2016 – Sensing Our World

Human Sensor

Title: Human Sensor
Artist(s): Kasia Molglas
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Visual
Issue(s): Air pollution

This performance piece visibilises urban air pollution through a combination of a dance performance and wearable environmental sensors. The environmental sensors monitor air pollution, and the wearable costumes involve a mask that both monitors the air quality of the artist wearing the costume, and allows the costume to visually respond to the wearer’s respiration. It therefore revealed to urban audiences the visibility of environmental air pollution, while involving the performers in themselves being affected by the pollution. In this way, the project held a sense of complicity – at once the audience were given an aestheticisation of air pollution, yet in visibilising the pollution data, the audience was also aware that the performers were in real-time being subjected to that pollution. In this way, the Human Sensor work is a very visceral way of communicating a key environmental issue in contemporary urban contexts.

Cocíclo

Title: Cocíclo
Artist(s): Alexandre Castonguay
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Sound
Issue(s): Carbon monoxide pollution

Cocíclo is a device that measures carbon monoxide concentrations in urban environments. This device consists of various entities, such as a wearable that geolocates the user wearing the device, while also alerting the user with sound beeps depending on concentrations of CO. Additionally there is a ‘Cocíclo marker’ which is a ‘chalk-marking tool that inscribes the CO variations directly on the sidewalks or streets of the city’.¹ What is a key point for this project is in the observation that ‘The traditional visualization tools are not adequate for citizen involvement: We often witness data heatmaps of pollutants within our cities but they feel distant since they are not related to our actual experiences. Being situated at street level and witnessing the rapid evolution of pollutants because of our proximity to the sources of pollution, the data becomes more accurate (carbon monoxide dissipates rapidly from the emitting source), the experience is embodied and not abstracted’.² The chalk itself is impermanent, and thus serves as a suitable material for inscribing the data on streets, without the permanency of other materials. Thus, it both visibilises environmental data, and does so in a way that allows for changing levels of CO concentrations across time.

Pikslo deep diving

strong>Title: Pikslo deep diving
Artist(s): Robertina Šebjanič
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Sound
Issue(s): Underwater noise pollution

This project consists of field recordings and workshops to investigate the role of underwater noise pollution. The project acknowledges underwater noise pollution caused by human activity, and asks us to reflect on the sonic impacts of human activity on marine life.

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.