Art Beyond Nature

 

https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11259594-art-beyond-nature

From 1826 when the first photograph was made to 1889 when
rolls of celluloid film became available, photography changed
from a medium that required almost as much work to make
one exposure as the creation of a small painting, to a small
portable box that could take multiple pictures, each taking
a fraction of a second to record. The task of attempting to
represent nature in a single picture became unnecessary. 
Photography changed how we see nature.

Throughout the 19th century photography gradually moved away from the aesthetics of painting to become a medium that was about paying attention to fleeting instances of existence. In the 20th century public understanding of nature was increasingly mediated through picture-magazines, documentary film and television. The expectation of seeing the essence of nature depicted in a single monumental painting, as was the ambition of landscape artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, was eclipsed by a multitude of photographs and cine-films depicting the natural world. Despite the tendency of photography to create meaning through the accumulation of images, two photographs attained the monumental status of some landscape paintings. Both the Apollo 8 Earthrise and the Apollo 17 Blue Marble photographs of the Earth have been adopted by the environmental

The Blue Marble photograph of Earth

was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on

the return leg of their mission to the 

Moon in  December 1972. The image 

shows no sign of life that would be

incontrovertible if this were to be a 

picture of an exo-planet. The reception

of the picture by society is framed by

cultural values more often expressed 

by language. The photograph has

acquired the monumental status of some

19th Century landscape paintings. The

picture is sublime in that it is both

beautiful and contains implications that

are terrifying.

movement as emblematic images of our precious biosphere, even though only clouds are visible in them. The pictures are actually enigmatic and the values attached to them are essentially literary ideas inherited from writers such as Henry David Thoreau. His philosophy of simple living in natural surroundings is more influential now than in his own lifetime. His 1854 book Walden; or Life in the Woods insisted that a life lived isolated from nature is not an authentic life. The controversial writer and transcendentalist Laurens van Der Post promoted this idea in the 1950s and, inspired by Carl Jung, proposed that wellbeing could only be attained through access to a universal unconscious that civilisation was diminishing. Avant-Garde art was already exploring this concept as the ideal of pictorial realism became increasingly invested in photography - freeing artists to experiment with non-objective (abstract) pictures. In 20th century European art, two competing ideas of authentic representations of nature coincided; the fashionable Theosophical/Jungian idea that abstract art was pursuing a world of harmony or energy that lay beyond visible reality (Artists as different as Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock were interested in this concept), and the traditional but still popular idea that a realistic depiction of an ideal scene can express the beauty (picturesque or sublime) of nature. 

Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red
1937-42      Piet Mondrian 

In 1936 Holger Cahill wrote about modern

art "Art..had its own harmony independent

of nature...(now) art need have no frame of 

reference in nature at all. The relationship 

with nature, which had given the artist a

creative impetus for upward of two hundred

years, thus tended to disappear. "

Modern art, within modernism, became inward looking. The Bauhaus art school had its greatest influence on Architecture, graphic design and product design. The tendency for civilisation to become synonymous with the built environment and social space was legitemised by the 'disappearance' of nature into the laboratory as science explored matter at the level of atoms. Although (like music) fundamental nature has no visible surface, the search for authenticity occurs in modern science. In the age of remote-sensing satellites expeditions are sent out to establish 'ground truth' so as to calibrate instruments in space. In the parallel world of art, Walter Benjamin had a different problem with authenticity. In his 1935 book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Benjamin argued that the 'aura' of paintings is missing in photographic copies because their uniqueness in a particular time and space is absent. These different aspects of authenticity come together in any consideration of the future of landscape art. The land art pioneer Robert Smithson turned the problem of pictorial authenticity into a creative opportunity when he devised his 'non-site' installations in which sketches, photographs and samples of material from remote landscapes were

Electron orbits of a Uranium atom.

Today the ancient Greek concepts of 

'The Music of the Spheres' and

'platonic shapes' persist in a modified 

form in science. Shells of electrons

orbiting atomic nuclei are reminiscent 

of the concentric crystal spheres,

once believed  to surround the Earth,

and the geometry of molecules

too small for us to see echo the

'Platonic Shapes' of ancient Greek 

philosophers.

Chloroplasts in plant tissue. Genetic

editing could increase their efficiency

by 20%, causing more Carbon 

Dioxide to be extracted from the 

atmosphere.

The outstanding feature of our

relationship with nature in the 21st 

Century will be our ability to change

it at the most basic level of life - DNA.
Because living organisms reproduce,

changes that will be made using 

genetic editing techniques could

become more widespread than our

current onslaught on nature with

mechanical technology. Changes to

ecosystems would be irreversible.

A new ethos of our relationship to

nature will be centred around decisions

about how much of the biosphere 

should be changed. If art is to have

any relevance to this process it will

need to go beyond the type of 

landscape picture that Jaan Wijnants

painted. (Right)Perhaps it wiil take

inspiration from work such as the 

animated data-realisation 

Welcome to the Anthropocene. 

(Below)

Welcome to the Anthropocene

 3minute 38 second video

exhibited in art galleries. Smithson created an aesthetic from the gap between representation of nature and actual landscapes. In the 21st century similar ingenuity will be needed to reflect how the potential use of technologies, such as synthetic biology and the 'reverse-engineering' of the atmosphere by CO2 removal, will bring into focus questions about the authenticity of the heavily managed biosphere. The potential to change nature will be substantially greater than at any time in history. The area between photographic 'realism' and abstract imagining will converge with the evolving boundary between nature and artifice.  

   

     

Wooded Landscape with Figures Walking by a Sandy Bank - Jaan Wijnants  (1635-1684)

Wijnants picture is in the style of most landscape paintings

of that era, but the 'sandy bank' that is depicted is most

unusual. The feature is actually a former cliff-face that was 

left behind by the creation of a polder - land reclaimed from 

the sea. The figures are walking on what would have been a

beach or the sea-floor. This is perhaps the earliest work of

art that can be related to the Anthropocene, our current 

epoch in which humans have become a geological force

that rivals natural Earth systems.

Attempts at reconciling science and art have always been

problematic. The issue is not one of difference of methods

but difference of vision. Evolution has provided us with

senses that are just good enough for survival. Science and

technology have expanded our ability to see into the infra-

red, the x-ray spectrum, radio waves and electrons. 

Crucially it is through our own senses that we live. It is this

aspect of existence that art celebrates. The capacity of

scientific methods to map nature over time is also different

from our lived experience. It was Robert Smithson who

came closest to resolving this conundrum. Along with other

land artists he situated himself firmly within the conceptual

art movement and created a significant bridge between art

and science.

                                              

Lost in Landscape.

https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11200757-lost-in-landscape-john-stockton

Attenborough nature reserve in

Nottinghamshire is the result of 

gravel extraction that has left

behind flooded areas that are now 

managed by a wildlife conservation

charity. In this Anthropocene epoch

human activity moves more material

than rivers and glaciers. Humans have

become a geological force. Climate

change means that no corner of the

Earth is unaffected. No landscape

can be though of as truly 'authentic'.     

We are familiar with the possibility of getting lost in a landscape but the Anthropocene epoch, the present time in which humans have effectively overridden nature, presents a way of being metaphorically lost in the increasingly artificial world that we are creating by our own technological power. Ideas of nature are as much a product of imagination as landscape pictures. While we believe that we have a relationship with an objectively real world, there is a race between the discovery of its hidden intricacies and the rate at which agriculture and industry is transforming it. The defining characteristic of the 21st century will be the relentless replacement of the natural world by the built-environment, agriculture, synthetic biology and waste materials. Humans are responsible for a new mass extinction event. The expansion of agriculture and globalised consumerism is moving the world towards a homogenised biosphere in which the concept of 'invasive species' will no longer be meaningful. Biomass may remain broadly the same as the number of species within it diminishes. Biodiversity is reduced and Earth systems are being pushed to tipping points beyond which they will operate in new and unpredictable ways. 

The tradition of western landscape art has been complicit in this process. 

Bucolic landscape scenes depicted actual landscapes as constructed 

Flatford Mill c 1816 John Constable

The son of a wealthy corn merchant,

Constable's early paintings exhibit an

affection for the area in which he lived.

His landscapes belong to an era when

commerce was on such a small scale

it could operate in sympathy with nature.

Today, his paintings are part of a nostalgia

'industry' of which tourism is a very real

economic part. Hill farming subsidies

in the UK are partly paid to maintain

farms in the appearance made familiar by

landscape art. The grazing on hill farms

keeps the land free from vegetation that 

would help to reduce flooding and absorb 

carbon dioxide.

achievements that were a combination of providence and virtuous labour. The picturesque sub-genre of landscape art provides a dream of nature, in which the desire to exploit the landscape operates in harmony with a reduced form of wilderness in the form of woods and distant hills. Within landscape art there is no real difference between agriculture and nature.  This still popular aesthetic of the picturesque landscape picture (painted or photographed) suggests that as long as there are a few corners of the world that are still wild, all will be well. Actually, the impact of human activity on Earth systems occurs on a scale that is outside the scope of any single picture. Carbon dioxide emissions are not only increasing global temperatures, they are also acidifying oceans. Methane emissions from cattle also act as a greenhouse gas. It is possible that humans are now driving evolution and creating some new species as well as pushing many more to extinction. Inevitably technology in the 21st century will be used to try to navigate the Anthropocene. Attempts to use genetic engineering to modify not just crops but entire ecosystems to cope with climate change are being considered. The genes that control photosynthesis may be changed so that more carbon dioxide is removed from the air. Machines to capture the gas and store it underground already exist. Nostalgic landscape art is no longer a reflection of life.

Since the iconic Picture 51 x-ray

diffraction photograph was made

by Rosalind Franklin in 1952 the

discovery of the structure of DNA,

which the picture enabled, has resulted

in the invention of genome editing 

technology which will alter plants to

use more carbon dioxide from the air.

Eventually entire ecosystems could be

altered, either to help plants cope with

climate change or to try to return 

atmospheric CO2 levels to pre-

industrial values.

The 21st century needs a new genre of art that contemplates the changing distinction between the natural world and technology as well as acknowledging that the 'technological sublime' is now as eloquent as 'sublime nature' was in Edmund Burke's time. The extent to which contemporary art is characterised by detachment, coolness and irony is unhelpful in this direction. The expectation that minimalism can distill the essence of what is significant into a few lines or shapes goes unfulfilled. Visual art could provide a critical context to the exercise of control over nature by creating opportunities for contemplation and reverie and to momentarily step back from the language of institutions, writers and journalists. Landscapes will change as livestock becomes less prominent in agriculture. Opposing practices of permaculture versus intensive agriculture, including industrialised 'vertical farming' and the production of cultured meat in bioreactors, will probably operate at the same time in different places. While permaculture aims to reduce the impact of food production on nature, paradoxically, industrialised farming concentrated in smaller areas opens the possibility of rewilding and the return of farmland to carbon-sink wetland. Wind and solar energy will become

There is no guarantee that thermonuclear

fusion can be used as a source of electricity.

If a way of harnessing the heat released by

fusing protons together is found it could be

the most significant technical innovation 

since the discovery of how to make fire. 

Fusion power would not eliminate the need

for solar, tidal, geothermal and wind energy,

but the surplus capacity could be used to 

mechanically extract carbon dioxide from

the atmosphere, liquefy it and store it 

underground. Whoever controlled access to 

these underground stores would effectively

have their hand on the 'global thermostat'.

In some distant future the gas could be

released to negate the onset of an ice-age.

 more common. Controlled thermonuclear fusion, if it works, will effectively create artificial suns on Earth.  The diffusing boundary between naturalness and artifice will be the most important subject for art in the 21st century, creating the impetus for a new aesthetic in art as almost the entire world becomes a kind of walled garden with wilderness confined to ever-decreasing pockets - an exact reversal of the medieval hortus conclusus or ancient paradeisos.     

  

A winter garden under cover painted by Franz Antoine in 1852.

The glass-enclosed space is perhaps the ultimate form of a garden

in which the air itself is protected from cold.

Before landscape art evolved from narrative driven history 

painting, walled gardens such as the European Hortus Conclusus

and the  Paradeisos of Egypt and Persia were culturally important

means of maintaining a shared understanding and interpretation

of nature. The ordering of space can serve as metaphor for the 

construction of meaning in general, and the creation of a garden

is specifically symbolic of a belief in an underlying order behind

nature.

A paradox of our age is that although our arrangements of fields,

orchards and herb gardens were created to save what we value

from harm, it is wilderness that is now in need of protection. 

Humans now manage 75% of land that is not ice-bound. What

was once thought of as threatening is now itself in danger. It can

now be understood that although uncultivated nature was once 

seen as randomness it is in fact composed of dynamic 

relationships of organisms in complex ecological communities.

The future will bring increasing ability to alter nature. Genome

editing, synthetic biology and possibly nano-technology that

will join atoms together to form new compounds without chemical

reactions, will define the 21st century. It is over ambitions to 

expect art to reflect all of this, but the active border between 

nature and technology, the actual location of choices, will be 

a subject as significant as landscape was from the 17th century

to the 19th century. Metaphorically, the point of contact between 

nature and technology will be like a weather front dividing 

air-masses. This active zone of interaction will give rise to the 

most interesting art.

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• LOST IN LANDSCAPE
• ISBN
  • Hardcover, Dust Jacket: 9798210452474
  • Hardcover, ImageWrap: 9798210452467
  • Softcover: 9798210452450
  • 
    

                                    https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11200757-lost-in-landscape-john-stockton

Utopias - 10

 

Landscape and Science Fiction

 https://www.blurb.com/b/10762175-utopias-10-landscape-and-science-fiction

In the 1953 film It Came from Outer Space the main protagonists, John Putnam (an astronomy author) and his girlfriend Ellen Fields, are enjoying a romantic evening under the stars in Arizona when their conversation is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a fireball streaking across the sky. The apparition turns out to be a crashing spacecraft that has the power to destroy the Earth if humans interfere with it. Subsequent events follow the pattern of the formulaic science  fiction film script described by Susan Sontag in her 1965 essay The Imagination of Disaster. After convincing the local citizens that they are in danger Putnam uses his skill and knowledge to save the day, and the aliens return to space. The bewildered witnesses are left with the familiarity of their everyday existence shattered.   

Although the poster is in colour
the film was made with black
and white film and presented
as a stereoscopic anaglyph print.

What distinguishes post-1945 science fiction films from stories in magazines such as Amazing Stories and the radio drama Flash Gordon, is that the films are usually set in normal situations in which an alien invader arrives or some change in nature itself is brought about, often by an accident involving atomic power. If the threat is from outer space or results from scientists' hubris, it takes the form of destruction caused by unnatural creatures or a hitherto unknown process unleashed by a transgression of nature.

 

It Came From Outer Space is one of hundreds of similar films made in the two decades after the Second World War, and it is the events of the final year of that conflict that made them so different from 1930s science fiction. London and Antwerp had been bombarded by V2 rockets fired from German-held territory. These liquid-fuelled missiles came as a complete surprise to the public. Coming literally and metaphorically out of the blue, the V2 rocket was so advanced that a later derivative version launched the first American satellite in 1958. Another revelation was radar, which produced an uncanny electronic landscape image with perpetual night and no horizon.

1) 31st January - Explorer 1 satellite placed in orbit by a Juno 1 launch vehicle. The Satellite discover the Van Allen radiation belt.
2) V2 (A4) rocket prepared for launch at Cuxhaven in 1944.
3) Hurricane viewed on a radar-scope
4) 'Shadowgram' of atomic bomb victim in Hiroshima. The radiant heat from the detonation changed the surfaces of exposed objects, but the images of some people were preserved where their body had cast a shadow. When these pictures were released after the end of the Second World War it was thought that the deceased had been vaporised, but this is now thought to be unlikely. The uncanny nature of these photographs contributed to the post-war zeitgeist that inspired many science fiction films. 

X-rays pictures are uncanny not just because they reveal what is normally hidden but because they are negative images in which structures are ghostly white shadows seemingly existing in a world of perpetual darkness.  Similarly the original technology of radar is also uncanny, ahead of the sweeping beam there is a bleak, dark emptiness into which objects suddenly appear only to gradually fade, their presence briefly sustained by the electronic circuits that drive the cathode-ray screen -  as if the darkness of extra-terrestrial space was revealed to extend downwards into our everyday lives. Modern radar presents a more acceptable computer-generated image can be rendered as a coloured moving map.

Although the last cavalry charge in history occurred in the Second World War the conflict ended with the destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs that used the fundamental forces of nature. They were dropped from B29 aircraft that could touch the edge of the stratosphere. The bombs were triggered by barometric and radar fuses and the Nagasaki weapon used the artificial element Plutonium. In the post-war zeitgeist, the fantasies of Joules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs were replaced by more prescient stories which urgently indicated that the 'The Age of Improvement' industrial revolution paradigm was faltering.

The technology of the 20th Century was able to create uncanny images of nature and post- Second World War science suggested possibilities that were unsettling. The 1954 film Godzilla imagined destruction caused by a primal beast awoken by hydrogen bomb testing and in the same year Them! depicted monstrously enlarged ants mutated by atomic testing in New Mexico. Free from the restraints of seriousness that apply to art and literature, science fiction films were able to speculate about the changed relationship to nature brought about by science and technology. Whereas Godzilla and Them! employ their own versions of the technological sublime in there stories, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Les Yeux Sans Visage are inspired by the psychological phenomenon of the uncanny, as described by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay. The significance of post war science fiction films is that their stories draw from the technological sublime and the uncanny. They suggested that both nature and our human selves could be transformed.

 In the 1950s science fiction films became the genre through which it was possible to speculate about our changed relationship with nature because established cultural forms, art, theatre and 'serious' literature, failed to respond to it. Journalism reported newsworthy science, but without scrutiny of the long-term cultural significance of its discoveries. Against the background of the consolidation of the post -war relationship between science and government, exhibitions such as the 1951 Festival of Britain and Gyorgy Kepes' book The New Landscape in Art and Science treated what is now regarded as the start of the Anthropocene as an extension of the latest stage of modernism.

1) River Landscape with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl - Salvator Rosa (1615-1673)
2) No. 46 [Black, Ochre, Red Over Red] - Mark Rothko (1957)
3) Typhoon south-east of Tokyo - photographed by the Tiros 5 satellite.

For over 200 years landscape art helped to create a shared appreciation of nature. By the end of the 19th Century civic pride demanded that every city in the developed world should have a public art gallery providing democratised access to art-forms

A figure concealed by foliage is revealed by
infra-red film. While the aesthetics of landscape
art and landscape photography remain
broadly similar, images of nature created by
science tend to be uncanny.

originally created for aristocrats. By the 1950s the art world was too occupied by the challenge of reconciling the aesthetics of the 19th century with modernism and abstract art to notice that knowledge from science was replacing familiar representations of nature with uncanny images. As for science museums, their mission was to try to make the uncanny familiar.

 Art galleries and science museums were once major influences on the perception of nature. As well as being separate buildings, they owe aesthetic and intellectual allegiances to different institutions. Art galleries and science museums symbolise the division of the understanding of nature that was complete by the end of the 19th century. Subject areas in libraries confirm the separate identities of 'the two cultures' described by C.P. Snow. (2) Even today these differences are perpetuated by attitudes that are taught at the earliest ages in schools. Only the discipline of geography comes close to an understanding of landscapes that are created by a combination of work, biology, geology and entropy.

 

In science there is a putative separation between quantum physics and the older Newtonian 'classic' worldview that mirrors the supposed division of art into 'abstract' and 'figurative' practices. As 'classic' physics is still used in engineering and most science, so figurative art (including landscape pictures) is still popular a hundred years after Cubism. Actual landscapes that have historically (in landscape art) represented abstract ideas of beauty, the sublime and the picturesque are now altered by industry, agriculture and climate change. The transformation is like the uncanny aberrations of nature in science fiction.

Particles made visible

in a cloud chamber

In art, nature has been represented by landscape pictures and in science by mathematics. The work 

of art might be a landscape painting and the scientific equivalent could be a set of data. A condensed form of a landscape painting might be a still-life picture and the science equivalent of this could be a photograph of the tracks of sub-atomic particles in a cloud-chamber. What does this mean for the role of art in relation to modern media? The popularity of the Blue Planet television series has been encouraged by digital screens that have put a cinema into every home. The vibrancy of their colour and the size of these screens are material determinants that have revolutionised 'nature' documentaries. 

Nature can now be vicariously explored through video. It can be flown over, dived under and its events are stretched out by slow motion video or compressed by time-lapse photography. By comparison the landscape pictures lodged in permanent collections in public galleries around the world can seem quite moribund, but the new genre of 'infotainment' has not eliminated the divisive influence of art galleries and science museums. The binary perspectives of nature as wildlife and nature as physics remain in mass media. How will art react to our persistently ambiguous definition of 'nature' in the future?

Art now exists on a spectrum of engagement. At one end is the multi-millionaire who collects the work of 'pop star' artists and at the other end is the 'art worker' employed in community art or art therapy. From being a potential agent of social change, the Avant Garde has become a marketing vehicle for the high-end art market. The artists supplying this market are cast as philosopher-poets achieving insight through experimental and extended techniques. For the majority of art school graduates a career in community arts is a possibility - enabling the self-expression of individuals from challenging backgrounds. Between these extremes the more numerous consumers of art continue to receive the tradition of landscape art as 'heritage'.

 

1) Chloroplasts, the site of photosynthesis in plants. Genetic engineering could increase their
efficiency by 20% - creating the possibility of enhanced removal of C02 from the atmosphere.
2) Meat from cells cultured in a laboratory.
3) Thermonuclear fusion in the MAST 'spherical' tokamak at Culham in Oxfordshire.

We may be living during a 'hinge period' of history as revolutionary as the renaissance. The 20th century revealed hidden nature as if it were a dream, and the 21st century the means to undo the accidental changes brought about in nature could bring large areas of the world under artificial control. Just as renaissance art, exploration and science were related, so the Anthropocene era will require the cultural identity of nature to be a subject for art.

The 21st Century will be defined by climate change and the domination of ecosystems by agriculture (the Anthropocene) (3) and the ability to edit DNA, transform ecosystems and use energy from thermonuclear fusion to remove carbon dioxide from the air (the technological sublime). As societies face choices about climate change, synthetic biology and geoengineering, art will offer a contemplative space in which to consider evolving interactions of artificiality and nature. Equivalents to landscape art will emerge as the world becomes more like science fiction.

https://www.blurb.com/b/10762175-utopias-10-landscape-and-science-fiction

(1) Briggs, Asa. The Age of Improvement. London: Longman, 1959. Print. History of England (Longman ).

(2) Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. London: Cambridge UP, 1959. Print. Rede Lecture; 1959.

(3) https://futureearth.org/publications/anthropocene-magazine/

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/teams-engineer-complex-human-tissues-win-top-prizes-in-nasa-challenge

Utopias - 9

On the 26th September 1991, a team of four men and four women, watched by international press and television reporters, sealed themselves into what was essentially a huge terrarium called Biosphere 2.  Built over three years at a site in Oracle, Arizona, the project was expected to demonstrate that a working scale-model of the Earth's biosphere could sustain a space colony with not just food but also air and water.  The air-tight environment was built on the scale of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. To emulate the

Biosphere 2. The sealed environment was

divided into sections called 'biomes' and

can be regarded as a research facility to

test the viability of future self- supporting

space colonies and as a conceptual

art project foregrounding the complexity

of our biological and agricultural world.

entirety of the biological world the 1.27 hectare enclosure was covered by a glass and steel space-frame and divided into areas; rain-forest, ocean (with a coral reef), mangrove marsh, savanna, fog desert and an agricultural area. 

Biosphere 2 was the home for the volunteers for two years during which time they had to grow all their own food,  undertake a host of scientific measurements and (paradoxically) maintain the wilderness areas. The atmosphere was monitored every 15 minutes by 2000 sensors and the entire artificial environment was controlled by a computer and a nearby 'mission control'. Periods of rain were programmed and artificial waves created in the 'ocean'. Distinct climatic zones were emulated in different sections by heating, cooling, drying and humidifying the air.

The Bios 3 underground 
research facility in
Krasnoyarsk, Russia
Between 1972 and 1984 three 
people were able to live in
the 315 cubic metre
sealed environment with
25 % of oxygen supplied
by algae and wheat plants.

 The designers of Biosphere 2 attempted to encapsulate as many of the physical aspects of the Earth as possible. It was not the first experiment to use algae or plants to keep humans alive in a closed environment, but it was the first attempt at making a working model of the Earth's biosphere. In 1979 James Lovelock proposed that the totality of Earth systems form a self-regulating whole, which he named Gaia. (1) Although photosynthesising oxygen, Biosphere 2 could not  maintain temperatures as Earth systems do, and so the project used extensive underground air-management systems run by a gas-powered energy unit. 

Biosphere 2 was subsequently criticised for being unscientific because the 'biospherian' crew were not all qualified as scientists. This judgement ignored the fact that the first astronauts were test-pilots. The Skylab solar telescope was operated from 1973 to 1974 for hundreds of hours by astronauts who were not astronomers. It was also suggested that the project pursued a subjective 'new age' agenda. Some biospherians were from a performance background and they had previously worked with the designers of Biosphere 2, businessman and inventor Ed Bass and 'systems ecologist' John P. Allen, at a counter-cultural community known as the Synergia Ranch 

The United States pavilion
at the Expo 67 fair in Quebec.
Buckminster Fuller pioneered
the use of geodesic domes as
efficient structures covering
the greatest volume with the
optimum about of material.

This overlapping of interests came from the zeitgeist of the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, Ed  Bass and John Allen were influenced by the concept of 'design science exploration' which resists categorisation as either architecture or engineering and emphasizes the application of ingenuity over the marshaling of huge resources. Instead of regarding Biosphere 2 as a single experiment that could succeed or fail, it is more appropriate to understand it as a laboratory for multiple investigations. (2) The project could even fit within the definition of art, as chosen by Susan Sontag.

In her 1965 essay One culture and the new sensibility. Sontag wrote that the function of art was "giving pleasure and educating conscience and sensibility." Biosphere 2 may sit at the end of a spectrum of creations that might be considered art. The situation of its occupants was similar to that of the crew of a submarine as they lived with a fixed volume of air. Their personal effects had to be vetted as soap, shampoo, paint or glue that contained chemicals that could accumulate in the air were not allowed. This issue, along with many others raised by living in a microcosm, commented on life in the real world. Biosphere 2 blurred the distinction between science, engineering and performance art.

1. The Intensive Agriculture Biome in which the 'biospherian' crew produced their food.
2. The display screen on which data from 2000 sensors was displayed.
3. Although the ambition of Biosphere 2 was to emulate the process by which oxygen is replenished in the air by plants, it was necessary to use extensive electrical and mechanical systems to control temperate, create rainfall, control salinity of water bodies, remove algae from the 'rivers' and 'seas', as well as pumping water. The systems were monitored by engineers in
a nearby control centre, but maintained by the isolating crew.
4. The wilderness area was also maintained by the crew, pointing towards the 21st century when even non-cultivated areas may need to be helped to adapt to climate change.

The single greatest achievement of Biosphere 2 was to clarify the relationship between people and the actual biosphere. By attempting to live in a minuscule version of the entirety of Earth systems, the project highlighted problems that we face today. Population growth has changed the ratio of space that is occupied by humans, relative to wilderness, so as to approach that of biosphere 2.  We can no longer assume that waste is diluted by air and water to a level of insignificance. Human influence on Earth systems has increased to such a degree that we are now in a new geological era, the Anthropocene, 

Diamond mining. From the
first creation of ceramics
26,000 years ago, exploitation
of resources has expanded
to such an extent that
 humans can now be regarded
 as a geological force.

Within the limited definition of nature that excludes physics it is evident that economic activity is the main cause of species extinction. Within the wider definition of nature that includes physics; the change to the heat balance of the Earth caused by industrial carbon dioxide and methane

Open cast mine in Bohemia.
Humans move more material
around the Earth than glaciers
and rivers. 

emissions; and the discovery that humans move more material through mining, dredging and construction than the action of glaciers and rivers, means that humans are now a geological force on a planetary scale. During the first two 'missions' of biosphere 2 the crew had to manage every area of the space including the ocean, and the wilderness area. Their situation was similar to ours today.

The extent of environmental transformation and of global warming may require change not only to our modes of industry and agriculture but also the management of what used to be regarded as wilderness. Climate change may occur faster than plant species can migrate. The capacity to move bio-communities by transplanting species will be explored.(3) A more radical option would be to use CRISPR gene editing to adapt plants to new climates, or even increase the efficiency of photosynthesis so as to remove more carbon dioxide from the air. It is possible that we are already creating new species and driving evolution by changing environments. 

An arena will open up between the permaculture ideal of leaving as little trace on the Earth as possible and the technological ethos of genetic editing and geoengineering projects to mitigate climate change. Biosphere 2 presaged today's need for nuanced consideration of the interaction between artifice and nature - art that is not 'moral journalism'. In the 20th century a shared conception of landscape fragmented as nature disappeared into the laboratory and artists ended the distinction between content and style. The cultural baggage of landscape art; the sublime, the picturesque, numinist and symbolist imagery, was largely forgotten.  

TOP: Sub-atomic particles revealed in a bubble-chamber. The paths of the emerging particles are only partially constrained by the magnetic field within the walls of the chamber.

BOTTOM: Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock. His method of applying paint to a horizontal canvas on the floor of his studio created an 'all over' effect suggesting that the pictures are a small window on a greater field, seething with energy. Pollock's 'action' paintings often seem to resent the limiting borders of the canvas.

Since the Renaissance art and science have gradually drifted apart, with a few notable exceptions. For a few years in the period of impressionist painting it appeared that some artists' interests in the perception of colour overlapped with scientists' investigations of light. Some commentators have seen links between Einsteins theory of relativity and cubist art. Art came to concentrate more closely on subjective experiences as physics delved ever deeper into nature at the level of the sub-atomic. The divergence of art and science is illustrated by the Festival Pattern Group which was tasked with using images from x-ray crystallography to inspire work for the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition. The studies that the group made resulted in designs they were used for craft and not art (as defined by contemporary art critics and galleries).

Jackson Pollock's belief that abstract expressionist painting resulted from a relationship between the creative process and fundamental aspects of nature relates to the title of Leo Szilard's paper "On the decrease of entropy in a thermodynamic system by the intervention of intelligent beings". His paintings suggest the emergence of significant forms created from energy. Photographs of sub-atomic particles and Pollock's painting suggest the limitless and therefore sublime aspect of nature.

  

1. Michael Heizer - Double Negative - Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nevada in 1969-70.

2. Michael Heizer - displaced/replaced mass . Nevada. 1969

3. Michael Heizer - Circular Surface drawing - El Mirage Dry Lake, Mojave Desert, CA (ephemeral tracks created by motorcycle)

Land art constructions in the desert of the United States were a relisation of new directions in art that Susan Sontag described in her 1965 essay one culture and the new sensibility. Deliberately avoiding the emotional and cultural associations of landscape art, the constructions display a cool aloofness associated with conceptual art. Philosophers such as Hegel have argued that the beauty of ideas would eventually replace the need for visual art, but Land Art, while classifiable as conceptual art, escapes from this ideological cage by existing more as photographs and films/videos than pure ideas related by words. Pictures of land art constructions provide an aesthetic pleasure of their own, while the original creations continue to exist. Apart from ephemeral land art, the sites of these works can be regarded as both destinations for a pilgrimage and a touristic visitor attraction, like preserved Hollywood sets that become theme parks.

        

For art historians, the post-modern 'coolness' of the land art movement in the 1970s was full-stop to the genre of landscape art, but  it took place against a background of political turmoil. Robert Smithson produced his project Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University in January 1970. Later that year on the campus nine students were shot and four were killed by members of the National Guard during a Vietnam War protest. The emergence of the environmental movement from the Vietnam War protests was stimulated by the use of defoliant chemicals to deny cover for the Vietcong army. The dioxin by-product in the 'agent orange' sprayed by aircraft over huge areas left a toxic, carcinogenic and mutagenic legacy. 

1. Partially buried woodshed - An early land art experiment created at Kent State University by Robert Smithson January 1970.
2. Kent state University 4th May 1970. Four students were killed and nine students were wounded by the Ohio National Guard during a Vietnam War protest.
3. Aircraft spraying 'agent orange' defoliant in Vietnam. 

The unforeseen juxtaposition of Robert Smithson's partially buried woodshed and the shooting of thirteen students at Kent State University in the same year is a painful reminder that art does not operate in a vacuum, isolated from the society that ultimately funds it and provides an audience for it. The land art 'movement' of the 1970s was an implicit elision of landscape art that was associated with conservative values and privilege. Abstract art that occupied the attention of the art world between impressionism and the 1970s was influenced by the idea that aesthetic feelings for non-representational compositions arose from shared psychological processes, not dependent on race or class, that could contribute to 'universal' values that were implicitly socialist in nature. Before the Second World Was several abstract artists including Piet Mondrian and to a lesser extent Jackson Pollock took the idea of the psychological basis of creativity much further by involvement in the the quasi-religion Theosophy. Identifying the dividing line between mysticism and a poetic response to nature will remain a challenge for artists in the 21st century. 

In this century thermonuclear fusion could generate enough electricity to sequester carbon dioxide from the air. On a scale far greater than the defoliation of trees in Vietnam, the project would reverse global warming and allow us to release the gas at the onset of a future ice-age. Having a hand on the world's thermostat, we would be essentially 'flying the planet'. In the 21st century art cannot be limited to the rhetoric of protest movements. It could elucidate what we mean by the word 'nature' in a world shaped by synthetic biology and geoengineering.

BRINGING BIOTECHNOLOGIES TO CONSERVATION

Living robots from skin cells

Artificial life made in a laboratory

1.Chloroplasts are the sites of photosynthesis in plants. They are controlled by genes that may be edited in the future so as to increase the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 20%.

2. Lancelot 'Capability' Brown  championed the practice of creating idealised landscapes within the estates of wealthy landowners. The modification of landscapes to match the ideal of romanticised landscape paintings was eventually extended to great public parks such as Central Park in New York. In the 21st century it may be considered necessary to modify what is currently regarded as natural bio-communities so as to adapt them to climate change and extract more carbon dioxide from the air.

3. In 1952 Stanley Miller created compounds associated with living organisms by passing an electric charge through a flask containing a mixture of gasses created to emulate the atmosphere of the Earth soon after its formation.     

4. After Stanley Miller's experiments created the basic building blocks of life it was briefly thought that life could be created in a 'second genesis' in the laboratory. This has proved to be beyond present capabilities, but radical modifications of existing cells with entirely synthesised genes has been accomplished. Although there is a large gap between Stanley Miller's creation of chemical precursors to life and the modification of existing cells, the cultural significance of the changing distinctions between naturally occurring systems and engineered systems will be a major subject for art in the 21st century. 

Climate engineering

. 

The choices that are to be made in the 21st century around climate change and the Anthropocene are creating a need for an art of nature that moves on from the traditions of landscape art to respond to evolving values around artifice and naturalness. One challenge will be to remain distinct from both new-age mysticism and techno-utopianism. 

References from main text:

(1) Lovelock, James. Gaia : A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. 

(2) Alling, Abigail., Mark. Nelson, and Sally. Silverstone. Life under Glass : The inside Story of Biosphere 2. Oracle, AZ: Biosphere, 1993

(3) https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2020/07/how-to-plant-the-forests-of-the-future/

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Utopias - 9 on the blurb website