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// Sensing Environments // An Earth Week Festival at Rensselaer April 14-21, 2013
 * draft February 1, 2012**

During the week leading up to Earth Day 2013, Rensselaer will host a festival that celebrates //Sensing Environments// – the ways scholars in different fields have created ways to understand, inhabit, and protect environmental sustainability. Performances, workshops, lectures, and exhibits will showcase how artists, scientists, engineers and humanities scholars have worked – often collaboratively – to help people experience their environments, their significance, and the challenge of protecting them.

Presentations will highlight how scholars have engaged their audiences – including students – through music, film, ethnography, built projects, data visualization and modeling, working to enhance their sense of the environment. Presentations will also explore how environments that animate sensory engagement with nature and sustainability can be created – in classrooms, public spaces, and arenas of governance.

The festival will start with an eco-visualization hackathon the weekend of April 13th, and a film screening of //[|A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet]// on Sunday, April 14. Data visualizations created during the hackathon will be displayed the following weekend.

Throughout the week, there will be presentations and films across campus, hosted by diverse departments and organizations. Rensselaer's Igor Vamos, renowned for his work with The Yes Men, is on the program, as is musician Pauline Oliveros and historian of science Mike Fortun. Guest lectures will be given by Chuck Hass, Professor of Environmental Engineering at Drexel University and Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature at Duke University.. Philosopher-composer David Rothenberg will discuss "Bug Music: How Insects Gave us Rhythm and Noise."

A poster session beginning on Friday, April 19 will showcase the range of sustainability-focused research underway at Rensselaer, across disciplines. An afternoon panel will also focus on Rensselaer's sustainability research, highlighting projects that are deeply interdisciplinary. Friday at 4pm, NASA Goddard climatologist Gavin Schmidt will speak. Schmidt is co-author ( with Joshua Wolfe) of // Climate Change: Picturing the Science // (2009). In 2011, Schmidt received the [|American Geophysical Union] 's inaugural Climate Communications Prize for work. Friday will conclude with an 8pm film screening of // [|Reach of Resonance] //, which explores the creative paths taken by Jon Rose, Bob Ostertag, Miya Masaoka and others who have used music to interact with the environment.

The Saturday program also includes presentations by media artist Marina Zurkow, whose work explores how humans relate to animals, plants and the weather, by Andrea Polli, a sound artist who has collaborated with atmospheric scientists to help people sense climate change, and by David Dunn, a pioneer of environmental music who collaborates with physicist Jim Crutchfield to help people make sense of ecological change in forests.

Throughout the festival, there will be exhibits that showcase different ways people and organizations strive to sense and protect the environment.

The festival will conclude with a World Drum percussion performance that begins in Troy's Prospect Park, and then moves as a procession to Rensselaer's EMPAC concert hall. Rensselaer's own ensembles will be joined by those from Troy High School, Empire State Youth Orchestra, University at Albany and Union, Bennington, Williams Colleges, and the Berkshire Bateria. World-famous percussionist Susie Ibarra will compose and also perform, inspired by natural circadian rhythms in humans, animals and plants.

Festival events will be free, and open to the general public.

 **Sonic Interventions Into Hidden Sound Worlds:**  **//A Composer at the Edge of Science//**

For over three decades there has been an ongoing discourse addressing the role that the sonic arts can play in increasing our collective awareness to environmental issues through sensitizing us to the soundscape. A variety of approaches and strategies have used experimental music practices and audio recording technologies to document, compose, preserve, study, manipulate, intensify, and otherwise attempt to bring issues of the natural environment into foreground awareness through sound. This presentation will focus upon composer David Dunn’s participation in projects that have attempted to bring artists and scientists together towards applied environmental problem solving. These projects illustrate how the sonic arts might move beyond documentary and sensory heightening strategies alone towards participation in both scientific research and subsequent interventions to growing environmental dilemmas.