Green Statements is a project made by LabSynthE, directed by xtine burrough with creative researchers Cynthia O’Neill (PhD student) and Cansu Simsek (PhD 2023).
The corporate world is full of mission statements about goals, people, products, services, about commitments to diversity and of course, about sustainability initiatives. The problem is that these statements have lost their impact, and this loss spreads like a virus. When companies—especially large, visible companies—don’t behave in alignment with their statements, the public assumes that sustainability statements do not reflect authentic goals. Companies lose their credibility.
This project intervenes in the language of corporate green statements.
We are media artists. We are three trickster women. We collaborate in a laboratory that investigates synthetic and electronic poetry. Through our project we become watchdogs of sustainability statements while simultaneously offering statements that any company can use in their corporate communications.
Green Statements is inspired by two works of media art: Josh On’s They Rule performed an online panopticon, laying bare the people who held the most power through their CEO positions in global corporations. More recently, Ben Grosser’s The Endless Doomscroller performs the never-ending act of scrolling through bad news headlines. Our project, too, is an infinite scroll. Instead of scrolling for bad news, though, or keeping tabs on corporate positions, we offer a scroll of corporate language used in sustainability statements from around the globe. Half of our quotes are tagged with their authors—in this way we hold accountable the companies that promise to protect the planet with their green statements. Half of the quotes we share were written by us—a mash-up of language we encountered while researching this project. These appear as being attributed to “Your Company Name Here.” We offer these statements for anyone to use.
If you have language we should include: statements from corporations or statements you would like to see corporations use, please share it!
- Credits: LabSynthE: xtine burrough with Cynthia O’Neill and Cansu Simsek
- Origin: in 2022 during the “Hack-the-Planet” hackathon
- Exhibitions:
- Infinite Scroll, Ivester Contemporary, Austin, Texas, July/August 2024, curated by Tiffany Smith and reviewed in Glasstire
- AURORA Video Art Nights (VAN), Downtown Dallas at Pegasus Plaza, April 5, 2024
- Lines Crossing: Intersections of Art and Technology, Design IQ, Richardson, Texas, March 2024 curated by Anne Balsamo