The chief executive of the world’s largest miner, Marius Kloppers of Australian based BHP Billiton, called on Australia to take the lead on the climate change debate. He warned that Australia’s economy would suffer if it did not look beyond coal for alternative sources of energy, particularly given that almost 50% of the Australia’s emissions emanate from Coal-fired power stations. BHP Billiton derives 8% of its revenue from coal, and is the world’s largest producer of thermal coal. Kloppers stressed the necessity for clarity on carbon emission pricing, recommending a mix of solutions to apply to electricity generators such as a combined carbon tax with a limited emissions trading scheme and land use taxes. Australia’s economy would suffer significantly he claimed if action was not taken to clarify pricing in light of a future global carbon response.
Political Arts | Ian Bunn Visual Artist
My digital art work is essentially politics and art. It’s about iconic people, places and events of our day. Recorded visually through daily compilations of manipulated digital images, posted online and disseminated via online media and social networks. The works are diaristic in nature that metaphorically record a spectator’s experience of the contemporary digital age. The resulting work intentionally has a painterly aesthetic acknowledging my historical painting practice.
Adapting Pop Art’s notion of mass media imagery into a context of the contemporary digital age, the work draws on a myriad points of reference. Utilizing fractured images to provide an allusion to the digital noise pounding away daily into our sub consciousness. The work is essentially popular culture arts, diverging from the traditional Pop Art notion of a pronounced repetition of a consumer icon, instead this work focuses on the deluge of contemporary digital content. The compilation of the fragmented imagery is vividly distractive, not unlike cable surfing or a jaunt through Times Square.
This digital photo manipulation art work is premised on the basis that Pop art in its beginnings, freeze-framed what consumers of popular culture experienced into iconic visual abstractions. With the advent of the techno age, visual information circulates in such quantities, so rapidly and exponentially, that to comprehend a fraction of it all becomes a kind of production process in itself. Hence this work considers fragmented elements of Popular Culture through an artistic and conceptual exploration of specific people and events of the day.
