Ruth Catlow | we won't fly for art

Where did we won't fly for art begin?

We've been thinking for quite a while about the particular responsibilities and capabilities of artists who work with climate change, and what the relationship is between environment and digital culture and technical culture generally, and in the process of trying to work that out we've realised just how complex it is. Our search for understanding where we might have some agency in this led us towards reading all kinds of journalism and science from the IPCC, social scientist Tim Jackson, and Monbiot --- the pledge has links to articles that informed the pledge.

The fundamental thing that that started us off was we were in residency in Banf, Canada, last March. It’s in the rockies in Canada and it’s really beautiful.We’d been invited back to run a resiency around issues of media artrs and ecology and we realised that by doing that we would be contributing to 30 people traveling there by plane from all around the world.

It seemed to undermine the whole point, when it's our understanding that planes are such a core part of the problem.I think Gustav Metzger really put his finger on this button, understanding the role that flight in our contemporary imaginative lives. Especially in art, flying around the world really represents success. It’s a representation of professional and cultural success.

The artistic inspiration for it was Gustav Metzger’s Reduce Art Flights. We are very inspired and changed by the fact that we tend to work within networks a lot, so what the pledge attempts to create is a reworking of Gustav Metzger’s work to see what additional agency was available by placing that within the network. Having an artwork citied within a network puts it in the same place as discussion and dissemination, all those things happening in the same place, which is slightly different to how things operate within the gallery system.

So we decided not to do Banf and  experienced what feels like a cutting off of further opportunities, because in the media art world Banf is a prestigious and very connected.

So it's a significant to decision to make?

Yes. To have run a programme like that there would have definitely increased our profile and allowed us to connect with other people who are doing leading work in this area already. So we started thinkng about alternative ways to either achieve the same thing, and about what it means for the other work we do instead. Processing that has been a big part of this project.

Presumably it forces alternative networks into being?

This was the other thought behind it. At the moment we are developing a programme Rich Networking which is looking at satisfying ways of being together informally using digital networks. But then we are also aware that there is research to be done on the impact of digital culture on the environment and we don't have the and we don’t have the capacity to do that.

Another reason for us to choose this project was that it's looking at our own backyard and it’s something that we knew woul db be very provocative and quite painful for our own network and that’s proved to be the case. So we’ve had some quite strongly negative responses to what we’ve done, and that’s always really informative.

See also Ruth Catlow and Mark Garrett: 100 responses to we won't fly for art