art & fiction Archives

Bookshelf

Hopepunk, Solarpunk: Here are climate narratives that go beyond the Apocalypse

29th January 2020

Alyssa Hull writes: We desperately need narratives that move past apocalypse as an endpoint, not only because there are people and societies already living through the Western world’s vision of climate apocalypse, but also because it can only inspire a helpless waiting for the post-apocalypse to arrive, suddenly, to cleave the past from the future….

Bookshelf

K. Ramachandran: Literature in the age of climate change

19th July 2019

Literature has always conditioned our philosophical understanding of nature. Likewise, ecology as a way of seeing and reading the world has irrevocably changed the study of literature itself. We must examine literary/cultural production in relation to questions of environmental impact, ecological thinking and the implications of revising conventional ways of articulating human with extra-human nature….

Tagore in an open-air classroom at Shantiniketan, the university he founded

ALTERNATIVES

Re-reading Tagore in the age of development gone mad

20th September 2018

Aseem Shrivastava writes: Tagore’s play Mukta-Dhara foretells the manner in which people across the country have been losing their freedom— those uprooted by development quite obviously so, those ‘benefitting’ from it (mostly living in cities) more subtly and invisibly. This is the ecologically fatal price of ‘progress’, which Rabindranath anticipated in much of his work….

ALTERNATIVES

R.I.P. Ursula Le Guin, visionary science-fiction writer

25th January 2018

Ursula K. Le Guin, legendary American sci-fi author and creator of the classic ‘Earthsea’ series, died on January 22. She was 88. In this tribute, we present a video of her talk on “Transformation Without Apocalypse: How to Live Well on an Altered Planet”, as well as her article on ‘the future of the Left’….

Culture/Cognition

Art Eco 1: The ethereal beauty of ‘Bioluminescent Forest’

7th August 2017

Nature has always inspired art, but in our own age of ecological crisis, it’s taking on a special significance for many contemporary artists. This series looks at path-breaking artists and works that reflect this growing awareness. Here, watch artist-filmmakers Friedrich van Schoor and Tarek Mawad turn trees, mushrooms, and even toads into pulsing, projection-mapped creatures….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Hitler Denial: A comic on global climate action

25th May 2016

Today, global action to stop climate change is inconceivable. Yet, in 1938, global action to stop Nazi Germany was also inconceivable. The world was in Hitler denial. Australian cartoonist Stuart McMillen, whose acclaimed long-form comics are inspired by science, ecology, sustainability and economics, takes on the most daunting challenge of our times – climate change….

Culture/Cognition

Anthropocene, or the art of living on a damaged planet

19th May 2016

Donna Harraway: I’m going to propose that the Cthulucene might be a way to collect up the questions for naming the epoch, for naming what’s happening in the airs, waters, and places, in the rocks, oceans, and atmospheres. Perhaps needing both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, but offering something else, something just maybe more livable….

Bookshelf

Bookshelf: Hot Earth Dreams by Hank Landis

30th April 2016

John Michael Greer writes: We are about to witness the disintegration of everything that counts as business as usual, and the opening phases of a bleak new reality that author Frank Landis has sketched out in his Hot Earth Dreams—a brilliant fictional take on what the world will look like in the wake of severe climate change….

ENERGY

Isaac Asimov: The Nightmare Life Without Fuel

26th February 2015

In 1977, Time magazine asked science writer Isaac Asimov for his vision of an energy-poor society that might exist at the end of the 20th century. The following portrait, Asimov noted, “need not prove to be accurate. It is a picture of the worst, of waste continuing, of oil running out, of nothing in its…

Conflict/Dispossession

Film: Mad Max Fury Road

2nd January 2015

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akX3Is3qBpw] “It’s the oil, stupid!” Mad Max, the 1970 Australian dystopian movie which went on to be part of a hit trilogy will soon be back with a fourth edition. Going by the trailer, it promises a lot more explosions, high speed crashes and other such violent thrills the franchise is known for. The…