1. Introduction

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New Climates is an online exhibition of new and existing artworks responding to the relationship between art, global climate change and networked culture. This curatorial weblog will create a flexible and open-ended space to address these ideas at a time when climate change has become a vital concern among artists. Launching between February and May 2007, New Climates will take the form of a continuously-updated and extensive video weblog.

14 artists have been selected to create short web-videos or other “bloggable” projects responding to the pervasive discourse and images of the climate change crisis. The original works may include animations, documentaries, personal testimonials, appropriations, data streams and text or image slideshows. In addition, existing videos and other artworks relating to the theme will be posted and discussed.

As a video weblog—which will be aimed at a broad, heterogeneous audience of art- and non-art-world individuals—the exhibition will be distributed across both space and time: It will be open to the contributions of artists across the globe, and it will grow organically through a series of syndicated (RSS) posts over the course of several months. In this way, the theme of global climate change will intersect with the technology and language of global media. Just as the climate change debate is constantly shifting and evolving, this exhibition will remain transitive, flexible and open-ended.

This project will also explore the contemporary phenomenon of distributed curating: exhibiting artwork across a variety of spaces, networks, temporalities and audiences. It will take advantage of popular technologies (e.g. blogging and web-video sharing) to initiate a dialogue relevant at multiple levels to artists, curator(s) and visitors.

New Climates was developed during a curatorial residency at Rhizome.org, an affiliate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art. This project is made possible in part by a grant from the Brown University Creative Arts Council.

Check out the curatorial essay for more on the project and the associated curatorial concerns. The supplemental essay addresses art on climate change as a broader (multi-media) contemporary trend.

All work in New Climates is licensed under a Creative Commons License. You are invited to contact me for more information. Please link to and blog about this project!

– Shane Brennan