A Climate Change Poem Turned Hip-Hop Song – Whakaata Māori

Screenshot featuring poet Audrey Brown-Pereira and hip-hop artist Anonymouz from "They taking pictures of us in the water" Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) via Youtube)

Based on poetry by Audrey Brown-Pereira, a hip-hop version of ‘They Taking Pictures of Us in the Water’ premiered at the Moana Blue Pacific Pavilion for COP28…“I heard her poem and I was like ‘I’m in, this is ticking so many boxes for me in terms of exploring our culture, exploring a kaupapa that’s very important to us all, exploring creative artistry in terms of not only but the music production and the visual production. From the outset, it was all go…” – Anonymouz

Natural causes: artists address climate crisis in inventive ways – The Art Newspaper

COP28 in Dubai: Day 10, December 10, 2023 (by Mídia NINJA CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

What can art do about a crisis? This is a question that a growing number of museums across the world have been faced with as they mount exhibitions addressing the climate emergency. In the past six months alone, institutions ranging from London’s Hayward Gallery (Dear Earth, now closed) to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, until 20 January 2024) have opened eco-themed exhibitions. This month, a spate of new shows across London take up the baton, offering fresh perspectives on the subject’s relationship to wider society and taking the conversation out into the “real world”…

The Fantastical Mind of Benjamin Von Wong – Jejune Magazine

Benjamin Von Wong (by Peter Durand, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

Bringing an idea to life takes innovation, passion and a whole lot of patience. What’s more powerful is if the creation brings people to another world for just a moment and sparks a new notion in the viewers…Benjamin Von Wong is doing it as we speak. The Canadian-born artist is a big advocate for Ocean Plastics and has been creating art pieces to bring awareness to the most critical issue faced today — Pollution…

Littoral Drift – Lens Culture

Meghann Ripenhoff's Littoral Drift #38 2013 Unique Cyanotype (by SF Camerawork, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

Inky blues, frothy whites and occasional flecks of gold make up the color spectrum in Meghann Riepenhoff’s breathtaking camera-less cyanotypes..Littoral Drift—a geological term used to describe the transportation of sand and gravel by wind-driven waves—is Riepenhoff’s “collaboration” with the landscape and the ocean, in which she opens herself to chance and embraces the textures of nature into her working process…..

From Jane to the Octonauts, Children’s TV is Taking on the Climate Crisis – Grist Magazine

Screenshot from trailer for the children's show JANE, streaming on AppleTV via Youtube

Olivia Dreizen Howell wasn’t seeking out a climate lesson when she and her kids, aged 7 and 9, tuned into Molly of Denali, a popular children’s show on PBS. But there it was: Molly, a 10-year-old Alaska Native and vlogger from the fictional village of Qyah, goes with her friends to visit an old clubhouse. Upon arriving, they find it has begun to sink into the ground. The episode, “Not So Permafrost,” follows Molly as she uncovers why her refuge is sinking in the first place. It served as an unexpected opening for Dreizen Howell and her family to discuss the climate crisis…

Can video games change people’s minds about the climate crisis? – the Guardian

Terra Nil video game screen capture from Netflix game trailer via Youtube.

A new wave of game makers are attempting to influence a generation of environmentally conscious players. Will it work, and is it enough?….Terra Nil, the video game that Alfred has been developing since 2019, is a response to these terrifying events. Dubbed a “city-builder in reverse”, it foregoes the consumption and expansion of genre classics such as Civilisation and SimCity to paint a picture of environmental restoration. Starting with arid desert, it’s up to the player to rewild a landscape using various technologies – a toxin scrubber, for example, or a beehive…

Hip hop has been a climate voice for 50 years. Why haven’t more people noticed? – Grist Magazine

Hip Hop Graffiti (CC BY-SA 4.0 via Pxfuel).

“People have spent time bobbing their heads to our stories of this despair and not seeing it as a call to action…”
Hip hop’s relationship to the environment, both in terms of lyrics and political activism, goes back to its very beginning, when smoke from apartment fires blackened the skies of the 1970s South Bronx. And yet its role in advocating for climate solutions has largely gone unnoticed…