The United Nations describes the current state of “our” water resources as a “water bankruptcy”. This water crisis has several causes and consequences:

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Earth Hour is a global event organized by WWF asking households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights and other electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness towards the need to take action on climate change.

Check out the video of Earth Hour 2010 held on 27th March from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. local time.

It’s a fact: Climate change communication can sometimes be dim and dull. Few communication campaigns succeed in reaching their targets, raising awareness and sparking off a reaction. Add to this that many campaigns are aiming at hitting an unidentified and obscure target known as “the people”. Defining your target, digging into its aspirations, motivations and the channels to reach it, is the preliminary step of any successful communication campaign.

This task can be even harder when you try to reach an audience which defines itself as “not mainstream” and is fighting hard not to be labelled or targeted. But this is exactly the challenge that Greenpeace and the Blacksmoke art collective tackled when they set up a project to communicate climate change issues to the British underground “scenesters”, a young British sub-culture group (“urban middle class adults and older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture” –Wikipedia).

The Danger Global Warming Project is an independent multimedia initiative aimed at raising awareness around climate change issues through the medium of art and digital media.  Artists from all over the world were asked to incorporate Greenpeace’s black and yellow warning tape motif into artworks of any forms. As a result, multimedia pieces of art (video, image, installation…) were submitted from all over the world.

The collective has efficiently dug into its audience culture to highlight its motivations (the hunt for exclusive arts) and aspirations. The campaign features sharp music bands like Utah Saints and underground stars such as Bruce LaBruce and Billy Childish; artists few people know, but icons for the British underground scene. Blacksmoke is going against a majority of climate change campaigns that feature global celebrities such as Leonardo Di Caprio, thus aiming at reaching the wide majority of “people”.

Blacksmoke aim at creating a buzz in the British underground scene and on the internet. Visuals and clips are relayed on the web through Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube etc.

One can however question the efficiency of such an unconventional campaign. Indeed the use of alternative artists pushes the target audience to focus more on the communication channel than on the actual message. Just flick through the comments posted underneath the pieces of art on the internet and you will see that the majority of posts are actually more interested in the artistic happening than in the message conveyed.

The campaign manages to reach its target audience (get a foot in the door) but actually fails to transmit the message (pass the door) and therefore inspire action. This observation leads to the question to what extent climate change communication can be tailored to an audience’s motivations and “scene” without dissolving the message in everyday life inspirations.

As an example of the material featured in this campaign, you can watch below the Danger Global Warming tune, remixed by Utah Saints and video clip by Alexandre Athane, “As an allegory for recycling, influential musicians and DJ’s from around the world are remixing the official Danger Global Warming theme tune, featuring lead vocals by Hugh Cornwell and a 35 piece orchestra”.

Caroline Martinot

I think sometimes you’ve just got to get out from under the pile of e-mails and overbearing work schedules to mobilise yourself and generate awareness through mass protest for the issues one cares about. I often think of the quote by Martin Luther King Jr who said “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that happen.” I did wonder how easy it would be for people to show any sort of freedom of expression in the Square Mile with so much regulation, control and overbearing protectionist systems in place preventing the public from diverting from their ‘acceptable’ forms of behaviour, dress and actions. The closer I got to the centre your’e reminded that we’re in a society where we’re being denied some of our basic freedoms with CCTV cameras everywhere and roadblocks herding us through predefined routes. One of my favourite books is the Traveller by John Twelve-Hawkes which muses over a battle in society between randomness and one driven by systems. It’s quite frightening to realise Britain has more surveillance than any other state in Europe. And as communication is a cornerstone to civilization it’s worrying that more people are more institutionalised than ever, armchair-ridden followers of fashion and not willing to stand-up and fight for what they believe in. Anthony Robbins neatly puts it that were immersed in and deluded by this ‘all pervasive hypnotic culture’. Even though we’ve all been very institutionalised and our ideas homogenised as citizens,if it’s a debate between nature and nurture I think we all have the inbuilt capacity to get out there sometimes and shout as loud as we can. I suppose that’s why football matches play such an important role in society as they provide an outlet for people to reconnect with their tribal roots of solidarity and group expression. If we don’t mobilise now as the earth faces the catastrope of a 2 degree temperature rise we’ll be all responsible for the slow suffication of our innate communications skills and more worryingly witness to the slow degredation and further exploitation of our planetary scarce resources. We must maintain a voice and wake up! On a more positive note this week it was good to see docu films such as ‘Who Killed The Electric Car’ aired on national TV last night. And by the way, it was a sunny, chilled out, peacful and positive day on Bishopsgate today. I’m definately off to the next Climate Camp. So how is it that The Evening Standard showed the front page like Armageddon. Oh yes…of course the state apparatus having it’s say.

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. The artist hopes that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many. The artist hopes to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming. Running the Numbers images will look at some issues that are more global in scope: the world’s oceans, African issues, species extinctions.

To see the work visit

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php