In the run up to COP15 (United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, December 2009), Michaela Crimmin gave her personal take on a number of anxieties, interests and opportunities.

Drawing on selected images from their work over the last twenty years, Ackroyd & Harvey charted their entry into the unknown territory of the high arctic and the complex world of a changing climate.

Over the last few decades artists have been engaging in various ways with both the ‘natural’ environment and ecological issues. This paper introduced some of the controversies and debates confronting artists, critics, historians and theorists engaged with these concerns. It explored some problems of definition, and the complex and differing ways in which art – in particular installation art - mediates these issues to a wider audience.

Discussion and question session chaired by Bob Spicer.

Climate change is almost always presented as an urgent near-term science and policy problem. But this fails to recognise how climate change forces us to revise how we think about our ethics, politics and culture. It prompts entirely novel questions about how human beings relate to the world. To call it 'the greatest challenge facing humanity' is to underestimate its significance...

The climate of the Earth has never been constant and there is a vast record of the patterns and process of change in the rocks around us: a record that shows that computer models used for predicting the future are likely to underestimate what is both possible and likely. Humans are altering the Earth System in a way that has never been seen before but, also for the first time in the history of the Earth, we have the capacity for intelligent planetary management.

Discussion 2 This symposium explores the controversial status of Futurist movements in art history, and some of their ‘avant-garde’ practices. Speakers engage with various forms of Futurist art, performance and film, including the use of manifestos and demonstrations. Italian Futurism will be viewed in relation to other radical art practices across Europe. The Futurists’ disdain for traditional values and their pursuit of an ‘art of modern life’ will be explored in relation to prevailing concepts of modernity and ‘avant-garde’ utopias.

Tom McCarthy and Dominic Willsdon: These panels are our only models for the composition of poetry, or, How Marinetti taught me how to write  Marinetti's proclamations about literature—what it should and shouldn't be, the operations that it should attempt and tendencies that it should shun—outline a vision whose scope goes far beyond the boundaries of the middle-brow novel.

Mary-Ann Caws, Manifesting A look at a selection of visual manifestos, in their relation to verbal ones—what sorts of crossover features might we determine (or invent), with our post-event imaginations running high, as in the original big and loud futurist ones? A quick dada/surrealist spin will be put on the whole thing, with additional thoughts after the Venice Biennale sneaking in.Suggested Further Reading:Mary Ann Caws, ed.

Lutz Becker and Dominic Willsdon, Vita Futurista  A new version of Becker's acclaimed film Vita Futurista is being released on the occasion of the 2009 Centenary of Italian Futurism. It covers the story of Futurism from its beginnings in 1909 till the 1930s. The exhibition presented by Tate Modern concentrates on the first phase of Futurism which ended with the death of Boccioni in 1916. The film continues the history of Futurism through its second phase.