from our trees that blew down after a neighbor clear cut their land. Read January 17, 2023 LENSCRATCH article "David Paul Bayles and Frederick J Swanson: Following Fire: A Resilent Forest, an Uncertain Future" Chat back to exhibition Chat
- Storying Extinction | the confluence lab
Storying Extinction Responding to the Loss of North Idaho’s Mountain Caribou Jack Kredell, Chris Lamb w/ Devin Becker Summer 2020 to present funded by the CDIL Graduate Student Summer Fellowship Program, Summer 2020 The Lab partnered with the University of Idaho Library’s Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) to support “Storying Extinction ,” a digital humanities project spearheaded by graduate students Jack Kredell and Chris Lamb, which officially launched by CDIL on February 1, 2022. Supported by CDIL’s Graduate Student Fellowships, Kredell and Lamb produced a GIS-based “deep map” consisting of oral histories, trail camera footage, nonfiction essays, and historical documents related to mountain caribou and their 2019 Idaho extirpation. Kredell, Lamb, and CDIL director Devin Becker will co-author an analysis of the project and its methodology for publication later this year. Learn more about this project. July 2021 The Spokesman Review Article special thanks to project partner: explore the Storying Extinction website: Next
- Ground Truths Spotlight: Meredith Ojala | Confluence Lab
featured artist Meredith Ojala Kenmore, WA Meredith Ojala is a multi-media artist and activist from Seattle. Her artwork often delves into the emotional landscapes of environmental and social-justice issues. She worked on environmental campaigns while studying sociology and studio art at Princeton University. She is currently splitting time between Seattle and the Arctic of Sweden. featured artwork "All I See is Red" oil on canvas, 18in x 24in, 2018 responding to Ground Truths After being evacuated from the Erskine fire in 2016, I moved back to the Pacific Northwest hoping the heavier precipitation would ease the wildfire risk. After managing a meditation retreat in Southern Idaho 2018, I had great difficulty driving back to Seattle through all the wildfires in Eastern Oregon and Washington. This painting is part of a set of paintings made at a time when wildfires felt all-encompassing, when the world felt like it was on fire, and my dreams were turning red.These paintings are about sleeping with fire and how wildfires spread into our dreams and subconsciously color our perception of the world. They take us into feelings of falling asleep with wildfire in clear view from our home window; to feelings of being woken up by water-bombers. Wildfires are one of the most beautiful and simultaneously terrifying landscapes I have ever seen. They have taken over many of paintings even when I had no plans to incorporate them. more from Meredith's perspective ... This image was taken near Meredith’s old studio, which was situated on traditional Nehelam, Clatsop, and Chinook territory. Inspiring autumn landscape on traditional sdukʷalbixʷ (Snoqualmie) territory. Meredith’s studio in Haida Gwaii. A collection of political and wildfire landscapes-in-progress fill the space. Chat back to exhibition Chat