Plein Air: The Ethical Aesthetic Impulse
With Plein Air: The Ethical Aesthetic Impulse, Goto and Collins have worked with a team of scientists, technologists and musicians to construct a box easel for the 21st Century. Like their predecessors, these artists seek an authentic experience ”in nature‟. Where Millet extended the idea of landscape to peasants working in the fields and the impressionists examined the phenomenological exchange between light and material; Goto extends an interest and the intent to seek empathic exchange with the trees themselves.
The work integrates aesthetics, ethics and cognition in the pursuit of a better understanding of the limitations of people/plant and culture/nature relationships. It also addresses CO2 source and concentration by monitoring the impact upon a tree. This provides an experiential interface to an important but relatively invisible climate change issue.
In this first exhibition of the experimental work, the artists explore specific trees in different public places between the Don River and the Dee River in Aberdeen. The work results in "true‟ scientific data that tells us about the respiration of trees. The work also results in a musical output which is embedded in a context of feelings and freedom but oddly connected to the life force, which is, at the same time, the tree and me. There is a specific question driving the work:
“Is it possible to create change if we understand that life is interdependent and interrelated with nature in our environments?” - Reiko Goto
For more critical and philosophical detail on the exhibition see the exhibition catalogue.
