Trish Morgan – Page 2 – Sensing Our World

Project Dust

Title: Project Dust
Artist(s): Brother Nut
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): Sight? tangible
Issue(s): Air pollution, PM2.5, particulates

In this project, Brother Nut used an industrial vacuum cleaner to suck up air pollution in Beijing. He did this for 100 days, collecting the material. He then mixed it with red clay to produce a brick. In a sense this both visibilised and made tangible the air pollution in Beijing. The piece is therefore a thought piece on the levels of pollution in cities such as Beijing, and also a way of materialising such pollution.

Plastic Souls

Title: Plastic Souls
Artist(s): Geert-Jan Hobijn
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): Sound
Issue(s): plastic waste in the ocean

This work functions as an art installation and a form of activism in the form of beach litter cleaning. In this work, Hobijn created a floating musical instrument made entirely from reclaimed plastic beach litter. Furthermore, he created instructions for the replication of the instrument. When installed at a beach location ‘the waves of the sea will act as the musician of the instrument, which thereby also takes on the role of a siren and hopefully make people more aware of the disturbing trend of plastic waste on beaches and in oceans and seas’. ¹ Thus, the installation both sonifies the motion of the waves, and in doing so in situ, visibilises the kinds of plastic waste that may have washed up on that beach.

The project is significant, in that it includes several tutorials and documentation to enable others to make their own version of the work. It was included in the German version of Make magazine, a popular magazine for DIY/hacker culture. This acknowledges the global issue of plastic waste, and enables would-be artists and activists anywhere affected by plastic ocean pollution to visibilise, sonify and materialise it.

What is Rising

Title: What is Rising
Artist(s): Gaspard and Sandra Bébié-Valérian
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): Sonic, visual, visceral/touch
Issue(s): Fracking

What is Rising is an audio-visual performance on the theme of fracking. The performance takes place in an anechoic chamber, that is one where there is no sound reverberation. The experience of being in an anechoic chamber has been described as very uncomfortable. The artists draw upon seismic data from earthquakes caused by fracking, and they use this data in a live audio-visual composition, where sounds are mixed with on-screen visuals and type, in a ‘sonic and sensory composition’.¹
The seismographs from existing earthquakes are ‘performed’ in real time in what is both a performance and installation.²

Additionally, there is a narrated component, with two narrators describing contrasting perspectives on the technological future-present. One character ‘trusts the system, he believes in its proficiency and thinks he belongs to [a] global system he doesn’t want to fight against’.³ The other character ‘feels the things, he’s scary [sic] and knows that he will ineluctably die in the catastrophe. He questions the system and tries to understand it’ (ibid.). Mixed with these voices are low-frequency sounds, and even infrasound, which is sound at frequencies that cannot be heard but are felt in the body. This adds a visceral component to the installation.

Sink

Title: Sink
Artist(s): Julian Priest
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Visual
Issue(s): co2 pollution, ocean acidification

This piece is a sculptural work from 2012 that stands ‘as a model of anthropogenic ocean acidification’.¹ Priest placed a scallop shell in brine, and attached a small combustion motor to the installation, and into the brine pumps the exhaust gases. This ‘killing environment’ ² thus simulates the contemporary environment of ocean acidification and pollution. Over time, the carbon dioxide released from the combustion engine, reacts with the brine, making it more acidic and eroding the scallop shell. This is a representation of the damage created by carbon, and at once it reveals the usually hidden ‘mechanics of operation and the connections with the world’ (ibid.), especially those of contemporary technologies. For Priest, ‘even when the workings are exposed, most of the time the environmental impact of a technology is not explicitly stated, but treated as an externality’ (ibid.).

For the purposes of this project, this piece is interesting in how it visibilises the process of environmental degradation, through the erosion of the scallop shell, while visibly connecting the cause – the combustion engine and carbon – into the installation. This removes the conceptual distance between what society does in its carbon-intensive practices, and the destruction that may be spatially distant from that society. By juxtaposing these two elements together in a ‘killing environment’, Priest removes that conceptual distance.

Woodpecker

Title: Woodpecker
Artist(s): Rihards Vitols
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): Sound
Issue(s): Biodiversity loss

This piece is a stark solution to the issue of biodiversity loss, specifically that of bird species. In this piece Vitols asks the question Should bird populations decline drastically in the near future, could fake birds replace them and contribute to keeping the natural balance of a forest intact?¹ Based on research that Vitols found, indicating that trees can emit sounds under conditions of drought that affect insects preying on the compromised tree. Under such conditions, birds naturally keep the insect population in check, but with declining biodiversity, the absence or decline in the birds would affect the insect population.

Thus, Vitols set up an installation that replaces live woodpeckers with artificial ones that make similar sounds to woodpeckers, thus causing the destructive insects to avoid the particular trees in which the devices are installed. To that end, he developed thirty artificial woodpeckers and installed them in a forest near Dusseldorf.² He then monitored the devices on a weekly basis. While there is no conclusive evidence available on the outcome of the project, it is noted that ‘Despite the generated sound, the invasion of Vitols devices seems like a peaceful attempt to restore the balance of an ecosystem, one in which a simple but strategically applied technology becomes the simulation of a crucial natural communication between insects, trees and birds, one that is now missing despite its fundamental role in their mutual survival’.³

Therefore, this project stands as a visualisation and sonification of a sad environmental outcome – that of species decline. Therefore, it connects the hubris of the ‘tech fix’ approach to environmental crisis, with the pathos of the small artificial birds attempting a hollow simulacrum of the real species.

Harvest

Title: Harvest
Artist: Julian Oliver
Source: Creative Applications
Sense(s): sound, visual
Issue(s): cryptocurrency, data mining

This piece could be seen as a precursor to the later ALT-C by Michael Sedbon. It is significant for this project as it is an example of how critical making, and in this case, critical engineering, can be utilised to problematise the ecological impacts of mining cryptocurrency, while transforming the problematic dimension of the energy use of such activities. HARVEST is an installation whereby a computer system is connected to a wind turbine. The computer mines cryptocurrency. Thus, the computer itself is powered in an ecologically sustainable way, counterposing the potentials for renewable energy to transform socio-economic processes. However, what is also novel about this piece is in how the cryptocurrency is invested. In this case, it is invested in ‘donations to non-profit climate change research organisations such that they can better study this planetary-scale challenge’.¹ Indeed, the artist himself ‘envisages hundreds of such HARVEST nodes could be deployed in the windiest parts of the world, together generating large sums of supplementary funding for climate-change NGOs in a time where climate science itself is under siege from the fossil-fuelled interests of governments and corporations’.² Oliver describes the work as ‘computational climate art’.³

Floral Automaton

Title: Floral Automaton
Artist: Thomas Grogan
Source: Creative Applications
Sense(s): visual, visceral
Issue(s): ‘smart’ sensing, ecosystem growth

This piece is a digital installation that works with ‘smart city’ data to trigger visual representations of flowers in bloom. The installation does this in real time, to visibilise in a creative way the environmental data available in ‘smart’ city contexts. In this way it is an important work for this project. The project works with various environmental parameters, such as CO2 levels, light, humidity and temperature. Only when the parameters are within correct levels do the digital flowers represented on screen bloom. For the artist ‘Floral Automaton explores how environments become programmable and are made to be operational through sensor technologies. It sits as a response to the current trends for environmental programmability and computational environments’.¹

Anachronic Landscapes

Title: Anachronic Landscapes
Artist(s): Curime Batliner and Jake Newsum with Paralelo Architectos
Source: Creative Applications
Sense(s): visual, installation
Issue(s): biodiversity, ecosystem automation
This piece both visibilises and critiques the problematic nature of industrial and urban development, particularly critical of the ‘cities of the future’ focus of neoliberal urban policy.
¹ For the artists, many of these urban developments ‘are cementing reductive infrastructure at global scale for eternity’.² The installation problematises this relationship by setting up an ecosystem in an abandoned industrial building. This symbolises how nature can take over these former spaces. However, within the installation is also an industrial robot that waters the ecosystem, and gives it light on a schedule. This represents the human dimension to ‘managing’ nature. Indeed ‘while the machine keeps the plants alive it simultaneously ignites a process of transformation forcing the plants to adapt to the new condition’.³ Therefore, it visibilises co-evolutionary processes, reminding the audience of human responsibility for industrial and ecological matters.

Pixi

Title: Pixi
Artist(s): WERC Collective
Source: ?
Sense(s): visual, visceral
Issue(s): visibilising ecological processes

This project is an installation of ‘pixies’ in a forest in Drenthe, the Netherlands. Each ‘pixi’ is a digital device, bound by a set of rules, and connected to other ‘pixies’ following the same rules. The devices can communicate to each other and respond to both environmental data and the presence of an audience. In this way, the Pixi is ‘a digital organism, inspired by the complex patterns that exist in nature, such as flocks of birds and schools of fish’.¹ It therefore visibilises such complex patterns, while asking key questions about the collective intelligence of, for example, murmurations of starlings and other natural collective phenomena. Furthermore, it asks ‘whether a technical natural phenomenon can imitate the complex aesthetics of nature or interact with it’. ²

This piece is significant in that it visibilises ecological processes such as the communication of organisms, that can be not apparent to publics. When an audience visits the site, the Pixies illuminate based on the proximity of an audience. Thus, the audience member only sees certain Pixies and their interactions. In this way, Pixi is a metaphor for the myriad ecological processes taking place in our midst that are usually hidden. Furthermore, it visibilises the networked dimension to ecosystems, which is also important.

Brandalism

Title: Brandalism – an interview
Artist(s): Brandalism collective
Source: Manifesto
Sense(s): multiple
Issue(s): multiple

Brandalism is in itself an organisation that conducts ‘subvertising’, that is action taken on advertising spaces to subvert or disrupt the intention of the adverts themselves. The group claims that ‘Intervening into ad spaces that usually celebrate consumption, Brandalism use ‘subvertising’ as a lens through which we can view the intersectional social & environmental justice issues that capitalism creates.’¹