2018 – Sensing Our World

Weather Thingy

Title: Weather Thingy
Artist(s): Adrien Kaeser
Source: Creative Applications
Sense(s): sound, installation
Issue(s): weather data, climate change

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.

Climoji

Title: Climoji
Artist(s): Viniyata Pany, Marina Zurkow and Manuja Waldia
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): visual, tactile/haptic (texting)
Issue(s): communicating climate change

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.

Monolithe

Title: Monolithe
Artist(s): Fabien Léaustic
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): visual, smell?, installation, visceral
Issue(s): ecosystem support, socio-ecological relationship

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

Title: CarbonScape
Artist: Chris Cheung
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): audio, visual, installation
Issue(s): carbon pollution

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.

A Diverse MonoCulture

Title: A Diverse MonoCulture
Artist(s): Jip van Leeuwenstein
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): visual, installation
Issue(s): invasive species, tech fixes to eco issues

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.

See figure X for the installation in situ.