'Animate Earth' a film about ecology, place and nature

Animate Earth - with the Cardiff Philosophy Cafe

Thursday 7 March 2013, 8.00pm, The Gate , Keppoch Street, Roath

FREE Admission

Modern humans have lost a vital connection to "animate Earth", says ecologist Stephan Harding . Re-connecting with the natural world and the true place of humans in the cosmos is the best route, he argues, to sustainable societies and economies.

Cardiff Philosophy Café as part of their ongoing 2013 event series 'The Future for Wales', is presenting a special showing of Animate Earth, a film written and presented by Dr Stephan Harding, renowned ecologist and colleague of James Lovelock. In the film, Dr Harding offers a view of our connection to nature that, through interviews undertaken with a variety of commentators, lays out a vision of interconnectedness that builds on the Gaia theory of the biosphere, together with Johann von Goethe‘s theories of the role of intuition in scientific knowledge. From this perspective, if we face an economic crisis now, then its causes can be traced to the lack of a meaningful connection with nature which characterises contemporary societies.

Following the film, a specially invited panel will lead a discussion on the issues it raises, reflecting on the links between them and their own work, and offering some thoughts on the future prospects for our relationships with place and nature in Wales.
 The panel includes a bio-archaeologist, a geographer and two artists, all of whose work features a strong relation to place. They are Dr. Jacqui Mulville, Dr. Jon Anderson, Glenn Davidson and Stefhan Caddick


The screening will take place on 7 March 2013, in the Theatre at The Gate, from 8pm, with the event finishing around 10.00pm.
Howard Gardens Library will be buying a copy of the DVD shortly

water paper scissors film

Nearly a year in the making and shot in a continuous take, Revolution follows the cyclical journey of a single water droplet.

Photography - Chris Turner
Paper Engineering - Helen Friel
Animation - Jess Deacon
Post Production - Neil Cunningham
Music - Joe Shetcliffe

 

Culture Grid and Porphyry

This is porphyry. Stephen Cox sculpts in this stuff because he likes a challenge-its very hard (literally). In 1988, he was commissioned to carve sculpture for the new Cairo Opera House, Egypt, and was allowed to quarry Imperial porphyry at Mons Porphyrytes in the Eastern Desert, which had not been used since the end of Roman Empire.  Below is 'Chrysalis' a work from 1991, the  image is  from the Tate website . The artist describes this work as having to do with transition and reincarnation. It suggests a recumbant Egyptian funerary figure in the process of changing and mutating

Marble Roman emporers used to be dressed in porphyry togas because it is the colour of Roman Imperial Purple.

The first image of  porphyry in this blog entry  is not from an art image database  but from a geological one which I found by searching The Culture Grid. If you are after images from Ethnography, Geology and other non art and design objects then have a look at the Culture Grid.

Culture Grid opens up a wealth of information from museums, galleries, libraries and archives: giving greater access to UK culture, arts and heritage. It contains approximately  3 million items from hundreds of collections on all topics.

University College London (UCL) and University of Reading have just added 6,500 images of objects from their museum collections to Culture Grid. The images can be freely viewed, downloaded and used under a Creative Commons licence.The objects include rare Ancient Egyptian artefacts brought to life in twenty-first-century 3D; digital images of zoological specimens in glass jars, strange and beautiful anatomical prints, sixteenth-century portraits, and intriguing nineteenth-century scientific gadgets.

 Preserved infant lemur Grant Museum of Zoology UCL. Image from the Culture Grid