For the past five years, we’ve screened SIMA juried films in communities and classrooms across six continents and witnessed an increasing demand to use the inspirational force of documentary filmmaking to build a global digital community around today’s most pressing issues.
“The real wealth of the Nation,” marine biologist and author Rachel Carson wrote in her courageous 1953 protest letter, “lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife… Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.” Carson’s legacy inspired the creation of Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose hard-won environmental regulations are now being undone in the
In a massive act of ‘brand vandalism’ just two days before the launch of the UN COP21 Climate Conference, 600 anti-advertisement posters have been installed in outdoor media spaces throughout the streets of Paris. The posters display artwork from over 80 artists from 19 different countries, including big names such as Banksy-collaborator Paul Insect, Alex One, Know Hope, Escif, Cleon Peterson, Hyuro, Jimmy Cauty, Ron English and many others.
From Public Delivery:
For Ice Watch (2014), he extracted 30 blocks of glacial ice from the waters of Greenland and in 2018 strategically placed them in front of Tate Modern in London . The ice was left here to melt. Ice Watch was to inspire public action against climate change, advocating for a rapid public response.
This piece draws on the agit-pop theatre tradition of a short pop-up provocative & disruptive intervention in familiar spaces. The purpose of Punch & Judy style short piece is to inform and raise awareness Ireland’s failure to meet its carbon emission targets and to emphasise the inadequacy of our government’s N.M.P. (National Mitigation Plan).
The following description is taken from Amanda Froelich's article on www.trueactivist.com (link below):
"Dumpster diving is a topic that is rising in popularity. Just take a peek at Rob Greenfield! This activist won’t hesitate before jumping in a dumpster, but he’ll also take time to spout reasoning behind why we should work hard to ‘waste less’.
Zhang Huan is a very talented performance artist in China. In the famous work "Twelve Square Meters", he was covered with fish oil and honey sitting in a dirty public toilet in Beijing's East Village for an hour, not only making swarms of flies greedily surround him, but also People feel extremely uncomfortable and even nauseous.
Sewing and textiles have always been a part of the artist Aram Han Sifuentes’ life. Her South Korean immigrant parents operated a dry cleaning business, and she mended her own clothing from a young age.
Two pairs of dusty, pastel-orange roller skates. A ram's skull. Several meters of tangled, bright red rope. They aren't the sort of items you'd find in the great fashion houses of Europe or on North American catwalks.
But, for unconventional Chinese designer and performance artist Wan Yunfeng, they are perfect.
From his small apartment in eastern Beijing, Wan makes fashion that only he wears.
In 2016, Zhou Zhenfeng, who was a student at a college in Hebei at the time, discovered that there were a lot of waste tires in the streets and alleys. Zhou Zhenfeng learned that tires are made of infusible or refractory polymer elastic materials. It takes hundreds of years for these materials to decompose in the soil to the extent that they do not affect the growth of plants.
For more than 20 years, Metronome, which includes a 62-foot-wide 15-digit electronic clock that faces Union Square in Manhattan, has been one of the city’s most prominent and baffling public art projects.
In the south-western city of Chengdu, by all accounts a city on the edge coping with heavy pollution but also with authorities scrambling to put a lid on simmering discontent. That night police detained a number of artists who managed to stage a silent demonstration, while wearing face masks.
Anonymous urban artists set up art installations, large nest eggs, at several locations in Skopje, wanting to alarm the growing number of trees in the city.
In the nest read a message "You cut all the trees, where do we make nests? Birds".
Northeast Minneapolis is going to have the first full-fledged water bar of its kind, an establishment where you can sit and drink a variety of local tap waters to your heart’s content. Their delightful motto: “Water is all we have.”
It’s certainly a long way from Grand Theft Auto. Henry David Thoreau’s classic “Walden” is the inspiration for what Smithsonian Magazine is calling “the world’s most improbable video game”: Walden, a Game.
Alex King describes Project Ukko in detail for Huck Magazine (March 17, 2016):
"Moritz Stefaner’s Project Ukko turns climate and wind data into an immersive art installation that allows viewers to explore the future of the planet."
Visible Distance / Second Sight is an art installation by Jennifer Bolande for DesertX. The temporary artwork can be found along the Gene Autry Trail near Vista Chino (33°50’41.70”N 116°30’21.02”W), where a series of consecutive billboards have been replaced by perfectly aligned photos of the landscapes they are blocking.
From the DesertX project page:
Coal Seam Greed was going to be a simple satire showing Katso and Nowhereman posing as a mining company called Reed Gas and erecting notices stating their intent to explore for unconventional gas or CSG in inner-city Brisbane. The idea was that residents would see the signs, phone and leave messages in response, which would then be incorporated into the video.
The project consists of a small mobile workspace and a micro artist residency program composed by two tiny art studios founded in Oakland. Studio 1 is a solar powered art studio which was built on the back of a flatbed trailer and Studio 2 was built in collaboration with students at Stanford University, both spaces are composed of second-hand materials.
ACE Bank was a hoax bank developed as part of a bigger campaign by Netwerk Vlaanderen, a Belgian organization concerned with banks’ responsibilities for what they invest in. ACE bank was an elaborate deception, with a headquarters in central Brussels, parodying other banks. It claimed to be investigating whether there was a market for its special way of doing business.
East West Market in Vancouver, British Columbia have made it clear that they are very concerned about the effect that single use plastic items have on the environment.
Unveiling the Unseen
BlindWiki is a location-based audio network where citizens who are blind or partially sighted use smartphones to share their findings by posting sound recordings. The platform does not just contain information about difficulties and barriers but is also a repository for experiences, opinions and stories, generating a creative and collaborative cartography of the unseen.
Hoax: The London 2012 Olympic Games website was faked by group CAMSOL
The official London 2012 Olympic Games website was faked on Wednesday by protesters demanding that BP be dropped as one of the event’s official sponsors.
Published April 13, 2012 on The Telegraph UK by Jacquelin Magnay