Taking the recent hi-profile cultural activities surrounding Al Gore’s climate change campaign as the point of entry, this talk will address how the increasingly prominent trope of sustainability — defined by the UN in 1983 as “development that meets their own”– provides a fertile, through highly contested terrain for politicizing artistic and design activities that might go beyond the rhetoric of neo-situationist militancy so popular in the artworld today. The talk was designed to have a site-specific resonance, insofar as Cooper Union is an institution that brings together artists, architects and industrial designers, all fields that have been called upon in various ways to contribute to the so-called “Neo-Green Revolution.”

This talk is a part of the Interdisciplinary Seminar at the Cooper Union School of Art. The lectures and seminar are organized and led by Doug Ashford and Walid Raad.

This talk took place on October 30th, 2007.