October/November @ 319 Scholes: Ecologías Correlativas, Notes on a New Nature, Monthly Music Series: Leisure :: 319 Scholes Street, Brooklyn NY.

How has the (contested) term ‘ecology’ mutated over past decades? If we cannot separate nature from culture, what is the role of subjectivity in the ‘ecological’? Where are opportunities to reconfigure social models with technology? How does one reconcile the space between a screen and a landscape? What can the natural world tell us about the online environments that we’re building everyday?

Over the course of the next few months, 319 Scholes will be exploring two schools of thought related to technology and ecology. Next week, chimera+ will introduce Ecologías Correlativas, an exhibition of projects by artists, architects and scientists who are creating DIY, largely open source, technologies to navigate environmental and socio-political ecologies. We will then look at how technology has created an essential shift for our experience of the natural world, from a physical landscape to a virtual one, with Nicholas O’Brien’s exhibition, Notes on a New Nature. The purpose of these exhibitions is to explore our relationship to ecology within a technologically-driven culture, and to consider how these parallel narratives are mapping our understanding of “real” and “virtual” environments.

Ecologías Correlativas
October 13-27, 2011
October 13; 7:00 - 10:00 pm
Curated by chimera+

In “The Three Ecologies,” Félix Guattari proposes strategies for an eco-logic and ethico-aesthetic. In grammar, ‘correlative’ implies a (non-adjacent) reciprocal or complimentary relationship. Affixing the two, Ecologías Correlativas presents projects and research from a trans-disciplinary group of artists, architects and scientists navigating interrelated environmental/socio-political ecologies. Many of the participants privilege an open source ethos and think tank mentality, effectively democratizing prototypes and distribution models. From harvesting energy to mobilizing individuals, the works on display ask us to reconsider the roles of technology and subjectivity in what is broadly referred to as ‘ecological’.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Dan Baker, b.a.n.g. lab, Ecosistema Urbano, Fluxxlab, Living Environments Lab, Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, N55, Miguel Soares, Dr. Manos Tentzeris, Terreform ONE texts by Ignacio Nieto & Avinash Rajagopal.

chimera+ is a curatorial initiative preoccupied with constructing a politics of the present. The members have done odd jobs for: The New Museum, Eyebeam Art+Technology Center, e-flux, Independent Curators International, National Gallery of Art, and X-Initiative.

Mountain Range by Mark Beasley (2010)

Notes on a New Nature
November 10-20, 2011
Opening: November 10; 7:00 - 10:00 pm
Curated by Nicholas O’Brien

For me the Internet has always been a physical space. Working as a sculptor, the first moment I started experimenting with HTML code and viewed the results in the browser, I witnessed a physical installation. - Jan Robert Leegte talking to cont3xt.net

The history of representing landscape is intrinsically involved with the advent technological development and research. However, a departure from this history is currently underway, and digital technology has radically repositioned perspective and vision with regards to how we pictorially engage nature. Notes on a New Nature has served as a research practice that attempts to trace the ways in which artists working online or in dialog with digital technology are processing landscape as a site for contemplating ways in which the dichotomy between the “real” and the “virtual” are rapidly collapsing. Artists in this exhibition use various digital tools and methods to create works that foster new aesthetic approaches for depicting landscape and its physical, emotional, and phenomenological affect.

Nicholas O’Brien is an artist, writer, curator, and researcher in net-based practices and new media art forms. His work and writing has been featured on Rhizome.org, Networked_Performance, Art:21, and he is a regular bi-monthly contributor for contemporary art blog Bad at Sports. His visual work has been been mounted and presented in many national, international, and online exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Xth Biennial of Lyon, and tank.tv. For more information, visit doubleunderscore.net.

319 Monthly Music Series: Leisure
October 8, 2011; 8:00-11:00 pm
Organized Phillip Stearns

Leisure is a monthly social exchange at 319 Scholes involving electronic music and visual performances, installations and spectacle.

$10 at the door, please visit Leisure on 319scholes.org for more information.

Jeff Donaldson, Philip White, Twistycat, toktek, Simon Berz and Phillip Stearns