2017 – Sensing Our World

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