2019 – Sensing Our World

Alt-C

Title: Alt-C
Artist(s): Michael Sedbon
Source: Creative Applications
Sense(s): visual
Issue(s): ecological cost of data, ecosystems and growth-based economies

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.

BioSoNot 1.2 / 2.0

Title: BioSoNot 1.2 / 2.0
Artist(s): Gilberto Esparza
Source: WMMNA
Sense(s): sound
Issue(s): river pollution

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

Title: Insect Songs
Artist(s): Ursula Damm, Christina Meissner, Teresa Carasco
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): sound
Issue(s): biodiversity loss

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

Title: Waiting for the Light
Artist(s): Taavi Suisalu
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): visual
Issue(s): data, bioart

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.