Expanding Landscapes & Impossible Futures
Dates & Times:
Fri, Jan 31, 2025, 5:00 pm
Venue: Augsburg University, Foss Center & Anderson Music Hall
Cost: Free with registration
Augsburg University’s Schwartz School of the Arts is hosting an evening of narrative, performing, and visual arts that explore the impact of climate change on our physical and psychological worlds. This event, part of the 2025 Great Northern Festival, will feature immersive, multi-sensory projects. Attendees can expect installations, live performances, and interactive experiences in various mediums. The exhibitions and performances will run concurrently throughout the evening, allowing guests to move through at their own pace.
Cold Spell
Collaborative Music-Making Experience
Through strumming, singing, moving, and creating, audiences become participants in a collaborative music making ritual where together we embody and imagine musical futures in light of a chaotic, changing climate, helping us to consider radical care and purposeful action in our g/local community.
Winter Interlude
Visual & Aural Performance
In Winter Interlude, audiences are surrounded by a revolving sequence of outdoor visual and aural experiences performed by artists incorporating evocative music, movement, text, and technology to illuminate themes of climate, nature, and our urban environment.
Dandelion
Interactive Art Project
In Dandelion, participants use ink made from plants grown in Augsburg’s greenhouse and handmade postcards from recycled paper to paint and write messages of hope to their future selves to inspire advocacy and love for our planet.
Glittering Scenes
Interactive Write & Share
During the first half of Glittering Scenes, writers respond to artist-led prompts with an emphasis on vivid imagery, playful forms, and wintry themes; in the second half, writers are invited to share their work at a warm, supportive, open-mic performance.
In “Sea”
Live-Music, Multi-Media Performance
Terry Riley’s minimalist classic In C evolves slowly, with subtle changes in rhythm, harmony, and texture over the duration of the piece. A listener may initially perceive the music as static, but the shifts become apparent and impactful over time. Likewise, climate change operates on a long timescale, with gradual shifts in temperature, sea levels, and weather patterns. We invite listeners to contemplate the powerful accumulation of small changes as they listen to this performance (renamed In “Sea” for this performance), accompanied by images of the Great Lakes and graphics documenting the impact of climate change on our region.
No Thank You! (2025) by Dahn Gim
Large-Scale Installation
No Thank You! is a tapestry suspended from the ceiling, crafted from fused recycled plastic bags. This artwork transforms everyday waste into a vibrant and captivating piece. As it sways gently, it prompts introspection on the excesses of capitalism and the often-overlooked environmental consequences of our consumption habits.
Godai, the great 5 by robert tom
Interactive Outdoor Installation
Godai, the great 5 represents the five elements: earth, water, fire, wind, and the void.
each element relies on each other to find balance within our lives and with others. the "void" is the empty space, it is stillness—silence. it becomes the door to connect to oneness…
Disrupted Views
Interactive Virtual Reality Lab
Visitors will endeavor into curated virtual reality experiences that displace and disrupt the viewer’s notions of the world they inhabit, challenging what is “known” about environments and self.
About Augsburg
Augsburg University educates students to be informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers, and responsible leaders. The Augsburg experience is supported by an engaged community that is committed to intentional diversity in its life and work. An Augsburg education is defined by excellence in the liberal arts and professional studies, guided by the faith and values of the Lutheran church, and shaped by its urban and global settings.
About the Schwartz School
The Schwartz School of the Arts is a place of creative exchange where students learn artistic responsibility and cultivate individual agency. At the Schwartz School we recognize that creative work flourishes best in an environment balancing independence, vulnerability, and joy. The school advocates self-discipline in practice, candor in collaboration, rigor in questioning, and exuberance in play, toward the goal of “a life changed through the arts.”