installation – Sensing Our World

Trees: Rendering Ecophysiological Processes Audible

Title: Trees: Rendering Ecophysiological Processes Audible
Artist(s): Marcus Maeder
Source: NEURAL
Sense(s): Sound, Installation
Issue(s): Environmental impact of climate change

This research project by Marcus Maeder seeks to render audible certain processes of trees and forests. Maeder recorded various sounds of trees using scientific measurement tools (Neural). He then presented the work in spatial audio installations, where the speakers playing the sounds are ‘suspended in the shape of a cube formed by 9 columns of 4 speakers each. Using virtual imaging techniques field recordings of climate conditions are projected outside of the boundaries of the installation, while recordings of the acoustic emissions of trees are reproduced within the installation on individual speaker columns’ (Neural). In addition, the environment in which the installation is playing, is fed by environmental data from the trees/forest, such as temperature affecting the loudness of the installation.

Thus, the installation provides a complex sonic landscape from both outside and within the forest installation. However, in creating a feedback loop from within the forest installation that affects the sounds itself, it echoes the feedback loops created by society upon nature. It is therefore relevant for this project. Indeed, ‘the combination of both recognizable and previously unheard sounds create a sonic representation of natural processes, attempting to convey the complexity of specific ecological systems through correlations between processed environmental data and recordings of acoustic phenomena’ (Neural).

Project Dust

Title: Project Dust
Artist(s): Brother Nut
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): Sight? tangible
Issue(s): Air pollution, PM2.5, particulates

In this project, Brother Nut used an industrial vacuum cleaner to suck up air pollution in Beijing. He did this for 100 days, collecting the material. He then mixed it with red clay to produce a brick. In a sense this both visibilised and made tangible the air pollution in Beijing. The piece is therefore a thought piece on the levels of pollution in cities such as Beijing, and also a way of materialising such pollution.

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.

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.

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.