121201 Champion of degrowth, less is much more

            Erik Assadourian the American Senior Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute where he studies cultural change, consumerism, degrowth, ecological ethics, corporate responsibility, and sustainable communities, has been profiled in an article by Malgorzata Stawecka for IPS News titled ‘For Champions of Degrowth, Less Is Much More’. Assadourian states “…intentional societal shifting is essential for a world where seven billion humans are depleting Earth’s biocapacity and threatening the collapse of key ecosystem services, like climate regulation, fisheries, pollination, and water purification, by not proactively pursuing a path of degrowth, then we accept that instead of degrowth we’ll have an uncontrolled global contraction that will lead to much more discomfort and human suffering than degrowth ever would. … The main challenge degrowth entails is the obvious one: how do we convince those with wealth and power to be willing to redistribute this to others – both within and across societies. All would benefit if that dynamic were altered … supporting efforts to create informal economic opportunities like small-scale farming and community gardening, bartering, and repair could help in creating new means for people to sustain themselves … As people worked less, they’d earn less, in turn reducing their overall luxury consumption; fewer people would fly, they’d buy smaller homes, they’d choose smaller cars or car-free lifestyles, and so on, while this would be seen negatively by some, the newfound leisure time and less-stressful lives would offset this – especially if governments also strengthened their traditional role of providing a robust set of public goods: libraries, public transit, safe drinking water, and so on. And these public goods could be funded by increased taxation of the wealthiest, which would also help reduce luxury consumption by the very segment of society having the largest ecological impact on the planet…” Inspired by Malgorzata Stawecka ow.ly/fuLN7 image source Linkedin ow.ly/fuLL2Pop Art - a rolling daily diary comprising a manipulated digital art collage that visually documents a local, political or international event of popular culture based on fractured photographic images.

The work is premised on the basis that Pop art in its beginnings, freeze-framed what consumers of popular culture experienced into iconic visual abstractions. With the advent of the techno age, visual information circulates in such quantities, so rapidly and exponentially, that to comprehend a fraction of it all becomes a kind of production process in itself.

Adapting Pop Arts notion of mass media imagery into a context of the contemporary digital age, this work draws on a myriad points of reference. Utilizing fractured images to provide an allusion to the digital noise pounding away daily into our subconsciousness.

This work diverges from the traditional Pop Art notion of a pronounced repetition of a consumer icon, instead focusing on the deluge of contemporary digital content. The compilation of the fragmented imagery is vividly distractive, not unlike cable surfing or a jaunt through Times Square.

This work considers elements of Pop Art through an artistic and conceptual exploration of specific people and events of the day. The works are diaristic in nature that metaphorically record a spectators experience of the contemporary digital age.

Taken on: November 27, 2012

Tags:

pop art

contemporary culture

digital manipulation

iconic events

photoshop manipulations

popular culture arts

digital photo manipulation

Erik Assadourian

American

Senior Fellow

Worldwatch Institute

Malgorzata Stawecka

IPS News

Degrowth

EarthÕs biocapacity

ecosystem

global contraction

Earth’s biocapacity « less

Sets appears in: • 1212 - December 2012

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