This paper argues that a first step in finding a sustainable solution for the pressing global issue of ‘waste’, is to consider waste a value attribution rather than a material condition. Doing so means a shift in focus from finding more efficient ways to ‘clean up the mess’ to changing the way in which value is attributed to things. The paper looks at a selection of recent literature on value systems to identify useful concepts and theory for a value-based solution to waste and proposes to probe such potential solutions through art and design.

This article examines the policies that have transformed water into a market commodity in Chile. Graciela Muñoz, an artist born and raised in one of the country’s areas affected by the drought produced by these policies, travelled to Chilean Patagonia to record the sound of the Baker River, and transferred its sounds to 28 small loudspeakers installed on the dry riverbed of the Petorca River, near her hometown. Through this soundscape, Muñoz temporarily recovered a lost experience where a river that does not exist anymore appears again, in sound, superimposing the past over a uncertain present.

The article presents Esmog Data, an immersive installation exhibited in the Balance-Unbalance International Conference held in Manizales, Colombia in 2016. The piece explores the visualization and sonification of urban environmental data. Esmog Data works transforming sensor readings of different toxic gases into perceptible stimuli (audio and computer graphics). While air quality is a local everyday community issue, the goal of the project is enhancing environmental awareness. In this regard, the work aims to create a meaningful context for interpreting scientific data of the urban territory.

The author describes her artistic process and works exploring the recontextualization of recorded sounds into radically different environments, such as the ocean and the desert. Such unusual juxtapositions of place aim to stimulate awareness of technological mediation and the processes we rely on to build knowledge of environmental issues. The artworks do this by focusing on a physiological experience that combines the senses, thereby activating an experiential affect that may stimulate a sense of remote presence, empathy and curiosity to more fully understand distant and diverse ecologies that we cannot otherwise access.

The recent emergence of the interdisciplinary fields of ecoacoustics and sound studies has resulted in a dramatic increase in both artists and scientists engaged in the practice of audio field recording for a diversity of purposes. The recording techniques used vary substantially reflecting differing loci of interest. We argue that both fields could benefit from greater cross-fertilization, and enhanced discussion of existing field recording practices. We suggest acoustic ecology as a field provides a natural home for such interdisciplinary exchanges, and discuss our application of Acoustic Ecology in the Biosphere Soundscapes project.

The METABODY project proposes an ontological critique of perceptual regimes, such as perspective and rationalized vision, which eventually underlie contemporary control society and imperial colonization projects, thus being an ontological substrate of contemporary environmental problems. Metabody proposes relational and perceptual modes exceeding the ontological splits (subject-object divide) that account for colonization processes as well as for models of control based on quantification, prediction and modulation in the Big Data Era or Algoricene. These proposals become enacted in a novel architectural paradigm of dynamic self-construction techniques across the digital and physical for an indeterminate and emergent space, called METATOPIA.

Existing methods of linking climate and music exist, but do they lead to action to address amplifying and changing climate related risks? At Balance-Unbalance 2016 in Colombia, a session was facilitated to explore new modalities of linking climate and music. The session revealed a potential to further develop modes to convey this relationship, leveraging the ubiquity of music-driven emotional response and universality of feeling, but likely not responding to, climate.

Visually conspicuous sites of water infrastructure have historically served to publicly acknowledge water’s essential role in urban civilization and the feats necessary to maintain its supply. By bringing five disparate sites together in a new musical composition, this project seeks to create a space for the contemplation of solutions to issues of water availability. Doing so encourages audiences to reconsider their own relationships with water and the challenges associated with it.

Visual artists and graphic designers have rarely communicated with economists. Yet much of applied economics involves comparisons of states of the world that ought to be imagined. Through a simple case study, we discuss methods used in economics to value individual preferences over the environment, and the use of visualizations in these exercises. We pinpoint that it is time for economists to start a constructive dialogue with artists in general and visual artists in particular.

This paper describes a transdisciplinary approach that takes places in South of Brazil with the aim to contribute with an eco-bio-social problem: dengue fever. Inspired by enactive theories about relation between body x environment, the authors present here a nontraditional multifaceted bottom-up intervention, designed by civic-oriented journalists and artists to promote health and mobilize a small community in Maringá. The intention is to promote healthier behavior in a participatory perspective when citizens can produce and share their narratives. The content was used as creative material to produce multimedia news, sketch and prototype mobile apps with the support of community.

This article is a brief review on the contemporary artistic epistemology and its use of the transdisciplinary practices as a form of developing artwork. The main objective is to analyze the artist’s interest and creativity on scientific issues and their peculiar view on new scientific and ecological paradigms to generate new knowledge, critical thinking, creative processes or new innovations. The author also explains his experience as researcher in the Institute of Microbiology at San Francisco University of Quito, Ecuador, where perhaps his presence could have been viewed as an “invasion” of the laboratory. For that reason, he uses the expression “intruder artist”—“the scientific spaces” foreign visitor who tries to understand technical considerations on processes and experiments, so they could produce inspiration on new “hybrid” artworks.

The equilibrium between a healthy environment, the energy our society needs to maintain or improve this lifestyle, and the world’s interconnected economies, could pass more quickly than expected from the current complex balance to an entirely new reality where human beings would need to be more creative than ever before to survive. The frequency and severity that certain weather and climate-related events are having around us is increasing, and the ability of human beings to modify our adjacent surroundings has turned into a power capable of altering the planet. Do the media arts have a role in all this?