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By Jens Hauser
Sampling Colour - Living Installations and Symposium curated by Jens Hauser for Muffatwerk, München.
What is ‘green’? Are we ‘green’? And is it the vegetative world at all? Do algae count as ‘superfoods’, environmental pests, or both? Is biofuel green? Through monumental biotechnical installations, artistic olfactory portraits of trees, and the chemical re-enactment of historical toxic pigments, Muffatwerk initiates a series of events dubbed gREen that fosters debates in climate politics in the field of tension between art, nature and science.
Beyond the rampant ‘greenwashing’ of our times, the artistic positions get to the bottom of the increasingly uncritically accepted symbolism of ‘green’ - as a RE-mix and RE-evaluation of contradictions and paradoxes. Engineers praise ‘green’ chemistry or biotechnology as ecologically benign, while climate researchers bemoan the ‘greening of the earth’ as an alarming sign of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and toxic algal blooms discredit the overused association of ‘green’ with sustainability. The economic and political sciences often use the greenness trope in a naively literal way, when ‘green growth’ is supposed to reconcile ecologically sustainable development with market-based economic models: the fallacious symbolic connection between economic and vegetal growth is purposefully maintained to capitalise on the metaphor’s positive connotations. Is ‘green’ perhaps so important to us because of the oscillation of naturalness and artificiality, the healthy and the toxic, the hoped-for and the lost?
In the Western context, ‘green’ is rooted in Middle English and Latin and signifies growth or sprout. Across cultures, it is first and foremost associated with vegetation, fertility, spring, youth, renewal, hope and aliveness. However, despite its positive connotations of aliveness and naturalness, the term ‘green’ is increasingly reduced to its metaphorical value, stripped of all material, epistemological, and historical referents. As such, it serves the fetishistic desire to hyper-compensate for human-made systemic failures. The good intention to metaphorically use ‘green’ as a proxy to defend ecologically sustainable policies has been superseded by an uncritical attitude, which enables capitalist mechanisms to appropriate the metaphor by greening everything. Greenness has become a “metaphor we live by,” one that “in allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept” keeps us from “focusing on aspects inconsistent with that metaphor.”5 ‘Green’ therefore needs to be considered simultaneously as a natural and a technical colour – used in visualisations, lasers, GFP biomarkers, or night vision devices – as well as an index of alarming perniciousness, which turns its ambivalent status into a powerful discursive and political tool. This means that the concepts ‘green’ and ‘nature’ need to be disentangled. ‘Green’ is related both to the representation of natural phenomena and to techno-scientific and social fabrication, and consequently acts as a composite chameleon colour, as a central cue in the evolution of our cultural representations.
In addition, its perception prompts a startling paradox: to humans, a plant only appears green because its chlorophyll absorbs high-energy red and blue light photons for photosynthesis, but reflects the middle spectrum as ‘waste’, so to speak. This spectrum with a wavelength between 490 and 565 nm, which remains largely unused in the plant’s photosynthesis, corresponds to the largest and brightest spectrum visible to humankind. Humans are therefore tempted to take vegetal chaff for the vegetal green itself. While human perception depends on the reflection of this middle spectrum, “colour perception and colour language give us anthropocentrically defined colours and not colours themselves.” As environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III reminds us: “Trees are not really green after we have learned about electromagnetic radiation and the optics of our eyes, though we all view the world that way.” This poses the question of greenness’ multi-modality; it also calls ocular-centrism into question while integrating hearing, gustation and olfaction. If, for different beings, greenness is more than the wavelength of the visual spectrum, what might be the information “associated with green that we cannot visually observe,” while the ‘smell of greenness’ or ‘green odour’ are often being ascribed to different types of therapeutic effects?
Art works in gREen therefore go beyond the visual effect and scrutinise the underlying materialities and histories at stake. For example, while natural green pigments have always been easy to obtain, they are difficult to fix; they fade and degrade when exposed to sunlight, and even often degrade their supports. Despite the availability of plant-based materials, pigments stable enough to technically fix green have been among the most toxic in art history. In 1775, Swedish-German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele produced a green copper arsenite pigment that enabled painters to go out ‘into the green’ with handy metal tubes. But how many painters and art lovers actually died in an effort to represent ‘nature’, given that “in order to hide the substance’s toxicity, all sorts of phantasy names” were invented. The history of green in art is connected to the irony “that green should be so prominent in the landscape and so hard to achieve with pigments and dyes” while, at the same time, “the humanistic concern to match colours to nature placed a greater demand on green than on any other colour.”
Today, the experimental media arts stage the ambiguity of greenness, inspired by cybernetics, systems theory, and ecology. Art on the threshold of the techno-sciences investigates and samples the material factors of what appears to us as being ‘green’ – but no longer just metaphorically, but above all metabolically! Is ‘green’ maybe even itself a ‘presumptuous’ or ‘pretentious’ colour, and should we start to question its casual symbolic use?
Chlorella algae grow in the larger than life-sized photo-bioreactors and meandering hoses of Thomas Feuerstein’s expansive installations involved in manifold metabolic processes. They are harvested to produce beverages, paint pigments, bio plastics, and even charcoal in an accelerated process.... is black the new green? In Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ work, trees are no longer just considered green photosynthesising carbon sinks, but complex organisms with their own identities that communicate with each other thanks to their specific gas emissions. They can even interact with visitors who agree to experimentally put on an ‘odour costume’. Adam Brown goes on to produce arsenic-based pigments in his neo-alchemical live laboratory reminding us that in art nature has often been depicted in the most poisonous of all colours.
View the exhibition catalogue for 2021 and 2022.
Sampling Colour - Living Installations and Symposium curated by Jens Hauser for Muffatwerk, München.
What is ‘green’? Are we ‘green’? And is it the vegetative world at all? Do algae count as ‘superfoods’, environmental pests, or both? Is biofuel green? Through monumental biotechnical installations, artistic olfactory portraits of trees, and the chemical re-enactment of historical toxic pigments, Muffatwerk initiates a series of events dubbed gREen that fosters debates in climate politics in the field of tension between art, nature and science.
Beyond the rampant ‘greenwashing’ of our times, the artistic positions get to the bottom of the increasingly uncritically accepted symbolism of ‘green’ - as a RE-mix and RE-evaluation of contradictions and paradoxes. Engineers praise ‘green’ chemistry or biotechnology as ecologically benign, while climate researchers bemoan the ‘greening of the earth’ as an alarming sign of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and toxic algal blooms discredit the overused association of ‘green’ with sustainability. The economic and political sciences often use the greenness trope in a naively literal way, when ‘green growth’ is supposed to reconcile ecologically sustainable development with market-based economic models: the fallacious symbolic connection between economic and vegetal growth is purposefully maintained to capitalise on the metaphor’s positive connotations. Is ‘green’ perhaps so important to us because of the oscillation of naturalness and artificiality, the healthy and the toxic, the hoped-for and the lost?
In the Western context, ‘green’ is rooted in Middle English and Latin and signifies growth or sprout. Across cultures, it is first and foremost associated with vegetation, fertility, spring, youth, renewal, hope and aliveness. However, despite its positive connotations of aliveness and naturalness, the term ‘green’ is increasingly reduced to its metaphorical value, stripped of all material, epistemological, and historical referents. As such, it serves the fetishistic desire to hyper-compensate for human-made systemic failures. The good intention to metaphorically use ‘green’ as a proxy to defend ecologically sustainable policies has been superseded by an uncritical attitude, which enables capitalist mechanisms to appropriate the metaphor by greening everything. Greenness has become a “metaphor we live by,” one that “in allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept” keeps us from “focusing on aspects inconsistent with that metaphor.”5 ‘Green’ therefore needs to be considered simultaneously as a natural and a technical colour – used in visualisations, lasers, GFP biomarkers, or night vision devices – as well as an index of alarming perniciousness, which turns its ambivalent status into a powerful discursive and political tool. This means that the concepts ‘green’ and ‘nature’ need to be disentangled. ‘Green’ is related both to the representation of natural phenomena and to techno-scientific and social fabrication, and consequently acts as a composite chameleon colour, as a central cue in the evolution of our cultural representations.
In addition, its perception prompts a startling paradox: to humans, a plant only appears green because its chlorophyll absorbs high-energy red and blue light photons for photosynthesis, but reflects the middle spectrum as ‘waste’, so to speak. This spectrum with a wavelength between 490 and 565 nm, which remains largely unused in the plant’s photosynthesis, corresponds to the largest and brightest spectrum visible to humankind. Humans are therefore tempted to take vegetal chaff for the vegetal green itself. While human perception depends on the reflection of this middle spectrum, “colour perception and colour language give us anthropocentrically defined colours and not colours themselves.” As environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III reminds us: “Trees are not really green after we have learned about electromagnetic radiation and the optics of our eyes, though we all view the world that way.” This poses the question of greenness’ multi-modality; it also calls ocular-centrism into question while integrating hearing, gustation and olfaction. If, for different beings, greenness is more than the wavelength of the visual spectrum, what might be the information “associated with green that we cannot visually observe,” while the ‘smell of greenness’ or ‘green odour’ are often being ascribed to different types of therapeutic effects?
Art works in gREen therefore go beyond the visual effect and scrutinise the underlying materialities and histories at stake. For example, while natural green pigments have always been easy to obtain, they are difficult to fix; they fade and degrade when exposed to sunlight, and even often degrade their supports. Despite the availability of plant-based materials, pigments stable enough to technically fix green have been among the most toxic in art history. In 1775, Swedish-German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele produced a green copper arsenite pigment that enabled painters to go out ‘into the green’ with handy metal tubes. But how many painters and art lovers actually died in an effort to represent ‘nature’, given that “in order to hide the substance’s toxicity, all sorts of phantasy names” were invented. The history of green in art is connected to the irony “that green should be so prominent in the landscape and so hard to achieve with pigments and dyes” while, at the same time, “the humanistic concern to match colours to nature placed a greater demand on green than on any other colour.”
Today, the experimental media arts stage the ambiguity of greenness, inspired by cybernetics, systems theory, and ecology. Art on the threshold of the techno-sciences investigates and samples the material factors of what appears to us as being ‘green’ – but no longer just metaphorically, but above all metabolically! Is ‘green’ maybe even itself a ‘presumptuous’ or ‘pretentious’ colour, and should we start to question its casual symbolic use?
Chlorella algae grow in the larger than life-sized photo-bioreactors and meandering hoses of Thomas Feuerstein’s expansive installations involved in manifold metabolic processes. They are harvested to produce beverages, paint pigments, bio plastics, and even charcoal in an accelerated process.... is black the new green? In Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ work, trees are no longer just considered green photosynthesising carbon sinks, but complex organisms with their own identities that communicate with each other thanks to their specific gas emissions. They can even interact with visitors who agree to experimentally put on an ‘odour costume’. Adam Brown goes on to produce arsenic-based pigments in his neo-alchemical live laboratory reminding us that in art nature has often been depicted in the most poisonous of all colours.
View the exhibition catalogue for 2021 and 2022.
Jens Hauser is a Paris and Copenhagen based media studies scholar, writer and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology. He is currently a researcher, and has been a Professor in Art History at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He is also a researcher at the Medical University Vienna, University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion, as well as a distinguished faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist in residency program. As a curator, Jens Hauser has curated about thirty international exhibitions and festivals.
By Jens Hauser
Sampling Colour - Living Installations and Symposium curated by Jens Hauser for Muffatwerk, München.
What is ‘green’? Are we ‘green’? And is it the vegetative world at all? Do algae count as ‘superfoods’, environmental pests, or both? Is biofuel green? Through monumental biotechnical installations, artistic olfactory portraits of trees, and the chemical re-enactment of historical toxic pigments, Muffatwerk initiates a series of events dubbed gREen that fosters debates in climate politics in the field of tension between art, nature and science.
Beyond the rampant ‘greenwashing’ of our times, the artistic positions get to the bottom of the increasingly uncritically accepted symbolism of ‘green’ - as a RE-mix and RE-evaluation of contradictions and paradoxes. Engineers praise ‘green’ chemistry or biotechnology as ecologically benign, while climate researchers bemoan the ‘greening of the earth’ as an alarming sign of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and toxic algal blooms discredit the overused association of ‘green’ with sustainability. The economic and political sciences often use the greenness trope in a naively literal way, when ‘green growth’ is supposed to reconcile ecologically sustainable development with market-based economic models: the fallacious symbolic connection between economic and vegetal growth is purposefully maintained to capitalise on the metaphor’s positive connotations. Is ‘green’ perhaps so important to us because of the oscillation of naturalness and artificiality, the healthy and the toxic, the hoped-for and the lost?
In the Western context, ‘green’ is rooted in Middle English and Latin and signifies growth or sprout. Across cultures, it is first and foremost associated with vegetation, fertility, spring, youth, renewal, hope and aliveness. However, despite its positive connotations of aliveness and naturalness, the term ‘green’ is increasingly reduced to its metaphorical value, stripped of all material, epistemological, and historical referents. As such, it serves the fetishistic desire to hyper-compensate for human-made systemic failures. The good intention to metaphorically use ‘green’ as a proxy to defend ecologically sustainable policies has been superseded by an uncritical attitude, which enables capitalist mechanisms to appropriate the metaphor by greening everything. Greenness has become a “metaphor we live by,” one that “in allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept” keeps us from “focusing on aspects inconsistent with that metaphor.”5 ‘Green’ therefore needs to be considered simultaneously as a natural and a technical colour – used in visualisations, lasers, GFP biomarkers, or night vision devices – as well as an index of alarming perniciousness, which turns its ambivalent status into a powerful discursive and political tool. This means that the concepts ‘green’ and ‘nature’ need to be disentangled. ‘Green’ is related both to the representation of natural phenomena and to techno-scientific and social fabrication, and consequently acts as a composite chameleon colour, as a central cue in the evolution of our cultural representations.
In addition, its perception prompts a startling paradox: to humans, a plant only appears green because its chlorophyll absorbs high-energy red and blue light photons for photosynthesis, but reflects the middle spectrum as ‘waste’, so to speak. This spectrum with a wavelength between 490 and 565 nm, which remains largely unused in the plant’s photosynthesis, corresponds to the largest and brightest spectrum visible to humankind. Humans are therefore tempted to take vegetal chaff for the vegetal green itself. While human perception depends on the reflection of this middle spectrum, “colour perception and colour language give us anthropocentrically defined colours and not colours themselves.” As environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III reminds us: “Trees are not really green after we have learned about electromagnetic radiation and the optics of our eyes, though we all view the world that way.” This poses the question of greenness’ multi-modality; it also calls ocular-centrism into question while integrating hearing, gustation and olfaction. If, for different beings, greenness is more than the wavelength of the visual spectrum, what might be the information “associated with green that we cannot visually observe,” while the ‘smell of greenness’ or ‘green odour’ are often being ascribed to different types of therapeutic effects?
Art works in gREen therefore go beyond the visual effect and scrutinise the underlying materialities and histories at stake. For example, while natural green pigments have always been easy to obtain, they are difficult to fix; they fade and degrade when exposed to sunlight, and even often degrade their supports. Despite the availability of plant-based materials, pigments stable enough to technically fix green have been among the most toxic in art history. In 1775, Swedish-German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele produced a green copper arsenite pigment that enabled painters to go out ‘into the green’ with handy metal tubes. But how many painters and art lovers actually died in an effort to represent ‘nature’, given that “in order to hide the substance’s toxicity, all sorts of phantasy names” were invented. The history of green in art is connected to the irony “that green should be so prominent in the landscape and so hard to achieve with pigments and dyes” while, at the same time, “the humanistic concern to match colours to nature placed a greater demand on green than on any other colour.”
Today, the experimental media arts stage the ambiguity of greenness, inspired by cybernetics, systems theory, and ecology. Art on the threshold of the techno-sciences investigates and samples the material factors of what appears to us as being ‘green’ – but no longer just metaphorically, but above all metabolically! Is ‘green’ maybe even itself a ‘presumptuous’ or ‘pretentious’ colour, and should we start to question its casual symbolic use?
Chlorella algae grow in the larger than life-sized photo-bioreactors and meandering hoses of Thomas Feuerstein’s expansive installations involved in manifold metabolic processes. They are harvested to produce beverages, paint pigments, bio plastics, and even charcoal in an accelerated process.... is black the new green? In Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ work, trees are no longer just considered green photosynthesising carbon sinks, but complex organisms with their own identities that communicate with each other thanks to their specific gas emissions. They can even interact with visitors who agree to experimentally put on an ‘odour costume’. Adam Brown goes on to produce arsenic-based pigments in his neo-alchemical live laboratory reminding us that in art nature has often been depicted in the most poisonous of all colours.
View the exhibition catalogue for 2021 and 2022.
Sampling Colour - Living Installations and Symposium curated by Jens Hauser for Muffatwerk, München.
What is ‘green’? Are we ‘green’? And is it the vegetative world at all? Do algae count as ‘superfoods’, environmental pests, or both? Is biofuel green? Through monumental biotechnical installations, artistic olfactory portraits of trees, and the chemical re-enactment of historical toxic pigments, Muffatwerk initiates a series of events dubbed gREen that fosters debates in climate politics in the field of tension between art, nature and science.
Beyond the rampant ‘greenwashing’ of our times, the artistic positions get to the bottom of the increasingly uncritically accepted symbolism of ‘green’ - as a RE-mix and RE-evaluation of contradictions and paradoxes. Engineers praise ‘green’ chemistry or biotechnology as ecologically benign, while climate researchers bemoan the ‘greening of the earth’ as an alarming sign of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and toxic algal blooms discredit the overused association of ‘green’ with sustainability. The economic and political sciences often use the greenness trope in a naively literal way, when ‘green growth’ is supposed to reconcile ecologically sustainable development with market-based economic models: the fallacious symbolic connection between economic and vegetal growth is purposefully maintained to capitalise on the metaphor’s positive connotations. Is ‘green’ perhaps so important to us because of the oscillation of naturalness and artificiality, the healthy and the toxic, the hoped-for and the lost?
In the Western context, ‘green’ is rooted in Middle English and Latin and signifies growth or sprout. Across cultures, it is first and foremost associated with vegetation, fertility, spring, youth, renewal, hope and aliveness. However, despite its positive connotations of aliveness and naturalness, the term ‘green’ is increasingly reduced to its metaphorical value, stripped of all material, epistemological, and historical referents. As such, it serves the fetishistic desire to hyper-compensate for human-made systemic failures. The good intention to metaphorically use ‘green’ as a proxy to defend ecologically sustainable policies has been superseded by an uncritical attitude, which enables capitalist mechanisms to appropriate the metaphor by greening everything. Greenness has become a “metaphor we live by,” one that “in allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept” keeps us from “focusing on aspects inconsistent with that metaphor.”5 ‘Green’ therefore needs to be considered simultaneously as a natural and a technical colour – used in visualisations, lasers, GFP biomarkers, or night vision devices – as well as an index of alarming perniciousness, which turns its ambivalent status into a powerful discursive and political tool. This means that the concepts ‘green’ and ‘nature’ need to be disentangled. ‘Green’ is related both to the representation of natural phenomena and to techno-scientific and social fabrication, and consequently acts as a composite chameleon colour, as a central cue in the evolution of our cultural representations.
In addition, its perception prompts a startling paradox: to humans, a plant only appears green because its chlorophyll absorbs high-energy red and blue light photons for photosynthesis, but reflects the middle spectrum as ‘waste’, so to speak. This spectrum with a wavelength between 490 and 565 nm, which remains largely unused in the plant’s photosynthesis, corresponds to the largest and brightest spectrum visible to humankind. Humans are therefore tempted to take vegetal chaff for the vegetal green itself. While human perception depends on the reflection of this middle spectrum, “colour perception and colour language give us anthropocentrically defined colours and not colours themselves.” As environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III reminds us: “Trees are not really green after we have learned about electromagnetic radiation and the optics of our eyes, though we all view the world that way.” This poses the question of greenness’ multi-modality; it also calls ocular-centrism into question while integrating hearing, gustation and olfaction. If, for different beings, greenness is more than the wavelength of the visual spectrum, what might be the information “associated with green that we cannot visually observe,” while the ‘smell of greenness’ or ‘green odour’ are often being ascribed to different types of therapeutic effects?
Art works in gREen therefore go beyond the visual effect and scrutinise the underlying materialities and histories at stake. For example, while natural green pigments have always been easy to obtain, they are difficult to fix; they fade and degrade when exposed to sunlight, and even often degrade their supports. Despite the availability of plant-based materials, pigments stable enough to technically fix green have been among the most toxic in art history. In 1775, Swedish-German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele produced a green copper arsenite pigment that enabled painters to go out ‘into the green’ with handy metal tubes. But how many painters and art lovers actually died in an effort to represent ‘nature’, given that “in order to hide the substance’s toxicity, all sorts of phantasy names” were invented. The history of green in art is connected to the irony “that green should be so prominent in the landscape and so hard to achieve with pigments and dyes” while, at the same time, “the humanistic concern to match colours to nature placed a greater demand on green than on any other colour.”
Today, the experimental media arts stage the ambiguity of greenness, inspired by cybernetics, systems theory, and ecology. Art on the threshold of the techno-sciences investigates and samples the material factors of what appears to us as being ‘green’ – but no longer just metaphorically, but above all metabolically! Is ‘green’ maybe even itself a ‘presumptuous’ or ‘pretentious’ colour, and should we start to question its casual symbolic use?
Chlorella algae grow in the larger than life-sized photo-bioreactors and meandering hoses of Thomas Feuerstein’s expansive installations involved in manifold metabolic processes. They are harvested to produce beverages, paint pigments, bio plastics, and even charcoal in an accelerated process.... is black the new green? In Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ work, trees are no longer just considered green photosynthesising carbon sinks, but complex organisms with their own identities that communicate with each other thanks to their specific gas emissions. They can even interact with visitors who agree to experimentally put on an ‘odour costume’. Adam Brown goes on to produce arsenic-based pigments in his neo-alchemical live laboratory reminding us that in art nature has often been depicted in the most poisonous of all colours.
View the exhibition catalogue for 2021 and 2022.
Jens Hauser is a Paris and Copenhagen based media studies scholar, writer and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology. He is currently a researcher, and has been a Professor in Art History at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He is also a researcher at the Medical University Vienna, University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion, as well as a distinguished faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist in residency program. As a curator, Jens Hauser has curated about thirty international exhibitions and festivals.
By Jens Hauser
Sampling Colour - Living Installations and Symposium curated by Jens Hauser for Muffatwerk, München.
What is ‘green’? Are we ‘green’? And is it the vegetative world at all? Do algae count as ‘superfoods’, environmental pests, or both? Is biofuel green? Through monumental biotechnical installations, artistic olfactory portraits of trees, and the chemical re-enactment of historical toxic pigments, Muffatwerk initiates a series of events dubbed gREen that fosters debates in climate politics in the field of tension between art, nature and science.
Beyond the rampant ‘greenwashing’ of our times, the artistic positions get to the bottom of the increasingly uncritically accepted symbolism of ‘green’ - as a RE-mix and RE-evaluation of contradictions and paradoxes. Engineers praise ‘green’ chemistry or biotechnology as ecologically benign, while climate researchers bemoan the ‘greening of the earth’ as an alarming sign of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and toxic algal blooms discredit the overused association of ‘green’ with sustainability. The economic and political sciences often use the greenness trope in a naively literal way, when ‘green growth’ is supposed to reconcile ecologically sustainable development with market-based economic models: the fallacious symbolic connection between economic and vegetal growth is purposefully maintained to capitalise on the metaphor’s positive connotations. Is ‘green’ perhaps so important to us because of the oscillation of naturalness and artificiality, the healthy and the toxic, the hoped-for and the lost?
In the Western context, ‘green’ is rooted in Middle English and Latin and signifies growth or sprout. Across cultures, it is first and foremost associated with vegetation, fertility, spring, youth, renewal, hope and aliveness. However, despite its positive connotations of aliveness and naturalness, the term ‘green’ is increasingly reduced to its metaphorical value, stripped of all material, epistemological, and historical referents. As such, it serves the fetishistic desire to hyper-compensate for human-made systemic failures. The good intention to metaphorically use ‘green’ as a proxy to defend ecologically sustainable policies has been superseded by an uncritical attitude, which enables capitalist mechanisms to appropriate the metaphor by greening everything. Greenness has become a “metaphor we live by,” one that “in allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept” keeps us from “focusing on aspects inconsistent with that metaphor.”5 ‘Green’ therefore needs to be considered simultaneously as a natural and a technical colour – used in visualisations, lasers, GFP biomarkers, or night vision devices – as well as an index of alarming perniciousness, which turns its ambivalent status into a powerful discursive and political tool. This means that the concepts ‘green’ and ‘nature’ need to be disentangled. ‘Green’ is related both to the representation of natural phenomena and to techno-scientific and social fabrication, and consequently acts as a composite chameleon colour, as a central cue in the evolution of our cultural representations.
In addition, its perception prompts a startling paradox: to humans, a plant only appears green because its chlorophyll absorbs high-energy red and blue light photons for photosynthesis, but reflects the middle spectrum as ‘waste’, so to speak. This spectrum with a wavelength between 490 and 565 nm, which remains largely unused in the plant’s photosynthesis, corresponds to the largest and brightest spectrum visible to humankind. Humans are therefore tempted to take vegetal chaff for the vegetal green itself. While human perception depends on the reflection of this middle spectrum, “colour perception and colour language give us anthropocentrically defined colours and not colours themselves.” As environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III reminds us: “Trees are not really green after we have learned about electromagnetic radiation and the optics of our eyes, though we all view the world that way.” This poses the question of greenness’ multi-modality; it also calls ocular-centrism into question while integrating hearing, gustation and olfaction. If, for different beings, greenness is more than the wavelength of the visual spectrum, what might be the information “associated with green that we cannot visually observe,” while the ‘smell of greenness’ or ‘green odour’ are often being ascribed to different types of therapeutic effects?
Art works in gREen therefore go beyond the visual effect and scrutinise the underlying materialities and histories at stake. For example, while natural green pigments have always been easy to obtain, they are difficult to fix; they fade and degrade when exposed to sunlight, and even often degrade their supports. Despite the availability of plant-based materials, pigments stable enough to technically fix green have been among the most toxic in art history. In 1775, Swedish-German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele produced a green copper arsenite pigment that enabled painters to go out ‘into the green’ with handy metal tubes. But how many painters and art lovers actually died in an effort to represent ‘nature’, given that “in order to hide the substance’s toxicity, all sorts of phantasy names” were invented. The history of green in art is connected to the irony “that green should be so prominent in the landscape and so hard to achieve with pigments and dyes” while, at the same time, “the humanistic concern to match colours to nature placed a greater demand on green than on any other colour.”
Today, the experimental media arts stage the ambiguity of greenness, inspired by cybernetics, systems theory, and ecology. Art on the threshold of the techno-sciences investigates and samples the material factors of what appears to us as being ‘green’ – but no longer just metaphorically, but above all metabolically! Is ‘green’ maybe even itself a ‘presumptuous’ or ‘pretentious’ colour, and should we start to question its casual symbolic use?
Chlorella algae grow in the larger than life-sized photo-bioreactors and meandering hoses of Thomas Feuerstein’s expansive installations involved in manifold metabolic processes. They are harvested to produce beverages, paint pigments, bio plastics, and even charcoal in an accelerated process.... is black the new green? In Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ work, trees are no longer just considered green photosynthesising carbon sinks, but complex organisms with their own identities that communicate with each other thanks to their specific gas emissions. They can even interact with visitors who agree to experimentally put on an ‘odour costume’. Adam Brown goes on to produce arsenic-based pigments in his neo-alchemical live laboratory reminding us that in art nature has often been depicted in the most poisonous of all colours.
View the exhibition catalogue for 2021 and 2022.
Sampling Colour - Living Installations and Symposium curated by Jens Hauser for Muffatwerk, München.
What is ‘green’? Are we ‘green’? And is it the vegetative world at all? Do algae count as ‘superfoods’, environmental pests, or both? Is biofuel green? Through monumental biotechnical installations, artistic olfactory portraits of trees, and the chemical re-enactment of historical toxic pigments, Muffatwerk initiates a series of events dubbed gREen that fosters debates in climate politics in the field of tension between art, nature and science.
Beyond the rampant ‘greenwashing’ of our times, the artistic positions get to the bottom of the increasingly uncritically accepted symbolism of ‘green’ - as a RE-mix and RE-evaluation of contradictions and paradoxes. Engineers praise ‘green’ chemistry or biotechnology as ecologically benign, while climate researchers bemoan the ‘greening of the earth’ as an alarming sign of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and toxic algal blooms discredit the overused association of ‘green’ with sustainability. The economic and political sciences often use the greenness trope in a naively literal way, when ‘green growth’ is supposed to reconcile ecologically sustainable development with market-based economic models: the fallacious symbolic connection between economic and vegetal growth is purposefully maintained to capitalise on the metaphor’s positive connotations. Is ‘green’ perhaps so important to us because of the oscillation of naturalness and artificiality, the healthy and the toxic, the hoped-for and the lost?
In the Western context, ‘green’ is rooted in Middle English and Latin and signifies growth or sprout. Across cultures, it is first and foremost associated with vegetation, fertility, spring, youth, renewal, hope and aliveness. However, despite its positive connotations of aliveness and naturalness, the term ‘green’ is increasingly reduced to its metaphorical value, stripped of all material, epistemological, and historical referents. As such, it serves the fetishistic desire to hyper-compensate for human-made systemic failures. The good intention to metaphorically use ‘green’ as a proxy to defend ecologically sustainable policies has been superseded by an uncritical attitude, which enables capitalist mechanisms to appropriate the metaphor by greening everything. Greenness has become a “metaphor we live by,” one that “in allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept” keeps us from “focusing on aspects inconsistent with that metaphor.”5 ‘Green’ therefore needs to be considered simultaneously as a natural and a technical colour – used in visualisations, lasers, GFP biomarkers, or night vision devices – as well as an index of alarming perniciousness, which turns its ambivalent status into a powerful discursive and political tool. This means that the concepts ‘green’ and ‘nature’ need to be disentangled. ‘Green’ is related both to the representation of natural phenomena and to techno-scientific and social fabrication, and consequently acts as a composite chameleon colour, as a central cue in the evolution of our cultural representations.
In addition, its perception prompts a startling paradox: to humans, a plant only appears green because its chlorophyll absorbs high-energy red and blue light photons for photosynthesis, but reflects the middle spectrum as ‘waste’, so to speak. This spectrum with a wavelength between 490 and 565 nm, which remains largely unused in the plant’s photosynthesis, corresponds to the largest and brightest spectrum visible to humankind. Humans are therefore tempted to take vegetal chaff for the vegetal green itself. While human perception depends on the reflection of this middle spectrum, “colour perception and colour language give us anthropocentrically defined colours and not colours themselves.” As environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III reminds us: “Trees are not really green after we have learned about electromagnetic radiation and the optics of our eyes, though we all view the world that way.” This poses the question of greenness’ multi-modality; it also calls ocular-centrism into question while integrating hearing, gustation and olfaction. If, for different beings, greenness is more than the wavelength of the visual spectrum, what might be the information “associated with green that we cannot visually observe,” while the ‘smell of greenness’ or ‘green odour’ are often being ascribed to different types of therapeutic effects?
Art works in gREen therefore go beyond the visual effect and scrutinise the underlying materialities and histories at stake. For example, while natural green pigments have always been easy to obtain, they are difficult to fix; they fade and degrade when exposed to sunlight, and even often degrade their supports. Despite the availability of plant-based materials, pigments stable enough to technically fix green have been among the most toxic in art history. In 1775, Swedish-German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele produced a green copper arsenite pigment that enabled painters to go out ‘into the green’ with handy metal tubes. But how many painters and art lovers actually died in an effort to represent ‘nature’, given that “in order to hide the substance’s toxicity, all sorts of phantasy names” were invented. The history of green in art is connected to the irony “that green should be so prominent in the landscape and so hard to achieve with pigments and dyes” while, at the same time, “the humanistic concern to match colours to nature placed a greater demand on green than on any other colour.”
Today, the experimental media arts stage the ambiguity of greenness, inspired by cybernetics, systems theory, and ecology. Art on the threshold of the techno-sciences investigates and samples the material factors of what appears to us as being ‘green’ – but no longer just metaphorically, but above all metabolically! Is ‘green’ maybe even itself a ‘presumptuous’ or ‘pretentious’ colour, and should we start to question its casual symbolic use?
Chlorella algae grow in the larger than life-sized photo-bioreactors and meandering hoses of Thomas Feuerstein’s expansive installations involved in manifold metabolic processes. They are harvested to produce beverages, paint pigments, bio plastics, and even charcoal in an accelerated process.... is black the new green? In Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ work, trees are no longer just considered green photosynthesising carbon sinks, but complex organisms with their own identities that communicate with each other thanks to their specific gas emissions. They can even interact with visitors who agree to experimentally put on an ‘odour costume’. Adam Brown goes on to produce arsenic-based pigments in his neo-alchemical live laboratory reminding us that in art nature has often been depicted in the most poisonous of all colours.
View the exhibition catalogue for 2021 and 2022.
Jens Hauser is a Paris and Copenhagen based media studies scholar, writer and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology. He is currently a researcher, and has been a Professor in Art History at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He is also a researcher at the Medical University Vienna, University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion, as well as a distinguished faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist in residency program. As a curator, Jens Hauser has curated about thirty international exhibitions and festivals.
By Jens Hauser
Sampling Colour - Living Installations and Symposium curated by Jens Hauser for Muffatwerk, München.
What is ‘green’? Are we ‘green’? And is it the vegetative world at all? Do algae count as ‘superfoods’, environmental pests, or both? Is biofuel green? Through monumental biotechnical installations, artistic olfactory portraits of trees, and the chemical re-enactment of historical toxic pigments, Muffatwerk initiates a series of events dubbed gREen that fosters debates in climate politics in the field of tension between art, nature and science.
Beyond the rampant ‘greenwashing’ of our times, the artistic positions get to the bottom of the increasingly uncritically accepted symbolism of ‘green’ - as a RE-mix and RE-evaluation of contradictions and paradoxes. Engineers praise ‘green’ chemistry or biotechnology as ecologically benign, while climate researchers bemoan the ‘greening of the earth’ as an alarming sign of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and toxic algal blooms discredit the overused association of ‘green’ with sustainability. The economic and political sciences often use the greenness trope in a naively literal way, when ‘green growth’ is supposed to reconcile ecologically sustainable development with market-based economic models: the fallacious symbolic connection between economic and vegetal growth is purposefully maintained to capitalise on the metaphor’s positive connotations. Is ‘green’ perhaps so important to us because of the oscillation of naturalness and artificiality, the healthy and the toxic, the hoped-for and the lost?
In the Western context, ‘green’ is rooted in Middle English and Latin and signifies growth or sprout. Across cultures, it is first and foremost associated with vegetation, fertility, spring, youth, renewal, hope and aliveness. However, despite its positive connotations of aliveness and naturalness, the term ‘green’ is increasingly reduced to its metaphorical value, stripped of all material, epistemological, and historical referents. As such, it serves the fetishistic desire to hyper-compensate for human-made systemic failures. The good intention to metaphorically use ‘green’ as a proxy to defend ecologically sustainable policies has been superseded by an uncritical attitude, which enables capitalist mechanisms to appropriate the metaphor by greening everything. Greenness has become a “metaphor we live by,” one that “in allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept” keeps us from “focusing on aspects inconsistent with that metaphor.”5 ‘Green’ therefore needs to be considered simultaneously as a natural and a technical colour – used in visualisations, lasers, GFP biomarkers, or night vision devices – as well as an index of alarming perniciousness, which turns its ambivalent status into a powerful discursive and political tool. This means that the concepts ‘green’ and ‘nature’ need to be disentangled. ‘Green’ is related both to the representation of natural phenomena and to techno-scientific and social fabrication, and consequently acts as a composite chameleon colour, as a central cue in the evolution of our cultural representations.
In addition, its perception prompts a startling paradox: to humans, a plant only appears green because its chlorophyll absorbs high-energy red and blue light photons for photosynthesis, but reflects the middle spectrum as ‘waste’, so to speak. This spectrum with a wavelength between 490 and 565 nm, which remains largely unused in the plant’s photosynthesis, corresponds to the largest and brightest spectrum visible to humankind. Humans are therefore tempted to take vegetal chaff for the vegetal green itself. While human perception depends on the reflection of this middle spectrum, “colour perception and colour language give us anthropocentrically defined colours and not colours themselves.” As environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III reminds us: “Trees are not really green after we have learned about electromagnetic radiation and the optics of our eyes, though we all view the world that way.” This poses the question of greenness’ multi-modality; it also calls ocular-centrism into question while integrating hearing, gustation and olfaction. If, for different beings, greenness is more than the wavelength of the visual spectrum, what might be the information “associated with green that we cannot visually observe,” while the ‘smell of greenness’ or ‘green odour’ are often being ascribed to different types of therapeutic effects?
Art works in gREen therefore go beyond the visual effect and scrutinise the underlying materialities and histories at stake. For example, while natural green pigments have always been easy to obtain, they are difficult to fix; they fade and degrade when exposed to sunlight, and even often degrade their supports. Despite the availability of plant-based materials, pigments stable enough to technically fix green have been among the most toxic in art history. In 1775, Swedish-German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele produced a green copper arsenite pigment that enabled painters to go out ‘into the green’ with handy metal tubes. But how many painters and art lovers actually died in an effort to represent ‘nature’, given that “in order to hide the substance’s toxicity, all sorts of phantasy names” were invented. The history of green in art is connected to the irony “that green should be so prominent in the landscape and so hard to achieve with pigments and dyes” while, at the same time, “the humanistic concern to match colours to nature placed a greater demand on green than on any other colour.”
Today, the experimental media arts stage the ambiguity of greenness, inspired by cybernetics, systems theory, and ecology. Art on the threshold of the techno-sciences investigates and samples the material factors of what appears to us as being ‘green’ – but no longer just metaphorically, but above all metabolically! Is ‘green’ maybe even itself a ‘presumptuous’ or ‘pretentious’ colour, and should we start to question its casual symbolic use?
Chlorella algae grow in the larger than life-sized photo-bioreactors and meandering hoses of Thomas Feuerstein’s expansive installations involved in manifold metabolic processes. They are harvested to produce beverages, paint pigments, bio plastics, and even charcoal in an accelerated process.... is black the new green? In Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ work, trees are no longer just considered green photosynthesising carbon sinks, but complex organisms with their own identities that communicate with each other thanks to their specific gas emissions. They can even interact with visitors who agree to experimentally put on an ‘odour costume’. Adam Brown goes on to produce arsenic-based pigments in his neo-alchemical live laboratory reminding us that in art nature has often been depicted in the most poisonous of all colours.
View the exhibition catalogue for 2021 and 2022.
Sampling Colour - Living Installations and Symposium curated by Jens Hauser for Muffatwerk, München.
What is ‘green’? Are we ‘green’? And is it the vegetative world at all? Do algae count as ‘superfoods’, environmental pests, or both? Is biofuel green? Through monumental biotechnical installations, artistic olfactory portraits of trees, and the chemical re-enactment of historical toxic pigments, Muffatwerk initiates a series of events dubbed gREen that fosters debates in climate politics in the field of tension between art, nature and science.
Beyond the rampant ‘greenwashing’ of our times, the artistic positions get to the bottom of the increasingly uncritically accepted symbolism of ‘green’ - as a RE-mix and RE-evaluation of contradictions and paradoxes. Engineers praise ‘green’ chemistry or biotechnology as ecologically benign, while climate researchers bemoan the ‘greening of the earth’ as an alarming sign of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and toxic algal blooms discredit the overused association of ‘green’ with sustainability. The economic and political sciences often use the greenness trope in a naively literal way, when ‘green growth’ is supposed to reconcile ecologically sustainable development with market-based economic models: the fallacious symbolic connection between economic and vegetal growth is purposefully maintained to capitalise on the metaphor’s positive connotations. Is ‘green’ perhaps so important to us because of the oscillation of naturalness and artificiality, the healthy and the toxic, the hoped-for and the lost?
In the Western context, ‘green’ is rooted in Middle English and Latin and signifies growth or sprout. Across cultures, it is first and foremost associated with vegetation, fertility, spring, youth, renewal, hope and aliveness. However, despite its positive connotations of aliveness and naturalness, the term ‘green’ is increasingly reduced to its metaphorical value, stripped of all material, epistemological, and historical referents. As such, it serves the fetishistic desire to hyper-compensate for human-made systemic failures. The good intention to metaphorically use ‘green’ as a proxy to defend ecologically sustainable policies has been superseded by an uncritical attitude, which enables capitalist mechanisms to appropriate the metaphor by greening everything. Greenness has become a “metaphor we live by,” one that “in allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept” keeps us from “focusing on aspects inconsistent with that metaphor.”5 ‘Green’ therefore needs to be considered simultaneously as a natural and a technical colour – used in visualisations, lasers, GFP biomarkers, or night vision devices – as well as an index of alarming perniciousness, which turns its ambivalent status into a powerful discursive and political tool. This means that the concepts ‘green’ and ‘nature’ need to be disentangled. ‘Green’ is related both to the representation of natural phenomena and to techno-scientific and social fabrication, and consequently acts as a composite chameleon colour, as a central cue in the evolution of our cultural representations.
In addition, its perception prompts a startling paradox: to humans, a plant only appears green because its chlorophyll absorbs high-energy red and blue light photons for photosynthesis, but reflects the middle spectrum as ‘waste’, so to speak. This spectrum with a wavelength between 490 and 565 nm, which remains largely unused in the plant’s photosynthesis, corresponds to the largest and brightest spectrum visible to humankind. Humans are therefore tempted to take vegetal chaff for the vegetal green itself. While human perception depends on the reflection of this middle spectrum, “colour perception and colour language give us anthropocentrically defined colours and not colours themselves.” As environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III reminds us: “Trees are not really green after we have learned about electromagnetic radiation and the optics of our eyes, though we all view the world that way.” This poses the question of greenness’ multi-modality; it also calls ocular-centrism into question while integrating hearing, gustation and olfaction. If, for different beings, greenness is more than the wavelength of the visual spectrum, what might be the information “associated with green that we cannot visually observe,” while the ‘smell of greenness’ or ‘green odour’ are often being ascribed to different types of therapeutic effects?
Art works in gREen therefore go beyond the visual effect and scrutinise the underlying materialities and histories at stake. For example, while natural green pigments have always been easy to obtain, they are difficult to fix; they fade and degrade when exposed to sunlight, and even often degrade their supports. Despite the availability of plant-based materials, pigments stable enough to technically fix green have been among the most toxic in art history. In 1775, Swedish-German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele produced a green copper arsenite pigment that enabled painters to go out ‘into the green’ with handy metal tubes. But how many painters and art lovers actually died in an effort to represent ‘nature’, given that “in order to hide the substance’s toxicity, all sorts of phantasy names” were invented. The history of green in art is connected to the irony “that green should be so prominent in the landscape and so hard to achieve with pigments and dyes” while, at the same time, “the humanistic concern to match colours to nature placed a greater demand on green than on any other colour.”
Today, the experimental media arts stage the ambiguity of greenness, inspired by cybernetics, systems theory, and ecology. Art on the threshold of the techno-sciences investigates and samples the material factors of what appears to us as being ‘green’ – but no longer just metaphorically, but above all metabolically! Is ‘green’ maybe even itself a ‘presumptuous’ or ‘pretentious’ colour, and should we start to question its casual symbolic use?
Chlorella algae grow in the larger than life-sized photo-bioreactors and meandering hoses of Thomas Feuerstein’s expansive installations involved in manifold metabolic processes. They are harvested to produce beverages, paint pigments, bio plastics, and even charcoal in an accelerated process.... is black the new green? In Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ work, trees are no longer just considered green photosynthesising carbon sinks, but complex organisms with their own identities that communicate with each other thanks to their specific gas emissions. They can even interact with visitors who agree to experimentally put on an ‘odour costume’. Adam Brown goes on to produce arsenic-based pigments in his neo-alchemical live laboratory reminding us that in art nature has often been depicted in the most poisonous of all colours.
View the exhibition catalogue for 2021 and 2022.
Jens Hauser is a Paris and Copenhagen based media studies scholar, writer and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology. He is currently a researcher, and has been a Professor in Art History at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He is also a researcher at the Medical University Vienna, University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion, as well as a distinguished faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist in residency program. As a curator, Jens Hauser has curated about thirty international exhibitions and festivals.