Project Founders: Leslie Carol Roberts, Adam Marcus, Chris Falliers
ECOPOESIS is about re-thinking and re-imagining how people see and feel their own ecologies and their roles in times of climate change.
ECOPOESIS gathers humans together for a meal or coffee to establish shared, collective contexts and understandings, about local wisdoms, about questions, about anxieties – around ecological awareness and climate change.
ECOPOESIS is about models – about how we use words and forms to make mental and physical models of our worlds.
ECOPOESIS is about sharing our models – through sharing our process – through discussion and dialogue, through language and form making.
We believe in the power of gathering – to create a collective context and vocabulary, to see paths forward for humans and non-humans alike.
The practice of ecological storytelling by writers, designers, and artists produces texts, objects, and speculative representations often towards a polemic and often in isolation by discipline. The history of ecological storytelling, from paleolithic cave dwellers’ depictions suggesting a unity with nature, to utopian promises and dystopian warnings, illustrates an evolving sense of human relational identity to nature. Within the context of evolving philosophies and ecologies, The Ecopoesis Project at California College of the Arts is a multi-year sequence of collaborative, interdisciplinary think-tanks exploring front-line concerns around ecology, climate, and spatial expression. As our everyday lives are increasingly suffused by the impacts of climate change and climate chaos, The Ecopoesis Project explores the language, syntax, diction, form, media, and representations of ecological uncertainty.
The Ecopoesis Project is a collaboration between CCA’s MFA Writing Program and Architectural Ecologies Lab, offering a place for interdisciplinary discussion of ecologies as form and language. The inaugural Ecopoesis symposium and workshop took place at CCA in April 2019, featuring Professor Timothy Morton, a leading ecological philosopher and Professor and Chair of English at Rice University.
Ecopoesis 2022
(Add this copy)
April 9, April 14, 2022
Ecopoesis 2021
April 22, 2021
One year into the Covid-19 pandemic, we are re-launching the How We Hear Now project for Earth Day 2021. Please see this link to participate and contribute!
Participants, Ecopoesis 2020
April 22, 2020
Please see How We Hear Now, a participatory, distributed, and collective work produced by the 2020 ECOPOESIS cohort.
Participants, Ecopoesis 2019
April 7-8, 2019 at California College of the Arts
Timothy Morton, Rice University, Keynote
Alexander Arroyo, University of California, Berkeley
Joseph Becker, SFMOMA
Louis Bury, CUNY & Writer, Hyperallergic
Kate Bickert, Golden Gate Parks Conservancy
Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz, The Long Now Foundation
Alicia Escott, Artist
Chris Falliers, California College of the Arts
Beth Ferguson, University of California, Davis
Lisa Findley, California College of the Arts
Nataly Gattegno, California College of the Arts
Lynda Grose, California College of the Arts
Maria Paz Gutierrez, University of California, Berkeley
Robert Hunt, California College of the Arts
Margaret Ikeda, California College of the Arts
Janette Kim, California College of the Arts
Adam Marcus, California College of the Arts
Keith Krumwiede, California College of the Arts
Scott Paterson, Adventuring Ventures
Leslie Carol Roberts, California College of the Arts
Erik Scollon, California College of the Arts
Vivian Sming, Art Practical
Tina Takemoto, California College of the Arts
Ignacio Valero, California College of the Arts
Student Participants, 2019:
Vishnu Balunsat, M.Arch
Jillian Crochet, MFA
Margot Becker, MFA
Isha Fathmath, M.Arch
Sean Cunningham, M.Arch
Mamdouh Khogeer, M.Arch
Marwan Bamasood, M.Arch
Karol Horr, M.Arch
Chang-Tse Sung, M.Arch
Grace Galletti
Project Credits:
Ecopoesis Chairs: Leslie Carol Roberts, Adam Marcus, Chris Falliers
Project Assistant: Vishnu Balunsat
Graphic Design: Ryan Legaspi
Staff Support: Matthew Tedford, Dustin Smith, Mike Rothfeld, Leah Kandel
Sponsorship: CCA MFA in Writing Program, CCA Architectural Ecologies Lab, CCA Architecture Division, CCA Humanities & Sciences Division
2021
The Ecopoiesis Project presents
How We Hear Now (add link)
A collective artwork exploring the sounds and syntaxes of ecological change.
June 25 – July 10, 2021
San Francisco Ferry Building, Southeast Corner
On view every evening until 9:00 pm
How We Hear Now is a participatory, collective artwork created by The Ecopoesis Project, a multi-year initiative led by the Architectural Ecologies Lab and MFA in Writing program at California College of the Arts. The project was initiated in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, a response by The Ecopoesis Project to continue their collaborative explorations of emotions and thought towards action around climate change. How We Hear Now invites participants to engage in audible changes in their environments—to record and transmit how the sounds of both human and nonhuman ecologies may have changed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic’s shelter-in-place orders. This installation of the project includes contributions from both 2020 and 2021; each participant constructed a sound recording of their environment on April 22 (Earth Day) and provided a description of ecological or cultural factors. How We Hear Now is a collaborative exercise in ecological thought and emotional response. It offers an open-ended field of text, recording, and visual patterns to create an immersion space of reading and listening. With no beginning, end, or prescribed sequence, it simply asks us to consider, how do we hear the world now? These different narratives of environmental experience from the same day offer viewers/listeners a prompt to consider their sense of environmental presence and its complex nature.
The audio recordings and environmental descriptions are compiled into a layered stream of sound and text, a visual and aural landscape of ecological observations collected during this unique time. The individual contributions meld together with a visualization of seismic data collected on Earth Day
April 22, 2020-2021.
Each iteration of the data is unique, so each time you engage with it the sequence varies. Overlap of individual contributions is a key aspect of the artwork, producing new patterns, rhythms, experiences, and unanticipated connections between the individual recordings and voices
Project Team: Leslie Carol Roberts, Adam Marcus, Chris Falliers, Patrick Monte, Vishnu Balunsat, Margot Becker
Creative Direction, Coding, and Design: Patrick Monte
Featured Contributors:
Erik Adigard, Rob Bailey, Amy Balkin, Vishnu Balunsat, Michelle Boyd, Rita Bullwinkel, Civyiu Kkliu / Robert Machado, Kevin Claiborne, William Cook, Ellora Daley, Alicia Escott, Christopher Falliers, Isha Fathmath, Garth Fry, Guillermo Galindo (aka gal*in_dog), Edith Garcia, David Gross, Lindsay Haddix, Shy Pacheco Hamilton, Gregory W. Hurcomb, Evan Jones, Wioleta Kaminska, Adam Marcus, Christie Mc Gee, Sarah Meftah, Marc Northstar, Denise Newman, Helen-Maria Nugent, Catie Newell, Colin Priest, Kaus Raghukumar, Leslie Carol Rob erts, Sharan Saboji, Alex Schofield, Shobha Shivakumar, Ross Simonini, Allison Smith, Ignacio Valero, Michael Wertz
Thanks to:
Keith Krumwiede, Sarah Meftah, Dustin Smith, Jason Kelly Johnson, Samuel Higgwe
Presented by The Ecopoesis Project
Architectural Ecologies Lab + MFA in Writing Program
California College of the Arts