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The author presents her encounters with venerated and Sacred Trees on field trips to India to affirmatively answer the question: Is it possible for the artist to change how we perceive the environment to the extent that people change the way they respond to and inhabit it? She argues that how we perceive and contemplate the land affects how we treat the land, and ultimately how we live within it. The paper goes beyond the economic or conservationist perspective, setting out the religious context with which the tree is perceived aesthetically in its natural environment. The practice of venerating the tree through decoration has, over time, effected cultural change in India. The tree is seen as a form that houses the sacred and thus is protected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary art practices are characterized by the transformation of completed or finalized objects into open works, fluid spatial situations and relations in the social field. Art processes raise the question: Can the complex structure of artworks provide an analogy and methodology that art researchers can use to co-design our culture from anthropological, philosophical, aesthetic and sociopolitical perspectives? This paper addresses this question through an examination of the artistic use of, and critical commentary on, media and available technologies, and of the artistic treatment of life forms found in the work of the younger generation of Slovenian artists (Tratnik, Berlot, Peljhan, Lovšin and others). The strategies these artists employ in their projects significantly strengthen the case for a re-articulation of the aesthetic, the ethical and the political, through a transition in various territories: art, (biotechnological) science, technology, new media and everyday reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space satellites are invisible instruments of globalization that influence governmental policies. This paper examines remote sensing satellites as optical devices capable of redefining human cognition. They represent accessibility and openness through the more agreeable paradigm of transparency. However, transparency, like surveillance, is based on the interconnection between power, knowledge and perceptual experience. Artists use a variety of tactical practices, including amateurism, to tease apart these connections. Amateurism dedicates itself to the politics of knowledge. The author concludes, based on examples of her work and that of others, that the potential for political intervention exists when knowledge is paired with action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the work of Brazilian artist Flávio de Carvalho (1899-1973) from the perspective of contemporary media art, highlighting his practical and theoretical legacy. Initially associated with the Anthropophagy art movement, Carvalho used mass media creatively and incorporated insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology into his art. He realized events that went beyond "performance art," including a pioneering presentation on television in 1957. This article offers a brief overview of Carvalho's trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lovely Weather Donegal Residencies was a Leonardo/Olats art-and-climate project that took place in Donegal, Ireland, in 2010. In this paper, the curator reflects on the art-science-local communities approach taken as a basis for the residencies and the results of the process, which caused her in the end to reconsider the universal versus the specific context for creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conditions of crisis can be fertile soil for social transformation. The Lovely Weather project in Donegal, northwest Ireland, brought artists into residence in localities where changing socioeconomic and awareness of shifting environmental conditions opened up space for different cooperative relations. Donegal, bounded by the Atlantic, sitting between the north and south of Ireland, is an ambiguous in-between region with strong yet undervalued traditions relating to the sea and land. Drawing from a keynote presentation, this paper considers how residency models can dynamically connect poetics of place with broader environmental influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]