ecosystems – Sensing Our World

In the Eyes of the Animal

Title: In the Eyes of the Animal
Artist(s): Marshmallow Laser Feast Collective
Source: Creative Applications
Sense(s): visual
Issue(s): biodiversity, ecosystem visualisation

This project is a 360º video and Virtual Reality installation in Grizedale forest in the UK. For this installation, specially constructed VR headsets were created and installed within the forest. When a viewer puts on the headset, they are taken on a VR journey, where they visualise the forest as different animal species. The installation includes recorded field sounds and a virtual mapping of the area using LIDAR.

This piece is important because, as humans, we see forests and nature in particular ways. However, this installation allows us to view the forest from the perspective of a different species, such as dragonfly. In this way, it is an attempt to transcend the anthropocentric assumptions of our relationship with nature, and to imaginatively visibilise how ecosystems can be viewed from different species’ vantages. For the project creators ‘the ultimate goal is to create an understanding of how these animals process optical information and so give people a chance to reflect on their own visual perceptions of the forest’.¹

eLEmeNT: EaRTh

Title: eLEmeNT: EaRTh
Artist(s): Nandita Kumar
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Sound, vision, touch – multisensory
Issue(s): Nature/society relationship, human impact on ecosystems

Element Earth is an elegant and delicate mixed media installation that is inspired by the principle of biomimicry
¹, that is ‘a design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. The core idea is that Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with: energy, food production, climate control, non-toxic chemistry, transportation, packaging, and a whole lot more’.² This project therefore functions as a model of a living ecosystem, made with wood, printed circuit boards, sensors and various other elements associated with digital and/or electronic arts. The model is placed in a glass jar, providing the compelling visual of a ‘natural’ ecosystem made up of electronic components.

However, this work is not just a representational model – it in itself is ‘living’. For example, a tree within the model is made of solar cells which charges the circuit boards within the model. When charged, these electronic circuits make nature-based sounds such as those of the ‘big bang, the sound of earth from a distance through radio waves, whales mating, rain, wind, birds, etc’.
³ Furthermore, the human impact on this model environment is evidenced by a sensor attached to the glass jar itself. When the jar is touched ‘it makes high pitched electronic sounds which indicates our carbon imprinting on the diorama of Earth’ (ibid.).

Therefore, this project is a multi-sensory and interactive piece which not only visibilises the nature/society relationship, but in allowing for dramatic responses to the interaction with the jar, it materialises the human impact on an ecosystem in a bold symbolic audio gesture.

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.

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.