Our guest this week on the podcast is London-based artist and researcher John Hartley. John is probably best known for turning an office (desk, computer and business suit!) into a sea kayak. We talk about a bunch of John’s projects, including the kayak, and the intersection of art and ecological thinking. While listening to the podcast I’d suggest taking a look at John’s work which you can see on his website ambivalency.net. During the show we discuss:
- John’s interest in peaks and declines
- Why art is uniquely placed to deal with the problems of climate change
- His “Contingency Research Platform” Kayak project
- Hydrohacks
- Zero Dollar Laptop Project
- William Blake’s Angel Oak
- The Peckham Experiment
- Building Jewellery
- The Goldcrest Standard
Special thanks to Kate of the blog Wild Economies for tipping me off to John’s work.
If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. The theme music is by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.
I just got around to this one. My original thoughts when I saw your post was that a kayak made of an office was just a little bit too precious. But I really appreciated the acknowledgement that, yes, this is outrageous but the point is to play on the edge and see what shakes out. i could listen to you two ramble on all day.
Hi Kyle, Many thanks for your kind comment. It means a lot to me when someone takes the effort to say something about the podcast. And, yes, John is a really interesting artist. We didn’t even scratch the surface on all the projects he’s done.
I finally listened to this just now — great episode. I particularly liked the bit John said about deciding what goes in and what is left out of a project (or thought experiment as he said) and also the social sustainability of a project. Much of what he said is relevant to my own work, so lots to ponder here for me. Thanks! (And thanks for the shout out 🙂 )