NARRATION

Something has changed too, for the Tuart trees. At Lake Clifton, south of Perth, their twisted skeletons rise through the peppermint groves. These ones died in the 1990s. In other areas, they are failing to fruit, and the species’ seed bank is drastically declining.

Prof Giles Hardy

Again, we don’t fully understand what’s driving these declines, but in some areas we’re losing a hundred per cent of the trees.

NARRATION

Despite many different ailments, there is one obvious common stressor that could explain why so many trees are dying. They are facing higher temperatures with less water. The south-west of Western Australia has lost fifteen per cent of its rainfall in the past few decades. Average temperatures have increased by just over half a degree Celsius. Heatwaves have become longer, more frequent, and more intense.

Prof Giles Hardy

We haven’t seen such scale of damage in the last fifty, sixty years, probably in recorded history.

…

Dr Craig Allen

What’s most alarming is that these die-off events may be just the tip of the iceberg. We know that warming, temperatures exacerbate tree mortality, and the climate predictions are that the world is going to get much warmer soon. Um, so we may be just at the very front edge of what could be wholesale mortality of the world’s forests – the forests that we know and care about today.

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3488105.htm

Also on display are some work in progress drawings and prints and a sample of some sound art walking — ideas and media that I am exploring as part of The Sixth Shore. If you are nearby then pop in for a look at blend(er) Tuesday through to Friday, from 10am to 2pm until Friday 4 May.

(or join us at 10am Friday 27 April for morning tea for an informal talk about the project and artworks).

CUsp is gallery-based spatial sound work. Sound will move through different speakers in a sequence similar to the way waves come up a beach before washing back out into the sea. It will be exhibited in Adaptation (6 May to 10 June at INQB8).

INQB8.mandurah Centre for Contemporary Art
63 Ormsby Terrace
Mandurah, Western Australia

Exhibition opening and talks: 4:30 to 7:00 pm Sunday 6 May
Open on the Stretch Festival weekend 5 and 6 May (12.00 noon to 4.00 pm) and then
Wednesday to Sunday 12.00 noon to 4.00 pm  Thursday 12.00 noon to 6.00pm.

wishing you less extinctions and habitat loss

wishing all humans thoughtful connections and positive futures

Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ [linking smoking with disease] that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy…if we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health

1969 Brown & Williamson (B&W) document http://tobaccodocuments.org/landman/332506.html

Original Paper: Qing Li; Toshiaki Otsuka; Maiko Kobayashi; Yoko Wakayama; Hirofumi Inagaki; Masao Katsumata; Yukiyo Hirata; YingJi Li; Kimiko Hirata; Takako Shimizu; Hiroko Suzuki; Tomoyuki Kawada; Takahide Kagawa Acute effects of walking in forest environments on cardiovascular and metabolic parameters European Journal of Applied Physiology (November 2011), 111 (11), pg. 2845-2853

You can listen to it here http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/offtrack/permeate3a-perdita-phillips/3932726 (download might possibly be restricted to Australian isp addresses).

The sound art walking work continues with The Sxith Shore and with the up-coming cusp.

Explanation for the formation of beach cusps remains inconclusive and may involve the formation of standing edge waves or alternatively can be understood as a paradigm of self organisation, where positive feedback between the morphology of the beach and the flow of the water, create slight height differences that reinforce themselves.

Beach cusps are self organising once they form and continue until wave energy conditions change. They can be seen as analogies for how we can re-evaluate and reset our environmental and cultural priorities.

In this gallery-based work, sound moves through different speakers in a sequence similar to the way waves come up a beach before washing back out into the sea. It will be exhibited in Adaptation (6 May to 10 June at INQB8).

INQB8.mandurah Centre for Contemporary Art
63 Ormsby Terrace
Mandurah, Western Australia

Exhibition opening and talks: 4:30 to 7:00 pm Sunday 6 May
Open on the Stretch Festival weekend 5 and 6 May (12.00 noon to 4.00 pm) and then
Wednesday to Sunday 12.00 noon to 4.00 pm  Thursday 12.00 noon to 6.00pm.

With thanks to Simon Wise and Michelle Outram for loan of some vital equipment!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100909122801.htm

The original article: John A. Endler, Lorna C. Endler, and Natalie R. Doerr. Great Bowerbirds Create Theaters with Forced Perspective When Seen by Their Audience. Current Biology, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.08.033

This is not Endler’s work but an interaction I did with bowerbirds at Broome Bird Observatory