Photo: J-Brokowski, Australia Antarctic Division 2010
What is knowledge and what is belief?
In Antarctic Animation: Expanding perceptions with gesture and line (thesis submitted April 2010), I demonstrate the need to combine scientific data with aesthetic responses in order to accurately communicate climate change information.
Can information gathered, created and shared by scientists and artists, while working together in Antarctica, be made accessible through an animated online interface? Could such an interface represent a whole, unified ecosystem?
I am not alone in believing that most people can know the world from both a scientific and aesthetic (sensory) perspective. A combination of these perspectives is essential for human survival.
Because human perceptions are based on belief systems, our views must be expanded in oder to increase our understanding of the world.
Are belief systems necessarily moral?
In his essay, Moral Frames for Landscape in Canadian Literature, Ronald Bordessa identifies three conceptual worldviews ( Simpson-Housely and Norcliffe, 1992, p.58):
Religious – Man against Nature, anthropocentric ethic
Scientific – Man in Nature, biocentric ethic
Existential – Man as Nature, ecocentric view
Bordessa further identifies the Existential view as ‘Aesthetics: A world of Dissolved Differences’ (p.59).
I fail to understand what is moral about the Scientific and Existential views.