Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
It's the Skin You're living in
• PaR (DVD and portfolio)
A multi-platform film, installation and digital art project about climate, connectedness and home.
300 word statement - Information about the research process and/ or content
This multi-platform PaR project takes the forms of: a short film; a multi-screen film installation; and an iPhone app. The research inquiry is concerned with interrogating the dominant visualisation of climate change.
Drawing on collaborative research with Dr. Julie Doyle at the University of Brighton (as part of a Leverhulme Trust artist in residence award), It’s the Skin You’re Living In critiques the mass-media’s stock images for visualising climate change – non-human species such as polar bears and “threatened landscapes” such as the ice floes of the high Arctic – and proposes alternative visualisations, which connect nature, culture, home, environment, human and animal. As such, the project attempts to bring climate change “back home” by suggesting that it should not be conceived as concerning non-human species and distant environments, rather that it is enmeshed, in complex and non-linear ways, in the material practices of daily life.
The film’s principal metaphor is that of connectedness. The split screen, or the multiple screens of the installation and iPhone app versions, connect and divide different places, actions and images, both spatially and temporally, exploring non-linear narrative structures. The installation and app versions furthermore explore connectedness as a function of contemporary communication technologies.
The project connects the disparate disciplines of environmental science, media studies, and the arts. Although it grew from a residency in a media studies department, it ultimately suggests that in the arts new visual languages, narrative structures and methods of communication can be created to articulate the multivalent and non-linear dimensions of climate change, in ways that offer alternatives to the standard media mechanisms of photography and documentary film.
The film was first screened at Dovecote Studios, Edinburgh in September 2012. See portfolio for details of all showings.
