Coinciding with Earth Day (Friday, April 22), the UGA Lamar Dodd School of Art and College of Environment + Design will host Port Futures and Social Logistics 01: A virtual research summit and online exhibition of works. The summit and exhibition will explore the port city as a platform for furthering global cultural dialog through art and urbanism. The event focuses on environments, histories, and materials of production, extraction, and circulation in the age of energy transition. The exhibition uses the 4-D medium to document fixity and flux, and the virtual platform unites the works amidst distance and separation.

PFSL01 brings together work from an international group of artists offering atypical planetary visualizations. They are the first in what will be a series of positioned ‘views,’ which will form a collective archive of the contemporary condition. Together, these views couple together aesthetic investigations of ecological, social, and industrial flows with a renewed belief in art as a tool for situating belongingness within systems. The collective archive emerges as an inductive study of the material present. Artist-collaborators are ports, and their exchanges serve as logistics to operationalize this collective present through cultural connection; greater than mere commodity chain.

Artist-collaborators working across field recordings and found footage offer interpretations to our call: what might the planetary look like from the ground-up? Their visualizations move beyond implied, ever-distant lines of connectivity towards a depth of field typically left out of global discussions. In choosing to belong to this latent archive, artist-collaborators trace edge conditions and connections across territorial divides. When viewed as a constellation, imaginations of the sky and the sea as vast spaces for politics join a fragmented almanac of the earth, in opposition to known tropes or scales.

For more information: https://www.social-logistics.org