Topic: Get It? The Medium, the Message, and the Environment

Speakers:
Chris Dickinson (Film-maker and Executive Director of Wildlife Asia)
Lucy Davis (Visual artist, writer and Assistant Professor of NTU)
Paul Rae (Director of spell#7 performance and Assistant Professor of NUS)
Zhao Renhui (Photographer and member of the Institute of Critical Zoologists)

Moderator:

Tan Tarn How (Theatre Playwright and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, NUS)


Estimated Duration: 80 mins

===
The Panel:

One of the most striking things about the environmental movement is the variety of strategies its activists use to get their message across. But is this always to the good? Are some methods more effective than others? And how does the medium being used influence the message being conveyed?
To put it another way, what would “An Inconvenient Truth” be without PowerPoint? 

In this wide-ranging panel, five speakers with extensive experience in environmental arts and media will talk about the relationship between the medium and the message in their work. Covering advertising, film, theatre and the visual arts, their discussion will deal with the following topics:

• Art, propaganda and ‘greenwash’

• Creativity and/as activism

• Narratives, nature and the ethics of representation

• Making sense of science

• The ecology of art-making

• Publics, audiences and environmental debate

The panelists will argue that being true to a creative medium can often result in a tension between saying what is ‘right’ about the environment, and doing what is meaningful. What is the responsibility of the artist or documentary maker in such circumstances – and how should audiences respond?