The social demands on the forest have been changing during the
last centuries. After World War II the investigations on the sustainability of the forest use have been intensified in Austria.
In the 1960’ies a statistical based Austrian National Forest Inventory (AFI) was set up and since
that time up to the presence the AFI assesses status and changes of the forest ecosystem.
Key issues that will
be presented and discusses during the seminar are:
• What is a forest and is there only one perspective?
• Changes of society’s demands on forests and their mirror in the AFI
• Research
design
• Historical and up to date technical tools – from a human calculation chain to visual techniques
(Satellite imagery, laser technology, aerial photos)
• Who needs forest information?
•
Other BFW links to art
Klemens Schadauer is Head of the Department of Forest Inventory at the Federal Research
and Training Centre for Forests, Natural Hazards and Landscape (BFW) and Deputy Managing Director of the BFW. He studied forestry
at the BOKU and holds a PhD for forestry. He has more than 25 years of work experience in research and project coordination
in international and domestic cooperation. Since its formation in 2003 he leads the European National Forest Inventory Network
ENFIN. He is permanent member of the “Comité Scientifique et Technique de l’Inventaire forestier national (IFN)” of the French
National Forest Inventory as well as of the Expert Committee of the German National Forest Inventory.
NATURA
NATURANS – IN THE WOODS // Lecture seriesWhich ingredients are necessary to transform Nature into ‘Natura naturans’–a
place wherein bodies strive to enhance their power of activity by forging alliances with other bodies in their vicinity? (Bennett,
J. on Spinoza, 2004)
Presumably, the notion of matter has to change: instead of postulating inanimate matter which does
nothing more than composing the world out of long concatenations of cause and effect where nothing is supposed to happen (Latour,
B. 2010), a “new materialism” installs freedom, movement, creativity in the very heart of things. What tools might be appropriate
to realise this conceptual change from passive to active matter, to transport various kinds of ingredients into the motley
arena of things? Transport and transportation need mediators that import and export and thus traverse. Metaphor, in facts,
means “transport“. And this is a (research)question:
Can metaphors act as mediators for transportation? Like Gaia, mediators
can be human and non-human things that invent but also can betray, that nourish, but also can be mistaken. Transportation
(metaphors) can be the craziest and the most certain – metaphors as messenger create contradiction and foreignness/otherness
that may be the route to invention. (Serres, M., 1995)
This module explores the transdisciplinary conditions for transportations
and their consequences for invention. We meet in the woods, this proud and humble emblem of nature. And there is a method:
“Research in the wild” aims at exploring actors and active entities that populate this emblematic site. Point of departure
of Research in the Wild: the wood as a polluted, impure, composite reality, and, secluded research in laboratories that risks
paralysis if it refuses to cooperate with research in the wild. (Callon, M., Rabeharisoa, V., 2003) And there is a caveat:
when “first” Nature (and the hegemony of scientific knowledge that claims to define that “first” nature for its own part)
starts to lose its monopoly (see e.g. “multinaturalism”), it seems to be fair to distrust a “second” Nature: Economy as the
universal dialect of a globalised world, and, to avoid believing that the Economy would supply “the unsurpassable horizon”
of investigation and nevertheless respect what informants say about the troubles with subsistence.
There is an aim: to
explore and chart a site-specific transdisciplinary trajectory of metaphors: a model of the fictional existence of a forest
area. A time-based chart that encompasses the multiplication of goods and bads, the production and following organisational
scripts, the exploration of the links between ends and means, the
risks of reproduction. A chart that “animates”.
See also:
www.dieangewandte.at/artscience
