EcoArt.Approach(James_Austin)

HUMAN ENCROACHMENT Mission Human Encroachment is a blog featuring original nature photography alongside existing Ecoart projects, with a focus on how humans interact and coexist with nature  in ways that are often detrimental. The first thing you see upon entering the blog is a work by artist Nils-Udo (another work from the series is also discussed) titled Enfant. It’s a human figure painted red so that it stands out dramatically against the natural background. This, I think, sums up the mission statement of the project: the way humans interact with the world can easily ruin it, drawing beauty away from its natural state. It doesn’t take much, either. Consider the figure in the photo: small and standing perfectly still. According to the title, they’re a child. The figure’s presence alone is what’s leaving the impact, not anything they’re doing. If you look closely, you’ll see that paint is dripping off of them onto the ground, symbolizing something that will be forever left behind. The point here is that humans, as we are right now, stand in contrast to the world around them. We have to do some work to try and blend in. Content The original photography all follows the same theme: bland, colorless, with a focus on litter and other things left behind by humans. There was initially a painfully small amount of content, so I decided to draw on existing projects. There are a lot of these on Tumblr, many of which are painfully lacking in artist credit and explanations. I decided the second function of this blog should be to synthesize, credit, and caption these pieces in a thoughtful way, along with including projects from the Green Museum not yet uploaded to Tumblr. Crowdsourcing Another goal of this project is to create a small community of people to further its goals. On the sidebar, there’s a list of potential events. I’d like to post fliers and recruit people in other ways to get together and talk about Encroachment, do some community service, etc. In this way, I could also recruit a small amount of trusted people to serve as the blog’s moderators, curating and possibly producing their own content. It’s not easy to keep coming up with my own things, but a little bit of crowdsourcing could make it easy. Budget Blogs are generally free to make, but difficult to make appealing. This one is based off some open-source code that I spent a couple hours making small adjustments to. As for the events, it would take time and effort to gather people, and possibly a small amount of money to print fliers and buy things like trash bags, gloves, and pizza. Overall, this project would probably cost me under $50.