biodiversity – Sensing Our World

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.

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.

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.

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.