Performing/Transforming Practices - LCA perspectives on filmproduction within in the context of performative artistic research by Lina Persson

A collaboration between Anna Björklund, associate professor/docent, Dept. of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering (SEED), KTH and Lina Persson, Researcher, Department of film and media, Stockholm Uniarts. We aim to monitor and evaluate the life cycle climate impact of practices in film and media, in research and education at Stockholm Uniarts on two levels, on an individual researcher’s level and on an organisational level with student’s teams. As a first step, we will monitor and evaluate the impact of these artistic processes and as a second step we will develop new tools and documents that can support students in shifting their productions towards films with smaller climate footprint. The tools will enable the students to carry out performative productions, using their creativity to stay within set sustainability limitations, finding new ways to make films and to let, the story, the experience, of that process accompany them in the coming productions. The joint conclusions of the collaboration will be interwoven with Persson’s research project Climate-Just Worldings where the performativity of fictional story-worlds and how they can interact with an organization’s reality is explored. become part of the climate-just narrative developed within Persson’s project. We also aim to develop an app tool to make the documentation process more intuitive. The documentation of this process will also be continuously available to the public online.

Excerpt from recording of zoom discussion on the methods in the project Transforming practices - LCA perspectives on film-production within in the context of performative artistic research, October 6, 2020, with Anna Björklund, Associate Professor, Dept. of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering, Lina Persson, Researcher, Department of film and media, Stockholm Uniarts & Karin Lagercrantz, research engineer, Dept. of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering. Visual backgrounds: Distorted Lidar scans from Stockholm Uniart’s basement corridors where electricity, heating, goods are distributed. Made in collaboration with Mirko Lempert as part of an experiment of assessing climate impact of a new previsualization tool.

For us the transdisciplinary method in this project stems from a drive to gather around something we all find important, sustainability, but from different viewpoints and with different methods.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) as method is always multidisciplinary in the sense that experts in LCA need to collaborate with experts in the field of application in order to untangle how that field can be described with a life cycle perspective. In this case the LCA is applied on artistic processes and film production, a somewhat less standardised processes than e.g. in the transport industry. Therefore, we plan to have a bit more agile analysis process with dialogue with film team students to allow for discussions and more general understanding of the varying degree of climate impact of the different aspects of the film making process.

To have LCA as an active collaborator in the artistic process also opens up for artistic methods such as performativity, in the way it may shift how we see what we are doing while we are doing it and thereby shifting what we are doing.

In the artistic practices quantitative methods can play a role in breaking with internalized and normalized outdated structures or unjust privileges. When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Therefore, it can be necessary to measure our behaviour in order to render our privileges visible. In this quantitative analysis we hope to bring forth a discussion of climate-justice in relation to artistic practices and productions.

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