Sound Of Sirens

Picture by Treehugger

Last week i stumbled upon several sites with some interesting artcles and news about greenwashing. Due to the lack of time for blogging, you’ll get them as a single link-list right now:

• Marketers, Not Consumers, Need Environmental Education - Greenwashing Has Made It Hard to Know What to Believe.
• Record Complains over Greenwashing - Shell identified as one of the worst offenders (OK, not that big news - but everytime worth mentioning it again and again, again…)
• Greenwashing - very insightful interview with an an “employee of a major multinational corporation”.
• Clean up your ACT not your image - Greenpeace marked Earth Day 2008 with the launch of project StopGreenwash. Wow - huge! You can submit greenwashing examples here.
• How Marketers analyze the green Buzz today. Some statistics from the Center Of Media Research Blog.
• Is your corporate really green? - Very good article at CNBC, including The Six Sins of Greenwashing. Find some more related CNBC news here.
• ‘Recyclable’ is so last century - Valerie Davis, President, Green Canary Sustainability Consulting shows us the differents between oldschool 90’s greenspeak and today.

OK - all quite usa-focused, i guess everything is transferrable to the rest of the globe, though. So, what’s the conclusion? Both sides are aware of the problems, hopefully the companies seriously start “cleaning up their acts, not just their images” some day…

“A Fake is A Fake” Is a new communication/media-criticism ongoing art-project from Les Liens Invisibles. It’s a free service where you can run a blog with ready-made themes that are clones of popular CI’s like Financial Times, White House or the Bundeskanzlerin design. “Get a free Account, choose a mask, start faking!”

“You were told that a new democracy of communication was possible, that the lies of corporate media were to disappear and that your voice was going to play an active role in the formation of public discourse.
You were deluded into believing that even the world, this world, would become a better place through detailed diffusion of low-cost technologies, through the birth of telematic networks and the establishment of blogs and social networks.
While the watered-down fantasies that came with the rise of web 2.0 are being dissolved, a bitter consciousness remains: that communication itself, after all, is an illusion. That information, however probable it may seem, is still a fiction and that a fake, in the end, is only a fake. Anyway.”

Looks like great fun and i allways loved the idea of deconstructing corporates by simply faking their look. “A Fake is A Fake” takes the primary punk method a step further into our 2008 digital era. Nice!

Starting new conversations on design and innovation.

Doors of Perception is a design blog that not infrequently picks out the issue of design and sustainabilty.

I.e. read this article about ‘Ecocide’!

‘[...] A good example of ecocidal policy in action was an announcement last week concerning the Design Centre of the North (DCN). The regional development agency, One North East, has published a public call for tenders for organisations to run the new institution.

The word sustainability does not appear, once, in the accompanying text - despite the fact that 80 percent of the environmental impact of products and buildings is determined at the design stage. [...]‘

‘[...] Professional design bodies and old-paradigm design schools will persist in dragging their feet - but they are baggage we can afford to leave behind.’

Word!

Via: psfk.

It seems to be finally high time to visit the New Museum in NYC! (if for no other reason than simply because of the building by SANAA)

In occasion of a new exhibiton called Media Art in the Age of Transgenics, Cloning, and Genomics i’d like to spread some relatied links.

Let’s start with We make Mony Not Art. They’ve got 2 very nice articles about “Ecological Strategies in Today’s Art” - part 1 & part 2, which base on a same named exhibiton at Edith Russ Site for Media Art. You’ll find a lot of background info and links there!

There is a huge field called Bio Art or Biotech Art where “the medium is living matter and the “works of art” are produced in laboratories and/or artists’ and designers’ studios. [...]“ (Wikipedia) For example DNA-visualisations are a popluar theme. My favourite blog about that all is Organism: Making Art with Living Systems. They take a step forward by posting more critical works, too.

German readers find an interesting article at arte.tv called “Was ist ‘Biokunst’? – Ein mutierender Begriff unter der Lupe”. I’s from 2004 but still quite worthy to read, i guess. It referrs to a french site named Colloque Bioart (which seems to be currently broken, unfortunately).

Several noticeable artists are Caitlin Berrigan, Adam Zaretzky, Brandon Ballengee and Kathy High. (They all take part at the New Museum exhibiton, btw.) WMMNA calls them the “cream of biotech art”.

And another good ressource is neural.it - filed under “art, biotech, music, science, sound” you’ll find some more flashy projects, exhibitons and artists. Neural.it is available in italian & english.

Well, that’s all for now. Feel inspired and enjoy installations with great names like: “Feeding Plants with Gatorade and Growing Them in Golf Balls”.

“Kenneth Cole is known for using socially- and politically-charged messaging in his ads, like the latest billboard that just went up in NYC proclaiming, “In the U.S. somebody is shot every 6 seconds. Is this what arms are for?”

Now he’s doing the same on the web, launching a blog all about social awareness called Awearnessblog (how cute!). The site is going to feature celebrity bloggers, who will post about issues close to their hearts and, hopefully, the hearts of consumers (Mr. Cole himself is planning to post once a week). Blogging will revolve around all manner of social issues ranging from poverty and homelessness to the environment and politics, and you can expect about 5 posts a day.[...]“

Hum. Greenwashing - erm blogging? The shoppping link is definitely conspicious, but we’ll give em a chance and review it later…

via: psfk crain’s

Endlich hat’s mal einer gemacht! Gute Idee.

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