BLog Number 2

This week we had a guest lecturer by the name of Colin Ives who came into our class and discussed his artwork and the problem with the growing number of inhabitants now living in urban environments. "As of 2008, humans have become an urban species," this statement is not only scary and frightening, its dangerous. The fact that us humans have evolved so much in such a short period of time, from leaving the natural world that once created and cradled us, to now the majority of us living in unnatural urban environments is just incredible. This quote above was the biggest impact that Colin made on me. His work was extremely interesting and different, the way he connected such an unnatural thing such as a webcam to videotape extremely natural things was truly outstanding. But I believe this quote made a much bigger impact on me then any of his artwork could have, humans are overpopulating this world at an alarming rate and destroying and deteriorating the once natural world that made us who we are. 

Its interesting to see the philosophical contrast between different artists attempting me to make somewhat of the same statement. There's two sides to everything and everyone has a different viewpoint on something then anyone else. In Conversations Before the End of Time, Rachel Dutton and Rob Olds go about making an environmental statement in an extremely different way then Colin does. Instead of accepting the unnatural urban environment and embracing it like Colin does, Rachel Dutton and Rob Olds do the exact opposite and give away and sell everything they ever had to go take survival classes and then to go live in the wild. Rob and Rachel moved from Los Angeles to the desert in order to escape the urban environment and problems that come with living in such a city as Los Angeles. "We lived in one barn for nine months while we built the little house. Then we moved into the little house, and the living of our life on the land became our art form." (pg 65) For them, just living off the land and surviving with what they had and were able to get became there form of art. The two of them felt an immense urgency to make a profound change in both their lives in order to attempt to help save the planet a little bit more, and this profound change that they made was obviously dropping everything they once had and loved to start a new life, start fresh and clean and away from the urban environment and decay that they once had been surrounded in. 

This change in view is almost a complete 180 degree flip flop of what Colin Ives did. Instead of attempting to run and escape from the inevitable, Colin embraced urban society and sought to correct and change it. He captured and documented the lives and behaviors of different animals living in urban environments, not only for art purposes, but for scientific ones as well. I don't believe that is so much how someone goes about attempting to make a change so profound as this one, but why someone would go to such troubles to express his or her personal emotion.