Sunday, October 9, 4 PM
SP Weather Station Event in conjunction with the Congress of Collectives
EARTH / FUTURE
Utopia—Dystopia—Ecotopia?
with Judy Natal
Flux Factory
39-31 29th Street, Long Island City
Free and open to the public
Why do artists imagine the future? Will we see Utopia? Dystopia? Ecotopia?
In the third in a series of events related to Air, Water, Earth and Fire:
SP Weather Station presents EARTH / FUTURE, featuring a presentation by artist Judy Natal and a conversation about how and why artists imagine the future.
As a photographer and the first artist-in-residence at Biosphere 2 (and co-creator of its ongoing residency program), Natal has often been an observer of contained environments—artificial ecosystems and protected and designed wildernesses—in an uncertain relationship to alien terrain. She travels to extreme environments to capture images that suggest life “after nature,” or perhaps a new relationship between the Earth, the built environment and our human-ness.
Her interest in the way landscapes are altered—by scientists, engineers, designers, and utopians—has recently opened into a broader inquiry into the myriad sources of our collectively constructed futuristic visions. Mining fields such as science fiction, ecology, robotics, architecture, and art history for source material, Natal posits a relationship between a fantastical/imagined future and the peculiar ways the land is already technologized—for research, tourism, and survival.
For EARTH / FUTURE, Natal will explore themes and questions raised by her latest body of work, Future Perfect, while surveying some of the artworks, images, and texts that contribute to our visions of futurity. Audience members will be invited to join the conversation and participate in compiling a visual bibliography for further reading on Utopian/Dystopian/Ecotopian themes. Please bring along visual representation (copies, drawings, paintings, collages, snaps, etc.) of your favorite books on this subject to add to our library installation.
This event is made possible (in part) by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
About Judy Natal:
Judy Natal is a Chicago artist, author of EarthWords published in 2004 by Light Work, and Neon Boneyard Las Vegas A-Z, published in 2006 by Center for American Places. Her photographs are in the permanent public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, California Museum of Photography, Center for Creative Photography, the International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. Her work has been exhibited widely and she has received numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies, mostly recently at Biosphere 2 and the Robotics Institute. She is a professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago. For more information: http://www.judynatal.com/
Thanks to Judy Natal and everyone who came out for her EARTH / FUTURE presentation on Sunday, particularly the Congress of Collectives participants. Special thanks to Meow Wolf, who created the immersive psychedelic installation in which many Congress events will take place this month, and to Parfyme, for helping with with our visual bibliography on futurity (more after the jump!)
The Chicago-based photographer presented a talk in three sections: a definition of the terms utopia, dystopia, ecotopia, reflecting on their origins and applications within art and popular culture; an account of the history of Biosphere 2 and her encounter with it, as co-founder of its artist-in-residence program; and a tour through her latest photographic project, Future Perfect. Organized as four decade-sections flowing backwards in time from 2040 to 2010, the this series (and book) is comprised of images with varying degrees of legibility, suggesting technologized landscapes and new kinds of relationships between humans and their environment. Rather than taking a linear or didactic approach to her narrative, Natal juxtaposes otherworldly, seemingly sci-fi images from three distinct real-world sites (Biosphere 2, a Las Vegas desert preserve, and geothermal springs in Iceland). Her approach emphasizes hands on research and exploration of diverse source material, finding images in the present that evoke futurity’s recurring tropes and some of the hopes and anxieties that accompany them.
In collaboration with SPWS, Natal, who is currently teaching a course titled “Utopia—Dystopia—Ecotopia” presented a kind of ‘visual bibliography’ of the texts that inspire her to explore these issues which audience members could walk through, creating connections in a similarly nonlinear, imaginative fashion.
SPWS is grateful to artist Jo Q. Nelson and Andrew Beccone of the Reanimation Library for their generous contributions to the bibliography. The book cover images from the installation are gathered here and we will be posting this as a text list very soon.