User:Njeremijenko/Lifestyle experiments
Natalie Jeremijenko uses the term lifestyle experiment to describe a set of creative environmental actions and practices not based in deprivation or “doing without.” Lifestyle experiments offer alternative methodologies to both market based “green solutions” and drawn out legislative solutions to environmental problems. In the tradition of Thoreauian civil disobedience but responding to the contemporary conditions of the enclosures of public space and limitations on traditional protest, lifestyle experiments take civil disobedience into the home (which has been colonized by the market since the advent of advertising) to propose experimental approaches to civic agency. Through her conceptual art project the Environmental Health Clinic participants can consult with clinicians to develop, monitor, and facilitate diverse experiments aimed at assessing and improving environmental health. People who come to the clinic are referred to as “impatients”, a play on the term patient. Impatients are impatient with the environmental solutions being offered from governing and commercial bodies and want to have more agency to contribute to measurable and demonstrable environmental solutions themselves.
Lifestyle experiments have included:
http://www.dymproducts.com/programs/programs-uiau-fe.html
http://noimpactman.typepad.com/
http://xclinic.ning.com/
Lifestyle experiments are an emerging form of international cultural activism aimed at reimagining and transforming our collective relationship to socio-ecological systems. The term applies to activities and projects implemented by individuals and small groups to improve environmental performance in their own lifestyles, and provide a resource for others to do similarly. They embody a contemporary nonviolent social movement in the tradition of Ghandi and Thoreau and have been international response to the failure of globalization and consumption driven responses to and have been formalized by the environmental health clinic.
Lifestyle experiments are wonder and question driven, ranging from the pragmatic: how much of my own food can I grow and does it really taste better? (see avant gardening); how many plants can I integrate into my home to improve air quality and sequester CO2? (the vegetating lifestyle); What can I forage from the urban wilderness?(foragers and ; or using social networking sites for carpooling PurPool, to the more spectacular: can I cohabit with, wrestle with and help to repopulate the soil producing rhinoceros beetles? Raising and cohabiting with the tadpole bureaucrat as a companion animal, aka KeepingTabs on how industrial pollutants circulate? will birds use a bird operatable gun, or a ferriswheel?) and characterized by imaginative, creative and novel strategies that draw on the particular environmental health concerns, resources, network, biogeography, skills and talents of people interested in addressing environmental issues, directly, to supplement, encourage and circumvent traditional governmental or legislative response. Lifestyle experiments are in effect crowdsourcing the problem of how to respond to the climate crisis.
In contrast to a green consumer response, lifestyle experiments are not mass-produced, (nor massproduceable), but rather site, community and person specific—while they sometimes incorporate new products like a solar awning, they also include life without a refrigerator -- which is the value that makes them experimental, interesting and character driven. Therefore there is a secondary characteristic is an emphasis on self-documentation, blogging and sharing experiences and results, or the extensive use of web-based documentation youtube, vimeo and/or social networking platforms Lifestyle experiments are therefore an informal genre of knowledge production, sharing both the documentation or publication imperative of more formal academic work incorporating the empirical, measurable or testable strategies, and a reputation-based, rather than financial incentive system. Although many “Lifers” are scientists, academics and students, it is distinct from another participatory movement, so-called citizen science. Citizen scientists might collect data to be involved in “real science”, promote scientific literacy etc, however, in lifestyle experiments, it is the lifers that create or co-create the questions, design the experiments and co-define the evaluation strategy and data collected. Lifestyle experiments address questions formulated by nonexperts, rather than a particularly important scientific questions. Which is the difference bt does this work in principle and does this work for me, really … and how well?
Examples of lifestyle experiments include : • Melters: life without a refrigerator is one that regulates the use of fresh food, tri-weekly visits to farmers markets, instead of other weekly to … to produce a social experience, know the local farmers and demand for more fresh local produce. • Istalling a solar awning. Rather than committing to a entire roof, this small scale allows direct exploration of DC charging, orientation and projection experiments, that is, you can experiment with the different amounts of charge generated by windws. • cooking a meal in Iceland with geothermal power –currently 25 students in Reykjavik are using this LE to explore the geothermal sources available for reuse and reimnatination. • urban foraging in Chicago, --se • the more experimental forms of urban agriculture (that do not reproduce the env. Degradation focus on monoculture leads), tend, holding clinic hours on a raft on the east river or using it as a writing studio. • Making an appointment at the floating environmental clinic, office hours, or using writing studio on East River... • INtergrating plants into domestic environment for the health and other benefits ... • Avant gardening • Cohabiting with plants; • Avant Gardening... (space station; • Urban foragers • Feral Trade --exploring how social networks can be used to deliver good while simulatneously affirm and extending social ties.
Lifestyle Experiments are a powerful alternative to other cultural responses to the climate crisis, such as
• “green or responsible consumer movement”; • Suicide Environmentalism • change your lightbulbs (i.e no substantial change is needed) particularly in terms of defining the agency of people to respond. in that the former has compares the results. promoting and supporting and sharing the diversity. 1) figuring what might work 2) “opening the black box” and familiarizing with technical and social systems that have been ‘naturalized’ onscured in a leave-it-to-experts. 3) Gathering empirical --i.e. crowd-sourcing the environmental crisi 4) Demonstrating to neighbours that alternatives are 5) Informing governmental and legisltative responses with the results 6)
Improve env. Performance of . The xClinics Although this promotes an si a new form of knowledge production that is not so much peer review but. Lifestyle experiments. To provide forms of living that will accumulate to positive effects on environmental health, civic productions. that explore how to transforms one own agency in and It builds on a certain knowledge that even if effective policitcal pressure can political represnteation were possible the vastness of Crisis of agency.
Lifestyle experiments are not lifestyle choices and are differentiated by the intention, method and results. ed to explore new possibilities in contemporary life, address and mitigate the climate crisis, food crisis and glocal financial destabilization, rather than to perpetuate inherited and pre-programmed observable forms of class stratification, and social normalcy. There build on the contemporary zeigtgiest captured by . Lifestyle experiments are often playful, always demonstrative, and experimental. They are not tied to consumption choices, they are not marketed, but invented and shared. As such they demonstrate both the particularity of any particular persons lived situation, and
Fostering diverse highly optimized soutions over huge geo-engineering ‘experiments’ Lifestyle experiments are in the tradition of American Prgamitsim and in particular John Dewey and corporate disobendience promulgated. These are prescribed This widescale Whereas Burning Man may provide an forum for experimentation it is precisely outside of the
Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories, they are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of diversion and preference. -John Dewey, The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy, 1909 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/02/assignment_america/main4696340.shtml?source=mostpop_story They are They are a testimony to the diversity of. As a first assignment to explore the particularly ready ... please cook a meal using a direct form of geothermal heat. Document and post on the xclinic website. This may involve finding ... with 26 high temperature geothermal fields, and over 250 low temperature areas. In total over 600 natural hot springs have been found in Iceland.
Glocal Lobal
It opposes the idea that culture propogates without individual agency, for example, from a sociological or
Sky Full of Bacon 07: Eat This City from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.
Although No Impact man, call himself lifestyle experiments
--this is however more in the class of
limited repertoire of what not to do... without ..
A related form of agency is involved in the
Citizen science ...
Citizen environmentalism
A early person to use and to whom the term “liestyle experiment” would be credited is Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man. However, deprivation experiments. Are very different. The deprivation and removal that is focused on …