This piece offers a form of algorithmic composition by attaching environmental sensors to a keyboard synthesiser. The environmental sensors measure rain, wind speed, and wind direction. This data is converted into MIDI signals, which are used to trigger various sounds. In this way, the artist ‘was particularly interested in being able to use the controller in Live [computer software], so that the listeners can feel (in real time) the impact of the climate on the composition’. 1 Therefore, while the artist maintains control over the sounds being played, the artist and audience alike are aware that the sensors, and thus the weather, are also influencing what is sounded.
While not visibilising environmental data, this conceptual project, which designs a set of emoji pertinent to the issue of climate change, is an example of visibilising the entirety of the climate issue. Furthermore, if actualised through acceptance by the Unicode Consortium, which decides on new emoji 1, it potentially empowers publics affected by climate change in a vernacular way, and allows those affected by, for example, extreme weather events, to communicate these issues. For that reason, it is an important work to include.
The work ‘is meant to put the climate change discourse at the centre of our personal and public communication, infiltrating one of the most used media’. 2 The emoji have been released as a poster, and as a sticker pack.
This work is a visual, but presumably smelly installation of a living artwork. In this piece, a large block of stone is covered with a phytoplankton, monumentalising it. The phytoplankton is alive, it develops over time, and it produces oxygen in the immediate surroundings.1 This ‘affects the visitor’s environment’, but rather than in a destructive way, is in a ‘saving biological nature’ (ibid.).
While not concerned with visibilising environmental data per se, it is a work of interest in that it connects the beneficial effects of what may be conceived as inconsequential organisms, with the audience’s lived experience of the exhibition. Therefore, I contend that it somewhat bridges the gap between the alienated experience of societal life, with that of the myriad organisms in the natural world that benefit human life on the planet.
CarbonScape by Chris Cheung is of particular salience for this project in that it sonifies carbon pollution data, while also visibilising it. The work is an 18-track ambient sound installation, whereby the artist draws upon environmental pollution data and uses it to manipulate sounds of sampled car and aircraft engines, along with other built environmental sounds such as air conditioning and noise from factories.1 Cheung uses an environmental dataset of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from NOAA, which confirms that the levels of co2 ‘have reached the highest levels seen in the past three million years’(ibid.).
For the installation itself, black spheres are placed in transparent tubes. The representation of the increasing co2 levels is achieved in a twofold manner. First, the intensity of the sound levels, ie. engine and industrial noise, increases over time. This is synchronised with the visual representation of increase, through the black balls rising through the transparent tubes.
For the purposes of this project, CarbonScape both visibilises and sonifies a well-established and respected environmental dataset. Furthermore, while not tacticle per se, the embodiment of the audience within the work makes it also a potentially visceral and tactile experience.
This installation functions as an artificial device that seeks to ‘restore the balance within our eco-system’.1 This device is a ‘predator robot’2, named Dionaea Mechanica Muscipula’ that preys on the oak processionary moth, which is seen as a ‘plague’ due to overpopulation. 3
The device attracts the moths using light, then traps them, digesting them in the robot’s ‘stomach’,4 ‘where the chemical reaction of the Micro Fuel Cells will power the robot’ (ibid.).
This piece is a critique on how historically, predators have been introduced to environments, with underlying assumptions of how the economic system can exploit and manipulate the ecosystem for profit and capital gain (ibid.). For van Leeuwenstein ‘the introduction of the robot predator within the eco-system has the all the advantages of the predator without losing control. Using the robot predator, a new balance for the eco-system can be found’. 5
While the artist’s intentions cannot be necessarily known, I suggest that this, rather than a celebration of the ability of technology to solve ecosystem issues, is a critical visualisation and installation of a thought experiment that reveals how the management of nature under human technical systems is somewhat potentially itself invasive and grotesque. The sight of the metallic, robotic installation amongst the organic oak trees is at once jarring and distasteful. Rather than celebrating this, I suggest that the artist is questioning if this is the kind of aesthetic we wish for our lived environment.
This piece is a novel attempt to communicate the link between ecosystem health, and the vast ecological cost of the ‘mining’ of cryptocurrency. In this piece the artist created an electronic installation that utilises the electricity produced by the natural processes of plants, to power a small computer that in turn ‘mines’ cryptocurrency. In this regard it connects the economic world of the ‘cloud’ and data processing to that of the environmental impact of powering such data centres. Furthermore, the algorithms also created as part of the project ‘will try to come up with a strategy to reinvest the grown/harvested money into farmable land’. 1 Thus, as the system becomes more profitable, it self-sustains by investing in land that (in theory) is planted with trees that can provide more electrical power to continue to support the cryptocurrency mining.
This project therefore asks key questions about the nature/society relationship, particularly in relation to nature ‘capital’, the non-ecological nature of data, and the potential to utilise ecological networks in economic contexts. Thus the artist asks:
Could an ecological computer virus reverse deforestation?
Alt-c question our relationship to ecosystems in regards to networked technologies and abstraction problematics.
What would it mean to perceive forest and fields as giant networked processing or powering the information grid?
How forecasting technics in places in the finance industry can recall Aeromancy (Cloud reading Divination)?
What would it mean to live in a world where economic would be driven by the weather forecast, atmospheric conditions or any naturally occurring phenomenon?
Would this made us respect more natural ecosystems or nourish our will to control them?
With enough abstraction and control, could we plan on growth?
In such a context, would economic growth lead to ecological sustanability or a total financialization hegemony on farmable lands making them vulnerable to the fluctuations of the market?
Furthermore, the project closes the conceptual gap between economics and ecology, and between ephemeral data and material impacts.
In this piece, the artist created a sound installation that incorporates sensor data from rivers. The sensors collected various data parameters such as the activity of bacteria in the river, river pH, temperature, amongst others. 1 Concerned about the levels of pollution in Mexican rivers, Esparza wished to ‘sonify’ this data. To this end he created a machine that would turn the sensor data collected, into analogue signals that could then be sounded. Furthermore, the device also cleaned the water as it worked, providing an ecological restoration service as it was at once rendering manifest the pollution to an audience.
Insect Songs is a work for Cello by artists Ursula Damm, Christina Meissner and Teresa Carrasco.
This work interrogates species decline by engaging in a performative work that interacted with, and caused a species of midge, the chironomous riparius to swarm. As Damm describes of the inspiration behind the piece:
When I left the county side and moved to a city I begun to miss the sound of the fields and the forrest. And when I later returned to the small village in the middle of vineyards, called Diedesfeld, something was gone. I took me a while to figure out that I missed the sounds of insects. And that this sound was like a confirmation of a strong, ecological balance. Science proofed only years later that insecticides diminished insects up to 80 % of their former presence.1
The key affordances of this work are in how it sonifies and, to an extent through the swarming of the insects, visibilises biodiversity loss.
Waiting for the Light is an installation by the artist Taavi Suisalu that integrates ideas of data and connectivity, with bioart.
This installation places plants in protected ‘Wardian’ cases , where they are free from pollution or predation.
The plants are supplied by light that comes from them being connected to the internet via mobile broadband. 1 Therefore, the light comes ultimately from submarine fibre optic cables. As the artist explains ‘This network carries threads of light as thin as tenth of human hair while being as existential to technological societies as the sun is for the plants. We are hanging by a thread while the artificial sun rays plunge through the oceans and light up our faces via bright screens’. 2 The lights that help the plants to grow are triggered by bots, as any device connected to the internet becomes a visibile entity, capable of interacting with such bots. Therefore ‘each plant then becomes an object of interest to these robots whose communicative acts, streams of light, once passed the floors of oceans, are lit back into our environment as bursts of growth light, giving them an agenda they are unaware of.’3
This project is of interest in how it links together the often dematerialised aspect of data communications, that is, thousands of kilometres of underwater cable, with the materiality of biological and ecological growth. Therefore, it invokes in the viewer a connected space of data communication and the living world.
